If you had two weeks to travel to your target language’s country with the sole goal of practicing your language, how would you go about doing it?

This is assuming you already have an intermediate level and can at least get by in day to day situations.

This would also be assuming you don’t know anyone or have any friends in this country.

Curious to know how you would all go about this. Looking for actual examples and not just “talk to people”.

Started learning on October 1st, 2023 as a complete beginner. Took the CILS C2 test on June 5th, 2024 and passed with 75/100.

Though my experience might be helpful, so ask me anything!

Do you think the IPA is still necessary with modern speech recognition tools? Isn't that like walking instead of using a bike?

I sometimes have some time off I can do anything I want on my night shifts (it depends on a day, but usually I can have about 1-2 hour spare time).

So my main question is, what to do on those time - do you have any suggestion, what is good? Do I put time on listening podcast? Reading or what? I don't think I can bring textbook and all, but I still wanna use time productive

Hi all! I have a question about improving my speaking skills. I've lived in America since I was 16, and although I understand 99% of what people are saying, I struggle with speaking and tend to forget grammar rules in conversation. I'm 23 and have a noticeable slavic accent.

I'm looking for advice on how to practice speaking more naturally. I work and live surrounded by Americans, so I’m constantly speaking the language, but I still feel like I sound like I just arrived. I’ve heard about shadowing—has anyone tried it, and if so, what were the results?

Are there specific techniques you'd recommend for someone like me? I already watch mostly American shows and listen to American podcasts, so any additional tips would be very helpful!

Hello! I don’t know if this is supposed to be posted here but if not then feel free to lemme know.

How do I get better at Mexican Spanish specifically? I’m half Mexican and my mom never raised us to be fluent in Spanish. But my elder sister is. My family line is from Cosala Siñaloa.

I know my numbers and basic phrases but I don’t know what to learn because I’m just so lost and don’t know what to look for specifically. My conversational Spanish is decent and my accent is good for words I know but when it comes to having to say long sentences I get unconfident/uncomfortable and lose my accent. Like people tell me to watch shows and talk to people but every time I try to converse with my mom she’ll just switch to English.

Another thing, I understand Spanish fairly well thanks to my buzzwords so I can follow along like decently but I don’t know how to respond. I’ll understand the main point and know what my response should be but I can’t translate it properly. It is getting really frustrating when my mom has to translate my responses cause I can feel the judgement but I don’t know where to even look or what can help.

Sorry if this is more of a rant and if I explained it badly but if anyone has tips or tricks then those will be greatly appreciated.

I have been considering finding a language exchange partner, since I want to improve my speaking skills in my target language. However, I’m a bit hesitant, partly since I have a busy schedule, but I would be willing to make the time if it will help me improve. Let me know how effective exchange partners are and whether it is worth it for me to find one.

Hi friends! I am feeling discouraged because I’m an upper A2 I think, or maybe lower B1. I can understand podcasts, YouTube videos and even some shows, but when it comes to speaking I completely blank and forget things. I’m also frustrated because while I can listen to a podcast, I find it difficult to process what other people are saying in person. Is this normal at this stage? I constantly have a feeling of “I’m so stupid I don’t know anything” and “wow, you literally just understood this entire podcast”. How do I get past it? Just continue on and hope I gain more confidence at a solid B1/B2? 😭

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to significantly expand my productive vocabulary in my native language (L1) and would love advice on the best, scientifically-backed methods for achieving this. I already read a wide variety of texts actively, and I’ve recently started recording myself speaking and watching the videos afterward to identify and correct instances where I use less suitable words.

While I’ve heard of methods like spaced repetition and contextual learning, I’m curious if anyone here has found effective strategies for moving words from passive understanding to confident, active use. I’d especially love feedback from people who have tried certain methods—how have these techniques impacted your life, and how long did it take to see results?

Any insights on methods, daily routines, or studies you’ve found helpful would be fantastic.

Thanks in advance!

Hi guys, I feel like just learning one sentence one by one is slowing my progress, but I’m also worried a graded reader will be too much too soon. Any advice? Do you like graded readers? Do you wish there was something else that helped more? I used LingQ before and it was pretty helpful, but I felt like my progress slowed.

