How Can I Inject Fun Into Language Learning? (Special Guest: Olly Richards)
Having fun is a key to success when it comes to most big endeavours. Surely language learning is one of those, too. But how can you best have fun when you’re learning a language? In this podcast episode, Olly Richards from I Will Teach You A Language joined me to discuss how you can love learning languages and have fun with it.
Learning a language is the challenge of your life.
It requires motivation, discipline, empathy, and some serious grey cells. It's an art because you learn to express yourself freely, beautifully, and you paint pictures with new words. It's also a science because you need to experiment with what works and what doesn't work.
But How Much Fun Can Language Learning Be?
In today's podcast episode, my guest is Olly Richards from I Will Teach You A Language. Olly says he used to learn languages for fun, going out with friends, and enjoying a great social life.
We had an incredible discussion - click play below to listen to it in full.
Now he's still learning them, but his motivations have shifted to intellectual gratification. He still gets fulfilment and a sense of achievement out of learning a language but in today's show he joined me to ask
"How Can I Inject FUN Into Language Learning ?"
Olly cites a few reasons in this youtube video, for example:
- He is busier than he used to be, mostly because he works a lot.
- He considers himself a social learner, but he doesn't have access the fun part of social interaction.
- He pursues the intellectual achievement, which means books and rules rather than pints and parties.
In January I sent out a tweet that caught Olly's eye and opened up the question about fun. Here it is:
Golden Rules of Daily Language Learning
Make contact with your target language on a daily basis
Find a convenient way of making that contact - the more convenient it is, the better
Prioritise fun and find something you enjoy in your target language
Olly saw that I talked about fun, and it was on his mind already...so we got together to have an in-depth discussion about having fun while learning languages.
The Discussion
Debate Team
Fun or No Fun, That Is The Question
Enjoying something does not mean that you are not learning anything. In fact, it is often a huge motivator for learning a new language - but both Olly and I agreed that fun and motivation are NOT the same thing. Fun and enjoyment also matter in language learning, because they add motivation. But can the fun ever be in the learning, or is it always part of the result?
Olly says:
"I care much more about speaking a language than the learning process. For me, the real fun is speaking the language."
Language Choices
We have to acknowledge that a language that's easier to learn can be more fun, because you can use all you learn just that little bit quicker. But does that mean your motivation to learn it will fade just because a language is "difficult"? Not necessarily! Deciding which language to learn is about much more than just thinking whether you'll enjoy it.
Conquering A Challenge
Adding to that, it's also fun to discover that you have achieved something you found difficult. But is that fun? I argued yes, but Olly wasn't sure - he thinks it's more about the results. We both found that conquering a challenge is a big motivation and so are the results. But the challenge itself may not always be the fun part. It can be the opposite of fun when something is way too difficult.
It Has To Be Interesting
The #1 fun killer? Boredom!
If you're all about the results and you work through those verb drills...but you're falling asleep over them...that's definitely not fun. It might still be productive though!
Olly thinks it's impossible to have 100% fun in language learning. There has to be a disciplined aspect, there has to be some routine...but if you were to focus on that exclusively, you'd lose sight of why you even started in the first place. This is especially important for those of us stuck somewhere in intermediate levels, when the honeymoon period is over and new words feel like "ugh, another one" instead of "wow, a new one".
7 Tips: How To Enjoy Language Learning More
So what can be done? How to plan for fun? Here are a few tips emerging from our conversation:
- If you have been feeling frustrated or under stress, take the pressure off and focus away from the results for a little bit. Try doing the opposite for a while and see what happens.
- Adjust your expectations of what "learning" looks like. and
- Be sillier, and try to use art, music, poetry to expand your mind and explore language. This isn't always easy to do, so consider reaching out to a coach or tutor to help you find a new way of looking at language.
- Embrace your own personality and work with who you are. If you enjoy play and your hobbies include juggling and clown skills, it's a safe bet that you may enjoy reading and telling jokes in another language. I also see this with analytical-minded engineers I work with, who love focusing on creating the most effective flashcards and routines based on data and hard facts.
