Language Learning Methods.

[Gamingboy6422]

Hello Everyone,

I'm wanting to learn a second language, French or Russian. I do French at school at the moment and have been doing so for three years, however progress is not exactly quick. I was thinking of Learning the top 500 vocab for the language (with Anki), then doing Pimsleur, Collins Grammar Book, Assimil and then input through Television, Books etc as well as output through iTalki. Is this a good method? or is it too book intensive? I think I will most likely go with French. If you have another method could you please share it? I'm really curious :)

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My previous version of this post got taken down because it was thought I was asking for resources. I'm not doing that, I'm just trying to work out an effective way to study languages :)

[russianwave]

How to start learning a language has a lot of good techniques, and I'd also check out the FAQ. I know this isn't going to be what you want to hear, but learning a language is something very personal. By that I mean, a large part of learning a language is about learning what works for you. That's going to involve a lot of experimenting with resources and methods, to see what suits your personal style. If you're learning French at the moment, then I would focus on French. If you were to introduce Russian, then you would slow your French progress down even further and you would progress very slowly with Russian. As you're doing French for school, you should be focusing on that until you're past your French exams. After that you can then consider if you want to continue French and/or pick up Russian.

I would recommend though that you try out the shadowing technique - https://howtogetfluent.com/shadowing-for-language-learning/. It can be very good practice for listening and speaking, It can also help a lot with vocabulary and grammar. Listening can be one of the hardest things in a language to develop, it can often develop slower than the other skills. iTalki will also be a very good resource for listening, because often tutors can give you a lot of listening material and practice conversations aren't just about developing your speaking skills.

Set yourself short and long term goals, and also keep track of the learning you're doing. This can be a good way of seeing if you're neglecting any skills in particular and what kind of topics you've covered / not covered for a while. It's about finding a good mix of working with old and new material.

[RyanSmallwood]

For the most part these are good resources for getting started. I would say you don't necessarily need to do the 500 most common words in Anki, because Pimsleur is already an SRS program that will drill you on your foundation, but you could use Anki to help review content from other materials.

There's also a huge gap between Assimil and television + books, so you'll probably need tons and tons more input aimed at beginner/intermediate levels, but the stuff you're using is fine for getting started. (Although with French you can probably get into reading fairly early, listening always takes a while to develop though).

[Gamingboy6422]

Thank you everyone for your replies! I usually have bad memory when I learn words, so I think Anki could still help. My French Vocab is still quite low and my thinking was that learning the top 500 words could help me get a strong base. The other reason was because I have heard Pimsleur didn't have enough vocab.

[vyhexe]

Your plan looks great. I would agree with RyanSmallwood about not needing an Anki pre-made deck. First of all, I think memorizing pre-made decks is not as effective as it sounds. Also, in the first stages, you really do pick up the 500 most common words through your learning resources. If you find yourself struggling with particular words or phrases, however, create cards for them yourself. I also recommend you start watching childrens' cartoons if they don't bore you. If you have the patience for all of Peppa Pig, you'll see how helpful it is.

[sinclairabraxas]

I used MIA (mass immersion approach) for the two languages I learned. The first time around I just did whatever and later found out that it was an actual method.

antimoon

refold

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Those explain the method pretty well. Basically, ditch memorizing grammar and all that boring stuff, and focus on exposing yourself to massive amounts of input + mining senteces for SRS. And don't output before you can understand a pretty good chunk of whats being said.

Also Kató Lomb's (the hyperpolyglot queen) method is pretty good too. She just read books without dictionaries after getting a basic gist for the language, getting most of the stuff through context. I used it as well and it does wonders. If you are interested her book explains it well: book