World Language Classroom: End of Year Fun

I love teaching languages. There are so many things we can do in the world language classroom to bring our lessons to life. With that said, the end of the year can be hard for students to stay focused. Below are some fun activities for your world language classroom to try during this end of the year period.

A Tour of My House

Inspired by @irishpolyglot @bennylewis and his apartment tours- a fun project for the end of the year.⁣

⁣

The student gave us a video tour of their house, a dream house or a celebrity’s house. ⁣

OR The student gave us a photo or drawing of a house and described it in the target language without notes. ⁣

⁣

At least five rooms were described and shown. Your presentation should answer the following questions:⁣

⁣

What does your house look like?⁣

What things are in your house?⁣

What do you do in the different parts of your house?⁣

What do you like most about your house?⁣

Use your phone, or put your photos on a Google Slide and narrate it with the app Fishbole.

Personal Soundtracks⁣

⁣

Students select a certain number of songs (you decide) that represent them. They might select their own anthem, their favorite song, their outer self, their early childhood, their future- you pick the categories.⁣

⁣

For each song, they write an explanation of why they chose the song they did in the target language.⁣ These are great for exploring culture in the world language classroom.

Rose, Thorn and Bud⁣

⁣

I love roses, and find so much inspiration in them.⁣

⁣

For this activity, every student shares a rose (something great), a thorn (something difficult) and a bud (something to look forward to) in the target language.⁣

⁣

This works best as an icebreaker in the world language classroom. However, if you teach the novice level, this activity will be something to work up to later in the year. It also serves as a nice review of vocabulary and structures before the end of the year.⁣

Nature Walk⁣

⁣

I love to take students for a walk outside for a change of pace and some movement. They must speak the target language the entire time. When we return we discuss and journal about what we saw.⁣

Myself, Inside and Outside⁣

⁣

Students can take or use a selfie to start. They must also select three images that represent them on the inside. They must then present these photos and describe why they selected these photos in the target language.⁣

⁣

I allow them to do their presentations from their phones. They can also create a presentation and upload it to Fishbole. ⁣

⁣

Students can also do their own drawings- a good option for our artists.⁣

Bubbles⁣

⁣

I learned this activity my first year teaching from an excellent world language teacher. Essentially, you blow bubbles and give students a task.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources and advice for making engaging language learning happen any time, anywhere.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week I want to share with you my amazing guest, Dr. Tamara Walker. She’s doing some amazing work. She’s a Professor of History, published author, she’s published numerous times in The Guardian and she’s got a couple of books coming out with, I believe, Crown next year. Brilliant woman who’s doing amazing work in the world, and I’m just going to let the interview speak for itself. We’re going to put some links. She talks about her foundation and the amazing work that she’s doing and how we can help out. Again, thank you for listening.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week I have a guest who has some amazing projects going on and writing and books, and there’s so much to talk about. This is Dr. Tamara Walker, yes? Okay, and can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your teaching, and-

Sure. Yeah. So, I am a Professor of History. I teach Latin American history at the University of Toronto and I also co-founded and co-direct a non-profit called The Wandering Scholar, which is focused on making international education opportunities accessible to high school students from low income backgrounds. And those are kind of related pursuits; my day job and the non-profit, since I wouldn’t have become a historian of Latin America had I not had an early experience of travel in my school when I went to Mexico. And it really changed the course of my life. It led to me studying abroad in college and pursuing the career that I have now, so it’s with that in mind that I, along with my partner, Shannon O’Halloran Keating, decided to found this organization to make those experiences available to students like us.

That’s amazing. So, I believe that you grew up in Colorado, is that right?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Did you do your undergraduate in Colorado and then sort of went… Is that right?

No, I did my undergraduate in Philadelphia. I went to the University of Pennsylvania for undergrad. So, from the time I turned 18, I left home and have continued to just be away from Colorado.

And then, but you also… Congratulations, that’s Ivy League, that’s quite an accomplishment. Did you tell me that you studied in Mexico as a high school student, is that right?

Yeah.

And this is kind of what everything… Can you tell us about that, please?

