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...

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...

 Listen on Spotify here: Learning the Françiano Way  Listen on YouTube here: Learning the Françiano Way   Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on a journey through my language learning process and learn my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about… Learning the Françiano Way, Or, How’s the Italian to French Going? So, how is my Italian to French learning journey going? Plain sailing, or am I stuck in port without a paddle? Yes, I know that’s an idiom mismatch, but that’s where my brain went. Well, I have had a number of issues plaguing my progress, which is to be expected. Let’s start with the big one first. Questions in French. Questions in French seem much more complicated than they are in Italian. I don’t remember them being quite so difficult first time around, but that may be because of how I’m doing my learning and that my detailed memory doesn’t stretch that far,...

 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...

EPISODE 4 Find this episode on Spotify at:  Episode 4: What Do I Know About Languages? Find this episode on YouTube at: Episode 4: What Do I Know About Languages? 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… What Do I Know About Languages? Or, My Language-Learning Journey, So Far I’ve referred a little, in previous podcasts, to the languages I’ve learnt throughout my life, but I haven’t outlined the journey specifically. It’s possible you might be thinking, what does she really know about this subject? So, let’s start at the beginning. Before the age of 11, I had no specific exposure to foreign languages. Then, I moved on to Secondary School. There, everyone was expected to learn French from the start, at least for three years, when exam subjects...

EPISODE 2 Find this episode on Spotify at: Episode 2: Is this Madness? Find this episode on YouTube at:  Episode 2: Is This Madness? 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 This Madness, or, Starting to Refresh My French Yes, refresh. This isn’t a ‘from scratch’ deal, but a waking up of latent information hidden in those rarely visited cubbyholes in my brain. Back in my youth, French was one of the languages I learnt. In fact, everyone at school had to learn French from the first year of Secondary School – that’s age 11 for those from other nations. However, I didn’t stop there. I continued on to A levels and then on further to a Diploma in Foreign Languages for Business, which was a degree equivalent. What I learnt from doing the Diplom...