Sometimes, I just cannot help but wonder if “born and raise in a bilingual or multilingual household” or “fortunate enough to be educated in an immersive program or moved to a country during one’s ‘critical’ developmental period” have become status symbols that some wave around to shame those who did not have the same privilege growing up. Or even in adulthood, where some somehow get the chance to learn a language “authentically” in the country - the “way that it’s ‘supposed’ to be learned”.

I’m not talking about those who were born and raised speaking only one language, refusing to learn another or find the necessity to, or boldly claim - often while travelling abroad - that “English is all you need”. Rather, I’m speaking of those - like me - who respect and even admire those who can “straddle” two cultures effortlessly and would love to even get a glimpse of what it’s like to see the world accordingly. I couldn’t care less about language debates, identity politics, or status signaling - I just want to work as hard as I can to reach fluency to the best of my ability, with the resources and opportunities at my disposal.

But some just choose to “gate-keep” even the idea of bilingualism as reserved for those who “grew up” fortunate enough to be bilinguals. Especially here in Canada, where sometimes, even outside Quebec, fully fluent and proficient bilinguals are treated as morally superior to “non-bilinguals”. Forget about communication or deeper cultural engagement: just being able to say that you’re “fully bilingual” - however you want to define it - is akin to asserting a kind of “superiority”, no matter how your second language was acquired. Which is a shame, since there are SO many convincing and exciting to reasons to learn French - independent of its usefulness.

Had I not felt so intrinsically driven to learn French and reach C1 as an adult, the whole intersection with identity politics and the social pressure it creates to avoid the “shame” of the monolingual label would have discouraged me so much.

Now that I’m learning Russian as a “third” language, it’s an immense relief NOT to have to worry about “proving” my cultural credentials by not having to work towards a “bilingual minimum”. And I don’t even have to worry so much if learning the intricacies of Russian grammar will take longer than usual - there’s no pressure at all. It feels like I’m rediscovering the childlike joy of learning by going at my own pace and not having to worry about the whole “most of the world is at least bilingual” narrative that I’ve felt for so long - especially in online language learning forums.

ok this may be totally unrelated to my adhd and just a me problem, but i've noticed throughout my experience of learning foreign languages that listening comprehension in particular is especially hard for me to grasp. it always makes me wonder why, because many other people frequently say that it's easier for them than other aspects that come much easier for me.

my main two languages are french and japanese, and while spoken french is notoriously difficult to understand, japanese should be much easier right? in japanese, i am very good at writing and remembering kanji, reading text, and i can speak somewhat decently, but ask me to listen to and translate japanese dialogue with no subtitles or transcription and i wanna die.

it sort of feels like everything moves by way too quickly and my brain easily becomes overloaded trying to process each word, when i do hear things clearly it's usually because the speaker is using simple words or sentences/speaking slowly. i'm a very visual person and have not been the best listener throughout my life anyway, but this seems especially hard for me and i'm considering discussing with my teachers about extra time on tests specifically for listening portions.

all this to say i guess: do i have a leg to stand on? or am i just making excuses for my poor listening abilities? most other aspects of language come much easier for me but this remains my biggest struggle. if it's unrelated, what could this issue be and how do i fix it?

any help or advice would be much appreciated.

E.g., as far as I know, passé simple in French is only used nowadays in novels and formal writing, and although everyone understands it in the written form, most French people get confused if they need to conjugate a verb in passé simple on the go.

Do you know of similar things in the languages you speak?

Have been learning some language, and it piqued my interest in linguistic itself, can anyone recommend me some books?

Or to be more goal-oriented, what I need to know to make a constructed language?
Resource about what make language a language, the element of languages (grammar, phonetic, script) things like that?

I want to learn Italian. My local college offers Italian language courses. I think this will be better for my learning style personally. I'm wondering:

a) would this be an efficient way to learn a language? There are three seperate courses, Italian I, Italian II and Italian III, each spanning 3 months, 3 hours a week, 9 months total. (I will also be studying in my free time as I want to be passably fluent in a years time)

b) this is something i will ask the college when I call to inquire, but incase anyone has any insight, is it possible to attend a college for just one course? I've heard the term non-degree admission, and this is what I'm hoping to do.

