languages

Sharing my language learning best practices and would love to hear from others on this!

1. Deprioritize apps that don’t focus on speaking and listening.

Apps like Duolingo and Babbel are great for learning to read and write but are pretty useless for speaking

2. Learn some core “trick” phrases so I can start speaking ASAP

E.g. in Spanish, if you learn "I want" (quiero), you can add any infinitive verb afterwards (e.g. to eat) to express a desire and so don’t need to learn to conjugate verbs in different tenses to express yourself!

3. Get an Online Tutor

Use platforms like Preply/italki to find a tutor for as cheap as $5/hour. 

Tell them that I only want them to talk to me in the foreign language. No English except in exceptional circumstances. This feels unpleasant and challenging but forces my brain to adapt to the new language faster.

Cont... 

I find people often don’t maximize speaking minutes and feel uncomfortable talking about the most mundane things they'd never talk about in English. 

4. Bias towards speaking even if you make mistakes. 

I make mistakes in English all the time, its ok to make them in foreign languages too

5. Listen to Audiobooks on 0.75x to improve listening

I'd be keep to hear what other people do!