Yeah. So, I went to this high school that had an interim program, is what they called it, and it was basically a way to spend Spring Break doing something productive or constructive. And so, students had the chance to either work at a shelter, a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, to do different types of community service projects, to hone their interest in theater or the arts, or if they had taken language classes, to study overseas. And so, my first year of the program I was able to go to Mexico and then I studied French the next year basically to be able to go on the class trip to Paris and to Lyon. So it was through this amazing program that my high school had offered, that, had I not gone to that school and not gotten a scholarship to go to that school, I never would’ve had those opportunities. Because I started out at a public school in my neighborhood in Denver that didn’t even have language classes, much less these kinds of programs.

Really?

Fast language fluency

Prefer to read?

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. I wanted to share with you an old recording I made of my 200 hour challenge. As I’ve talked about in other episodes, and people ask often why five weeks? It seems like a bizarre random time period and it’s 100% not.

Fast language fluency: time

When I first started teaching languages, I was a pretty typical non-native speaker of Spanish. So I was that B2 level, intermediate high. I definitely wanted to work on my skills. I wanted to speak like a native speaker, not so much necessarily out of having a passion for Spanish, which I do, but more for some really practical work reasons. I knew it would be so much easier. I’d be able to answer anything. I’d be able to really take whatever I was saying to my students and make it comprehensible, which is the key to learning any language is for things to be understandable, comprehensible. That’s research based, Dr. Krashen.

And I knew that the more proficient I was, the better and more easily I could do that, the better that would be for my students and I would have the freedom of never really having to think too much about what I was going to say, and it definitely turned out to be true. I also wanted a qualification of being able to teach… Have a native level proficiency, or near native, in speaking Spanish so I could teach language immersion. So something I’ve done in English as well where people learn content and in my case, in this particular case, it would have been primary school content. I’m a qualified primary school, elementary school teacher as well. So whatever you would learn, math, science, social studies, students would be learning the same language. They’d also be learning language through that which I think and know is extremely exciting and there’s lots of takeaways which we’ll talk about in another episode. For anybody with a connection to the internet can do something similar tailored to their own interests and needs on their own.

So the five weeks. I always had nine weeks during the summer where I wasn’t teaching and even if I was working, which I had done summer school and immersion school a few times, I always had about five weeks to find of my own. And I started really intensely and intensively studying Spanish to really get to that native level. And that was definitely a struggle. Once you go through the level, so if you go through the A-level, through the B-level, through the C-level, or in the United States, we use ACTFL, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and we have novice, intermediate, advanced, et cetera. Your investment of time is going to have less of a return.

Fast language fluency: progress and time

So what that means is as you’re at the novice level of language where you’re starting with nothing and you’re moving up to being able to create your own words, phrases, sentences in a language that if you invest about 200 hours, which I very specifically picked that time because I knew it was realistic for me to get into five weeks. I could listen to lots of audio books, I could study, I could watch TV, I could go abroad, which I did lots of five weeks, I could go to a private language school. There were so many ways for me to invest that time and get a tangible return on that time. And as you go up that 200 hours, you’re going to make less progress. It’s important. You have to go through that stage. It just gets harder and harder and then as you hit the advanced level, which is what I wanted to go through to hit that near native level of Spanish, that 200 hours, there’s less of a measurable return on that in...

Krashen, SLA and Yabla

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show if you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I want to talk about the five theories, Krashen’s five theories and Yabla. You hear me talk about Yabla a lot because I absolutely love it as a learner, I love it, love it, love it.

And just a quick review of what it is, it’s just a subscription site and they have collections of videos in Spanish, French, Italian, English, Chinese, and I believe German. And essentially it’s a growing collection of videos. Just as many subscription sites are, there’s always something new. And it’s a mix of some that are specific to grammar lessons, especially immersive produced language lessons by Yabla or people that they’ve contracted to do so in the different languages, as well as commercials and documentaries, game shows, music videos. I could go on and on and on and on. And they’re broken up into little bits and there’s a patented player and you can play it slow or fast. You can repeat it. It’s captioned. It’s also subtitled. You can click through words and it’ll give you the definition. It’s pretty amazing.

And in addition to that, into being able to see all this language and culture, there’s also a series of games. I like some more than others. So there’s one where you listen and you pick the missing word. There’s another one where you use space repetition to go through a set of flashcards of chunks of words that were taken from the video vocabulary. It’s called Vocabulary Review. There’s some other ones, Scribe and a couple of other ones, some comprehensive retention questions. I haven’t tried all of them, but the first two I mentioned are my favorite.

