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Welcome to week three of your New Year’s course to learn a language. And this week, we’re going to talk about reading and listening to speak a language.

Investing time and input is essential to learn to speak a language. Dr. Stephen Krashen has the input hypothesis as one of his five theories of language learning. And basically, we learn by what we hear and what we see, what we understand. And I really like to keep the formula simple. I have two years and one mouth, two eyes and one brain, so I read and I listen twice as much as I speak and I write.

Reading is one of the most effective ways to learn a new language, and it gives you all the vocabulary and grammar served up in context. And unlike when you’re talking to somebody, you can repeat whatever it is you see as much time … You can take a highlighter, you can underline words, you could use a tool like Readlang, which is specifically for language learners. Make it high interest, pair it up with one of your personal interests. So, one of the things that I’ve always really liked to do, I really like to read magazines, its been a lifelong love of mine. And when I say magazines, all kinds. And what I love so much about magazines is that when I get a magazine, I can pick it up and I can expect to have a lot of, usually, depending on the magazine, light reading that’s all around a certain theme that I’m interested in. So I have loved design magazines, particularly when I bought a house. I love magazines on weight loss. It’s a topic that interests a lot of us. I love magazines about cooking because I like to cook. I can count on that content, most of it being really interesting to me, and then I get to learn something.

Don’t underestimate the power of reading. Dr. Stephen Krashen’s done lots of studies and there are so many people out there who speak 10, 15 languages, that they all picked up from doing their reading in another language, so you can too.

Listening, I think, is a lot more difficult. And that’s where it can be really important to have some good strategies, as well as to pick the right materials. So, it’s really fundamental in learning to speak a language. You’ve got to be able to hear it, and it does require a huge investment of time. And what’s really great about listening, now, in today’s world, is that our devices let us stop things, listen multiple times.

I really love videos. So right now I think it’s so exciting, everything that’s out there that allow people to listen. So podcasts, right? There’s podcasts specifically for language learners, apps that use a lot of artificial intelligence. So, I’m not sure about all languages, but I know Duolingo has a lot of chat bots and stories and really great places to get input beyond their traditional language exercises. I love Yabla, I’m a proud affiliate of them, you’ll hear me talk about them in so many of my episodes, because I love them, and it’s long term. They take authentic content and they make it understandable for learners. To my knowledge, it’s the only program that’s out there that doesn’t just offer closed captioning, which is great, or subtitles. It’s just addictive and it’s immersive.

So, I want to go over listening, some places that you can find listening online. So, for audio courses, I love Pimsleur for beginners. It’s almost always where I start with languages. I love to work in my notebooks and I love to get on Italki right away, but the truth is my life is really busy and I have to find ways to learn language on my commute, and that’s been through audio programs.

Speak a foreign language: crash course week 2

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Speak a foreign language: vocabulary

Learning vocabulary in a new language is obviously vital. This week, we will focus on learning vocabulary. Please note that you will learn a lot of vocabulary through reading, speaking to people, listening and any activity that immerses you in your target language, which we will explore in the next few weeks. This week, we will talk about deliberate, focused activities to learn vocabulary independently.

Speak a foreign language: chunking

The secret to being able to express yourself in a language is to know enough words and phrases. Once you’ve memorized enough words and phrases, they all start working together, and you can start creating with language. This is a feature of the ACTFL intermediate level, or the CEFR B-level. A great way to do this is from playlists. Think relevant words and phrases that will help you survive in the target language. Think about useful phrases, like “I need”, “I want”, et cetera. This is called chunking.

Every word and phrase that you know in a language will help you express yourself more. With that said, focus on chunks of vocab that will be useful for communication and focus on that. You’ll learn all your grammar and vocab in context. 

Create your own playlist, listen over and over. Then, record your own playlist, and you’ll have them right at hand on your phone.

Speak a foreign language: memorization

Acting and learning languages have a great deal in common. When you’re starting out learning something over and over and over again to the point where it gets into your brain so you won’t forget it, this is what actors do with plays, and this is what successful language learners do when they’re starting out in a new language. You have to think like an actor- study your lines over and over until they stick. 

Speak a foreign language: phrasebooks

Phrasebooks.  Phrase books serve up thousands of useful words and phrases to get you communicating right away. They are the perfect place to start learning any new language. 

Check out this video on phrasebooks.

Vocabulary Columns. A useful way to memorize all of that vocab we talked about is with vocabulary columns. Select a set of phrases that you want to learn and write them all down in a column on a piece of paper. You can either start with the target language, which is probably easier, or with English, and then draw a line. In the next column, write your other language equivalent. Again, this is easier if you start with the target language and start with recognizing. 

