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Learn a Language at Home: 3 Simple Tools

How would it be if you knew you could learn a new language at home without great expense, hours of tedious study, traveling to courses, or disrupting your life? Transform your downtime into skills in a new language. Think about the situation right now. Many of us are stuck at home. We can’t go anywhere. How can you turn the time that you have at home into a new language?

If you have a smartphone or anything that can connect to the internet, but anything that’s mobile, you have the ultimate language learning lab enabling anyone to learn a language at home. Many years ago, language learning labs had to be stationary. They were in one place and there was no internet. You had to listen to cassettes and tapes to go have those immersive experiences. Now, this phone, you can learn any language anywhere if you’ve got this.

I want to talk about some surprising apps to learn a language at home, and as much as I love Duolingo, that’s not what I’m referring to. 

The first one is Google. If you can connect to the internet, there are thousands upon thousands of podcasts that are going to allow you access to any language you want to learn. 

Some are specifically geared towards beginning learners, and others are more advanced. Learn a language at home, regardless of your level.

You can get free materials from the largest search engines. Pinterest is a huge search engine. If you want to learn Spanish, go ahead and type that. Learn Spanish. Want to learn French? They’re going to take you to all these blogs and resources, the things that are pinned to this amazing search engine. YouTube is another example. You’ll find a plethora of material to learn a language at home on the three biggest search engines in the world, Google, YouTube, and Pinterest.

On your phone, Audible is one of my very favorite apps to learn a language at home. There are tons of audio courses published for learners of many languages. They’re really easily and readily available. Some of my very favorite for beginners are Pimsleur courses. I love Michel Thomas, and I love Earworms. You can listen to levels to get started. You can also listen when you start becoming an intermediate. I absolutely love Olly Richards’ short stories. He publishes in lots of languages. Listen to them over and over again. It’s an amazing way to build your vocabulary and hear some interesting stories at the same time.

When you become advanced or you start moving into the advanced levels, audio books are great to learn a language at home. They are what helped me do that final step towards speaking Spanish like a native. I spent a five-week period during the summer where I listened to novels and self help books in Spanish over and over again. I walked and I cleaned while listening. I really focused on deep understanding. Audio books are probably one of the best resources out there for language learners of all levels. You can do this anywhere with a phone. You can listen on your laptop, your desktop, your Alexa.

eBooks, any app that you use to read books on a device will work. I’m going to share two of my very favorite resources. They are phrasebooks. Phrasebooks are the perfect eBook or resource for a beginner, and they’re easily available online. These are two in Italian. If you buy a phrasebook online,