Supercharge Your Language Learning - Maximize Fun, Efficiency, and Effectiveness of Your Studies

1. Course Promo: Learning a new language is a life changing experience. You can communicate with a whole new group of people in their own tongue. You join new communities and foster new relationships. You appreciate new cultures to greater depth and understand the country's history better. However, to many people often reach plateaus with their progress. Fail to utilize all the available tools and get bored or employ inefficient learning strategies that can't be managed with busy lifestyles. What I'll share with you in this course is a collection of tools, ideas, and resources to supercharge your language learning and get you closer to your goal of effortless communication with natives. This course is not specific to any particular language. For example, I'm not actually going to teach you anything in say, French or Spanish. This course should be used as a supplementary to your existing language studies to maximize the effectiveness and fun of your invested time. The tools presented here, either low cost or no cost and a very applicable to our digital world, making this course very useful to all students. So who is this course for? These lessons will be of most benefit to beginner or intermediate level language learners dimes sure that advanced learners will still find several useful ideas here. This course is most appropriate for language learners whose main aim is to communicate and converse in the language with natives. That is, if your interests are more academic, say your aim is to read historic texts from ancient languages. This course won't be so helpful for you. The courses more suited to languages that are widely spoken. What's I mean here is that if you are hoping to learn some obscure language that doesn't have many online or literary resources available. The ideas here won't be of much help. Courses for people who don't currently live in the country whose language they are trying to learn. It is better suited for people who are trying to learn the language at a distance. If you are living in the country already, the most optimal way of learning that language will be different to those outlined in this course. Personally, learning a language is such a fulfilling experience. You gain experiences and friendships along the way that you'll remember for the rest of your life. It expands your horizons and gives you an achievement to really be proud of. So invest your time into something valuable and maximize the fun, efficiency and effectiveness of your language studies. 2. Course Introduction: This course should not be viewed as being in any particular order, is in. You don't need to complete everything and less than one before moving on to lesson two, these strategies can be employed immediately into your learning. So I recommend watching all the lessons together and then referring back to the relevant lessons when needed. When I go through these strategies, I will use the language that I'm learning, Brazilian Portuguese as an example. However, the languages irrelevant, apply these ideas to the language that you want to learn. Now, I want to start with the most important aspect of all of these lessons, languages used to communicate and very simply, so many do not progress because they don't communicate enough. This is understandable to a certain extent. Trying to communicate in a non native language is a challenge. We might pronounce words wrong, get the words wrong, speak really slowly and embarrass ourselves. But, and I cannot overstate the importance of this. That challenging process is what gets you better. That is what results in improvement. So stop caring so much about looking silly. Put yourself outside of your comfort zone, embrace the challenge and have fun. Also, little and often is better than big and infrequent. Try and schedule regular times throughout your week to focus on language learning. Consistency will reinforce those neural connections that essentially you need to make to learn anything new. If you neglect your learning six out of seven days of the week and then spend that one day pouring hours into learning. You are setting yourself up for failure. Here you'll need to use more effective learning methods by prioritizing short and frequent practice sessions throughout the week. 3. Lesson 1 - Preparing for Efficient Learning: First, let's make a number of online browser workstations to make getting ready for language learning so much quicker. Most of the time, we tend to use the same websites and our language learning. So let's make a super quick to access these by creating a browser workstation, which contains the essential tools for language learning. I use a Mac and I'm going to be using Safari for this, but the browser that you uses irrelevant or whether you're using Chrome or Internet Explorer or Firefox, just follow the steps in your particular browser. So in my browser, I'm just going to create a new folder in my favorites. I'm going to call that language language Workstation just perpetually in My Favorites. Okay, so it's just appeared. So we have a here and also we have the drop-down tab. And I'm just going to add some, some useful websites to this. So first what I suggest you add is a translator. Add whichever one you prefer for me, I prefer Google Translate. You can just search for it, Google Translate and it'll put this up. You choose your language. So my case is Portuguese to English. You kind