A Language Learning Tale

Podcast on YouTube:  YouTube Link Podcast on Spotify:  Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, 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…   ANOTHER LANGUAGE REFRESH? Did you notice the extra greeting at the beginning? If you’re not following me on YouTube, you won’t yet know that at the beginning of this year, I started refreshing my Spanish, which I hadn’t used for several decades. That’s much like your French, you might be thinking. Well, yes. It is. I hadn’t used French since finishing my studies. But, also, no, as I continued to use Spanish in work for about 8 years. The weird thing is, I’ve found it easier to relearn French than I’m finding it with Spanish. There may be several reasons for this, but I’m going to start with the one that I think is the biggest. When I went onto further educ...

Podcast on YouTube:  YouTube Link Podcast 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…   WAYS TO LEARN A LANGUAGE IN THOSE SPARE MOMENTS One of the biggest problems people have when learning a language is finding the time to do it. Obviously, you do have to have some dedicated learning time, but there are many small parcels of unused time within a day. What could you do to use those productively for learning your language? You might need to do a little prep, but here are some suggestions, not in any particular order. Keep a playlist of short videos to watch, downloaded, if necessary. If you keep these to a maximum of 10 minutes, then you can easily play them whilst waiting for the bus, or over lunch. They could be anything, from instructional, to just peop...

Podcast on YouTube: YouTube Link Podcast 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…   SO, LANGUAGE REALLY IS A GAME? No, I’m not talking about gamification again, not exactly. I’m talking about the book  The Language Game by Morten H Christiansen and Nick Chater, narrated by Peter Noble, which I recently listened to on Spotify. These are only brief discussions of a few of the points in the book, linking them to language learning. There’s a tonne more information in the audiobook. There will be a link to it in the description. The way language works has been explained in many different ways in the past as understanding changed. Was it created by ancient gods? Is it built into our genes? Is it scientific? Are our brains like computers? Or was it just tria...

The Podcast on YouTube: YouTube Link The Podcast 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…   READING OUT LOUD IN ITALIAN You might be wondering how I prepare to read out a story in Italian, especially a long one. Well, now I’m going to tell you and how you can use these practices to help your learning.   The first thing to say is that, no, I don’t do it without mistakes. I’ve narrated some of my own books in English. It’s impossible to do without mistakes. You get your tongue in a twist, you need to compose yourself for a few seconds. It’s even worse in a foreign language, especially the tongue-twisters! So, there is editing involved, but not too much, because …   The most important thing to do is to read the piece all the way through multiple times befo...