These past month I’ve been struggling with consistency in language study. I have tried to come up with a plan to improve steadily while not burning myself out.
How I Study Languages
When I think of learning a foreign language, I associate 4 skills with it:
- Speaking
- Writing
- Reading
- Listening
It personally helps me to consider these 4 skills because I tend to enjoy listening and watching videos a lot more, but I neglect writing and speaking. When I was learning German, I did a lot of reading and video watching and the result was something that looked like this:
My problem was that I could understand decently, but I had a very hard time speaking and writing when I needed to. This is actually a stark contrast to when I was first learning Spanish in high school. My classes were pretty focused on grammar and I took AP courses which had me writing essays and analyzing poetry, but I rarely ever spoke with Spanish speakers and so my Spanish looked like this.
The point is, it’s important that you give each of these 4 skills equal attention when learning a language.
What Should a Plan Look Like?
I am not a huge fan of how Xiaoma will sensationalize language learning and often times exaggerate his abilities, but I do think he gives a lot of good advice. He said something that I agree with in this video which is
Language learning is not hard like calculus, it is hard like exercise
And I agree a lot with this, because I’ve found that like most things, language learning is a grind. It requires a lot of repetition and so a good plan should be fun while still challenging you just enough. What I’ve been using lately is a technique called sentence mining. In a nutshell, it’s grabbing real content in your target language and making flash cards out of it so that you can remember word definitions along with the context of where you saw the word. With the tools we will go over below, I am able to learn languages in a chill setting and sentence mine with very little friction.
Tools I Use
The Refold youtube channel did a good job here explaining how to set up these tools if you want to do it for yourself.
Yomitan
Yomitan is a browser extension that lets you move your cursor over any selectable foreign language text in a web browser and instantly look up the definition.
Asbplayer
AsbPlayer is a browser extension that turns youtube video subtitles into selectable text, and if you combine it with Yomitan, you can quickly look up the definitions of words in video subtitles.
Anki
Anki is a really good flashcard program that can integrate with Yomitan, allowing you to create flash cards instantly (requires a bit of setup).
Lute
Lute essentially combines all this into a self-hosted web application. You import texts and when you hover over words, the definitions will pop up. This is a little more hands on, but I have found that Yomitan cannot parse khmer text well. So mainly use Lute for reading Khmer.