My Partner Speaks English - How Can I Help Them Learn My Language?

It’s easy to fall in love, even without words. But sadly, learning a language doesn’t become easier even if you’re in love. Just like good relationships, learning a language is a long-term game. It takes compromise, commitment, and a bit of hard work.

The easiest way to communicate as a couple is to stay in the language you were using when you met. Most couples settle on a common “official language”. For me and my partner, it’s English. English is my everyday language, and I don’t have the habit of switching into German with my partner. As for him, he didn’t come out of school with remarkable knowledge or confidence when it comes to foreign languages.

Most of the time, our life together works just fine. But I do wonder:

• “Do we have to move to Germany before my husband has the opportunity to become a German speaker?”
• “How can I walk the line between forcing him to pick up my language, and encouraging him to discover the culture of my home country?”
• “How can I help him learn German without becoming his teacher?”

We are facing that classic native English dilemma: If everyone else speaks English already, where’s the urgency and pressure to learn another language?

Love is a Deep Motivator

No matter where your partner is from, you’re likely to spend a lifetime trying to figure out what exactly goes on in their head. As Carol Madfouh puts it in this lovely article on language learning for love:

“For us and any other couple from a mixed marriage you are having to work that wee bit harder the whole time to understand the mentality (…) I’m never quite certain whether I am pissed off with him because he’s Tunisian, because he’s French, because he’s a man… or whether just because he’s old!”

If you are the partner who is learning a new language for love, I want to thank you and congratulate you. I know it’s not easy, but you’re doing something amazing. Your desire for a deeper connection has a lot of value. It serves as your Vision Goal, the consistent motivation that keeps you committed to the problem.

Tips for Sharing Your Language With Your Partner

If you are the partner who wishes you could share more of your own language and culture in your relationship, I’m with you. It can be tough to walk the line between sharing your language and nagging someone to learn it.

Here are the things you can try for keeping your sweetheart motivated without putting too much pressure on them.

1) Talk to Third Parties

Every language learner knows that it feels bad to understand nothing, especially when you care about the person who is speaking to you. Introducing your native language into the household becomes a lot easier when there’s a third party around. Adding bilingualism to the home is common when you have a child (try Bilingual Avenue for more tips). But even if you don’t have kids, it helps to have your partner hear simple dialogues in another language.

If you are an expat yourself, your sweetheart likely won’t hear a lot of your native language outside the home. But what about your own circle of friends? Try and see if you can invite a fellow native speaker around the home, giving you more occasion to throw in a few words of vocabulary now and then.

At the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava, one fellow expat wife told me she switched to talking to her pet in another language. What a great idea! This way you can keep your native language active in the home without putting the pressure on way high.

2) Let Them Know What To Expect

One of the trickiest parts of switching into your native language with your partner is that you can never be sure what mood they are in. They may respond with curiosity and enthusiasm one day, only to roll their eyes and ask to be left alone the next. So it’s helpful to make your non-English moments a little more predictable.

• Try setting up an English-free zone in your house, where your partner knows they will be able to practice. I can’t decide if I would suggest the bedroom for this, or tell you to avoid that at all costs..
• Have a regular date night with your native language where you spend time experiencing something new like a restaurant, dance lesson, or language meet up
• Set language times or days, so you know that both of you have agreed to switch languages once a week

3) Treat Language as an In-Joke

In an animated discussion on language learning, Idahosa Ness from the Mimic Method shared that a past girlfriend and he would speak her native language to each other as a sign of closeness. Learning the language came more easily to him as he felt he was in on a private joke with his sweetheart.

Just like nicknames, sharing a second language can make any couple feel more deeply connected. If you want to build your own private language together, try starting with a few loving phrases, or learning the words related to something you love to do together.

4) Share Your Background Without The Language Barrier

If your partner lacks confidence when it comes to learning your native language, you can still offer many fun ways of engaging with your background. Bring in foods or music from home, or discuss the politics of your home country. As long as the topic is interesting to your partner, it will serve as an inspiration for both of you to connect to each other’s cultures.

Sharing traditions of your home country is what makes you special as a couple. It can also create memories that last for life. At my wedding in Germany, my husband asked for us to act out the German tradition of sawing a log together as the couple. My parents happily obliged…with a pretty blunt saw! The experience of my neighbour running in to “rescue the couple” with his chainsaw won’t be forgotten any time soon.

What's more romantic than a bit of mansplanation about sawing logs?!

5) Learn a third language together

The biggest problem with teaching your native language to your sweetheart is that it can create a power imbalance. You don’t want them to feel like the stupid one, right? Some couples have reported that learning a third language together became a great leveller and hobby. Go for something that you both consider relatively neutral and easy, such as Esperanto. This way, it’s their chance to flex those study muscles without feeling any pressure.

