Storytelling for languages

Welcome to the Five Week Linguist Show. Today, I want to talk about your story. So stories are an amazing way to learn languages, and if there was any one thing I had to tell people to do, if I only had to pick one, because it works, everything works best when you have variety and you’re balancing the right amount of input with the right amount of output, et cetera, the way that you learned your own language, so it feels so sort of effortless, the more of that, the better. With that said, if I had to pick one thing, it would be stories to learn languages. And I want to dig a little bit deeper into that.

Storytelling for languages

So stories. Watch movies, binge watch on Netflix, on Yabla, on YouTube, really getting into people’s stories, and not just drama. It could be a play. It could be a film. It could be a TV show. History, right? Those are stories, too. Plays, books, audio stories. I love Olly Richards, especially for language learners, but they don’t necessarily have to be specifically for language learners. If there was one thing I would tell people, it would be to invest in interesting stories. I’m loving some of the stuff that Duolingo has been doing. The last time I checked their podcast in Spanish, they were taking stories from Medium and adapting them for their Spanish learners.

Why storytelling for languages?

Stories are powerful. This language is at the center of human connection, and one thing that we all share are our struggles through life, our challenges, our victories, love, not feeling love. And reading about those is a really powerful way to learn languages. So if you could find 30 minutes a day to somehow engage in stories in your language, please do so. And there’s some resources that are specifically made for learners. My very favorite Spanish reader was my easy Spanish reader that I discovered from my grandfather when I was in high school. And there’s versions in French and et cetera. Olly Richards, again, especially for language learners, but don’t feel limited to that. Get Netflix for language learning. It’s a Chrome extension, and they have on their website a whole catalog of shows in different languages. You just put a couple of filters on there, and you got it. You can find content in all kinds of languages. Get into those stories, really pay attention. It’s closed captioned and subtitled. You can really learn a lot that way.

Storytelling for languages: reading

Reading on the web. If you’re reading anything on the web, you can use something called Readlang, which is another browser extension, and it will help you read things in any language, and you can sort of toggle over words and it will translate for you and you can save them to your vocabulary and your dictionaries. It’s really powerful, really great. And it will also offer you recommendations for content in different languages, so newspapers and magazines. Really powerful. So instead of searching around for stories, you can use Readlang to help you.

Now, when we get into talking about stories, there’s a couple of levels that I want to talk about. So again, if I had to pick one thing to offer language learners, it would be get into stories, get into understanding stories. But the way to really accelerate progress is to use your own output. So all of those stories,