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daikisuki · 2 years ago

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Tips to Make a Language You’re “Forced” to Learn More Interesting/Enjoyable

Not everyone learning a second or third, or even fourth, language is doing it purely out of a desire to connect to a language or culture. Sometimes, you’re doing it because you have to for some reason or another.

Maybe you’re being relocated for work to a country where you don’t speak the language. Now it’s either learn Turkish to at least a survivable degree or be stuck using translator apps for the remainder of your stay.

You got a job as a cashier and it turns out a lot of the customers passing through only speak Spanish and you’re tired of the awkward mishaps that happen when you’re cashing said customers out.

You’re a first year student in high school and the only languages offered at your school are languages you have no interest in, but it’s a graduation requirement. Now you’re stuck picking the one you can tolerate the most for a school year so you can pass the class and get it over with.

Regardless of the reason, you’re stuck learning it for the foreseeable future and it’s not necessarily because you wanted to. We’ve all been there at some point, myself included. When something is more of an obligation, it’s pretty difficult to maintain any level of passion or interest for it, especially outside of class. I feel like that’s especially true for languages you had no interest in learning before suddenly being in a situation where you had to. The best advice honestly is to try and make the language more interesting to you personally that way, at least to some level, it’s less of a chore to study.

So for the language learners tied to a language due to obligation, these were my tips and tricks I did in addition to using the textbook and class. I’m not saying these are things that will make you fall head over heels for your TLO (Target Language of Obligation), but hopefully these are tips that will make your TLO a little more fun.

(TLDR at the end.)

Find content creators in your TLO that talk about things you like

I’m not talking about educational channels dedicated to teaching the language you’re learning like the Pod101 channels or Superholly. I mean entertainment.

You a fan of Danny Gonzalez or Jarvis Johnson reacting to terrible movies? Find an equivalent of them in your TLO. You like makeup tutorials or storytime videos? Look up ‘GRWM in Korean’, ‘メイクのチュートリアル’ or ‘storytime em português’. Or maybe you enjoy a good book review, or a review trashing 50 Shades of Gray for the tenth time in a row. ‘Reseña de 50 shades of gray’. Your language doesn’t need to be perfect, even the most basic vocabulary will get the point across and lead you to plenty of videos to choose from.

Vlogs, art, anime, song covers, Animal Crossing streams/speed builds etc. etc. It doesn’t matter. Use the amount of vocab you already know (or quickly searched on google) and make the youtube search bar your new best friend.

The same can be applied to other social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. If you like anime, find those anime news accounts on twitter but in French. If you enjoy content that discuss all things concerning the LGBTQ+ community, look up the equivalent terms in your TLO and start your search for those content creators.

This is a more interesting way to pick up on new vocabulary whether spoken or written, in a video and its comment section or on an Instagram caption.

Watch a show you’ve already seen, dubbed or subtitled in your TLO

If you’re a fan of anime or a user of Disney+, you are especially in luck. Shows like Boku no Hero Academia/My Hero Academia or The Owl House have been dubbed and subtitled all over in various languages due to their popularity. You can find entire episodes of the Moomin anime in Spanish on youtube.

You already know what’s going on because you’ve seen it in your native tongue, so you can pick and choose the least niche vocabulary and write it down on your notepad. Not to mention, this it is something you already like you might pay a bit more attention to it.

Additional tip: find a show in your TLO on Netflix subtitled in your language. Like murder mysteries? Rom-coms? Comedies? Netflix has a plethora of foreign films to watch that caters to various genres that could be in a language you’re learning. Try watching a foreign show with a plot that garners your interest.

Listen to Music in your TLO

We all have genres of music we enjoy listening to and there are usually singers of those genres in other countries. Rap, hip hop, pop, folk music specific to a country, you will find it somewhere. Just go to youtube search something like like ‘hip hop spanish’ and just click on one of those automatic playlist things youtube will suggest to you.

By doing that, I’ve found artists I personally enjoy listening to this day like IZA, Seu Jorge, Kaho Nakamura, Chila Lynn and Maluma.

Use Buzzfeed. I wish I was joking

Buzzfeed is certainly not the titan of the internet it used to be. And to quote Cody Ko, a lot of the times (especially nowadays) they tend to “Buzzfeed us some terrible content”. But the simple language and formatting of Buzzfeed articles and quizzes, make it a surprisingly effective way to learn new vocabulary.

