A Language Learning Tale

Podcast on YouTube: Link to YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link to Spotify 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… When I Wouldn’t Use a Large Language Model Recently, I talked about using ChatGPT as a conversational tool and how I thought that was probably an acceptable use of a Large Language Model. However, my thoughts on using it to learn grammar are somewhat different. Why? Isn’t it just the same as speaking? Well, no, it isn’t. Now, I’m not talking about translating a phrase or a word using Google Translate or Reverso Context, or even Microsoft Word’s language tools. Yes, those involve grammar, and what we call AI to some extent, but they’re not questions. That’s more like proofreading. What I mean is something like, “Please explain to me how to use direct and indirect pronouns in...

Podcast on YouTube: Link for YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link for Spotify 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 Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society This book is written by Viorica Marian and narrated by Cassandra Campbell. The author is Romanian and wrote this in their third language, English. The aim is to look at the mind through the lens of multilingualism. Before we start, there are quite a lot of things mentioned in this book that I have heard in other books, and I won’t go over previously discussed things too much, if I can avoid it, but all authors will go at things from a different perspective and bring up different points. And that kind of ties in with one of the themes of this book. Speaking multiple languages changes the way you think, both as ...

Podcast on YouTube: Link on YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link on Spotify 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… L’histoire des langues parlées Yes, that was in French and today I’m discussing a short French audiobook on Spotify which is about languages and seeing how much I’ve understood. L’histoire des langues parlées is by Anne-Marie Deraspe. It’s only an  hour and nine minutes long and I set it to read at 0.8x speed. This is a book aimed at teens and I believe is a teaching text. If you´re learning French, and you have access to this book in a subscription service, you might want to give it a go. A link to the book on Spotify will be in the description. So, I’m expecting this will be mainly headline facts rather than a deep dive on the history of languages, given the length of...

Podcast on YouTube: Link for YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link on Spotify 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… Translating into Your Target Language So, I’ve talked previously about foreign languages and translation and I’ve said that it’s always best to translate from a foreign language into your own to get the best translation and that this is the most useful exercise, because you’re trying to understand how people who speak that language actually phrase things. I still stick by this. But that doesn’t mean that translating into a foreign language is a complete waste of time. You just can’t expect to get the results you would doing it the other way and if you’re doing it on your own, there’s no one to tell you whether you’ve got it right or wrong. But, maybe you have a valid reaso...

YouTube Link: Link on YouTube Spotify Link: Link on Spotify 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 I Chat with an AI? Using AI in language learning is all the rage right now. How do you feel about that? In general, I dislike the use of AI in creative pursuits, because one, it’s been trained on the work of artists, writers, composers, lyricists, I’m sure there are others, who spent a lot of time creating something that people would want to buy. Oh, yes, photographers and videographers, as well. All this without their permission or any compensation, although there are some moves to change that. However, there are many uses of AI that will actually enhance lives. In medicine, for example. Languages might also be one of those uses, because learning a language, ingesting a languag...

YouTube Link: Link for YouTube Spotify Link:  Link for Spotify 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… Am I getting my languages in a muddle? As some of you will know, I recently refreshed my Spanish, which I learnt in my youth, using Italian. In other words, going from Italian to Spanish. I did this to try to force myself to keep the two languages apart, which worked quite well whilst learning, but how’s that going now? Is Spanish creeping into my Italian writing? Um … well, yes and no. When I started learning Italian, there were always some words that bled in from my Spanish, even though I hadn’t used it for many, many years. Mismo was one, meaning same, instead of stesso, and I really had to make an effort to expunge that and I did. Unfortunately, it is rearing its ugly head a...

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen 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 Power of Writing for Language Learning So, how does writing in your target language benefit your language learning? If you start trying to write in a language you’ll soon find out that there is a lot you still don’t know. Is that a benefit? Hmm. Okay, you might think you know how to say something, but until you write it down, you may not realise that, actually, you don’t. You will have to look things up. This can be anything from individual words, to specific phrases, to difficult grammar points. And you will end up doing this over and over again for the same things. What is this doing? It’s giving you repetition of certain facts about the language. You may not have them fixed ...

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen 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… Some Ways to Learn a Language by Yourself How you go about learning a language by yourself will probably depend on what you want to use it for. If it’s just to go on holiday, it won’t need to be as difficult, or intense, as if you want to learn everything possible about the language. So, first, think about this. What do you want, or need, to learn to achieve your objective? Then, you can get started. This will also partly depend upon whether you’re starting from scratch, or refreshing a language that you may have learned at school. I believe the easiest way to start learning a language is to use an app that teaches you. Which one you use, depends on several things. Can you afford t...

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen 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… What are the benefits of learning another language? Or, more accurately, some of the benefits, because there are bound to be more. Let’s start with something that’s less obvious: memory. Improving it. Keeping it in good shape and all that good stuff. All learning, taxing your brain helps with the memory function, and learning a language is no different, except when learning a language you’re not just studying a topic, you’re learning to connect another language with your language, which is another whole level of complexity to flex your brain muscles. What? If you can have muscle memory, why can’t you have brain muscles? Alright, brain connections. Brain activity is good. It stops y...

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...

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...