julie's Path of Growth

At the moment I am romanticizing learning new languages. At university I have to take Spanish classes so with my German, French and English one could think that I had already enough languages acquired to last me a lifetime. But if studying Spanish taught me one thing, then that learning a language “from scratch” is a whole different amount of work than growing up bilingual or even trilingual.

Though Spanish still has some similarities to French, I struggled a lot with this language in high school. Maybe it was the teaching method or the teacher, but I think that up until that point I didn’t think of learning languages as something where I had to put work into. I thought it just came naturally to me. A lot has changed. For the last two years, I learned to love the language and even got grades that I can now be proud of.

Apart from that, my sister and I recently started watching Animes together and now decided that we wanted to study Japanese. Again, learning a new writing system is a whole new level. But let’s see where this journey continues.

In this blog post, I want to share some tools and methods that I use to teach myself and study languages.

„Seek first to understand then to be understood.”

– “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey

For both languages, I do a lot of vocabulary revision online. I’m a big fan of Quizlet and love that my Spanish teacher regularly uploads new vocab sets for us. Apart from that, I use Duolingo for Spanish and Japanese to acquire new vocabulary. I like it because I can trick myself into thinking it’s a game.

For Japanese grammar, I also got a book, because I found that Duolingo doesn’t explain it that well.

My goal would be to start reading easy books in Spanish and maybe start “la Casa de Papel” in Spanish of course. 😉

Finally, I found some other tools recently that I’ll maybe start using soon. “Omniglot” for new writing systems like Hiragana in Japanese and “Lang-8” for practicing writing.

Has anybody made some experiences with those? What do you like to use, when learning languages?