of core switch those around. And I'm just going to add that to my language Workstation by just press Command D on a Mac. And then I'll add it to the books, bookmarks and you'll see it just appeared there. Now another thing I suggest you add is a search engine relevant to your language or to your country, depending on whatever you're trying to learn right? Now, this is useful because sometimes when you come across like phrases or words, it's quick, it's just simply to search for it and click images. And then, and then there'll be very helpful to you. So for me it's Portuguese, so it's google.com dot HBR. You can see recusal Google like search. Google. Still saw she like, I'm feeling, I'm feeling lucky. So again, Command D on a Mac and entrepreneur actually, you go. But OSU app up to Gauss already selected it. So at it's my language workstation. Now a big thing with romance languages, with European languages is verb conjugation. There's plenty different conjugations, verbs depending on the, depending on the context of your sentence. So for me, I like to use a search engine for this. This is my favorite one. And again, you may need to browse around to find one which is best for you. But once you have found the one best for you, you want to bookmark that and add that to your language Workstation. Just to give you an example here, if I search for a verb fuzzy to do or to make, IGA, conjugates it all for you in the different tenses. And this is just now Chaka and nice thing to have in your language workstation Command D to bookmark this, and we shot at it. Now you'll need a dictionary as well. This will be very helpful for you in your studies. Again, this is my favorite one. I'm going to bookmark this, but please add what is most relevant to you according to your language and your preferences. Add that to my language workstation. Now finally, the online platform that we'll be talking a lot about throughout this course is Ital key. If you're not familiar with Ital key, just bookmark it for now and we'll, I'll explain all the different features of this language learning platform as we go through the individual lessons, you may be using a different platform such as preppy.com or verbal planet.com. But for me this is my preferred platform. So again, Command D, And I'll add that to my language workstation. So now if we go back to our favorites, you'll see we have our tab here which is full of the different bookmarks that we just made. And also we have the folder up here in the tab. So this is really nice just to access everything. So if we were to open up a completely new browser, and we want to access all of these at the same time. Just click on the tab and then click open in new tabs, open everything. And honestly it, this may seem like a really minor thing, but when you're trying to introduce short frequent study sessions throughout the week, things like this will really save you a lot of time. You can just open up your browser quickly, open everything and like boom, straight away you have all the tools that are most helpful for you. And you can just get along with learning, with studying, with exploring the language. Now in addition to our language, our language workstation, I wouldn't need to do something else which would be really useful. So create another favorites folder and just call that, we'll just call it language entertainments. So we're not actually going to add anything to this right now. I'll just put that in my favorites. And again, we can see its appeared here, it's empty. We're not going to add anything to adjust now, but as we go through the lessons, we're going to be finding a bunch of different resources that we're going to use to help with their language learning. And we'll be adding it to this tab here. And again, this is just going to serve as a resource for you during your language learning. And again, I'll explain this further as we go through the lessons in this course. 4. Lesson 2 - Finding the Right Learning Syllabus: Lesson two, finding the right learning syllabus. First, let's cover a number of common mistakes. Mistake one, relying too much on free content contents such as this is okay for supplementary learning or for entertainment, but it shouldn't be used as a primary means of learning. It's simply far too unstructured to result in consistent and efficient progress. And it usually always leads to some paid-for program anyway, mistake to using poor quality resources. Some online platforms, books and DVDs just contain low-quality content. Expensive software in DVDs will not make you speak fluently. In this lesson, I will explain how to select high-yield, high-quality resources. So poor quality resources include most Smartphone apps, these usually far too superficial to make any real progress in language learning. Mostly they function as a tool for memory consolidation. And there are far better tools available for memory consolidation, which we'll cover in lesson five. And mistake Sri, not having any learning structure. Trying to learn a new language without any learning structure is like learning to drive a car by just getting in the car whenever you have the motivation and having a go without any instruction, effective learning starts by having a framework. So let's put one in place. So let's start by plotting our learning journey. Where are you starting from? What is your current level of knowledge and ability? Are you a complete beginner? Can you introduce yourself and have basic conversations? Are you