Tag Archives: learning techniques

How to learn languages time-efficiently

time efficiency

Today’s blog post is about time efficiency in language learning. Learning, and keeping up, multiple languages does not necessarily take up a lot of time. Much more important for any success in language learning is a clever use of the time you have at your disposal, not the ‘free’ time you have overall each day. The secret is to use the time which would otherwise go ‘unused’ or be lost in trivial daily activities, like grocery shopping, commuting, manual activities like housework or gardening, etc. and make it available for language learning. This is actually quite easy and does not require any special skills or methods.
1. When you are doing housework, cooking or performing similar manual tasks like gardening or making crafts, etc. listen to an audio course or a course CD that accompanies a textbook. This will train your listening comprehension while you go about your daily chores.
2. When out and about, carry a list with vocabulary to be learned with you. Learn the words when you have to wait for the bus, train or other transport or when you have to stand in line at the supermarket or while waiting in a waiting room – in short, learn them during the minutes that would otherwise be ‘lost’. These will add up over time!!
3. Learn or practise two languages at the same time by using textbooks and learning materials written in a language other than your native tongue. This only works when you already speak a language at least at an upper intermediate level, or better: at an advanced level, because you will need to understand nearly everything when using these materials to learn a new language. By learning in this way, the language you already speak will be reinforced and practised while learning a new language at the same time 🙂 .
4. Follow your usual pastimes or hobbies, but do it in your target language. For example, watch that movie you want to see or read that book you want to read in your target language instead of in your native language. Read the news in your target language. So while doing these ordinary daily activities, you will practise your language skills at the same time.

These extra minutes of language learning might seem negligible or like ‘nothing’, but they will add up over time. If you just make some extra 5 minutes for your language learning available each day in this way, this will be an extra hour spent practising your target language each week! 🙂

How to boost your fluency by learning vocabulary more effectively

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 156

Today’s blog post is about some tips and tricks to learn vocabulary more effectively to boost your fluency in your target language. While there is no shortcut to learning your vocabulary, there are some ways how you can make your learning more organized and effective to yield better results.
1. Instead of just learning words individually, learn them also as collocations (a collocation is a combination of words that frequently occur together, e.g. ‘to read a book’, ‘to go by train’, etc.). This is especially useful for languages which are governed by cases, like Russian, Polish or German, because when you memorize collocations, you won’t always have to think about the correct declination or case the words must be in in frequent expressions. Knowing frequent collocations by heart will therefore boost your fluency when speaking or writing your target language.
2. Learn frequent phrases and expressions by heart from a phrasebook. While a phrasebook alone will never suffice to learn a complete language, learning frequent phrases or ‘building blocks’ of expressions by heart is a good way to develop some conversational fluency especially at the beginning when you start learning a new language.
3. Use thematic vocabulary lists to learn words around a given topic. This is very useful when you want to speak or write about a given topic or theme, e.g. a hobby, because a good list will teach you not only expressions that you are likely to need in this context and words which are likely to occur together and which you will encounter, but also synonyms and antonyms for this context, collocations or groups of related words based on a word stem, and useful verbs, adjectives and nouns to talk about the topic of your choice.

4. Subscribe to a Word of the Day for your target language(s). While this will not help you directly to be able to speak about a topic, a ‘Word of the Day’-subscription is nevertheless highly useful both for regular repetition of random words and for seeing and hearing the words used in the context of a sentence which will help you gain more fluency in the long term. Since fluency depends on being instinctively familiar with words that occur and are expected in a certain context and situation, the more often you see and hear and come across words, the more familiar you will be with them and the more easily they will pop into your mind when you need them in a conversation or when writing a text. The ‘Word of the Day’-function is therefore not only an excellent means for repetition but also to keep up the languages you already speak.