- Curate your social life! Put the books down and spend lots of time with speakers of your target language, and make sure you end up in situations where your target language will actually be spoken.
- Change it up. It could be that you're bored because you've done the same thing too long. Olly finds that the ideal time to switch to a new activity is after a period of 3 weeks, and changing things more regularly is beneficial.
- Choose the easy language! This tip is a little tongue-in-cheek, but it boils down to the fact that you have to ensure you're making progress in order to keep enjoying what you're doing.
What About You?
Do you have fun when you're learning a language?
Do you think it's possible to have 100% fun in language learning?
Do you enjoy the language learning process? Or do you only really love speaking to people?
Join our discussion and share your answers in the comments below! I'm looking forward to reading how you treat "fun" in language learning!
Episode Links
Da Costa a Costa — Italian podcast recommended by Olly
The Fluent Show: Learning and Speaking 20+ Languages in New York City — Interview with "Language Learning Hedonist" Ellen Jovin
EPISODE SPONSOR
A Free Skype Class For Everyone! Claim It From Live Lingua Today
How can Music help you learn a Language? - Part 3: Musical Hacks
IMG credit: www.courtneycarmody.com
The following is the next instalment in my series looking at how music can help you get better in a foreign language. We looked at the way it transports you to the heart of the culture in your target country, and a great method for getting to know new words and practicing structures through song. In the final part, I wanted to share some more ingenious ways to use music for learning with you. These are my musical hacks.
1) Join a choir, sing vocal harmonies
A few years ago, I was in Poland with a group of other travellers and got chatting to a British girl who had studied French and German. We both had good fun trying to pick up a few Polish phrases and others had remarked on our good pronunciation skills. In the course of an evening at the pub, she presented me with the theory that our common hobby of choir singing could have something to do with our pronunciation and copying skills. In fact, to me this has always rung true, and in fact there are scientific studies looking into this "listen and copy" training method.
Your listening and copying skills are invaluable tools for language learning. You will need them to
- become familiar with pronunciation
- develop conversation skills
- get comfortable listening to yourself and others
- apply rules and instructions to produce sounds.
Singing in harmony with other vocal performers trains you to make sure you know the sounds they are producing. So for this musical hack, I recommend that you make your local choir into your new best friends. You will reproduce melodies and ensure that you observe and develop other sound producers (singers, speakers). Some choirs even use sign language to accompany the sung words, and many will feature pieces of music in foreign languages. Not only will it train the essential listen and copy skills, but you'll also learn to sing in a new language.
2) Make up your own jingle
Have you ever come across an earworm? It's a piece or section of music that gets stuck and plays over and over in your head. Use this repetition to practice by singing your vocab and getting that stuck in your head.
Every language has its own rhythm and melody, and building that into your jingle is a powerful thing. If you are feeling a little apprehensive starting this off, try a really well-known song. How about Gangnam Style? Listen here:
That was me practicing some Russian with a song stuck in everyone's head.
Advanced learners
Your option for this could be to translate some lines from your favourite song and sing them in the target language. For inspiration, maybe try the "Call Me Maybe" polyglot video.
Use a microphone or voice recording app to compare your pronunciation to the real speakers', and catch yourself in a moment where you were not worrying about getting it right or wrong because you are too busy trying to sing in time with the music.
3) Jam
Building a "jamming" session into your learning experience is a low-pressure way of letting go and allowing yourself to experiment. You need a little creativity for this, but there are no goals - just have fun and experiment.
Some ideas; Sing a song with your language partner (from Italki or Verbling for example). Learn the days of the week using notes from musical scales. Raid youtube for a foreign language song, use it as your alarm tune for a week, then write down all the words and translate them.
So that's it, I hope you enjoyed these posts as much as I did. As ever, I love hearing from you and if you enjoyed this post, please consider joining my newsletter crowd!
Further Reading
- 7 reasons why you should sing to learn languages.. by Benny Lewis
- Language Learning Tip: Use Music to Learn a Foreign Language by The Everyday Language Learner
- Tools to Learn Spanish #2 – Practicing Spanish with Lyrics Training on Fair Languages
How can Music help you learn a Language? - Part 2: Where to Look for Inspiration
After my recent post describing some of the reasons why music is such a great learning help, let's get into the groove today and find some song ideas! My examples in this post are in German, but you can use this inspiration for learning other languages too!