This is my first time learning a language. My native languages are French and English. Is this time frame possible with this learning method or should I explore other options first?

I want to get my 2 year old started on learning Spanish, as well as continuing my training with Spanish as a second language. Basically I want us to learn together.

Financially I’m thinking I can have a tutor come to our home 1x week for an hour. Ideally they’d work with us and give me tasks and goals to complete throughout the week (like speaking in Spanish x amount of times, etc).

She’s in daycare right now and her primary teacher is Spanish speaking, I can probably talk to her to see if she can incorporate speaking Spanish to her throughout the day.

Has anyone done something similar? What has worked best for you?

tl;dr Here are the most important lessons and strategies after 3+ years of daily immersion with German, where I now comfortably read, listen and watch for ~2 hours every day and have been focusing more on speaking. I expand on each point below.

1. To learn any language, you don’t need a “why.” You need a “what.” 
2. Aim to get in at least 10,000 words of input in your language per day (60 min listening, 30-40 pages of reading, or some combo)
3. Learning about language learning ≠ language learning
4. No amount of immersion prepares you for drunk people or that one mumbling grandmother from [enter region with dialect]
5. Don’t assume you know a word just because it sounds similar to English.
6. We are what we do repeatedly. Repeat the right things. (Duolingo in, Duolingo out. Immersion in, Immersion out)
7. Your progress is actually linear but feels like punctuated equilibrium
8. Find a way to make grammar or anything frustrating amusing.
9. The door to progress is hiding behind a monster you're avoiding
10. Travel is a time for hustling and gratitude
11. Anki is like taking the express train to comprehension

#1: To learn any language, you don’t need a “why.” You need a “what.” 

My "why" for learning German was family & intellectual curiosity, but that didn't tell me how to learn. I found that what works best was to find something you want to do that happens to be in your target language and focus on that. Watching the Easy German street interviews every day were my first playground with German, where I got used to the sound of the language and found lots of vocab. But after 2 months, I bought a book about general knowledge and random science called Eklärs Mir Als Wäre Ich 5 (Explain it like I'm 5) and decided I’d read 1 page a day, rain or shine, and learn every single word. And after 6 months and with 2000 more words in my vocabulary on a variety , I finished, despite knowing <500 words before starting. Then I did it again by undertaking the whole Harry Potter series. Then I did with a daily current events podcasts from die Zeit. My current project is a 3000 page work written in the 1860’s. And I plan to read Mein Kampf soon. While each project kept me progressing in the short term, it scratched the intellectual curiosity “itch” and my wife and I have a German and English speaking 2 year old. ✅ and ✅.

#2: Aim to get in at least 10,000 words of input in your language per day

That’s roughly an hour of listening to videos or conversations or just 30-40 pages in a standard book. If you think about Netflix, podcasts or social media scrolling you’re already doing, repurpose it for language learning. Pivoting your internet down-time to target-language content, you’ll scratch the itch to doomscroll while simultaneously enriching your mind.

#3: No amount of learning prepares you for that one mumbling person from Bavaria

You can have as large of a vocabulary as you want with command over all the grammar intricacies of your target language. But there is always someone who's pronunciation will confuse the hell out of you. Try whatever you want. Listen to lectures with formal language. Listen to conversational podcasts. Listen to round table discussions. If possible, hang out with a group of native speakers, since the fast paced and colloquial conversation layered with mumbling is the final frontier of keeping up with conversation in any language. But know that someone is always waiting to unintentionally humble you.

#4: Learning about language learning ≠ language learning

Spend time with your target language, not . Spend time with with your target language, don’t worry about optimizing your Anki settings for notecards. Understand the difference between content in your TL vs. educational entertainment about languages (that's usually in English). If you’re interested in language learning, then enjoy that as a parallel but separate activity. But know that’s totally different from actually getting better. It’s like attending a meeting when you actually have work to do.

#5: Don’t assume you know a word in your TL just because it sounds similar to English.

There are a lot of cases where your TL may look like English if you squint at it. But as you get better, you’ll learn that recognizing a word does not mean you can produce it when you want to speak, even if it’s similar. You still need to work with thousands of words to understand when you can just say an English word with an accent vs. when it’s completely different.

