Greek

Which learning strategies pay off? I'm not talking about what sort of input or activity will help you learn best; rather assuming you have the right material what frame of mind will help you get the most out of it? 💨Be good at guessing: instead of obsessing over what you don't understand, see how what you understand might help you understand the rest. Guessing is an art and cannot be clearly defined in my opinion. I learned to do it more and better with time. Despite my dislike of language certificates the kind of exercises you get there helps you become better at guessing. 👳Use circumlocutions: So you don't remember how to say bakery? Instead of freezing and thinking really hard (as if this would help remember) say it with more words "the place where I buy bread". Similarly, a house can be "the place where I live" and your mother "the wife of your father". Circumlocutions aren't elegant but allow you to keep the flow of speech without th...

tl;dr learn grammar to do well in exams, impress with your knowledge, or because you like it. It's perfectly possible to learn a language well without consciously studying grammar, so don't feel bad if you decide to skip it. Let's get to the most important thing right off the bat! Do not spend time with grammar at the very beginning. Let's examine what erroneous arguments people make in favour of the early study of grammar: ☝"Unless you know grammar you don't know what you are doing." One of the most pernicious effects of school education is to inculcate this belief deep inside people's minds. Conscious knowledge doesn't equate good language usage . Some of the greatest writers didn't have a formal education almost at all. Mark Twain left school after the fifth grade. The Russian novelist Maxim Gorky (nominated five times for the Nobel Prize) became an orphan at 11 y.o. and started to work shortly afterwards. Now, if memorizing grammar rules is...

If you studied languages in the 80s and even in the 90s, this image from MGLU in Minsk must be familiar. Desks equiped with headphones and cassette players for learners to practice their listening skills. At a time before YouTube and when finding native speakers was not always possible, recorded audio tracks were often the only way to listen to your target language. Still today all books are equipped with a series of audio tracks and exercises. To the extent that listening comprehension is a part of any language certificate, practice with such audio tracks is necessary to do well in the exams. But what about actually learning the language? I will argue below that such audio tracks are outdated and are not a necessary part of your learning. ☝ The conditions are artificial and hardly relevant to real life. In other words, outside phone calls and listening to the radio how often do you listen to someone without being able to see them? My guess is at best a few hours per week compared to s...

Do you remember when as a child you learned thousands of words using flipcards and duolingo?? Well of course not, this isn't how you learned your native language. You learned by listening and reading a huge amounts of material. Still many people try to learn foreign languages in a very different way: by consciously memorizing word lists using flashcards and online applications. No wonder this doesn't deliver leading to frustration and self-doubt.In what follows, I will take for granted that learning a foreign language works in fundamentally the same as learning a native language when it comes to vocabulary acquisition and see what follows from this. 1. Stay patient especially if you are a beginner If you have a baby in the family reflect on how long it actually takes to learn the basics. This is the slowest part of learning a language. Of course as a grown up you have a huge head start by comparison to a baby, but it still takes time to get to learn the basics. It is much harde...

1. Context matters.  Learning words through word for word translation (eg Anki) doesn't work very well. It will help in the short term (eg if you have an important exam) but won't stick with your memory for long. You have to take the time to write and listen to phrases with your target words.  One thing you can try is isolate the words you want to learn from a video or text you like and make an exercise on a website like quizlet. Then couple every revision of the vocabulary list with a rewatching of the video.  2. It takes a lot more time than we think.  The reality is that unless you already know a similar language (eg Italian and Spanish, Ukrainian and Polish), learning a foreign language to B2 level is a question of several years of consistent effort. People who previously learned a language quickly (usually one related to one they already knew) or think they did it quickly (because they were children and forgot how long it really took!) often underestimate how lo...