Once you’ve done that successfully, you might have to look up a couple of words, fold the first column over. Now, translate, and again, going back and filling in any gaps that you might have, testing yourself and relearning those words that you missed. Fold the column over again and keep doing this until you can easily go back and forth between both languages, your native language and the target language. 

Speak a foreign language: tasks

Learning a new language: crash course week one

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show.

Every year I like to share my five-week crash course, it’s January and lots of people want to improve and it’s a perfect time, you’re probably in to take advantage of what it means, how to learn another language. So the first week, our first lesson is what is fluent? So years ago I trained in something called language proficiency rating. So you learn how to rate people’s skills in a language. And it’s often used for testing for jobs or academic credits, placement, that kind of thing, but really the most useful place I’ve found it is in helping people, whoever they are, including myself, hit really specific targets in a language. And I took notes during the test and I actually made a graphic, I’ll leave it for you in the show notes. And if you follow me, you may have seen it before.

But I think it really well illustrates how we can become fluent in a language. And each one of the bubbles correlates to basically an ACTFL level, not so much CFR, but the American Council for the Teaching of Languages, from the very beginning of their scale, up to about advanced high superior, actually superior. They have another level now distinguished, but most people, you wouldn’t even need that.

So it starts with words, when we start acquiring and learning language, we do words and then, and phrases. So we start producing words and we start producing phrases. And then as those start working together, we then start producing longer phrases. And then those phrases become longer and more accurate and they become sentences. And then those sentences, as we’re building our skills, become longer sentences. And then those sentences start appearing in groups and they become more like paragraphs, and then they strengthen and they become paragraphs, and they become then longer, more accurate paragraphs. And then what we say becomes connected these long connected paragraphs, and then it becomes extended speech. So think about the college professor and usually it’s that sentences, that paragraph level is what we often consider fluent, so that would be the level that you might get. If you were majoring in a language in college that wasn’t a flagship program, or maybe you didn’t get a chance to study abroad, maybe you did a lot of work through classes and it’s often the test where they expect beginning level language teachers to be.

And while it’s not perfect. It’s definitely decent, it’s respectable, and it’s really good. And I also want to point out that you don’t have to be, in any way, to that level before you consider yourself a speaker of a language. It’s a continuum. So get out there and talk and say what you can, don’t worry about the level. So how long does it take? Different categories of languages take different amounts of time? So if we’re English speakers category one languages, I’ve seen different statistics, they say they take about 600, I’ve seen 600 to 750 class hours and I’ve also seen 750 to 1,000. But I think that the big takeaway is that languages that are similar or close to English are the easiest to learn. Category two languages take slightly longer. Category three languages, which for example, Tegala, Turkish, Armenian, Bulgarian.

They’re further away from England, and they take probably about twice as long. You’ll find different hours if you Google this. But again, the takeaway is it’s going to probably take twice as long to hit that same level. And then a category for language where there’s nothing in common, they’re very hard, they take about four,

Free Training: The 5-Week Linguist

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguistic Free Audio Training. My name’s Nina Klimas, and I’ve been teaching languages in several different countries, in Asia and the United States, and in Europe, since the ’90s. I have a BA in theater arts, and a BA in foreign languages and I also have an MA in the teaching of languages. I speak six different languages to various levels of fluency and skill. And I’ve also trained in language proficiency rating with the Center for Applied Linguistics. By the end of this training, you’re going to understand how long it takes to learn a language, how languages are learned, how to create time for language learning and how to select materials and activities, over five week periods of time, to learn any language you want to any level of fluency that you want.

So let’s get started with how long it takes. So before we get into the actual time of how long it takes, let’s talk about a specific level of fluency that we can all agree on as a common goal. So your goal might be higher than the level that I talk about or lower than that, but either way, we want to just have one specific goal in mind. So the US Government’s done loads of research on this and for very practical reasons. So they train a lot of military members in the Defense Language Institute, and they also train a lot of people who work in embassies and do work at consular offices, people who issue visas, et cetera, abroad. So they have very specific reasons for training people in languages.

And that fluency that we’re going to talk about here is essentially on the ACTFL, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, scale. It’s intermediate high, advanced low, that’s essentially the same level. So some very similar levels, or if you are European, the common European framework of reference. So a lot of the research has been done by the inter-agency language round-table, and they’ve published a lot of findings that you can easily find online, and they publish six different levels of fluency. So the levels are from zero, which means you can’t speak the language at all, no functional ability, all the way up to five, which means that it’s difficult to distinguish you from a native speaker. So that same level that we talked about that B2, intermediate high, advanced low is sort of a three on that level if that gives you any idea, it’s actually pretty high level of proficiency. It’s certainly not the type of skill that you’re perhaps used to in your own language, but it’s good, you can definitely communicate.

