in this video I'm going to take you through the top 5 language learning activities that you can do in a language that you want to learn in order to do just that learn it now these are absolutely not the only things that you can or should do but if I had to pick five that everyone could do just on repeat in order to get really good at a language it'll be these five because they're easy and effective now what do I mean by activities well just like if I said hey do you like to eat
food you might say well yeah but what kind of food if I then said hey do you want to spend some time in the target language you might want to know specifically what I meant by that and it's always easier to spend time on something particularly if that something is a little bit challenging if you've got some kind of task that you're working on something that you're actually doing so instead of my just saying you should spend time in your language here are five activities that you can put on your list so that on the
days that you feel like you should do some of your target language you can decide I'll do X by X I mean something not the new name for Twitter yeah I'm gonna jump on that bandwagon even though I've never used Twitter or X and I never will because there's a stupid name now on top of everything else let's get started [Music] the first task I call scratching now it's sometimes called that anyway but not normally in language learning circles and it basically refers to just listening to something or watching something or maybe even having a
conversation but all the while taking notes but there are no particular rules to how you take those notes or what you do or don't write down the aim is basically to just keep your head in the space of the target language so you might watch a show or listen to a podcast and if you hear a word you don't know you write it down with your best guess as to how it's spelled or maybe it's a phrase or maybe if you're more of a beginner it's a sound that you don't know that keeps cropping up
you basically just write down whatever your brain throws at you you're documenting your thoughts about the language rather than everything in the language itself and the beauty of it is that it's very good at keeping you focused even if you can't understand very much so it works very well for beginners but it scales perfectly through to Advanced so I could do this now in Swedish or even in English for example I could write down words that I probably do know but just don't use very often or particular phrases that I'll like you're really just allowing
your mind to interact with whatever language you pick up that is coming in this can actually be more tiring than you might imagine so maybe set yourself a small goal like scratching the language for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and even those 10 minutes may pass quite slowly and if you're looking for short or long videos in your target language I can recommend lingo pie the sponsor of today's video and the place to find quality content made specifically with language Learners in mind now I'll admit that it feels a bit strange to be recommending lingo
Pie when about a month ago I said I'd be putting Spanish aside and focusing on Swedish which lingo pie doesn't have not that that's very uncommon to not have Swedish but I can say that I'm really really looking forward to getting back to Spanish because I love the content that lingo pie have particularly the travel stuff in different dialects of Spanish and probably my favorite feature about it is the interactive word for word transcript which can also be used for bilingual subtitles you can make flash cards out of it which include the context from which
you took the flashcards I discovered recently that in Japanese the subtitles come in five different levels of difficulty from English all the way up to Raw kanji and another thing I really like is that lingo pie tracks the time spent immersing as well as making and reviewing your flashcards so you can gamify it and set yourself some really tangible goals and you can even book and take small group lessons from right within the platform whenever I do go back to Spanish I'm thinking of setting myself some lofty goal like spending four hours a day on
lingo pie for a week or something like that because it's the sort of ultimate Gem of language immersion everything you need is in one place they currently have Spanish French German Italian Portuguese Japanese Korean and Russian and you can get a seven day free trial using the link in the description thanks to lingo pie for making this video possible foreign activity I recommend I call puzzle brain and is designed to take advantage of the fact that most people are quite distractible by providing a minor stimulus to block any possible intrusive thoughts or impulses that you
may have but simply you do something that you can do without too much intense thinking at the same time as listening to the target language and whenever I've suggested this in the past I do get a lot of people surprised by how well it works with comments like wow I find that going for a walk or doing a jigsaw puzzle with a podcast on really does make me more attentive to the language but I also normally get some full-time shop assistant who thinks he's David Goggins telling me that running with an audio book on is
a complete waste of time because you can't properly focus on the training yes thank you I am aware that there are some people athletes who would want their sport to be the sole focus of their training session but for me and 98 of people a walk or a run is just a way to move your body and de-stress a little and that will happen equally well with a podcast or an audio book on maybe even better what's more is that my listening is often even more attentive and my recollection of what I heard in my
target language is better than ever meaning that it's a win not just for time efficiency but for the language study itself and by the way if you want to pretend that your marathon runner Elliot kipchoge or basketball or LeBron James and you therefore need complete Focus while you're working out so that you can get the most out of your session then that yeah that's fine you do you don't bring me into it I don't care and you should also know that at my gym at least literally every single person I've seen there ever wears headphones
which is actually good for me because I'm always listening to Swedish which means I count my reps in Swedish and that would get a little bit awkward when I got to six reps but it doesn't matter because no one can hear me by the way to do this one you don't have to be exercising you can do things like jigsaw puzzles or vacuuming or cleaning or tidying essentially the exercise is about not assuming that the target language must all always have your completely attentive Focus it's actually good for the target language and just the amount
