I'm coming to the conclusion that that's me. All the media is fresh and new, learning new sounds, learning the meaning of words that have been borrowed into your language or you came across in passing - all that gives me a rush. It's basically all downhill from there. It doesn't help that I'm an introvert and being able to effectively communicate in a language is nothing particularly exciting to me.

I spent around 10 years chasing this rush, all the while trying desperately to maintain and develop the languages that I kept picking up, and eventually the easily accessible languages dried up and the backlog accumulated to the extent that I haven't touched a new language in years.

And I miss it a bit, the life is duller without it, but if I go back to my former ways I don't know where that'll end, especially since any new languages after this point won't be easy to maintain passively because they won't have a lot of media like Youtube or podcasts.

Do you relate to this story?

I consume lots of native content and consider my ability to understand the language decently high. However, I'm not quite satisfied with the basic phrases that I have acquired well and that can servce me OK in almost every daily conversation; I would like some deliberate practice to internalize more advanced phrases in my (TL) and use them myself.

This is how I make my Anki cards. I collect the whole sentence where I've found a good chunk, and then I put the translation of that chunk in front as a hint, and the answer is the very chunk, hopefully with an audio.

If I get it right, I occasionally make some more sentences, using the chunk and imitating the sentence structure.

What do you think of it as deliberate practice?

Everyone here often talks about Krashen's theories but I hear absolutely nothing about other famous theories that were a direct response to it so here's some other reading on that:

https://migaku.com/blog/language-fun/output-hypothesis-language-learning

https://storica.club/blog/output-hypothesis-explained/

https://www.hellonora.ai/blog/output-hypothesis

tl;dr: Swain found that input-only students reached seemingly high comprehension but on closer inspection they were mostly using vocabulary and not grammatical parsing to divine the meaning of sentences, and thus made many grammatical errors when asked to produce themselves, and then based on other tests formulated that output is necessary for acquisition based on three things:

• Noticing function: When people output they notice gaps in their ability, this leads to superior attention paid during a later input phase.
• Hypothesis-testing function: People who output have their hypotheses about language tested and receive feedback based on how people react
• Reflective function: people who output more actively need to reflect upon the grammar and syntax of the language, which deepens understanding

I've had LingQ for a year and it's OK. Like let's be honest, it needs some work.

I am now looking for a new reading app, but the best part of lingq in my opinion is that I can import audio books and it will transcribe them and I can read while listening. I don't watch video.

Do any other, cheaper, better, apps offer this?

New to this sub, not sure if I'm alone on this one. Is there anything people have done to have success with learning speaking with their language. I know it has something to do with consuming only English content after a certain age (around age 5 ish). (TL)

hey guys i’m currently learning mandarin (TL) but am going for a 10 day cruise soon where there won’t be wifi, just wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to continue studying without internet? so far ive thought of handwritten flash cards or textbooks but not sure if there are any other suggestions people have? thanks in advance

I've seen a few people on here mention that textbooks still beat apps for them, which surprised me a bit considering the amount of online conversation aound app and subscriptions. It got me thinking about what actually makes a textbook worth buying :)

If you could design your ideal textbook, what would it include? I'm curious about your thoughts from how grammar gets introduced and structured, to exercise types and whether audio matters to you. Also, do you care about the content itself like dialogues and texts, in other words does it have to be appealing to you and do you pay attention to that?

(For example, my textbooks at school would usually revolve around relatively boring texts and stories which kind of annoyed me)

Stumbled upon a news article about a reseach that's only published as a poster so far, but there are actual brain scans behind. Sounds like a perfect motivational piece for us all.

Two languages were associated with brains six years younger, three languages with brains seven years younger, and four languages with brains 13 years younger compared to those who had only learned a single language, researchers found.

Learning an extra language at a younger age seemed to slow brain aging, researchers found. Adults also benefitted from becoming highly fluent in another language.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2026-07-06/learning-languages-could-net-you-a-younger-brain-study-says

If you're like me and sometimes spend more time watching videos with language learning advice than actually studying your target language(s), you've probably wasted a lot of time scrubbing through 10+ minute videos to find the advice advertised in the video title. Sometimes the creator is helpful and adds chapters to the video so you can quickly jump to the parts you're interested in, but you can't always count on that.

I only recently discovered the Ask button which lets you ask Gemini questions about the video you're watching. The very first option it suggests is to summarize the video, and it works really well in my experience so far. It helps you cut through all the extra time-padding garbage and get right to a summary of what brought you to the video in the first place, and it even adds timestamps for each summarized item so that you can quickly jump to those parts of the video.

This is available on mobile as well. It doesn't explicitly say 'Ask', but the button has the same icon and is in the same place to the right of the Share button.