an intermediate level? Can you have conversations but struggle with dialogue about topics that you aren't familiar with. Now that you understand your starting point, let's think about why exactly you want to learn the language and where ideally you want to be in the near future? Do you want to communicate with people on an upcoming holiday? Are you learning to improve your professional prospects? Do you have any friends or family that you want to converse with in their native language. Now that you've acknowledged your starting point, why you want to learn the language and your goals for the future. Let's use this information to source a structured learning syllabus. Regardless of your learning preferences, whether it be books, DVDs, online platforms, or one-on-one instruction with shooters, We want to source high-quality material. For my personal preference is to start with a book. However, don't just head to the bookstore and buy whatever looks best or head to your local library and rent out whatever happens to be available. First, search online and find a book suitable for your current level and goals for the future. Have others left reviews of this book online? Maybe you can find reviews on Amazon. Perhaps people who left reviews on YouTube. Search around and be sure only to select a book which has evidence of having a high-quality. I've also used many online platforms over the years, and many of the same rules that I just described with buying books should be applied to courses. Ignore the reviews on the course website itself and look externally. Have people left reviews on YouTube? Has anyone commented on the course on online forums? The gray thing these days is most courses allow you to have a free subscription for a week or a month to try the platform out. I recommend trying several different online platforms and see which you prefer the most, which one is best suited for your current skill level and goals for the future. Of course, you may want to have your learning syllabus and activities to be set by an instructor. This is a very important point that I dedicate an entire lesson to later on in this course. Okay, so now you understand how to find high-quality learning resources in relation to your current skill level and intentions for the future. I want you to start searching around for interesting books, DVDs, and online platforms, where possible, see if you can have some exposure to the material before buying it. If it's a book, maybe there's a free chapter online for you to check out. If it's an online course, maybe there's a free trial period. Just make sure it's a good fit for your learning style before you start spending any money. 5. Lesson 3 - Starting Conversations: The Earlier You Start, the Quicker You’ll Improve: As I said in the introduction, most language learners fail to learn a new language just simply because they are too reluctant to actually practice speaking the language. Again, referring back to my favorite example of learning how to drive. You won't learn how to drive a car without actually driving the car. In other words, the more you start having conversations now, the more improvement you'll start making. So let's go through a number of ways you can start practicing the language by having conversations. Now one very important point to mention before we get started is about online safety. I appreciate this may be patronizing to some of you, but I'm sure there'll be some students on this course who will need to hear the following. Do not share any private information, videos, or photos with people whom you've been speaking to online. Unfortunately, there will always be people in online communities who may have malicious intentions. As long as you were just having friendly charts and helping each other to improve your language skills. That is okay and that is safe. But as soon as your exchanges go beyond this, please use your common sense, exercise caution and make safety a priority. So I live in Cambridge and I've used online communities to find people in my local area to meet up with a peer to peer language learning. If you do ever decide to arrange a meet up in person, please make sure it is. That's a public area during daylight hours. Tell a friend or relative way of going and for how long. And again, use your common sense. Ultimately, you are choosing to meet a stranger and they may not turn out to be exactly who they say they are. But just to give you some relief, in all of the years, I have been talking with people online and meeting with people in local coffee shops. I've never once experienced any bad situations. Never. But that doesn't mean it could never happen. So makes safety your priority. Remember when we were setting up our language learning workstation, I mentioned the website Ital key. One of the amazing things about our Tukey is that it's so easy to connect with other language students from around the world. I recommend that you create a profile. So from Italica dashboard, you just click on your icon and go to profile. And then you can just click edit profile. Now I suggest you just list some superficial information about yourself, including your name, where you live, your interests, and your language learning ambitions. And perhaps include any Instagram or YouTube profile links, which will help people show how friendly and interesting you are. This is really just to show people that you are a genuine human being who would be fun to interact with. I usually find if your profile