We have that level of fluency, so think of being able to speak without a whole lot of refinement, making plenty of errors, but definitely being able to get your point across on a lot of topics. All of your every day needs can be met. You can make appointment, you can order food, you can socialize, but it’s, again, we don’t have that refinement that you have that you’re really used to in your own language. You speak mostly in sentences to paragraphs. So we have that level. Now let’s talk about different languages. So we have category one languages, which are pretty similar to English, so think French, think Spanish, think Italian, right? Those languages that are really similar to English. To hit that level of fluency might take between 750 and 1000 hours of really focused practice and input. And you’ll find different hours attached to these categories and you’ll even find some languages categorized it differently depending on what you read, but I think it’s a really good basic guideline.

The lower end, 750 hours, that might be somebody who’s really skilled at learning languages,

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,

Spirituality: Lessons for Language Learners

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.

Thank you for listening to The 5-Week Linguist Show with Janina Klimas. Join us each week here and visit us at reallifelanguage.com/reallifelanguageblog for more resources for learning and teaching languages.

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I wanted to talk about languages and spirituality. Charlemagne once said to have another language is to possess another soul. I’ve thought about that so many times over the years. Having another language gives us an entirely different outlook on life. It gives us a whole different set of ways to connect with people that you would never be able to talk to. It’s not just limited to the people we talk to. It’s limited to the ideas and the content they produce the films, the literature, their history. It completely broadens your horizons and opens up your world to so many possibilities.

I want to really define what I believe spirituality to be and give you just a little bit about my background. I was not raised with any type of organized religion. My parents divorced when I was very young. My father was almost anti-religion. He was raised in a Catholic house, and he’s a doctor level engineer who believes in logic, and reason, and mathematics, and numbers, and does not believe that there is anything beyond. Growing up, he felt that church was just his duty and that it was something that he didn’t want in his adult life.

My mother was raised in an Episcopalian household. Religion was important, but it was … They were really nice people, my mother’s family, and went to church. It was also social and a part of their culture.

Neither of them had any inclination to raise us with any religion. My brother and sister were both baptized as part of my father’s Catholic upbringing, and they decided they would not going to do that with me. And if I’m fairly honest, it gave me this huge sense of fear and instability when I was really aware that everyone else my age was learning religion, so going … Whatever that meant. Of course, that’s different for everyone. But, they had a really strong sense of what they should do and what they shouldn’t do and then what was going to happen later on. I felt really scared about that, even though I knew … I didn’t know the specifics. I knew that there was something else and that there was something greater beyond what we were experiencing here, but I had no idea what that was.

As an adult, I am really grateful for that experience of not being raised to believe in any one particular religion, because I do think that it’s helped me be open-minded to just see religion as part of someone in their culture and not completely defining them, that we have more in common than we don’t. So when I look at religions, I consider … I’m able to just see it as part of something bigger and not something that disconnects us, but something … Not a place in which we differ necessarily and that I come to believe that spirituality encompasses and accepts all religions and beliefs. I found that really comforting.

Recently, I was listening to Berné Brown. I want to get her quote right. She talks about how important spirituality is. I feel like she is a church-goer, and that maybe recently she has some sort of service, Church with Berné Brown, I think they’re calling it. I think it’s non-denominational. It’s just people getting together.

Extroverts and Introverts: Lessons for Language Learners

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.

Konnichiwa. Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Today I wanted to talk about extroversion and introversion in language learning. So I’ve been a teacher for a long time. And one thing that it has really surprised me, I didn’t expect to be a teacher this long that’s for sure. I didn’t expect to see people in such a different way, working with so many of them. You work with hundreds of people every year to include your parents and colleagues and students add that up over a few years. And it doesn’t take a few years to get into the thousands. And I’ve come to the conclusion that people are so much more… we’re very simple in many ways, we all want the same things, right? I think as humans, we all just want to feel safe. We want to feel accepted. We want to laugh. We want to feel loved. I think it’s really simple.

And how we express that of course is in different ways. We’re all the same in that way. But then we’re also unique, very obviously. And as a language teacher, I always think about personality traits and how I can maximize the personality traits of the people I work with, particularly students, of course, to help them get the best results that don’t feel unnatural to them. One challenge that I found as a language teacher is perfectionism. And a lot of really high achieving students have a lot of perfectionist tendencies, as you can well imagine. They want to do things well. They want to do things really well and they work hard and they try at it.

