A Language Learning Tale

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: Link to Spotify Listen on YouTube: Link to YouTube   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 Can Do Less Work? Or Is Using the Pareto Principle a Good Way to Learn Languages? Have you heard of the Pareto Principle, named after Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1896 observed that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land and also found this connection in other things? He didn’t name it, though. That was done by Dr Joseph Juran in the 1950s, who called it universal, applying it to many other things. So, how is this principle used these days? Well, those who believe in it state that 20% of the effort, for whatever you’re doing, will produce 80% of the results. That means that 80% of the work only produces 20% of the results. But does this actually hold true? W...

 EPISODE 5 Find this episode on Spotify at: Episode 5: Is 500 a Lucky Number? Find this episode on YouTube at: Episode 5: Is 500 a Lucky Number? Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on a journey through my language learning process, in real time, and learn my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the ALLT Podcast, which stands for A Language Learning Tale. Today I’m talking about… Is 500 a Lucky Number? Or, Can You Really Speak A Language With Only 500 Words? We’ve all seen them - the claims that if you learn just these 500, or 1,000, most common words, you’ll  be able to get by in the language. You like baby talk, do you? Okay, toddler talk, I’ll give it that. Let’s see if this can possibly be true. A quick Wikipedia search will give you a list of estimated word numbers in a whole host of languages. Here are just three of the totals. By the way, the sources are all very different so they’re not comparable, and there are multiple s...