Krashen and SLA Theories

So I talk about Dr. Stephen Krashen a lot as well, and it’s my belief that when you understand something really well, you can explain it in a really easy, concise way that can understand it. And I think that he’s done a beautiful job with that, Dr. Krashen. I think that he’s just taken second language acquisition and in his five theories, he tells us pretty much everything we need to know. And I say this without any disrespect to so many other people who contribute wonderful things, but I think on a really practical basis, this research really resonates with me for a reason. And so I always look at it with whatever activity I do when I think about it for broader purposes. I definitely always find myself back at these five theories. So I want to go through them and I want to talk about what these five theories are and how to apply them.

Krashen and SLA: Learning/Acquisition

So the first theory is learning acquisition. So language learning and acquisition are two different things, and they’re both really important. So really we say language is acquired. So when you learned your first language, and I have to be really careful about how I use the word learn, but when you acquired your first language, you did so naturally. You absorbed through authentic input in communication. Through books, through your parents, through real communicative context, through reading, through your schooling, through music, through your worship, whatever that means to you, sports. Learning or the really deliberate things you do. So think of learning the parts of speech or learning vocabulary lists, that kind of thing, exercises.

Languages for teachers

Welcome to the 5-week Linguist Show. Today I want to talk about language for teachers. So the very first thing that I want to say before I get into anything else is that you teachers are amazing. And I’ve been teaching for, I don’t want to tell you how many years, since my early twenties. And every year I have more respect for teachers. And it’s not just because I am one, it’s because I see what teachers do every single day.

I’m sure if you’re a teacher you’ve heard this quote before, or statistics rather, that teachers make more decisions in a day than an air traffic controller. I believe it. There are so many decisions that have to be made. And not to say that they’re all big, because many of them are small, but it’s, you’ve got 10 people asking you a question at the same time. You’ve got the phone ringing, you’ve got constant competing demands and not always the respect we deserve. Sometimes we have some really unrealistic expectations put on us. I do agree with some of the quotes that it takes a certain kind of person to teach.

However, we can’t do all the work. It’s the person who does the work, who does the learning. And so much of what teachers do is spending time, making, learning, engaging and fun and enjoyable. And they put themselves last. Teachers do so much looking after so many other people that they don’t all look after themselves. Right? And it becomes a way of life where you get used to working incredibly long hours and trying to help people learn as much as they possibly can with the time that you’re given.

But one question I get a lot from my teacher colleagues, and I’m not counting my language teacher colleagues, how do I learn the language? And I just talked about all the things that teachers do, right? Teachers are the busiest people I know. And I’m not sure that, apart from the planning and the classroom and everything teachers do for that part of their job, the grading, all the stuff that comes after school, I’m not sure that people realize if you’re not in teaching, how many other things teachers do. All the committees at school, the fundraising. If kids want to have an activity or you want to do a trip, you have to raise the money. And that involves things like bake sales and working extra jobs at school to help out with that. Planning and putting on special events and coaches, oh my goodness.

Coaches do such an amazing job. They give kids such a productive thing to do that involves building teamwork and a sense of belonging and physical activity. It’s just every year, I’m more in awe of what teachers do. But I wanted to share some tips for teachers to learn other languages. And I know that people, we all have different motivations for learning other languages. And the main motivations that I see for teachers to want to learn languages are first of all, they work at a community to be able to communicate with parents. They might have people from, service a lot of immigrant communities.

So learning another language sure will help in doing your work. So a very practical reason, as well as making a connection with the families, that home/school relationship. The other reason I often see is that teachers are smart and they want to help their kids learn another language because they know about all the advantages they give them. Or even teaching it a little bit in their classroom, just a little sprinkling on top of something. Teaching some words in Spanish or some words and phrases, just having one small part of the day where you can help your students learn that languages aren’t a scary thing and help them get the benefits of improved executive function...

Prefer to read?