is engaging enough, native speakers of the language you want to learn will start messaging you straight away if they don't, click community. Find language partners. And from here send out a few messages to people who are native speakers of the language that you want to learn and want to learn the language. This is your native language. So here in this pane we have a list of users who are using our talkie and you can search through them all. But just to give you an example, like at the top here we have a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker who is learning English and Spanish, so ideal for me to communicate with. And here we have a user who is a native Farsi speaker, but, but trying to learn English. And you can of course use the filters in italic API to search for particular people like what are they learning? Where are they from, where they living? So in my scenario, I'm looking for native Brazilian Portuguese speakers who want to learn English. You start exchanging messages with helpful and friendly people, offer to chat over Skype. This is a great way for you to help each other and learn the language in an authentic way without costing you any money. Again, please prioritize your safety in all situations and use your common sense when interacting with people online. And other great online community is into pals, which can be found at into piles.net. Similarly to Ital key, you create a profile and use the platform to connect with natives of the language that you want to learn and engage in peer to peer learning. So here with my profile, as you can see, I've just copied and pasted my profile from italics and you can do the same, but I suggest you make a profile such as this into powers is the platform that I use to meet up with Brazilians living in Cambridge and meet them for coffee. And we would practice speaking Portuguese, improved my learning and then practice English to improve their learning. I ended up making some really great friendships through this process. If you do decide to meet with people in person, again, prioritize your safety. Use your common sense. Try setting up a profile on Ital key and enter pals. Add some information about yourself, such as where you are from and state your language goals. See if you have any natives of the language you want to learn, get in touch and try exchanging messages with them. 6. Lesson 4 - Accessing High Quality and Cost Effective Online Instruction: So do you absolutely need to use an instructor? Definitely not many people, including myself, have become competent speakers of foreign languages just using self instruction. But I find you only ever achieve a high level with self instruction if you are very driven. I certainly found, as I had less and less time available with a busy career, I didn't have the motivation or enthusiasm to drive my own learning. And it is here that I greatly benefited from online lessons. So in other words, it's objective and it depends on your circumstances. If you're a self-driven person who doesn't struggle to explore a language and have the discipline for regular study, you can get really far without an instructor. But if you're not so concerned about the costs, could benefit from someone's setting your syllabus. I would rather learn quicker. I recommend seeking help from an instructor. The main consideration when it comes to finding and instructor, at least for me, is cost. The great thing about having lessons over Skype and other digital lesson platforms is the cost is usually much lower, but the quality and professionalism is just as high being that you can now reach instructors who live in all parts of the world can teach from the home and don't need expensive equipment. That cost of lessons with qualified teachers as now very affordable. I've personally had many online lessons with professional language instructors at astonishingly low prices using Ital key, you can also find so-called community instructors on italic API. These are people who don't have professional qualifications, but our passions instructors, they usually much cheaper to have lessons with than professional instructors. So consider community instructors as an option if your budget is tight. So how do you find online instructors? I've always personally used Ital key and had great experiences. The instructors usually have introductory videos so you can get a feel for their personality and teaching style. And usually you have access to several cheaper trial lessons two, which gives you the opportunity to try different instructors and find the best fit for you. You can see reviews from previous students giving you assurance of the instructive skills. And you can see any professional qualifications that the instructor may have other than a hotel key or that useful websites include properly.com and verbal planet.com. What to consider when using an instructor? Personally, I like to see evidence of their skill as an instructor. So I like to see plenty of good reviews. Some instructors can be quite expensive, so be sure to check how much they charge per hour and compare that against your budget. Watch the instructor's introduction video and consider if their teaching style would be a good fit for you. I sometimes like to find instructors with similar interests to me. At 1, I was really interested in learning more about Brazilian music. And so I found an instructor who also happened to be a jazz musician, as I said before, perhaps trial several different instructors