#6: We are what we do repeatedly. Repeat the right things.

Duolingo every day is a recipe to improve at Duolingo. But does picking options from a wordbank or speaking quietly into your phone actually translate to understanding TV shows or participating in a conversation? No. You learn a language by trying to do the things you want to do. You can use a textbook or an app like Duolingo to ease into the language, but you need to make the transition eventually to actually engaging with content and people in your target language on a regular, ideally daily, basis. I spent a few weeks with an intro textbook before starting with the Easy German interview content so I wasn’t completely lost. But I had enough classroom experience with Spanish and Hebrew to know that if I didn’t make the switch to compelling content, I would be able to fill out conjugation tables but wholly unprepared for any real human interaction or interesting piece of content.

#7: Your progress is actually linear but feels like punctuated equilibrium

2 theories of evolution in biology: constant improvement vs. punctuated equilibrium. Constant improvement means with every generation, things get a little better with a consistent upward trend. Punctuated equilibrium on the other hand, posits that you have periods of calm existence that are interrupted by quantum leaps in evolution, where advancements like moving from water to land or going from vegetable to cooked meat diets meant explosive growth for a species. When you’re learning a language, your progress is actually incremental, with every single day pushing you a few steps closer to fluency. Your brain processes and internalizes more with every page you read, every video you watch, every word you learn and every grammar structure you unlock. But oftentimes, progress feels like once in a while lightning flashes. When you recognize a new word for the first time, when you read a page in a book without needing a dictionary, when you begin thinking in your language, when someone talks to you and you respond back so eloquently and automatically you surprise even yourself. The key is to find the right process and process it so that even in the quiet periods between these quantum leaps, you feel motivated by the progress you’re laying the foundation for. 

#8: Find sweetness in points of frustration. 

Find some way to have optimism about the harder parts of your language. I will never forget hearing Lieblingskartoffelszubereitungsmethode for the first time. The 40 letter word is a great example of German compound words and was a fun example of finding lightness in what can be completely disorienting.

#9: The door to progress is hiding behind a monster you're avoiding

There will be times where you get comfortable with learning but don’t see progress, sometimes called the intermediate plateau. The thing is, this can happen at almost any point past the beginner phase with almost any skill among watching, listening, writing or speaking. It’s helpful to do some introspection if you feel like you’re stagnating, which isn’t novel advice. But it’s helpful to think about what change you’re resistant to. As an internet introvert, for me that was speaking and it’s been the same story with Hebrew. Anytime I try to speak, I feel like I’m pressing on both the gas pedal and the brakes because I know what I want to say but not exactly how to say it, so I’d rather just avoid conversation. But after getting an iTalki gift card as a birthday present, lessons with a tutor forced me to stay in that discomfort and I saw not only that I could improve slowly but that learning to speak also meant I could read more fluently as I better knew what to expect. Look, if writing or speaking in your TL isn’t a priority, then keep going with what you’re doing. Or if reading isn’t important because you just want to get conversational, focus on talking. But if your language exposure consists of only doing Duolingo or ASIMIL, you’re probably avoiding that crushing feeling of trying to watch a video and failing. If you’re just listening, you’re probably avoiding the discomfort of speaking. There is opportunity to grow in areas where you’re emotionally resistant, and who knows how much that can unlock.

#10: Travel is a time for hustling (and gratitude)

If you have the luck, opportunity and the means to travel or move to a country where your target language is spoken, it can be profoundly rewarding. It’s a time for gratitude to immerse in another culture and connect with others. I’d recommend preparing as much as you can and doing some sort of boot camp where you double your immersion and speaking practice in the lead up to your trip. Save a few extra bucks to buy books, though any museum or event you go to also should have plenty of brochures and maps for free.

#11: Anki is like taking the express train to comprehension

It is damn near impossible to beat the efficiency that Anki provides to get your vocab to a few thousand words. You can argue that it's tough to keep up with the reviews, it's demotivating or that you prefer to just immerse. But my experience echoes many others' that Anki is just too good at helping to lay a foundation. I now regularly help out German speaking family members with specific words I've picked up just using Anki (recent examples include: gout, esophagus, raccoon). Anki is especially effective for words that are domain-specific (e.g., medical, engineering)

Side note: I originally compiled this for a YouTube video but thought it'd be helpful to share here as well.