Respect Your Partner’s Learning Style

Allow your partner to determine the pace and learning style that they prefer. Even if you are a polyglot who swears by using Anki cards, their own preference might be for starting out in an adult class at the local college. Keep them accountable to their own goals, but never to demand unreasonable efforts. It may help to discuss their language learning goals together and to keep easy accountability through something like the Language Habit Toolkit. Like a good tutor, your job is to inspire motivation and excitement and to refrain from judgement.

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone from a different country? How did you go about language learning? Tell me more in the comments below. I’m excited to hear those stories.

How To: Bullet Journal for Effective Language Learning

Have you ever found yourself in a really good language learning flow, only to have a couple of days off and fall off the wagon? I know this has happened to me numerous times, whether when learning a language, trying to work out daily, or even trying to keep a housecleaning routine. You're doing great, you're feeling organised, and then you have a day off or a temptation and you just can't seem to get back on track.

So what if you had a system to organise your housecleaning routine or language learning that was proven to improve productivity? Bullet Journaling not only improves productivity, it is also extremely flexible in terms of personalizing it for your own needs. Personally, I’m never as efficient as when I’m using the bullet journal system.

So how does it work?

It’s fairly simple, really. You set yourself a number of keys, which basically mean you choose which symbols have which meanings. Clarifying your keys is, pun intended, key to using bullet journaling successfully.

These are the keys I personally use in my bullet journal, however a quick google search or Pinterest search will give many more options.

Once your keys are sorted, you need to decide on a format. This, however, doesn’t need to be strictly adhered to – indeed, I would actually encourage you to try out different things, since you will know when you’ve got a format that works for you. I like planning my whole year very briefly at the end or the beginning of my notebook. I use a Leuchtturm 1917 with dotted pages, having weekly spreads with the key events from each day, then doing daily pages with detailed to dos and agendas.

You can also incorporate spreads and pages for anything you want to track, such as:

• Food eaten
• Water consumption
• Budget and spending
• Daily gratitude
• Workouts
• Words written
• And – you guessed it – language learning.

Have you thougth about creating these spreads in your target language?

Since bullet journaling is almost sure to guarantee you to stay on track, the system is perfect for scheduling your everyday language learning habits.

How To Use It For Language Learning

Snapshot of my own goal setting spread from the Bullet Journal

My number one tip would be to use Pinterest for inspiration for this! Pinterest is excellent to see how other people are designing their bullet journals and to get inspiration for your own. Personally I have a folder just for bullet journal inspiration - it can become an addiction! - and whenever I am struggling for ideas I have a browse in there.

Abigail from Polyglot Progress has also made a really informative video on how to use bullet journaling for language learning, perfect to ease yourself into the system!

The Language Habit Toolkit

Another option, if you do like things to be ready made for you, is the Fluent Language Habit Toolkit. The toolkit combines the best parts of the bullet journal system and effective language learning into one cohesive package.

I started working on it in my own bullet journal, as I realised that there was no all-in-one system out there offering goals, tracking, and review.

The kit is designed to be printed out as either A4 or A5 and is perfect to glue into a notebook for easier overview of your progress. It provides you with a complete set of tools that you can use to make steady progress and start building towards fluency in any language, and is based on 20 years experience of teaching languages.

So what are you waiting for? The possibilities are limitless with this system, and I can't wait to see what you do with yours! Please feel free to tag @fluentlanguage on Twitter or @kerstin_fluent on Instagram to share your creations.

Motivated by Vladimir Putin's Russian (with Kris Broholm)

In episode 55, friend of the show Kris Broholm from Actual Fluency joined me to discuss mindset and accountability in language learning that come from a place of reality and gentle confidence.

Tune in to hear us chat and share:

• Great advice for English speakers who want to have early success in a new language
• Language learning is such a complicated jigsaw puzzle, so how can we really track what we have actually learnt?
• Is it presumptuous, are you lacking humility if you set yourself a big, impressive goal?
• How the reason you are learning a language is DIRECTLY connnected to the success that you are going to have a week, 3 months, and perhaps 12 months down the line
• The one thing you MUST have in order to get language learning motivated - a sense of "this is who I am"

Four Tendencies in Language Learning

We revisit perspectives on the 4 tendencies framework Lindsay and I discussed in episode 32. Kris is on record as an Obliger, saying:

"It would be Embarrassing to tell people that I gave up."

You can take a test to determine your own tendency here.

Links From This Episode

• Vladimiar Putin interviewed by Oliver Stone (sadly, no bear or horse)
• The Language Habit Toolkit
• Gretchen Rubin
• Kris's Course Language Routine Mastery
• Clear the List on Kris's Actual Fluency blog
• The James Altucher Podcast

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Are You Learning Grammar in The Most Effective Way?

