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… Listening Expanding your target language vocabulary by listening is something I’m a huge fan of and, I believe, is something you can do even before you’ve learnt all the grammar and vocabulary. Or, indeed, anything. You might think that doesn’t make sense, at all. You might think I’m contradicting myself according to what I’ve said in previous podcasts. I’m not. Hear me out. (Yes, that was supposed to be a pun.) When I started to learn Italian, almost three and a half years ago now, I was listening to Italian radio within a month. Back then, I didn’t really know what I was doing in the modern language-learning world. Things had changed a lot since I was a language student, but ev...

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… The British Council’s Language Trends study for 2023 Let’s start with the Infographic about what pupils think of language learning in the UK. Should be interesting, right? I’m not going to cover everything, so I’ll leave a link to the page where you can download this for yourself, if you want. The first thing to note is that these are kids at the end of their first year of secondary school, which I’m assuming, for many, will be their first experience of learning a language. So, the most learnt language in England is French at 79% of respondents. This doesn’t surprise me. It was French when I was a kid. In fact, French was obligatory, other languages came later. France is the close...

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… The book Languages are Good for Us by Sophie Hardach, narrated by Laurence Bouvard   A link to the Spotify audiobook is in the description. Sophie Hardach is a German novelist who writes in English, which, of course, made me want to listen to this book! If you don’t know, I’ve been experimenting with writing in Italian since May last year. She is married to an English man and is bringing up a child as bilingual. So, the author spends quite some time talking about prosody at the beginning of the book. Prosody is the study of a language’s rhythm and melody. This is, of course, the first thing a child hears in the womb and helps it to determine the language of its mother. It mad...

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… Should you forget about Grammar? You may have listened to a previous podcast of mine about the book The Language Game: How improvisation created language and changed the world, where they talked about the fact that when we talk, grammar often goes out the window. And no, I’m not just referring to talking in your target language, I mean when talking in your own language. At the time, I think I said it begs the question, why do we get so hung up about getting things right in a foreign language? Of course, what I mean by this is, why do we get hung up about the grammar in a foreign language? If the locals don’t, why should we? There are also people who say that you should only use c...

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… Motivation When Life Happens Some people just can’t get motivated when it comes to language learning, or anything else, for that matter. Partially, I think this is to do with how much you actually want something. If you really want to learn a language, you will find the motivation within yourself, no matter what, but there will always be times when you come up against a barrier, one that’s not under your control. Everyone loses motivation sometimes for external reasons, rather than anything to do with the actual language learning. So, when your motivation does fail you in this way, you need to have a back-up plan. Learning a language needs to have become so automatic, that you do...