27 easy and fun ways to learn/practice a language
because my goodness, this is something that has got so much better and easier across my lifetime, it is wonderful. plus also! my personal podcasts in other languages that I like to listen to
Last week we had the post of joy about how wonderfully easy language-learning is now. If you remember it as being a boring slog, I swear it is so much better now! And as promised, for paid subscribers, here are 27 ideas about how to do it. Split into listening, watching, reading, speaking & connecting and the last six are how to use AI for language acquisition and practice, which it can be very useful for.
(OK, here’s one if you don’t believe me: you can talk out loud to the AI in languages other than English and even if it does happen to be hallucinating, it will do that lying in French that is pretty blooming good and good enough for practice in a spare five minutes…)
listening
1. Listen to podcasts in another language, but listen to them at *slowed down speed*. Most podcast apps do this now I think, certainly my fave Pocketcasts does. Have a bit of a search around, find something in a topic you’re interested in, listen at 0.8 speed, see if you can understand more.
2. And, for podcasts – look at the transcript. Pocketcasts and lots of other apps automatically give you the transcript now. If you can’t understand it listening, read it and then listen again to see how it sounds.
3. Get the transcript translated – I mean you can literally copy and paste the whole thing into Google translate and then read it through in English to get the gist, and then listen again in your target language to see how much of it you can get. If it’s a subject you’re interested in, you won’t mind listening more than once!
If you liked this post do give it a like, it helps other people find it. I send out a letter about something that’s interesting me most Sundays, I am wilfully unpredictable but this post will give a sense of what I’m like. Fundamentally, I am in favour of thinking. I know.