Coffee talk and languages

Bonjour. Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Today, we’re going to talk about coffee talk and spilling the tea. So I have a really interesting family, I think. Regardless of what may go on in with the people in my family, I can say at the very least, I think that they’re all very interesting. And one of them who is very interesting is my uncle. And he’s an amazing man. He is massively intelligent and he went to Phillips Andover in Massachusetts, and then he went to college at Harvard and got one degree. And then he stayed on and got another degree from Harvard, graduating from Harvard Law. And while he’s massively intelligent and very hardworking and very accomplished, he’s the first person to say that if he can do that, anybody can do that. He’s extremely humble and modest and he really believes that.

My grandfather went to Harvard and to Harvard Law and to also that Phillips Andover and he became president of a university and so there was some privilege there. And he always says that he had people who had the money to be able to invest in him, to have the kind of education. And I asked him one time, “Isn’t Harvard, wasn’t that really challenging?” And he said, “Actually, no. When you go to a school like Phillips Andover, they prepare you for that kind of thing. You might have to get up at five in the morning and do your reading just to be able to get through all of your schoolwork, but you’re trained for that kind of thing. They call it prep school for a reason. And there’s plenty of people out there who are just as intelligent as I am, if not more so that just don’t have any education at all, much less the prestigious one that I have.” And he recognizes the good in absolutely everybody.

When he first became a lawyer, he worked for Sargent Shriver in New York and he was the first lawyer they sent into Attica for the prison riots. And he decided quickly that it wasn’t for him. He can empathize with anybody that his talents were going to be better served in a different place. And after traveling the world and teaching law in South America, he moved into a different kind of law, mainly corporate law, which served his interests and his talents really well, in that he’s a great writer, he can see many sides of an issue and he could speak Spanish, very good Spanish. And he has dealt with mostly intellectual law, international property, that type of thing.

He knows the laws of Venezuela and the United States very well and can help with contracts and business taxes, that kind of thing. So I asked him during my journey of learning Spanish and wanted to be able to speak Spanish, as well as a native speaker, really, really strong speaker. I said, “How did you do it?” And he, with his very strong education said, “All of the things that you learn in school are great and take advantage of them. However, at the end of the day, they don’t necessarily matter. They don’t even have to matter. You can get a beer and sit down and talk to somebody.” And this really resonated with me because he’s absolutely right. So take advantage of all the opportunities that you get in school, but coffee talk and spilling the tea have to be huge parts of your language learning routine.

Not everybody drinks beer. Maybe that’s not an appropriate thing. It’s definitely not for minors, but I think it’s that bigger idea of people just connecting and talking, having coffee talks, sitting around over a cup of coffee or spilling the tea, talking, is how you’re going to learn a language. And so I want you to talk about some ways to be able to get that into your life ...

Study abroad

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Today I want to talk about money and studying abroad. Studying abroad is one of my absolute favorite activities to learn a language. It’s travel, it’s eating, it’s connecting, it’s seeing places you’ve only dreamt about or read about.

I’ve made this happen for myself a few times. As a language student, it’s pretty essential. So I have degree in foreign languages, one of my degrees, and I have a master of arts in the teaching of languages. I had the opportunity to do that master’s degree in Spain, which was fantastic, and before then I studied abroad in Spain.

Studying for a degree, of course is different than studying abroad. And I’m not going to really get too much into the differences, because I think the big take away is that there are some great language schools all over the world in any country that you might want to travel abroad to, at least the ones of the most studied languages.

I want to tell you a little bit about how they work in very general terms, and then how to make that happen in a way that’s realistic for you as an adult.

Study abroad: private language schools

Some years ago, as I said, I studied abroad in Spain, and I discovered private language schools which I enjoyed in a way that I didn’t enjoy my work for my degree. I love school. I love books. I love reading. I’ve been a teacher most of my adult life, since my early 20s. I think I’m really well suited to the profession. I love learning. I love teaching. I love watching people’s skills grow. One of the things that’s been a real oxygen mask for me is my own learning.

So of course, when you study for a degree, there’s a lot of writing, there’s a lot of deadlines, and a lot of activities that are set by someone who is your teacher, of course. In a private language school, they tend to be structured for a few hours a day, so you might go to school in the morning for four hours, let’s say. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a private language school that was more than four hours. I studied at a couple of places in Madrid, that were not in my degree, one of them was Enforex, and the other one is a Swiss language school that’s closed, and they were outstanding. They had really high quality language classes. Enforex was quite good too.