and see which one you prefer. Choose an instructor who you enjoy communicating with. He guides you through entertaining lessons, who explains and teachers in accordance with your learning preferences, and who motivates you to learn more. I want you to explore some of the instructors available at Ital qi.com, perfectly.com and verbal planets.com. Consider your budget in accordance with how many lessons you want to have per month. Select several interesting instructors and books and trial lessons. If you have a restricted budgets, check out the options for community instructors, see how you get on and reflect on who you'd like to learn with more. 7. Lesson 5 - Memory Consolidation: Learning languages requires a lot of memorization and a common tool to use for this is flashcards. However, people usually make some costly mistakes here. So let's address these so you don't waste your time. Mistake one using physical flashcards. This is two, time and labor intensive. It also misses a key aspect of memory consolidation, which is spaced repetition. I-i knew flashcards are reviewed more frequently and older flashcards are reviewed less frequently. With our approach will be constructing digital flashcards, which we can create easily, can review and our phones, and which handles a length of time between reviews in accordance with our familiarity with each flashcard mistake to creating poor quality flashcards in order for us to maximize how effective our cards are during revisions, we need to keep them simple. Many people overload their flashcards with too much complexity in detail, and flashcards are not the appropriate tool for this. And so people who do this as simply wasting their time for memory consolidation, I recommend you use the computer program Anki and its associated iPhone app. As I mentioned previously, flashcards must be constructed well in order for you to get the most benefit from their use. Luckily, good resources exist to teach you the optimal way of constructing flashcards. You can find a number of useful links to tutorials for its use in the course materials PDF. Here several short video tutorials or all that is needed to teach you on how to construct effective flashcards and revise them in Anki. The software is free to use on your computer and the tutorials are free to watch on YouTube, the flashcards can be tagged, so specific topics can be reviewed with ease as you become more comfortable with the information that Anki algorithm will gradually increase the length of time between revisions, shifting the information from your short term to long term memory. During our language learning, we will come across plenty of new words. I want you to create flashcards of these words so they become cemented in your long-term memory. You'll be surprised at how quickly you can learn anything using space repetition with Anki. And this will have a huge effect on your vocabulary for your foreign language. A common approach in language learning is to utilize frequency lists that particularly observant among you may have noticed that our day-to-day conversations don't include a huge number of different words. We mostly tend to talk about the same sorts of topics where we live, what we did earlier in the day, how we feel, what we want to eat, or about our hobbies and interests. Therefore, if you were to learn the 100 most commonly spoken words in that language, you could probably communicate in that language in many different basic situations. Should you go to the publicly available database for Anki, Anki web.net and search for frequency lists, you'll likely find many available to download for free. So if I just search for Portuguese, here we can see all of the different decks that have been constructed by others and uploaded online available for you to use. If I hit Command F and search for frequency again, and we can see a deck that someone else has created. However, I much prefer making my own, and I believe this contributes to memorization. I will typically do an online search for a frequency list and then construct the Anki flashcards myself. Now frequency lists are the basics of the language, only comprising the simplest and most common words. They will not help you with complex conversations or correct pronunciation. However, your language flashcards will build over time in accordance with your general language studies. This builds an invaluable resource and incorporation of their regular revision will be of enormous benefit. I want you to download Anki or any other decent flashcard program and start creating digital flashcards of all of the new words you encounter. If you are a beginner language learner, frequency lists will be a huge benefit to you. Either Google a 100 most commonly spoken words and make flashcards out of them, or check out any pre-made frequency lists. Again, to the habit of spending five or ten minutes every day reviewing a flashcards, even within a few days, you will see the benefits of this approach. 