A Language Learning Tale

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link   Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   BECOMING LIKE SHERLOCK   “ It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. ”   That’s a quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I think it fits well with language learning. If you know anything about the character of Sherlock Holmes, you’ll know that he’s very good at noticing the little details. He can glean a lot of information from them, often a lot more than he gleans from the clues that are staring him in the face. These help him to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Language is definitely a puzzle that you have to put together, don’t you think? There is something called the Noticing Hypothesis in lan

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   BEING BILINGUAL Specifically, I’m going to be discussing some of the things in the book The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa, narrated by Luis Soto, which I listened to recently. The author comes from a bilingual family, hence the scientific interest, and quotes many studies, other than the ones they’ve been involved in. There’s a tonne more information than I’m going to mention here, this is just a brief skim through some of the points, and I’ll leave a link to the audiobook on Spotify, which is where I listened to it. There is a link to a pdf for the diagrams, but you don’t see that on all Spotify formats.   So, the book starts off with the statement that the author considers second languag

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   IS LANGUAGE LEARNING A GAME? If you need to learn in a gamified way, are you actually committed to learning, or the game? Gamifying of things, not just languages, is done to give you little rushes of excitement, dopamine, by creating achievements and awards and - we all know what I’m talking about here - leagues. The reason we have gamification at all comes from the fact that we learn, as children, through play. This is very apparent to even the most casual of observers. Therefore, this is considered to be a part of our make-up as human beings and, thus, gamification of, it seems everything, has become widespread. Okay, I buy that. But adults aren’t kids. Yes, many play competitive games, o

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   IS TRANSLATION GOOD FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING? Absolutely. It’s concentrating on the detail of the language. It’s making you think about the language, rather than simply studying grammar. But what should you translate and which way? These are just my thoughts on the subject and may differ from what others think. As a general rule, if you were an actual translator as your profession, you would most likely be translating into your own language, because that’s the one you’re more competent in. Therefore, I would suggest that is the way you should go with translation for language learning, translate into your own language. If you want to write in the target language, I would suggest you do that in

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   TIPS FOR LISTENING TO AUDIOBOOKS IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE I recently started dabbling in listening to audiobooks in Italian, on Spotify, so I thought I’d just list a few tips here if you’re thinking of trying this yourself, because this type of listening can be quite a lot more difficult than your regular listening to content. I’ll explain why in a minute. So, the first tip, which isn’t something I have done, but I accept that it could be a way to make things easier, is to have a copy of the physicial, or eBook, so that you can read along as you listen. I don’t think there’s any need to explain why this would be helpful, it’s like having subtitles on when you watch filmed content, but I do think

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … Understood or Correct? What is the purpose of learning a language? Okay, let’s break that down a little more so you know where I’m coming from. Is the purpose of learning a language to be understood by the person you’re talking to, or to be correct? I’m hoping you answered to be understood to that question, because the likelihood is that you’ll never be entirely correct, with anything but the simplest of sentences. And what is correct, anyway? Many people don’t speak entirely correctly in their own language. How many times do you hear someone on TV, or in a drama, pronounce a word in a way that you think is incorrect? I’ll bet it’s a lot. Or perhaps it isn’t pronunciation, perhaps it’s sentence construction. They say things in a really

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … I have to wait until everything’s perfect Are you waiting to learn a language until everything’s perfect, the stars are aligned, you win the lottery? Stop. No, I mean start. There is no perfect time, no perfect way, no perfect state for learning a language. You just have to get on with it.  There are many situations in which people wait for the perfect time to do something. They wait to get married, because they need to save up for the wedding. They wait to have kids, because they need to save up to buy all the things. They wait to learn a language, because … well, why? What’s stopping you? You can pretty much learn a language for free, these days, so that’s not an excuse. At least, if you’re de

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link   Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … Is Meaningful Interaction Just Speaking? In order to become proficient in a foreign language, it is said that you need to have meaningful interaction with it. But what is meaningful interaction? I think we can all understand meaningful easily enough, but what does interaction actually mean in this circumstance? The Google definition of interaction is: communication or direct involvement with someone or something. So, in its basic form, which I believe was first put forward by Stephen Krashen, this is communicating back and forth with someone in the language - in other words speaking - in a way that means you can get some benefit from the conversation. In other words, it’s not too difficult. A

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … Do You Have Multiple Personalities? Can your personality change when you learn another language? Or, more specifically, when you use another language? There seem to be differing opinions out there on this. Some say yes, your personality can change. Others, no, not really. And is this changing of your personality for better, or worse, depending, obviously, on your concept of these things. I do think that this is an interesting topic, so today we’re going to think about some ways this might happen, or be perceived to be happening. First up, I’d say the way a language is spoken could, at least superficially, change the way your personality is perceived. Some languages are very expressive in the w

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … I Don’t Have the Talent to Learn a Language Many people seem to think that learning a language requires some particular special talent. Is this true? Well, I’ve heard many people say that this isn’t true, that anyone can learn a language, and whilst I agree with the statement that anyone can learn a language, I do think some people have more of an aptitude for it. So, I’m not going to deny that I have an aptitude for languages. They were my best subjects at school, the things I most enjoyed the classes for (but still found stressful because of the way languages were taught at school). Staying with the subject of school, when you’re there you have to study a whole raft of diverse subjects. Some o

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … I’m Not Making Much Progress with my New Language So, you started learning a new language on the first of January, but you don’t feel like you’re making much progress and you feel like giving up. It sounds like you might have believed a common myth that pervades some corners of YouTube and, no doubt, the Internet in general, and that is that you can become fluent in a new language in a few months, or even a few weeks. It’s not your fault if you believed this, because the people who claim to have done this can be very convincing. They will give you evidence. They will talk to you in the language. And, maybe, some of them are being truthful about their abilities, but others definitely are affiliat

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … 10 Reasons to Learn a Foreign Language If you’re wondering why on Earth you should bother to learn a language in 2024, here are 10 reasons to get you started. Let’s start with one of the best reasons. You will eventually be able to talk to someone who doesn’t know English. Yes, it may sometimes seem like everyone on the planet speaks English, but that is far from the truth. There are plenty of people who don’t understand a word of it. And even it if they do speak English, they may not speak it well, or have the resources to be able to get better at it. What better than to be able to talk to them in their native  language? Okay, the second reason is that it could improve your job prospects. There

Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is … Will AI Kill Language Learning in 2024? We all know that the AI language models, now constantly in our midst, are capable of a lot and that includes generating information in many languages, possibly all by now, but does that mean that there is no longer any need to learn languages, at all, because AI can do it for us? Honestly, I think the answer to that question depends on you. Learning languages will continue if people want to continue to do it. But let’s take a step back first. At this point in time, the AI models all have a significant number of flaws. Not least the fact that they can hallucinate. Yes, that’s what people are calling it. In other words, sometimes they literally make things u