Grammar can be the stuff of nightmares! Imagine strict, uniformed schools where a teacher puts you on the spot, and dozing off in the dusty haze of tables and rules…and all of this takes hours upon hours.

Does it have to be that way? Could it be that a modern language learner has a use for rules too? I say yes, yes, yes!

So How Can You Make Your Grammar Study More Effective?

Let’s be real: If you’re a creative language learner wanting to express your own thoughts instead of rattling off a phrasebook, you’re going to benefit from grammar study.

I’ve got 7 tips to help you learn grammar without having to spend hours numbing your mind.

1) Adopt a Needs-Based Process

Some people want to study grammar first, following dialogues in the textbook and working through each stage of a text book. This is an old-school approach: meet a rule, learn the rule, practice the rule.

As an independent language learner, you are not bound to the rule-led approach. You can wait and explore based on need.

So for example, you may want to say “this is the most expensive house I’ve ever seen” in month 2 of your learning journey. At month 2, most books won’t be teaching you the “superlative” (grammar term for “how to say most”) yet. But if that’s what you need right now in order to communicate, your independent study advantage means you can go ahead and learn it anyway.

I call this the exploring approach, because it works only when you’re driven by curiosity. The key is to ask good questions, meaning you want to be as specific as possible about what you’re trying to communicate and where you’re getting stuck.

When you get it right, you will find that needs-based grammar study is the most efficient way of becoming fluent.

2) Don’t Ignore That Grammar Exists

If you feel that “immersion learning” means that you put yourself into an environment where all the input is in another language (“like a child!”), you risk the pitfalls of this approach. Adults are analysers, organisers, thinkers, and they are also a lot more valuable about making mistakes. So if there’s a question in your mind, why withhold the answer?

Allow yourself look up and practice a rule when it’s needed. Once you know what rule you’re missing, you’ll feel ever more confident about learning more and attaining a higher level.

Related article: The 5 Golden Rules of Adult Learning

3) Learn Your Own Grammar

The ways in which people express themselves tend to follow a very similar patterns, and most of the world’s languages adhere to patterns involving subject, verb, and object. In fact, this is the structure that exists in all the human languages found so far.

The more you know how language works to describe the world, the easier it can become to see those patterns in any new language. So understanding how your native language works is a huge head start.

4) Mindmap and Teach It

The first step of making sense of a grammar rule for yourself is to draw it out in your own notebook. Use colourful pens, write example sentences, mind map, draw connections. I prefer to write grammar rules on paper, but in my German grammar course you can also see a big student-generated mind map made in a Mindmap software.

Once you’ve taken your own notes, stage 2 of understanding grammar is to explain it to someone else.

I experienced this myself when I jobbed as a French tutor in my teens. As I tried my best to explain the different French past tenses to my tutee, a lightbulb came on in my head. These structures of passé this and passé that are actually the same as in German! Soon, I was beginning to see patterns everywhere. Explaining what I had learnt to other people was an incredible confidence booster, and helped me learn it twice.

5) Use Your Language Tutor

It’s okay for the tutor to let you make mistakes in conversation practice, but when it comes down to finding a problem and fixing it with you, they should be able to articulate what you need to know.

One great way of making use of your tutor time is to explain to them how you understood a certain rule and ask whether you’ve got it right. After all, two smart people are better than one! So never be shy, and don’t accept “we just do it this way” as an answer from a language tutor.

6) Don’t Learn Too Much At Once

Sometimes, your conversation partners and your books will ask a little too much of you. There’s so much useful information out there, but you might need more time to process it. I’ve found it helpful to learn the word for “too much” here, so I can make use of it in lessons when I need to.

It’s not a failure to know your own limitations, and in fact you will be more productive and effective if you respect the times when you’re overloaded. Better to focus small bits, and to learn those really well before moving on.

7) Look It Up

When a question comes up in your mind, make sure that you look it up! In my own routine, I like to keep a little list of things that I want to learn later. This is so helpful when I come across a weird construction in a news article, or when I realise there’s something I want to say but cannot. The Habit Tracker in the Language Habit Toolkit has this question built in, and it’s my own reminder to learn what I need.

When you keep a list and only look up what’s required, you are able to build a flexible, independent, and interesting grammar study method. No more need to follow a book - you can simply react to what’s required at the right time.

Where to Find Grammar Resources

Obviously, you can buy a straightforward book of grammar explanations. My favourites here are the books written for a teenage audience, perhaps even teenage native speakers, because these books tend to simplify their explanations and cut the word count right down. For example, I love BBC Bitesize for the languages on the British curriculum.

Related courses by me:

• German Grammar Explanations That Make Sense
• Finally Get It in French Grammar

Both of these courses are for beginners, and feature explanations and exercises in English, and in simple terms. And as you’re working with these courses, remember that they are designed to be your reference points. Each lesson answers a question, and it will be there for you when the question comes up in your own individual, needs-based curriculum.