8. Lesson 6 - How to Train Your Ears: One of the things that used to really bother me is when I would know a word in a foreign language could speak it and understand how it sounded. But then when I would hear in a conversation between natives, I would not recognize it. If you share this experience, do not be disheartened. Often words get mashed together in sentences when native speak and the words become harder to recognize. The key here is that you need to train your ear by listening to native speak whilst also having the text available so you can fully apprehend all of the different words being spoken, not to suddenly get all scientific on you, but some studies suggest that listening to a foreign language was having the transcript available in text results in much greater learning potential. So let's start training areas using the following resources. First, lets cover my favorite method. Listen to music, whatever your musical preferences are, you are shorter. Find a ton of great music with singing in foreign language. Search through Spotify on YouTube and try to find some artists that you enjoy listening to, browse through their albums and whilst listening to the songs, Google the lyrics and have them available so you can fully apprehend all of the words. If you're a big music fan, even try learning the words and singing them yourself. But you can do that in private if you prefer. The aim is to improve your language skills, not impress anyone with your singing. As an added bonus, this will make you more familiar with the different aspects of the country's culture, helping you with another major factor in language learning. I can guarantee there are tons of podcasts in your foreign language available, and there should be plenty specifically available for beginners to use the podcast app on your phone, Spotify or YouTube to find some entertaining podcasts. Ideally, there'll be transcripts available for conversations to which will maximize the apprehension of the language whilst you listen. With the explosion in online content, there should be plenty of entertaining videos available on YouTube to watch. Most of these will have subtitles to. So make sure you have the captions feature activated to improve comprehension. Just to give you some examples that are specific to me. So I'm a science nerd and I love to watch science lectures and lessons in Portuguese. So I really love this channel, strategy. And if we just scroll to the bottom, you can see not just science, but also other lessons in different subjects. And these are all in Portuguese and most of them have subtitles and captions. So I'll just add this channel to my language entertainment bookmark folder, Command D on the Mac. And I'll put that in language entertainment. I'm also really into calisthenics training. So I subscribed to this channel and watch all the new videos that come out on a regular basis. I also loved logs from people with interesting lives. And this is an example of a Brazilian who moves around the world and creates amazing videos about his experiences. Finally, if I'm keeping up with news and current events, I like to watch BBC Brazil, which also produces really interesting short history documentaries. So then when we move over to our language entertainment tab, we have all of these bookmarked and they're really easy to find when you need them. One YouTube channel that I highly recommend is the easy languages page. So with this page they feature all different types of languages. Go and check out the particular videos for the language you are trying to learn. Typically, each video will include the following. There'll be someone going around the country and interviewing people and asking them questions and having conversations in the language. And the great thing here is they have subtitles in both the language and in English. So this will increase your apprehension and understanding of what is being said. Didn't want the guy on presenting C. So that's just as an example and there'll be about different topics to so again, you'll gain exposure to wide vocabulary when you have a spare ten minutes or find yourself wasting time on Instagram or Facebook. Open up your bookmarks, find something interesting to watch and spend your downtime doing something more valuable. Okay, so now it is your turn to find some interesting material to train your ears, find some interesting artists to listen to, and start reading the lyrics, searching the available podcasts and be sure to prioritize those that have transcripts available. Finally, searched through YouTube and find some channels that produce entertaining content about your interests. Turn the subtitles feature on if it's available and be sure to follow and bookmark the channels so they're easy to find in the feature. 9. Lesson 7 - Getting Better at Reading and Writing: Regular reading can do wonders for understanding grammar and expanding your vocabulary. However, I think the stages best-suited for more intermediate level students is it helps to have a basic grasp of the language before you venture beyond the standard holiday language learner books. In the last lesson where we talked about sourcing, entertaining media to listen to. We're going to want to apply similar principles to sourcing interesting material to read. Again, just to give you some examples for me, this means finding a bunch of science news pages and Portuguese blogs about guitar playing and about Brazilian music and general news pages. Now think about the sort of material that you enjoy reading. What interesting articles and blogs are available for your hobbies and passions. Try searching online using a search engine relevant that language you want to learn. So I'll go to goal, but our z2 will search for your view alone. But as he later, Brazilian guitar, here we have our results. And the great thing here is that the content is usually free, don't pay to subscribe to anything. Reading non-fiction is another great way of improving your skills. Here I