almastudies:

If your target language is Spanish, or one of the languages you aim to learn, or you need listening practice, or you just want to have something in Spanish playing in the background, I would like to recommend a radio show that’s been a part of my life since I can remember, and still is. It is an Argentinian radio show hosted by Alejandro Dolina and it’s called La Venganza Será Terrible, I can’t even begin to explain how much I enjoy this show and how much peace it brings me and how much it makes me laugh.

There’s a site called Venganzas del Pasado which is an unofficial site, where they upload all the episodes really fast and keep a dated organized archive of the show so you can go as far back as you want or start from the newer ones.

If you do give it a listen or you have questions, please feel free to send me an ask!!!

lovelybluepanda:

How to get the most out of only 1 resource

I planned this post as a challenge in the future but someone asked for some ways to study a language with a few resources so I’ll cover every single resource that I can think of and ways to get the most out of them.

Books

I’ll divide this in 3:

• Grammar books
• Reading books
• Dictionaries

Grammar books

This kind of books cover grammar and vocabulary. Most grammar books have everything you need to know but my advice is to use at least 2 in case one of them covers some extra points.

• A way to learn the grammar is to write or have a speech that implies the grammar concepts. Of course this is for when you learned some vocabulary as well.
• Most books have exercises. Another way to recall the grammatical concepts is to use a workbook but most minority languages don’t have such workbooks so you have to create them. After each lesson think of similar sentences and try to make different kinds of exercises. Fill in and translation seem like the most available ones. My suggestion is to make more tests at a time and solve them periodically.
• Vocabulary, here’s really your choice but in my opinion the most effective way is to use it actively. Activities like writing or speaking will help you retain everything better. Howtomemorize
• Some books come with audio so you can repeat after the audio when you study a certain lesson. A suggestion is to have a plan and listen to the past audios + repeating what you hear often so you get pronunciation practice.

These apply to apps like duolingo, with vocabulary and grammar too.

Reading books/articles

• Vocab lists. Every single new word, write it down and learn it later. If you find a word that is for something that you will never talk about though, you don’t have to learn it. I.e. a disease you don’t know even in your native language but if you want to learn it, go ahead.
• You could print the pages and work on them. Analyze the grammar concepts if you think they are used in a way that you haven’t seen before, mark idioms, write your opinion on the action so far/a summary, suggest synonym or antonyms using a dictionary.
• Write a summary at a certain milestone. It can be with simple words like “he likes the girl”, “she has a sister” etc use words that you’ve read in the book.

Dictionaries

• This gives you more flexibility so use some words that you want to know and make a text or flashcards etc. Anything that can help you learn them.
• You can also choose randomly the words and try to think of connections between them.

Apps

2 apps come to my mind for minorities, Fun easy learn and 50 languages.

Fun easy learn can be used in a couple of ways:

• Write a text or add the words to a picture. I.e. You learn about body parts, download a drawing and fill the parts on it.
• Make some flashcards or use the method you memorize better with.

The reasons why I think FEL needs extra practice is because the exercises aren’t that high intensity but if you practice regularly with them, they could be helpful.

Same for memrise.

For 50languages:

• You can use your memorization techniques here to.
• This app offers audio files so just as for books you can listen daily to a couple of audios and repeat after them.

Video resources:

• Listen to it once. See what you remember or if you understand anything. If you do, then talk about the topic/action.
• If you don’t understand everything, try to change the speed or just repeat until you can figure out the words. If you can guess the spelling, look for translations online.

This applies to audio only resources too.

Extra

The extension Flewent changes a certain % of anything you read to your TL as long as it’s in the list of languages they offer.