Hey guys,

I've been reading recently about the "reading wars" and the various debates in teaching children to read. Phonics, whole language methods, balanced literacy etc.

My understanding (and I'm know to this, please correct me) from what I've been reading is that whole language is basically discredited, while phonics is considered crucial, though perhaps a little overstated in how much it prioritises drilling sounds rather than simply applying phonics / sounding out to learning new words and correcting mistakes.

This makes sense to me, though I don't really remember learning to read myself so I can't speak from experience. But I have been thinking about this as it relates to learning new languages. I'm a big fan of input methods, I like to learn languages by doing a little bit of basic vocab and grammar on some beginners method and then immediately hop into books with a translation method. I've been a big fan of Stephen Krashen and his talks on comprehensible input, but after reading around the reading wars, and noticing Krashen was an advocate of whole language, it got me thinking more.

Learning a second language isn't like your first, obviously. When I learn by reading, I'm really learning a lot of the spoken language too, with the added advantage that I can already (sort of) read. I'm sounding words out early on, but a whole language approach isn't going to work for me because... well I don't know the language as well as I can read it.

My question, if this makes sense, is do second language learners benefit from the phonics approach children learning their first do? We all have to learn the language's new sounds, of course, but I think we'd all agree that new alphabets aside, not knowing how to read a second language isn't the same as not being able to read at all? Does phonics have any real use if the problem you have is not that you can't read, but that you wouldn't know the word even if you heard it out loud? Do methods that don't work for children on their native language work for second languages?

And not just about reading. Phonics might not be necessary to read a language you'll never speak, but will it still improve your reading?

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, or resources where I can read more if you have them?

Edit: To clarify, I'm not talking about phonics in the sense of learning the sounds specifically for speaking or listening. i.e getting your accent exactly correct.

https://youtu.be/EpK6WAI4cPU%20 https://youtube.com/shorts/EpK6WAI4cPU

Hello I'm trying to learn spanish and would like some feedback on rolled R's. It seems like i have the motion down (near the tip of tongue vibrating against/near ridge behind teeth) but it doesn't sound right to me

Greetings to all Reddit fellow linguists!

I've been hatching one idea for a very long time and finally decided to implement it.

My colleague and I have created a server for linguists, which at the moment is mainly intended to assist with translation.

As freelance translators, we often miss working in a team where we can arrange a real brainstorming session and deal with problematic translation.

Therefore, we have created a server on Discord (https://discord.gg/cQx3KfRD), and there is a certain number of channels by language pairs (not one common channel and in the future the number of channels will increase when we see your interest). We understand that this is a difficult and risky initiative, but we really want to try to create something worthwhile for you.

You can join the channels you are interested in and receive notifications only for these channels.

We hope that in the future we will be able to create real virtual teams for most language pairs, which will be a real help in your work. Once, thanks to such a system, we managed to create an entire team for one large-scale foreign project.

We also plan to develop a whole website tailored exclusively for language specialists (we have an idea about a special invoicing system, maintaining a customer system, hosting translation databases, etc.)

Hope you’ll support our initiative. We will be glad to see you on the server!

And most importantly, since this server mostly in its green state, we will really look forward to your feedback regarding its development.

Join us and invite your colleagues!

Email for questions: bstranslateserver@gmail.com

Hello everyone, I speak English as a second language (probably B2 or C1). I lived my whole life in a non-English-speaking country and learned the language from watching TV shows and movies. All my skills are very good except speaking. So I thought if I traveled to a native English-speaking country, my speaking skills would significantly improve. But guess what? When I arrived in the US, my confidence became much lower than before. Listening to the natives and how they speak fluently made me afraid of speaking and making mistakes with my pronunciation or wording. I know it’s kind of weird; although I traveled solely for the purpose of improving my speaking skills, I didn’t expect to develop a lack of confidence in them.

I don’t want to read pep talk, I just want to know how to get out of this dilemma!

I have a decent vocab in my TL, I know the grammar quite okay, and my main focus for now has been to read simple books (graded readers, children's books etc). The language sounds correspond pretty well to the written form, so usually it's not a big issue to figure out what word is being said if you can hear the sounds. My TL is very far from any language I already know.

