Posts

How I plan to learn / acquire Lithuanian

While I have experience in learning / acquiring new languages my process is reliant on various resources that are not available for Lithuanian. Apps such as Speakly, Taalhammer and LingQ are fundamental to my usual approach but unfortunately they do not provide Lithuanian as an option. On top of that there is not as much content aimed at beginners such as YouTube channels, podcasts and resources. Because of this I will have to adjust my approach but for contrast my usual method can be summed up as follows: Use spaced repetition apps to learn vocabulary and phrases (recognised recall) . Listen to content that contains those learned vocabulary and phrases (recognised recall in context). Also known as 'input'. Practice speaking using the learned vocabulary and phrases (active recall and recognised recall in context). Also known as 'output'. 'Learning a language' means different things to different people and my preference is to focus heavily on what will allow me t...

LingoTrack Review

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 A review of a tool I've been using:  LingoTrack.com  

30 Day Comprehensible Input Experiment: Toki Pona

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If you don't have first hand experience of using comprehensible input to acquire a language, are somewhat skeptical of its efficacy and are not sure about investing potentially hundreds of hours into watching or listening to comprehensible input then here's a 30 day challenge that takes around 10 hours in total. The video series teaches you the con-lang (constructed language) Toki Mona through a series of 30 videos each lasting roughly 20 minutes. Toki Mona only has 137 words and has a simple grammar.  The aim of the course is to show you how you can learn a language with comprehensible input and motivate you to apply the same principle to other languages. I don't have time to follow the course just yet but I'd like to give it a go at some point. I don't need to prove to myself the importance of comprehensible input but I think it would be fun to be able to add a language to your repertoire for relatively little time investment. Especially if I can convince some fri...

Acquiring Languages the Natural Way

This is a blog about my various language learning experiments. Currently I am learning to speak Russian. My future bucket list includes: Ukrainian and Irish, perhaps Latin. But I'll wait and see when or if I have time for those. You can follow my Russian progress on my other blog:  Acquiring Russian The Natural Way The idea of 'acquiring' a language vs 'learning' comes from people like Stephen Krashen, Steve Kaufmann, and Jeff Brown. And methods like All Japanese All The Time, the Mass Immersion Approach, Refold.la and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS). However I'm not necessarily looking to avoid speaking too early and I've come to appreciate the power of memorising lots of words and set phrases. The core resources that I use are listed below (depending on the availability for my target language are): Anki  Or a beginners app to brute force memorise around 500 of the  Glossika  For reading, listening, pronunciation practice and ab...