of time you spend in it to split your time between attentive listening and semi-attentive listening foreign but if you are after fully attentive listening then I might suggest this third task which I call scuba diving but I don't mean with an oxygen tank and a mask I mean with a book and the matching audiobook and this one's great because you can do it at a very early stage assuming that the language has an alphabet and one that you know so it's not the same with character-based languages but for most of the languages that have an
alphabet you can generally learn that alphabet really quickly so as soon as you know all or most of the alphabet and between say 400 and 800 words it becomes really effective training and it stays effective for a long time too the first thing it trains is recognition between written words and their pronunciation so it's great for languages that are not particularly consistent in their pronunciation like English or Swedish because even if you don't know the meaning of a word you get to hear it pronounced by a native speaker in its proper context so you don't
get any wrong ideas about what it might look like written down it also means that you learn things that seem really obvious to native speakers but are actually quite hard like where words start up and finish I remember when I first started learning Swedish I would often try to look up words that didn't exist because of things like didn't exist but the other big advantage that reading along with the audiobook has is that you're completely attentive to the language and you really decrease the chances that your thoughts will wander because you're more fully engaged with
the two stimuli so even if you feel like you're too much of a beginner in a language to follow along with what's going on in a story I would still recommend that if you find an audio book and the corresponding book and just read along with the audiobook this works really well give it a go and yes I call that one scuba diving I won't go into why now but if you really need to know then leave me a comment foreign number four I call copycat and it is for slightly more advanced learners but if
you're not sure if you can actually do it then give it a try if you feel it helps then keep it up basically it's similar to shadowing but without the emphasis on copying every single detail and everything that a native speaker does you're more trying to feel the same emotion that they do and lock that in with the same kinds of language that they use and series and audio books are both good candidates for this because you'll notice that in series there are often large gaps in the dialogue that you can use to just repeat
the last thing that was said but even in audiobooks there are often pauses between things that are said that are often longer than you realize so if you're just a little bit more advanced you can use the silence plus just the very start of whatever is said next to repeat all of what was just said and pretty much go through a whole piece of dialogue in a book like that now it's a little bit complicated to explain exactly what I mean so at the risk of making a fool of myself I'm going to try to
show you right foreign [Music] they were perfect undone read this song so I'm not saying it exactly the same way as it's being said there I'm just trying to grasp the same emotions and again with this one the benefits are numerous and you can adjust it to your level you can pause the recording like I was just then because there wasn't a lot of Silence to work with but if the recording has a lot of Silence then you can just let it play and that's another thing that sets this apart from shadowing it's much less
strict you're not trying to catch every little detail you're just trying to make sure that the language doesn't just pass through your skull completely unengaged with I'll often do this one when I'm walking when I get a little bit of dialogue to work with I'll just uh yep that part that part that part and you're just trying to engage that little bit more with the language that is in your ears and the fifth activity I call eight rep which is the word repeat but with the first three letters at the end and it's basically repetition
but it's with a much longer term view so still my take one piece of material like an episode of a TV show or a kind of cluster of material like the entire season of a TV show but instead of a very deliberate set of repetitions you're going for a much more relaxed and long-term based Target for the repetition that will ultimately result in the complete saturation of your brain with that material to give you some context of where I got this idea from when I first started learning Swedish my car had an ordinary CD player
not an MP3 CD player or a Bluetooth or anything like that so I just had the same 80 minutes of an audiobook it was the first eight chapters of that audiobook on a CD and while I was fairly convinced that it didn't really do anything to listen to that while driving I was also pretty convinced that it couldn't really hurt so I just left that same 80 minutes playing every time I drove the car by myself for about 10 months and when I finally came across an input centered approach to language acquisition and started expanding
the amount of Swedish different Swedish that I was listening to I discovered that Allah lot of what I needed to know about Swedish was in those 80 minutes and it was unreasonable that I didn't understand anything that was in those 80 minutes because I listened to it so many times and I said a similar thing in my watching Spider-Man 50 times video if you hear something enough times in the end it's not really possible that you can't understand it you will just have to and I'm not at all saying that you shouldn't read watch or
listen to multiple things you definitely should but I'm also saying that there should be one thing one novel or dialogue heavy film or something like that that you just overcook to the point of saturation whether you realize it or not you probably actually had one of these in your native language I know I do in English and I know that it's made my English better so those are my top five activities now I'm not saying to not do anything else to learn a language you should do as much as possible I think if you did
enough of those five things on repeat in like 96 of languages you would end up very so I hope that you did get something out of this video I know that this one was a bit more General but I do have a very particular time consuming video that I'm currently working on and I think that everyone has a lot to get out of that one I don't want to give too much away but I'm going on the attack I'm going to tear down a big name make sure you're subscribed maybe even hit the Bell but
don't have notifications on on your phone no one wants stuff interrupting you when I've uploaded a video but yeah just so you know that I've made a video had the notifications on and remember to check out the seven day free trial of lingo pie using the link in the description if you want to watch another video this one's really good and until next time thank you