Every now and then I try listening to some podcasts or videos in my TL and I notice that, if I pause and take time to analyse, I'd understand a good chunk of it, but if I just let it play naturally I don't have time to "process" what I'm listening. My question is: is it useful to do this kind of listening -- without pausing? Am I eventually just become faster at processing it and start understanding more and more?

After the introduction of massive adverstisement everywhere in the app, in the photos, every time you open two profiles.

After the limitation of daily conversations EVEN with a premium account

After the fake one week free trial that charge you a full month directly when you enable it, and then the app support tell you to ask apple for the refund (that they won't give you)

Now I discover that they also removed the possibility to create an account on the website, you have to do it on your phone first and THEN connect on the computer.

Using the computer version was the only way for me to create an account until now since on every single phone I use I never get the invitation, so now I can't join the app anymore

I thought that it could not be worst when I decided to stop using it half a year ago, but they will never stop to surprise me

im in the college and i've a busy day between study my curriculum and learning languages.. that is a very hard thing to settle between them .. i know in here there are many ppl that can be good learners .. so can anyone suggest me to how to be a good one in balancing between them 🙂

edit : my major is about tourism.. im on my eay to be a tour guide

Welcome to our Wednesday thread. Every other week on Wednesday at 06:00 UTC, In this thread users can:

• Find or ask for language exchange partners. Also check out r/Language_Exchange!
• Ask questions about languages (including on speaking!)
• Record their voice and get opinions from native speakers. Also check out r/JudgeMyAccent.

If you'd like others to help judge your accent, here's how it works:

• Go to Vocaroo, Soundcloud or Clypit and record your voice.
• 1 comment should contain only 1 language. Format should be as follows: LANGUAGE - LINK + TEXT (OPTIONAL). Eg. French - http://vocaroo.com/------- Text: J'ai voyagé à travers le monde pendant un an et je me suis senti perdu seulement quand je suis rentré chez moi.
• Native or fluent speakers can give their opinion by replying to the comment and are allowed to criticize positively. (Tip: Use CMD+F/CTRL+F to find the languages)

Please consider sorting by new.

When pronouncing each phoneme, you need to change the shape of the lips. But it seems I can pronounce the phonemes using any lip position. Why is that?

I want to get back into learning Spanish and I need something I can do during slow nights at the restaurant or on the bus, but every app I look at is all about AI conversations or whatever and I don't want that.

Google is not being helpful so I thought I'd try Reddit. Thanks in advance!

I’m trying to learn Italian, and I was wondering if it would be beneficial to change my default phone language to Italian as a native English speaker?

I am A2 in Turkish, been self-studying on Duolingo + language books for about 8 months. My reading skills are getting pretty good -- I can vaguely get through the main idea of a news article or Reddit post without constantly checking the dictionary -- but listening is still hard.

My job has a lot of data entry, so I will often just listen to podcasts in Turkish. I don't understand 95% of what they're saying besides bits and phrases. Is this still useful as a skill to build listening? I feel like it's not doing anything but trying to convince myself it's a worthwhile activity at my job.

Has this worked for anyone else? Reccs when it comes to listening?

… especially with regards to smaller languages. I was originally studying modern Greek but I decided to switch to German a few months ago.

I live in the USA and I often buy foreign books on Amazon. I noticed that certain translations of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are considerably more expensive in smaller languages. Simply put, a Hungarian or Greek translation is often very overpriced compared to an Italian or German translation.

My computer and phone come pre-installed with multiple foreign language dictionaries. For languages like French, German or spanish I can highlight the unknown word and it takes seconds to get the definition. This doesn’t work for small languages like welsh, basque or Greek. Simply put, looking up a word is a lot more time consuming.

I’m someone who loves playing video games on my Xbox. It comes as no surprise but video games are often dubbed in major languages but not minor ones. I can play my favorite games in German, French or Italian but I can’t do the same in Hungarian, Romanian or Nepalese.

The buildup of the three items above makes me want to learn a major language rather than a minor one. I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences to me. For those of you who studied a minority language with fewer resources, how did you stay motivated? How did you buy books and other reading materials when they are so expensive?