suggest starting with something easy. For example, many people are very familiar with the Harry Potter series. Having read them in their native language or watch the movies, the writing isn't too complex and given the popularity of the stories that books have been translated in most languages, books such as these are a great place to start. Other examples include the Hunger Games or the Twilight series. Basically just anything aimed at teenagers because It's usually a bit simpler. Whatever you start with, just to give you a heads up that it is slow going in the beginning, open up your language workstation on your internet browser and have your translator ready because there will be plenty of new words and be sure to create flashcards with the new words so that they become cemented in your long-term memory. Although the style will be slow, I guarantee things do speed up and soon you won't need to keep stopping to use the translator when you first start learning a language, writing exercises are not usually at the top of the list. Usually speaking and listening skills are the priority. However, usually when you write, you pay more attention to the spelling of the words which can impact your pronunciation. And you pay more attention to the grammar, which will greatly improve all aspects of your skill with the language. I actually neglected writing skills for a long time and honestly it really held me back. I wish I give it more attention earlier. As my language instructor says, those who write well, speak well. So let's cover a number of fun and effective ways to improve our writing. So let's just start with the best way. The best way by far is to use the italic community. So from your dashboard, just clip community. No books. You can just click right a notebook, but I'll just quickly go to my entry so you can see and hear you compose your writing in online notebooks and the community will review and revise your writing free of charge. This whole system works on reciprocity though. So be sure to return the favor if the person who has reviewed a writing is trying to learn your native language, be sure to try and help them out wherever possible if they have no books, for example. As an added bonus, This is a great way to make friends and start having more conversations. It doesn't matter so much. What you write about. Just pick a topic and write a short paragraph on it, whether it is what you did today where you went on holiday, you'd like to travel, what you do in your job, what you would do if you won the lottery. It doesn't matter after a while. It would I would suggest, is picking a topic that you don't know so well to write about as this will improve your vocabulary in that topic. In addition, if there is any particular aspect of the language you're trying to learn or train. Try and play with that in your writing. For example, I really struggle with using the subjunctive verb tense in Portuguese. So in my writing, I always try and include some sentences using the subjunctive. With one of my previous instructors, we would set a topic to write about. He would then review my writing and we could go through it together. The benefit of this is you have someone explain your mistakes to you, and then you subsequent lessons to address these mistakes, which obviously you can't do using italic notebooks or with other online communities. And not the benefit here is that I would read my paragraphs out loud with my instructor so he could check my pronunciation. Like I said back in Lesson four, not everyone will have the budget for a personal instructor, but I would consider whether activities such as this would be of benefit to you. Again, if you're on a tight budget, you could use a non-professional or a community instructor on Ital key. Or you could use one of the friends that you've met using into piles to review your writing. Okay guys, there's nothing to it but to do it. Setting aside even a small period of time throughout the week for reading and writing really help all aspects of your language learning with writing. Start posting paragraphs for online communities to review or ask a good friend of yours to help make corrections, right? About your hobbies, right? About your activities, right? About stuff you don't know much on. Just try and get into the habit of writing regularly. And when it comes to reading, find a number of resources that are suited to your level and interests. Just be sure to create flashcards out of any new words you've come across, so you cement them in your long-term memory. 10. Lesson 8 - Long Term Progression: The truth of the matter is becoming a competent communicator in any language will require years of effort. But if you employ the ideas from all of these lessons, hopefully they'll also mean years of fun and interesting experiences. You just have to accept that there will be times where you won't be as driven to learn or periods where you will struggle to have the time available. In this lesson, I'll share a number of ideas for maintaining your enthusiasm and for continuing learning during those busy periods of life. I want you to set a challenge or a projects that will stretch your language abilities. Here you need to be creative and ambitious Just to give you some examples to get those ideas flowing. Let me tell you a number of challenges that I've set myself over the years. The two-week blogging challenge. This is a challenge that I talk about in my book that talent hackers guide practical strategies to