But it tends to be two hours of “Grammar,” and it’s all taught in the target language, and two hours of conversation. You might have a different teacher, so you don’t have one teacher for four hours and they all switch off, and new classes tend to start every Monday, or every other Monday, depending on the size of the language school. You take a placement test that tends to be some grammar questions, maybe some reading, and then you have a conversation and you get placed in the right level. So it’s pretty intense.

Then you have the afternoon to either do your own thing, which is day trips, or go around the city, and you tend to also have activities that the school offers. So sometimes they might offer food tasting, or cooking classes, or art, for example, and they’re immersive and cultural. They’re really fabulous. Obviously, I’m very partial to all of this because I love languages, and I love learning and it’s my ideal summertime activity, but I think it’s a great vacation.

I’ve seen in my studies in private language schools, parents and children go together when they’ve got some time during the summer. You could live with a host family, which makes it an even better activity.

Am I too old to learn a language?

Prefer to read?

Annyeonghaseyo. Welcome to the Five Week Language Show. Today, I want to answer a question that I get from people so often and it’s, am I too old to learn a language? And I think it’s such an interesting question, and I want to talk about the research in a very simple way, and then I want to talk about what that means for people.

So there are a lot of myths out there. I want to call the myths for the most part, that it’s harder for adults to learn languages. And it just isn’t entirely untrue. But I want to start with the very basic research about how people become proficient in second languages. And that’s the work of Dr. Stephen Krashen, and he has five theories of language acquisition. And he calls it acquisition. And one of the first theories, learning acquisition.

Am I too old to learn a language? – acquisition

So language acquisition is mostly how you mastered your first language, or it’s a huge part of mastering a second, third, fourth, et cetera, language. And it’s those things that you naturally pick up because you understood them.

Imagine your parents reading to you or sitting in a classroom and being read to, watching movies, listening to songs, that natural immersion. And you’re not thinking about the grammar that’s being presented to you. You’re not thinking about patterns. You’re just understanding the content. The communication.

Am I too old to learn a language – learning

Learning are the really deliberate things that people do. And you did this also if you were educated in your first language or in any language, you’ve done this too, where you’ve learned parts of speech and grammar and patterns. You’ve done exercises, really deliberate activities, focused on overlearning patterns, et cetera.

So there are lots of theories about that children are better language learners. And I want to say there’s one study. I wish I could remember it. Between the languages, after 14, basically people can’t learn languages. And we know that that’s not true.

So I want you to think about the life of a child compared to the life of an adult. Children are often put in situations, right? They live in a certain country with a family that speaks a certain language, and they have certain activities and certain ways of being exposed to that language. It could be through their church they’re learning certain things, or their place of worship, or their not place of worship, science, perhaps. Think about all the different experiences that a person would have. Think about a family that might move from one country to another. And they’re speaking one language at home and another language at school.

Bottom line, children do learn from their environment, and it’s the environment that we put them in. And they tend to do this over a really long period of time. So it takes kids a couple of years to master what we call BICS, which is interpersonal talking to people, essentially. And then they might appear to be fluent in the language, because they are, they’re fluent speakers. But to get that same level of academic ability in a language usually takes about five to seven years. So it’s a long time.

Children also do really well with accents. And I think that that’s physiological, just being able to hear certain sounds and mimic them, and have them be natural to a person. I really believe that that has a huge part of things.

Think about your life as an adult. As an adult,

Speak a language fluently in 2021

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show and today’s the last lesson in our New Year’s Get Learning Languages five week course. And today we’re just going to talk about putting everything for lessons one through four together. So I wanted to talk about the four skills we really talk about in learning a language, right? We talk about, we need to learn listening and speaking, and those have reciprocity, and we also need to learn reading and writing, which have reciprocity. And we’ve talked about that in lessons earlier.

So generally speaking, these four skills have an order in which they develop. So we first listen and then we speak, we read, and then we write. And as a young language teacher, I was asked to equally assess these four different skills. And it was something I really struggled with because it didn’t completely make sense to me to separate these skills. So while those are four separate things, we often learn and practice them in a really integrated way. So consider in a simple conversation, you listen and then you speak, right? So those are two skills, those are integrated. And usually what’s said is dynamic, right? It’s based on what the other person has said.