So there you have it. I don’t believe that adults learning a new language should completely avoid grammar, and believe they have to act like children to get the most effective results. Instead, adopt your needs-based approach and let curiosity lead you on your own language learning journey!

Need more help with grammar?

Check out my course Crack the Grammar Code for an in-depth walkthrough of how you can learn the grammar of any language, stress-free.

Language Tracking Insider: How To Move Steadily Towards Your Next Breakthrough

Language tracking is so important. It allows you to stay on top of your studies, master busy periods and see your own progress towards fluency. It’s not just an exercise in discipline or productivity.

When you find smart ways to track, it will enhance all the work you’re doing and become one of the greatest motivators out there. And since I recently built and shared my own best practice templates for tracking in the Language Habit Toolkit learners, I’ve been hearing back from students who have some incredible ideas for making this even more effective.

Check out the following creative tracking tweaks and see if they can transform your language learning, too.

1) Track Life Events That Affect Your Study Routine

We all know that rules are made to be broken, and this is true for study routines too! Big and small events such as trips, conferences, and birthdays can knock you off your routine and even break habits.

Look out for these types of events at the start of the week and make a note in your tracker. Give yourself permission to drop off the routine and pay attention to getting back on track in the days after your event. For example, you could schedule 20 minutes of writing for the day after your birthday.

How To Add This To Your Tracker

My favourite trick comes from Catrin, one of my expert testers.

As Catrin started tracking her studies every day, she made little notes of what’s going on in her life.

Remember that it is okay if you are just too busy to study sometimes.

Developing a language habit is not about perfect records of focused study every day. It’s about more than that: Making language feel natural, building structure, and helping you go further simply by coming back to the project every week.

2) Code In Your Activities

The next trick is from Mark, another expert tester. Mark used to be a runner, and found that regular tracking was a key to his training regime. Taking the method into language learning, he built on his tracking expertise by adding little extras to show what he did during those sessions.

Here are a few easy ways of enhancing your Habit Tracker:

• Use different colours to track which skill you trained that day (vocab, grammar, listening, speaking, reading and writing..)
• Use numbers or letters to shorten descriptions of your resources, for example 1 for Duolingo, 2 for Glossika, 3 for your vocab notebook, 4 for a video chat, and so on.
• If you are studying more than one language, highlight which languages you were studying on which day. On the right, you can see how I reserve every Thursday for training French instead of Welsh (using the Language Habit Toolkit, printed at 50% and pasted into my Moleskine notebook).

A post shared by Kerstin Cable (@kerstin_fluent) on May 10, 2017 at 1:01pm PDT

3) Add A Review Box to Your Habit Tracker

The next tip was shared by Toolkit user Colette. She shared a tweak she uses to make sure she stays on top of what she’s learnt so far.

When you are just finishing a lesson with your tutor or a timed study session, the temptation to close the app/book and do something else is at its highest. You have earned your break! But with just one or two words of new vocabulary, you can hugely increase the benefit of what you just learnt.

Colette’s idea takes this review system one step further, as she decided to write down one word to review from her vocab routine right on the Habit Tracker every day. Just think: If you review just one vocabulary word extra every single day, you save yourself 365 reviews a year. Your Memrise buddies will be very impressed!

How To Add This To Your Tracker

In the Language Habit Toolkit, your Study Tracker sheet also comes with a “What I Learnt” section that prompts you to make a quick note of exactly what you added to your knowledge on this occasion.

Making a note while it is fresh in your mind will help you realise that even just a few minutes spent on a flashcard review can take you further towards becoming fluent.

4) Log in Advance

The final trick in today’s round-up comes from me, and it’s my classic way of kick-starting any activity when I feel like I’m procrastinating a bit too much. I’m a person who can struggle with overwhelm, and sometimes I get nothing at all done because I don’t even know where to start.

One thing I’ve learnt is that I can usually get myself unstuck by creating dedicated times in my week. It doesn’t work if I say “I will study every Monday from 6 to 7”, but it does work when I look just a few days ahead and decide where important work will fit in.

The most effective way to “advance log” is to become extremely specific. Don’t just write “read in Welsh” - it has to be “spend 8 minutes reading MADRON comic”. Instead of saying “do Memrise”, make a specific note of the level you want to complete or the mini-goal you have.

Related article: How to Learn a Language With Smart and Useful Goals

Want To Get Ready-Made Language Tracking Templates?

You’ll find two in-depth tracking worksheets to print and use in the Language Habit Toolkit. These trackers are professionally designed, developed with language learning experts, and will give you an instant set-up for effective tracking.

Find the Language Habit Toolkit in Fluent’s Learning Section.

Do you keep track of your language learning sessions in detail, or do you prefer to sail along and set big goals only? If you’ve got a tip to share, let me know in the comments below!