develop your time for anything. For two weeks I set myself the challenge of writing a short blog about my thoughts, experiences, plans for the future and interests. I uploaded this in italic notebooks and had the online community of language learners correct my mistakes. I learnt so much from this challenge. And even if it's just one short paragraph a day, I would certainly recommend trying this out. If you're one of those people that likes to plan out your week with a diary or a planner, try keeping it in the language you're trying to learn. Not only will this force you to learn different words which will expand your vocabulary in relation to your own lifestyles and interests. But I'll also get you thinking more in that language. Have at least two conversations per week. If you followed my advice from lesson three, hopefully you will have a number of trusted online friends to rely on here, try and schedule in at least two short conversations in per week over Skype or any other video conferencing platform. Even if these conversations are very basic, just having them on a regular basis will help Greece the groove. Just to reiterate the philosophy of lesson three, the earlier you start conversing the quickie you'll improve. So put yourself outside of your comfort zone a bit and you make some really great language learning gains. As always though, make safety a priority when communicating online. Use your common sense and don't share any sensitive personal information. So I've given you three detailed examples of the sorts of challenges that you can set yourself. Other examples include spending 30 minutes a day thinking only in a foreign language. Learn all the words to one song per month. Creating a vlog about your language learning. I just want to share with you my favorite challenge that I set myself during an international conference in Brazil. I was invited to a local university to give a guest lecture to the medical and science students about my doctoral research into cancer immunotherapy. And I decided to do the introduction to my presentation in Portuguese. Game all minute zone is about, is the audience founder entertaining that an English person was trying to learn their language and their respect by showing that I cared about their culture. This is a moment I'll never forget. And it's moments like these that really bring a lot of fulfillment in life. One of the best parts of language learning is the chance to understand the country and its people better. So utilize the opportunity to learn more about the history and culture of the country or countries. Being aware of such details really add subtlety to your understanding of the language. And I find that when you are actually studying the language, it becomes less of a routine endeavor as you have a greater appreciation of the heritage and personality behind the language, also is he hit the more intermediate stages of language learning. You want to make more effort listening to native speak news channels are the common goto here, and they usually always reference the politics and history of the country. So an awareness of this will really help you out. I recommend that you check YouTube or different TV channels to see if they have any documentaries on the country or the language. They don't necessarily have to be in the foreign language itself. The purpose is just to broaden your knowledge. In addition, see if Amazon has any interesting books on its history. As mentioned in Lesson two, just check the book has good reviews. First, Inevitably there'll be periods of your life where you simply have way too much going on and won't be able to focus on improving your foreign language skills. My top piece of advice here is simply don't stop altogether. What I recommend that you do is reduce the time that you allocate your language studies in half. Tried to shift the emphasis from development of your skills to maintenance of your skills. This way, when your availability does open up again, you won't lose any time needing to catch back up to the level that you were previously, you can straight away put your focus back on development again, even if you only dedicate 15 minutes a day to the language, that is still better than stopping altogether. So what I recommend is the following. Continue to revise your Anki flashcards on a daily basis. This shouldn't take any longer than five minutes. Continue to listen to the language when doing other tasks such as cleaning the house, doing the grocery shopping, or driving around late at night or at other times of the day when you need to unwind, check out one of your bookmark language entertainment channels and watch a recent video. This way, you still keep things ticking over, even though you aren't using massive amounts of effort and time. These tactics work well in the short term. Just be sure to return to your normal study schedule and focus again on development when your calendar allows. 11. Course Wrap Up: I hope these lessons have equipped you with plenty of ideas to supercharge your language studies. If you found this course useful, I would really appreciate it. If you can leave me a review on this website. If you have any questions about the course or any comments, please get in touch with me at Francis Dot grant 344 at gmail.com. You can find me over at Instagram and also my personal website, www dot talent hacker blog.com. Have a great time learning a foreign language and I wish you success with your future language learning projects.