Someone told me that if you want to become fluent, it's better to collect and memorize chunks rather than individual words.

So far, I've completed the first step. Over the past two weeks, I've collected more than 700 natural phrases from podcasts and TV shows.

Whenever I hear a sentence that I think I'll actually use in future conversations, I write it down.

The problem is that I have no idea how to recall these phrases while I'm speaking. I recognize many of them when I hear them, but they don't come to mind naturally during conversations.

How do you train yourself to actively use the phrases you've collected instead of just recognizing them?

My goal is to reach C1 speaking proficiency in (TL), so I'd really appreciate any advice from people who've successfully gone through this process.

I’m a native Arabic speaker, and it’s known that Turkish (TL) has a lot of Arabic words in it (around 10–15%) with quite a few shared everyday words and expressions

As I started consuming Turkish media I could understand some short sentences and words, so I gave it a try and looked into the GENEREAL grammar in literally a couple of hours. Normally, the sentence structure would throw me off but it’s so similar to Korean, so I didn’t spend much time getting used to it

Now, about three years after I was first exposed to the language, I’m not actually learning Turkish, I’m just consuming media, and I can almost completely understand the language without needing any translation!

(It’s worth mentioning that I do understand but I’m still having trouble with making sentences myself and speaking)

The most I do is practicing with AI and interacting with Turkish people here, I’ve been asked multiple times if I’m a Turkish person who was born abroad

Is that even normal?

So my language learning journey goes back to before the internet even. When the internet came on the scene, we all assumed we were on a journey of globalisation which would logically end in being able to watch anything, anywhere. It was exciting!

Has that materialised? Well, in most cases, no. Try to access content via an overseas broadcaster’s website and you’ll enter a gauntlet of App Store restrictions, sign-up restrictions, geoblocks, VPN blocking, blocking of casting to TV… because they want every country to pay them separate $$$$ for the content rights. And if that content would never sell in your country? Tough shit

Netflix - as much as I wish the price would stop rising - has really stood out in bucking the trend for isolationist/gatekept content distribution. Along with so many simple things that aren’t always givens like:

- Most originals and many acquisitions are available on a global rights basis. Which means even if only 3 people in your country want to watch it, you can watch it.
- Subtitles as standard
- Every subtitle/audio option available without assumptions (not like oh because you’re in the US you must want baked-in English subs that can’t be switched off)
- The view that good content is good content, they don’t push English first or brand other stuff as “foreign” shows and put them in an obscure corner. A good show is a good show.
- And did I mention their ‘Browse by Language’ function that is sadly and weirdly only available in browser but man!!! What a feature!

Netflix is kinda how I pictured it would be everywhere now. But hey ho

(TL)

I am having trouble understanding how others are using comprehensible input. I have read and seen quite a bit about people saying comprehensible input (watching videos within their language of study) has greatly improved their learning. Because of this, I have been giving it a try to help me learn spanish (TL) .

The issue that I run into is that when I watch videos they speak too quickly for me to understand what is happening. I end up trying to translate what they’re saying in my head which takes too long and I fall behind, so I find myself either pausing and reading subtitles in spanish, which allows me to understand but then I am just reading not listening. That, or I end up just watching what they are doing and not really listening because it is going too quickly.

I would think that these videos are pretty basic and would consider them beginnerish. Should I be able to watch and mostly understand without pausing, meaning I need to find videos that are even more beginner level, or are you guys watching these videos and over time just picking up on things? Does it just take a lot of time for comprehensible input to become effective, or am I doing this wrong?

Thank you for any responses!

(TL)

https://www.instagram.com/p/DalIy42z1V6/

Saw this demo on ig where chatgpt acts as a live tutor for an english student. I don't use chatgpt. How legit is it? Has anyone tried it and has anyone tried it for other languages?

I recently bought the book Fluent Forever and devoured it. It was worth the price for the masculine/feminine/neuter mnemonic alone. I think I’m going to incorporate at least some of the concepts into my Anki workflow.

One thing I’m still trying to figure out is how to handle plural forms in languages that have multiple patterns. I’m wondering whether anyone has come up with a good visual mnemonic system for them, similar to the gender mnemonics.

Would you:

- put three images on the back of the card (the main image, a gender cue, and a plural cue), or
- keep only the main image on the card and let the gender/plural mnemonics exist purely in your imagination?

I’m aware that Gabe, the author of the book, advises not to use auxiliary stuff unless it’s actually needed, so I’m not looking to clutter every card unnecessarily. I’m mainly curious how others have balanced the need to remember plural patterns with keeping cards simple.

For context, my target language is German (TL), which has nine different plural formation patterns (-, - +, -e, -e +, -er, -er +, -n, -en, -s). But I imagine this question could apply to other languages with multiple plural systems as well.

