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...

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...

The Podcast on YouTube: YouTube Link The 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…   READING OUT LOUD IN ITALIAN You might be wondering how I prepare to read out a story in Italian, especially a long one. Well, now I’m going to tell you and how you can use these practices to help your learning.   The first thing to say is that, no, I don’t do it without mistakes. I’ve narrated some of my own books in English. It’s impossible to do without mistakes. You get your tongue in a twist, you need to compose yourself for a few seconds. It’s even worse in a foreign language, especially the tongue-twisters! So, there is editing involved, but not too much, because …   The most important thing to do is to read the piece all the way through multiple times befo...

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…   BECOMING LIKE SHERLOCK   “ It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. ”   That’s a quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I think it fits well with language learning. If you know anything about the character of Sherlock Holmes, you’ll know that he’s very good at noticing the little details. He can glean a lot of information from them, often a lot more than he gleans from the clues that are staring him in the face. These help him to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Language is definitely a puzzle that you have to put together, don’t you think? There is something called the No...

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…   BEING BILINGUAL Specifically, I’m going to be discussing some of the things in the book The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa, narrated by Luis Soto, which I listened to recently. The author comes from a bilingual family, hence the scientific interest, and quotes many studies, other than the ones they’ve been involved in. There’s a tonne more information than I’m going to mention here, this is just a brief skim through some of the points, and I’ll leave a link to the audiobook on Spotify, which is where I listened to it. There is a link to a pdf for the diagrams, but you don’t see that on all Spotify formats.   So, the book starts off with the statement that the author considers ...

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...