Use your favorite colors to highlight what you don’t know
Have a nice notebook where you keep track of grammar or/and vocabulary
Try making a snack specific to a country where your target language is spoken
Have sticky notes with texts you wrote in order to improve and motivate yourself
Annotate books if that’s your thing
Look up for new songs and then learn to sing then by looking up the lyrics (+translate the new words)
Remember how you’ll improve over time if you keep learning
Keep a journal in your target language. Write in another color the words you had to look up. Notice how over time there are less and less different colored words.
Decorate your notes with sticky notes and doodles
Chat with your pets or with yourself in your target language (or just tell to mister cat how you’ll improve your French, everything works)
Start a book or a comic and choose a reward for when you finish it
Pretend you’re a foreigner who knows only your target language, try using that language only for some time
Talk about each product from your grocery list/chart
Learn idioms and imagine in which circumstances you could use them
Change the settings of your phone for a day/week to your TL and try to read/look up things only in that language
Keep a journal or agenda where you plan, analyze and organize your life but use only your target language.
Have a notebook/digital notepad where you write about your day and add a picture.
Make a PowerPoint presentation with what you learned today. Think of it as the most important project you have to make or the thing that could teach someone else your TL. (Your favorite fictional characters for example)
Weekly write letters to future you about your progress. (In your native or target language) Open those letters when you’re more advanced. Decorate them with drawings or stickers.
These ideas might seem more appropriate for higher levels BUT if you’re a beginner and start trying to do these things, you’ll improve a lot so don’t discourage yourself just because you think you don’t know enough yet.
Hey guys! You may already know if you follow me on Instagram but I recently redid my Etsy store! I’ll be listing new things soon but please have a look at what’s available if you have a minute!
Hey friends! I’ve decided to make a studygram! I’m not sure I’ll completely stop using this studyblr, but insta feels like a more conducive platform to what I want to do with my content! If so inclined, you can follow it here!
I’ve slacked off this summer so now I have a month to refresh my Arabic and advance it to a level high enough to be able to understand my prof in september, who is teaching the entire class in Arabic. So recommend your favourite music and tv shows!!
watch a video in Japanese or a video about the culture
Send me an ask if you have any Japanese series (not anime) or music recommendations! I’m looking for true crime channels in Spanish or Japanese too. Send me your favorite resources, series, or music!
Tell me about your favorite Puerto Rican youtubers, music or series!
y’all ever just watch polyglot videos for motivation, but then spend all your time doing that so you don’t actually study any actual languages??? because same.
I have only recently heard about this method to improve your listening comprehension alongside your speaking skills. It’s called shadowing.
The concept is that you listen to your target language recording whether it be radio, samples, a podcast…
And you repeat immediately. Without stopping, simultaneously, as if you were an interpreter and had to belt out a translation right away.
This helps you to truly sharpen your hearing skills since you have to say everything immediately afterwards. If you find it too had at first, try listening with a transcript.
Something I wish I started working on earlier are prepositions. As a beginner you learn how to conjugate verbes. Let’s take the verb parler(to speak) for example. As you get more advanced, you learn the expressions that accompany that verb: parler à/parler de
This is how French was taugh to me: first the grammatical bases and then we build upon them with expressions and nuances. This method was great in that it did not overwhelm me and my other classmates with too much grammar at once. However, I wish I was taught prepositions while learning the verbs so that relative pronouns (like duquel and laquelle) would be more instinctual. So, I encourage you to look at this list my teacher gave me and start memorizing the preposition that goes with the verb. It’ll help you in the long term!