CC Licenced from SpecialKolin on Flickr
How To Use a Song for Language Learning:
Find a few songs in your target language - you won't have to look a lot further than the local google searchbox, youtube or library. Below, you'll find many ideas for easy starters.
Pick out a song that catches your attention and sounds fun - no matter if you understand the words at this point! Then listen, maybe a few times, and keep it around. Stick it on your iPod or put it on a CD for the car.
After you've become pretty familiar, you will catch yourself humming along and maybe even picking out words that you sing along to. Now get the lyrics and dictionary out. What's this song actually about?
Keep listening, sing along, sing it to your kid/pet/best friend. I bet it's almost normal by now!
Make a note of 10 new words the song has taught you. Then look out for how the verbs and sentences are used. You should recognise some previous grammar lessons or verb tables.
Congratulations, you can now sing in another language AND you revised without the boring effort.
1) Raid the Kids Section
Kids are full-time learners in their own right, and music for them can do the language learner many favours: a simplified range of vocabulary, many repetitions, perhaps actions, all aimed at making sure the song sticks! Think "If you're happy and you know it" and you've got the idea.
Beispiele (examples):
Germany's award-winning songwriter Rolf Zuckowski has given us a beautiful list of songs to choose from. My recommendations, based on them being so catchy that they are curently stuck in my head even though I sang them in the 80s, are:
Christmas favourite "In der Weihnachtsbäckerei" - perfect for seasonal vocabulary
"Sommerkinder" and "Winterkinder" - one composition, several versions based on the seasons
Another great example is the (slightly retro..) Sesame street theme in German - so great for question words. And general cheeriness.
2) Learn from Lovesongs
I'm thinking boybands here, and Céline Dion. Lovesongs have distinct advantages for the language learner. They are usually sung more slowly, giving you a chance to keep up with the pronunciation. The topic is predictable and the lyrics usually stay away from tricky stuff like world politics.
And auf Deutsch: Schlager
The Schlager genre is an absolute treasure trove for any German learner. These cheery hits from the 1960s and 1970s stick in your head for days. The lyrics largely restrict themselves to flirting and having fun and they always come out in a group of merry Germans so these will really give you the edge for making quick friends in the pub.
A few favourites of mine are Mendocino, Michaela and, best and surrealest of all, anything by Dschinghis Khan (these are more complicated lyrics, but the topics are easy to guess from the costumes!).
3) Not for the faint hearted: Drinking Songs
All right, now I don't know how far this will get you if you're trying to learn Arabic or Tamil, but for many European people a good party is never complete without a bit of a song.
German learners rejoice, you have a big range to choose from. If the Schlager genre was your thing, then I would recommend the gem called "Sieben Fässer Wein" (seven barrels of wine, no really, that's what it means) by Roland Kaiser. It has everything - drunken irresponsibility, a spoken section from a priest and that 70s humour where the wife is every man's nightmare
Other useful drinking songs are the regional ones, often blurring into folk song territory. For example, my own home region offers absolute beauties like "Oh Mosella". I have heard this song accompany the happiest wine festival memories of my whole life, for as long as I can remember.
CC Licenced by punk17er on Flickr
4) Pop Music
The big advantage of using songs that you love in your target language is that you'll look very cool and won't feel as silly as when you are singing a kids song. There is a huge range of songs and artists to discover who are making music right now. But handle these with a bit of caution - if you're into rap, for example, there will be an awful lot of words and lyrics to handle!
Germany for example has a strong indie scene represented by bands like Tocotronic, Blumfeld and Tomte. The rappers and hip hoppers are even more active - try Kool Savas or Samy Deluxe.
After all that, a deserved reward!
With any music from artists which are active and out there, I urge you to add a final step 7 to the instructions of using music in language learning. Get involved! Go buy a ticket to see your new favourite band, maybe discover a soundtrack written in the language (Disney films, for example, tend to have translated versions of all their songs), find other fans in online forums and really get out there and enjoy it! That way, not only will you have fun but you'll also be using your amazing language skills before you even notice.