And that’s fantastic. An effort is amazing and they’re wonderful people to work with, but languages can become a challenge because it’s something that you have to accept that you’re going to do. You’re going to just keep stumbling through for a really long time and you have to get comfortable with that, or else you’ll quit. You have to really manage your expectations, that this is new and I’m just going to get through it. And that of course doesn’t seem to fit well with those of us with perfectionist tendencies, right? And a lot of perfectionist would rather not do something if they don’t think that they’re going to do it really well, in my experience.

Extrovert or Introvert?

So it got me thinking about extroversion and introversion. And extroversion is one of the big five personality traits. And you’re going to have to forgive me if some of my verbiage is incorrect, because I’m not a personality researcher. I’m not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I’m not… I studied these things really for the practical side of it. And of course, extroversion is one of these and it’s one of the five core traits. And it’s characterized by being talkative and open and being excitable, being warrant, being assertive, being cheerful, loving being the center of attention, being really friendly, being really engaging.

And then it’s a continuum, right? So we have people who tend to be a lot more extroverted or high in extroversion. I believe they call it. Introverts are low in that, right? They tend to be quiet and they tend to be reserved and they tend to be less involved and they tend to be… Or seem less involved rather. And I think about this with language learning. So Benny Lewis, is super extroverted. He loves talking to people. So it’s no surprise that once he figured out how to get the language that...

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Language Learning and Pleasure

Welcome to the Five 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 Five Week Linguist show. I wanted to talk today about play pleasure in learning a new language. These are so important. So early in my career, I realized how essential fun is. It was definitely seen as something counter-intuitive. Learning isn’t fun. And it isn’t always fun. And it can’t always be fun. It shouldn’t always be fun, but I saw my role in teaching languages at school as something really… That most people just really didn’t want to sign up and do. I mean, the statistics will back me up on that. I think they would be kind of depressing if I researched them. They’re certainly easy to find, but the number of people in the United States who actually speak another language based on what they did at school, I want to say, it’s something like 1%. That’s according to the Atlantic, an article I read. I’m sure there’s more statistics out there. I want to say that the vast majority of people study languages for very limited periods of time and for very limited purposes, generally speaking, in high school for some kind of graduation requirement. And oftentimes, the study beyond that is to fulfill a college or university entrance requirement, or when they get to university to do more languages there.

And I realized the fun early on was really essential. And to be very honest with you, it was essential for me to get through the day. Here I had all of this stuff to teach and I had to find a fun way to do it that wasn’t going to get kids mentally exhausted and that I was going to enjoy my day. Every single day, I’m proven that it’s right, that the gains, the fun, the engagement work. And I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the research behind that.

Language Learning and Pleasure: Dopamine

A few years ago, I started really thinking about neuroscience and, specifically, about dopamine. So, of course, our brains… That’s released when we get pleasure, our pleasure receptors. All of you that are neuroscientists out there, please forgive me for what I get wrong here. I’m certainly not a scientist and you’ll know more than I do, but I think that was my takeaway as a layperson. We have a pleasurable activity and we get something out of it.

So, I started really thinking about that with Duolingo. So, about five years ago, I think Duolingo’s been around longer than five years, but about five years ago it really caught my attention. More and more and more, I would hear people talk about their experiences with using it. And I say Duolingo, and I think there’s many other great programs out there that do the same thing, but essentially it’s that gamification piece, right? It’s that really getting into something and really enjoying it. I think that Duolingo used to count fluency in terms of percentages, which that’s another story. I don’t think they do that anymore. It’s not accurate. It doesn’t show an accurate reflection of what people do. It’s really about the amount of time and the amount of exercises that you’ve done accurately. They’ve made a lot of evolutions, but bottom line is that it’s giving you a reward, right? You’re investing your time in something, and you’re getting a reward back. You’re seeing your quote unquote fluency or percentages or whatever it is they’re counting. These numbers are going up.

