A Language Learning Tale

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 Spotify: Spotify Link Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link 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 … Understood or Correct? What is the purpose of learning a language? Okay, let’s break that down a little more so you know where I’m coming from. Is the purpose of learning a language to be understood by the person you’re talking to, or to be correct? I’m hoping you answered to be understood to that question, because the likelihood is that you’ll never be entirely correct, with anything but the simplest of sentences. And what is correct, anyway? Many people don’t speak entirely correctly in their own language. How many times do you hear someone on TV, or in a drama, pronounce a word in a way that you think is incorrect? I’ll bet it’s a lot. Or perhaps it isn’t pronunciation, perhaps it’s sentence construction. They say things in a really ...

Spotify Link: Click for Spotify Link YouTube Link: Click for YouTube Podcast 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 … LEARNING BY DOING Or THINGS I’M LEARNING BY WRITING It’s a few weeks now since I spoke about writing in Italian. Today, I wanted to do an update on what I’m learning by doing this. First up, the subjunctive, or congiuntivo. I remember when I started learning Italian seeing it said, I don’t remember where, but more than once, that many Italians don’t even know when to use the subjunctive and don’t, which kind of rang true with me, because I know many people don’t use the limited subjunctive we have in English. But then, I also saw it said that Italians would be impressed by a foreigner using the subjunctive. Hang on a minute. If many Italians don’t know how to, or don’t use the subju...

Link to Spotify:  Spotify Link Link to 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: WHAT? CREATIVE WRITING? Or HOW I’M EXPERIMENTING WITH CREATIVE WRITING IN ITALIAN If you follow me on the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel, you’ll know that I’ve been dabbling in writing poems and very short stories - flash fiction - in Italian. I thought that today I’d explain how I go about this, because doing something like this is not exactly easy - there’s the understatement of this podcast. However, the one thing I’m not here to tell you is how to get your writing ideas, that’s nothing to do with language learning. This is just to discuss my process of putting together the words on the page to come up with something that’s vaguely passable in the language. No, I’m not claiming that...