Just by doing a ‘Which member of Anavitória are you ’(Quem é você no duo Anavitória?) quiz on Buzzfeed Brazil I was able to learn the Portuguese equivalents of red (vermelho), black (preto), yellow (amarelo), & white (branco) and Brazilian celebrities, among other vocab. A lot of the time videos on the youtube channels are either subtitled in the language or there are videos unique to those channels in the language.

This way, especially if you’re not a fan of Buzzfeed, you can laugh about the cringe in a different language while getting something out of it. Buzzfeed gets views and interactions, you get education and a good laugh. It’s mutually beneficial for everyone involved.

Try learning a little bit about a country that speaks your TLO or some Colloquialisms

Regardless of how anti-social some of us, myself included, can be I think deep down we all care about other people even if we don’t know them. We like seeing others succeed, we hate seeing others struggling, and to some extent we all recognize there is a shit ton of people living in the world that we don’t know.

We don’t know anything about them and we don’t know their language or anything about the culture they grew up in. A culture that shapes how they interact with and view the world and how they may view people who come from your country. I feel like we all experience levels of sonder like that, especially if you’re someone who watches a lot of vlog content which really puts into perspective how you are seeing a small window into someone else’s life even if for a few minutes.

So try personalizing your TLO to some degree by learning about a country or culture that speaks it.

Holidays, cultural quirks, historical figures, or idioms. You get some of that if you’re taking a language class, but try taking it outside your textbook.

Interested in art and learning Spanish? Try learning about artists from Equatorial Guinea and why they made a particular piece.

Interested in the aesthetic of weddings? Learn about wedding traditions in countries that speak your TLO.

Learning Turkish? Look up interesting factoids about certain words and phrases and their translations. For instance, the words for ‘Good Morning’ (günaydın) and ‘Good Night’ (tünaydın) respectively and literally translate to “the day is bright” and “the night is bright”.

In Brazilian Portuguese, there’s a phrase “ficar de conchinha”/”dormir de conchinha that means to cuddle that translates to “stay/sleep like little shells” which is really adorable. Another way to say Halloween is Dia das Bruxas which translates to ‘day of the witches’ and Dia dos Namorados which translates to ‘day of the lovers’.

One thing that also really developed my interest in Latin America when I was learning Spanish was looking at vlogs and seeing people walking around in their cities and noticing the differences in architecture. I also enjoy watching no commentary videos of people walking in different cities and feeling like I’m in that country myself seeing the sights and sceneries. (Ex ‘walking in Venice Italy, no commentary’.)

Look up Memes & the Meme Culture of your TLO

Everyone loves a good laugh so try to get some appreciation out of your TLO by learning about some of the memes or jokes. And not all jokes or memes are appreciated unless you know a specific language and culture that goes along with it.

For instance, when my at-the-time girlfriend told me about a little show called La Rosa de Guadalupe. Which she prefaced that, at least in Mexico the show’s origin country, it was a huge meme of a show because it was in a novela-like format with bad acting to go along with serious topics. One episode she told me about specifically was an episode about a girl with a cellphone addiction that escalated to a point where her mom threw her phone out the window, and then the girl jumped out the window for the phone. But through the power of a white rose and La Virgen de Guadalupe, her problems were solved.

It sounded so ridiculous, I had to see it for myself. So she sent me a video by a youtuber, Missasinphonia, who made commentary/reaction videos in Spanish about the show.

It’s hard to be disinterested in a language if you’re getting a laugh out of it. And even if you don’t understand most of what’s being said, the visuals alone can lead to a laugh due to body language and tone giving you an idea of what’s going on. This especially becomes true as you learn more vocab that makes the videos or captions of a meme easier to understand.

Tldr:

Find content creators in your TLO that talk about things you enjoy

Watch things you’ve already seen in your TLO (dubbed, subbed, or both)

Listen to Music in your TLO

Use Buzzfeed, I wish I was joking

Try learning a little bit about a country that speaks your TLO or Colloquialisms

Look up the Meme Culture of your TLO

And that’s it. I hope this helps someone out. I’ve always seen posts or videos about how to enhance your language learning experience for languages you’re already interested in, but never anything about a language you’re NOT interested in. So I wanted to do something with that.

Like I said, this is by no means, tips to make you 100% fall in love with your TLO. I did with Spanish, but that’s not going to be the case for everyone else and the moment you no longer have to learn/use your TLO, you’re going to forget it quite quickly.

But hopefully, these are tricks that can help it become a bit more tolerable to learn.

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