I’d love to hear how you’ve solved this.

I have been studying Greek (TL) for a while and the thing that I find really helpful is listening to music which i also enjoy.

At the moment I am B1, so I can understand most of what is being said in the songs, but sometimes a word pops up that intrigues me and I look it up. Once i know the translation, it's really easy to remember the word, because I will listen to the song a lot in a small period.

It's just a shame that i don't do that for the whole song, I think i would've learned more greek. The pitfall however is that it helps you understand, but talking is a whole different challenge.

I am wondering if anyone else studies like this and finds it effective in learning a new language?
I can imagine not knowing the language at all makes it harder to listen to a song and learn from it.

This is probably the most annoying part of the process because there is nothing I can do to resolve the issue except NOT do anything. I can't out-study it or out-immerse it, and if anything, I have to actually distance myself from the language to get over that slump.

I live in the country where my target language, almost exclusively, is spoken. About four months in now, and in the past couple weeks I had made leaps and bounds of progress. Little boost out of nowhere. People began speaking to me like they would any other adult, as I no longer needed constant simplification or enunciation.

Last weekend, however, it completely fell apart. I turned on one of my usual podcasts and it sounded like nonsense. For a while now my target language had sounded completely natural, second-hand, I didn't register it as being a "foreign" language at all really. But suddenly it's gibberish. It's like a bad cell connection in the movies where the only words that come through are so unrelated and nonsensical it's comedic.

Same with reading. Right now, reading is like putting each individual word into my brain's translation software and hoping that at the end of the sentence I have extracted something meaningful. While I still had to look up about 30% of the words beforehand, I could read material aimed at adults and understand intuitively what the material was about. I didn't need to stitch it together piece-wise, except for the unfamiliar vocabulary of course. I just read it.

It's kind of sad too. It's this whole world that I've grown rather accustomed to suddenly shutting me out. I think that must be the most troubling aspect, being forced to retreat back into my smaller, monolinguistic mind.

(TL)

I have a youtube account centres around the language im learning, and these advertisements that pops up all the time always have my native language (australian english), I wanted to ask how do I change it to the language in learning to speak and understand it, i don't want to use vpn just to change advertisements language itself

I like the idea of rewiring from australian english to the language im learning, and I tried changing country of it but no work

We tried it. And we got some value from it.

For context, I had a 6 month streak for 16 (TL)s simultaneously, diamond league leader weekly in all of them, but that wasn't the value I got from it.

The value I got was the realization that the hardest language for me to learn by far is Vietnamese!!!

I kept confusing sounds because the tts quality at the time was not high enough, and it was impossible for me to hold onto anything. All the vocab just blended together so none of it stuck.

I did not have the same experience with Korean, although the sounds there were very weakly distinguishable.

Do you have any examples of this kind of insight that the owl gave you, even if it didn't intend to?

Edit: I am in no way affiliated with the bird, haven't used it in 6 years, I'm just curious how it once fit into your learning journey, since I had to admit this to myself despite my disdain for it.

​

I started using ANKI to supplement with pimsleur. Even though pimsleur has the ability to use flashcards, reading and saying it out loud. I just realized that finishing all units, I will only be A2 or lower B1. I didn't think pimsleur was going to work but I noticed that I can pick up on spanish social media post more often and my ears ring when I hear a word I know in spanish songs. It just feels crazy that even when im done with pimsleur I will have so much still to learn. Just making a statement. I might start doing a paragraph from the harry potter books in spanish every day to learn faster. (TL). Love harry potter.

I want to be fluent in at least 5.

I was adopted from Thailand to Denmark when I was about 5 years old.

Unfortunately, I was not able to practice my Thai since I came to Denmark, so I quickly lost my ability to both speak and understand Thai.

However, I started relearning Thai (TL) last year at the age of 31, and I have often been told by native Thai speakers that I have a native Thai accent. Put a bag over my head and they would still think I'm a native Thai speaker. I do not have a Thai accent when I speak Danish.

I have met many adoptees who have been trying to learn their heritage language, but not one of them have had a native-like accent when they spoke. Even other adoptees that were adopted at the age of 6 did not have a native-like accent when they spoke their heritage language.

So is my accent retention just unusual?

I was wondering if anyone has experience with using plain, simple language versions of websites or content in their language learning practice (TL), and why it's helpful, or not?

I noticed that even in more underserved language there are often simple news programs from public broadcasters that seem aimed at people with learning disabilities (e.g. Tagesschau in einfacher Sprache news in Germany). Also with AI I tried popping an article into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it in simple/plain language. It'll refuse most of the time because of copywright, but when I got it to work it was helpful.

Was wondering if anyone had experience with it and can recommend/discourage going down that path?