And the order of our skill acquisition is pretty similar to how we learned our native language. We weren’t suddenly writing five page papers. We started with understanding first, and then we begin to learn how to read, which is learning what the words we say look like. We then learn how to write. And as you learn each skill, each enhances the other. So for example, as we learn how to read, we’re often at the same time, learning how to write. It’s not completely linear. You don’t completely learn how to read and then write, they have reciprocity. As we learn how to write, we start with copying and we’re learning how to read better. And we don’t learn the entire alphabet before learning the sounds letters make. All these things are sort of happening at the same time as you progress towards becoming a literate person, right? You learn to read and then you read to learn. And then all the language you understood became language you learned how to produce yourself. That became part of your language.

And we continue to learn how to read until we’re proficient enough to be able to read to learn. And when you can read, you can learn anything and you can do this on your own terms in your own time. ACTFL, The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages has defined some different modes of communication that are much more appropriate to talk about the skills, the reading, writing, listening and speaking that we talked about. So there’s interpersonal, and this is communication between people. Presentational where one person is communicating. So think writing, writing an essay, writing a letter, speaking and interpretive, it’s where we’re understanding. And just as we talked about in our experience in what it’s like to learn our own language, we also see how these modes, these three modes together can accelerate your progress to help mimic your first learning language environment.

So I want to share some examples from real life that you can use in your language learning journey. Reading a book and being part of a book club where you talk about the book. I’m loving Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Reading a letter or a newspaper article, and writing a letter to the editor, watching the news or a film and talking about it with someone, right, going to the movies, or just simply having a conversation. So in language classes, a lot of times we do things called IPAs and those are Integrated Performance Assessments.

Welcome to the five week linguist show. So week four of your course, we’re going to learn to talk in new languages, output. Right? Learning new languages through speaking and writing. Oh. I want to start with a writing. Writing is often the skill we develop last in languages, whether that’s your own language or a foreign language. And if you don’t believe me ask a high school English teacher. Or if you went to college, staring at either a white screen or a piece of paper in a typewriter, you need so much input and practice to master writing. It’s hard. But the good news is when you’re learning a new language and you’re an adult, you’ve already got literacy skills. Right? You already know how to read and write.

You can use these skills to develop your skills in a new language. And so the method is actually really simple. You just have to write really regularly. And I can’t stress how important this is. If you don’t have a real context in which to communicate with other people like a pen pal or something like that, don’t let that stop you. So you can learn how to fill in your gaps in your knowledge, by practicing speaking, and you do the same thing with writing. And it works at all levels and all languages. Writing at a very basic level, is just copying. Right? As an absolute beginner, you want to get communicating soon. So just understanding, listening, and combining it with speaking, will really accelerate your learning. And when you read and you write, it’s going to really help you develop those speaking skills.

And I just want to talk about a few little places to start, and I want to start with one that a lot of people have worked on and it’s flashcards. And so writing and creating your own flashcards is a really active way to build vocabulary. I really like to use a notebook. I really prefer that to flashcards, but I know a lot of people like… They really find flashcards effective, especially when you can… Once you’ve learned something, you can put it aside. So do whatever works for you. And when you write your cards or your notebook, it’s going to help you learn how to read in a new language. Right?

For example, if you were learning Korean script, copying those down, copying down all those strokes or Kanji for Japanese is really going to help you become literate in that language. And you’re going to have to take the time out to do it, if you want to learn how to become fluent in another language. So I really like to do everything in themes, themes and tasks. So when you sent your learning around talking about certain themes, and then you break them down into tasks and then all that vocabulary into chunks, that gives you everything that you need to learn. So themes could be food, for example. And it could be really simple, just the names for foods or how to order foods up to a very long and involved critique on a restaurant and everything in between.

So think about those themes and then think about the tasks that you want to learn how to master. So if you want to learn how to, we’ll stick with food here, learn how to return something at a restaurant, all in the target language. You can take a notebook and you write down everything that you need for that task. It’s a great way to learn language when you don’t have a teacher with you. It’s completely free. It’s low stress. And another thing that I really like to do is pick different ways to draw, different things to draw as a beginner.

And think about… I’ll stick with food here. Since we’ve been talking about that. Let’s say, I want to learn all the words for common vegetables. I might draw a salad that has all of those vegetables and I would label it.