So,

Learn Languages: 25 Ways to Learn Every Day

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Here are some ideas to turn some time every day into language learning time. Select an activity or two that realistically fits into your life, carve out some time each day and track it over the next five weeks. You will be amazed at the progress you can make with investing some time in interesting language learning activities. Consider these ideas:

Learn Languages: 25 Ways to Learn Every Day

*  Listen to audio courses on your commute. I love Pimsleur!*  Listen to audio courses in your car while you’re doing errands. Mark Frobose produces some great courses for beginners.* Listen to audio courses while you’re exercising or walking. Earworms has created some fun short courses.* Listen to short stories in the target language. I love Olly Richards’ short stories.* Listen to audio courses while you’re cleaning. I love Michel Thomas’ courses.* Listen to a course during your rideshare time or while you’re doing errands. * Read. Think pleasure reading-magazines, blogs, recipes, etc.* Meet online with a tutor on italki. I love to record my sessions and listen to them later. * Watch movies and TV shows in the target language. Streaming apps make that very easy and accessible. * Spend time with realia. Watching cooking tutorials from the target language is a great example of realia. * Journal every day for five weeks. * Binge-watch target language content every day for five weeks. Youtube is one of the largest search engines in the world. Learn a few key words in your target language to find interesting content.* Take a five-week language course at a private language school abroad. Consider getting a reward card from your airline and credit card company. I love my Chase United card. I get miles for purchases that can be used for a free flight.* Hit the streets and talk to people in your community.* Attend immersion programs, to include online immersion. Learn some key words to learn something new in your target language.* Attend language classes. * Language exchange.* Do exercise classes in the target language, like yoga or Batuka.* Phrase books-take those and travel to the target language country. Speak to people.*  Create your own language club. Meet regularly and practice your target language. Serve food and drink from the target language culture.* Talk to yourself every day. Read words and dialogues, or test yourself for fluency when you reach the top of the novice level. Do the same thing with a journal. I love those beginning task journals we talked about, where you write out all of the words and phrases you need to talk about a specific task. Move into fluency journals as your fluency grows. * Doodle, draw scenes and label the page. This is a fun and enjoyable way for the artist in us to build some language skills. * Spend time with apps. If you’re driving, that might not be realistic, but you can do it in your free time. Duolingo, Drops, and Flash Academy are fun and effective.* Listen to music. It is a great way to get exposure to sounds and new language.* Do language exchange online.

Track your time regularly and watch your progress accelerate.

MonthTime spent learningEstimated time already investedJanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovemberDecemberTotal

More?

7 Essentials to Speak Spanish Like a Native 

It’s one language.

 While there are many variations of Spanish, it’s still one language. Many of the words that are used in different countries are unique to that country or unique to that area. I’m sure you can think of similar examples in English. The English spoken in the UK is slightly different from that in the United States. People speak differently in New York than they do in Georgia. Having said all of that, it’s still the same language. You might hear a new word or two, or may not understand someone’s accent right away, but it’s still the same language. 

Don’t worry too much about the kind of Spanish that you’re learning. A fluent speaker of Spanish can communicate with other fluent speakers of Spanish. It’s all one language. 

How long does it take?

Spanish is what we call a Category I language- fairly close to English. People who go through the Foreign Service Institute (training for U.S. diplomats) can generally attain a B2 level (ACTFL Intermediate High)  of Spanish with 750 to 1000 hours of study in many cases. CEFR B2 and ACTFL Intermediate High might not mean anything to you, but suffice to say, it’s a pretty high level of language. You can speak and communicate with people, but in no way is it as easy as in your own language. You’re still going to be pretty rough with your grammar. You’ll still mispronounce some words, You’ll still be grasping for vocabulary at times, but you can communicate with people. A native speaker speaks much more fluently and accurately than that level. 

While I talked about that general amount of time that many Foreign Service Officers preparing for their assignments abroad can invest to attain that level of fluency that allows them to function in life in a Spanish-speaking country, to hit that really high native level, takes two or three times as long, in my opinion. It’s relatively easy to move through the Novice and Intermediate levels. It tends to take a bit longer to move from that high intermediate through the Advanced, and up into that native-level language. 

Learning-acquisition 

Dr. Stephen Krashen is a great teacher and researcher of Second Language Acquisition. He explains the difference between learning languages versus language acquisition very well. 

When we learn a language, think about all of those rote things that you do. Flashcards and apps, exercises, going to a traditional language class, studying verbs, or going to a language lab. Those are all traditional, deliberate activities to learn a new language. They work by helping you get new patterns and words into your long-term memory that eventually all work together to a level where you can create your own language and sentences. 

Acquisition is something that’s slightly different. Acquisition is the way that you learned your first language. You were spoken to, you watched TV, you were read to, you went to school, or you listened to music, to name just a few ways we acquire language. You were completely immersed in that language. Instead of learning separate words and phrases, or verb tenses and patterns, in the way we talked about with learning, you absorbed all the messages you heard and read naturally.

Many people who learn multiple languages, and/or learn languages to very high levels, understand how these two things work together. You want to be deliberate in your studies, journaling, use of flashcards, regular chunks of time to study and study of grammar. In combination with regular, focused periods of study,