Fancy reading more? Tofugo has a post about learning Japanese through kids songs and the topic is also covered by Everyday Language Learner Aaron.
Four Secret Weapons of Practice
Ah, learning, so hardwired into us and yet so difficult! The OED tells us that there are three ways to learn: by study, experience, or being taught. I think there's one thing that they've forgotten. The key ingredient to any new knowledge and skill: practice.
Gets you fit if nothing else.
I hope that the word "practice" doesn't sound disheartening to you. You're not meant to feel like you are rolling that rock back up the hill endlessly like Sysiphos. To me, effective practice means finding a safe environment to try something you've not tried before and then repeating your new trick until it feels effortless. No doubt this can become more than a bit tedious, but you can cut down on boredom by using a few smart techniques
1) Respect Frustration
Sorry! Hope you didn't think I was going to pretend there's a technique that eliminates irritation. Frustration is an unavoidable part of getting better. If you want to succeed, you need to become very aware of points at which you are frustrated. Perhaps make a little note of what it was that really made you feel stuck. Frustration can be such a killjoy that it's caused more than one great learner to just quit the whole endeavour, and no one really wants that! You have to respect that annoying feeling enough to know when it's not worth fighting against a setback.
No need to abandon the practice session, but you can minimise disappointment by repeating the things you're good at. Just give it a day or two and settle the foundations of what you have learnt, and you will find that problem you were facing before has shifted into perspective while you were away. Take a fresh look at things, perhaps get an expert's view or a new demo to bring back the inspiration, and hopefully you'll be right back on your way. And sometimes, there's nothing but a day off that will help you back onto your tracks.
2) Surprise Yourself
Morning! Time for être in the conditionnel, come on!
Mastering a new skill is about becoming so familiar with it that you could do it "in your sleep". I remember our French teacher always talking about how she wants us to be able to rattle down those verb tables even if she wakes us up at 2 in the morning. It's got to get into the head somehow, so make sure that you are really surrounded by your learning material. The easiest way of making this happen in language learning is to write a sentence or two on a sticky note, make 10 copies and stick them everywhere. My favourite places are in the shower (with a plastic wallet), on the bathroom mirror, on the door of your washing machine, in the chocolate drawer and right in the middle of the cork board.
3) Find the Rhythm
The link between music and learning has been explored by researchers and polyglots alike. Music is a very popular teaching tool in kids at primary/nursery school age, but you can also exploit it for your own benefits. If you build a few songs into your learning routine, you'll very soon realise how much more fun it makes it. Don't laugh, but I learnt at least 3 new Russian words from this. You can find examples of musical practice online, for example through Fluency MC or a language hack advocated by Benny Lewis. There are so many advantages to putting music in your learning, for example it makes it more fun, brings you closer to real life use of the target language, helps you remember things through melodies and rhythms and sticks in your head.
4) Get Physical
Movement is another great memory aid because it engages more than one part of your brain. The easiest way you can build this into your learning is to simply sit down with pen and paper (remember my love of the notebook..) and write out those verb tables and vocabulary lists. Maybe write the difficult ones in a different colour, or in capitals. If you want to take it a bit further, why not try and associate the word or sentence with a gesture, like in sign language? It works from "If you're happy and you know it.." to acting out whole bits of dialogue in your book or favourite show.
Get started with really easy exclamations, for example what would you do to illustrate these French expressions:
Au secours!
Je m'écrie! (Je chuchote.)
Je marche.
All of these ideas are designed to help you repeat what it is that you are practising without getting too bored. You may not find that each method works for you, but hopefully you'll have a laugh along the way. It would be great to hear if you guys have found any other ways of building fun repetitions into your learning.
For some other ideas and thoughts, you could these links.
- Learn Language by Repetition on Master Any Language
- Learning Languages whilst Exercising on Fairlanguages
- Learning a Foreign Language is like learning a Sport on The Atlantic
*note use of speechmarks here because I have no clue how that even works
Struggling with listening? Discover realistic tips, challenge prompts, and the best tools for improving your listening skills as a self-guided language learner