Monoglot Anxiety

How learning a language can boost your career

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 06:00:00 +0000

In this guest post, Reed Jane writes about how language learning can boost your career.

What is comprehensible input? Here's what language learners need to know

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Comprehensible input is anything in your target language that you can mostly understand. And research shows it’s the key to language acquisition.

Real Language Stories: How to be fluent in vulnerability in a year

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 06:00:00 +0000

For Lexie Grace, learning Spanish meant learning to be vulnerable, too

How I self-taught German to C1 using immersion — despite being busy and disorganized

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 16:53:00 +0000

As one reader put it, teaching myself German took “2 years of not really doing much actually”

Language Diary 3: Now with tracked time data!

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 22:00:00 +0000

Lots of German! Also: I finally found a way to track my language learning time consistently.

Why I don't like to "gendern" in German — and why I do it anyways

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:00:00 +0000

As an English native speaker, explicitly calling out that I’m female all the time feels more backwards than progressive. Many German speakers feel exactly the opposite

How to automatically track language learning time using iOS automations

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 14:00:00 +0000

You can use iOS automations to automatically start and stop time tracking apps like Toggl when you open and close language learning apps — and much more!

Real Language Stories: Ten Years of Russian

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 22:00:00 +0000

What started with a nerdy crush on the Cyrillic script ended up launching Dack into a 10-year love-hate relationship with Russian. Here’s what he learned.

Real Language Stories: Becoming an Imperfect Language Learner

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Upon moving to Italy, Heidi Lovejoy wanted to learn Italian, but her perfectionism was a bigger obstacle than anticipated. Making progress required a major change of mindset.

Science of Language: Newborns learn speech sounds using same brain regions as adults

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 20:00:00 +0000

A new study found that newborns start recognizing vowel sounds just hours after birth using a speech-processing system very similar to the one adults use to learn and use language

Real Language Stories: French, Fast and Slow

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 16:00:00 +0000

My language learning journey started in an American high school. I studied French for four years. I was a serious student. I had always felt drawn to the language by way of my family history — my ancestors on my mother’s side were French, and many generations of her family lived in French-speaking Quebec, Canada. Learning French was, to me, a way to connect to that heritage.

Who needs language laws?

Mon, 30 May 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Last weekend, thousands of people assembled in Belfast, Northern Ireland to march through the regional capital in protest. The red-clad crowd numbered around 10,000 — an order of magnitude more than the number that had gathered in Belfast to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just a few months prior. But war wasn’t on their minds — nor was police violence, climate change, energy prices, inflation, or any of the other headline-grabbing issues that have recently sparked large protests in other major cities.

Language Diary #2: Italian Crosstalk

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to my language diary. Which is apparently biweekly now with posts appearing on either Wednesdays or Thursdays, depending on how I feel. Yes I know bloggers are supposed to be reliable, but my whole “thing” is kinda chaos so forgive me this completely in-character 2 day buffer period.

Language Diary #1: Italian and making short-term language plans

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 23:00:00 +0000

I sincerely hope that future Elise will have a much better idea what she’s doing with this whole language business than today Elise, and with that in mind I thought it could be fun to start keeping track of exactly what I’ve been up to (approximately) each week. Future Elise can look back and laugh smugly at my mistakes.

Is it worth hiring a language tutor as a beginner?

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 23:00:00 +0000

I didn’t book my first lesson with an online tutor until about one and half years after starting to learn German. My lesson was my first conversation in German, but by that point I was already speaking at an intermediate level (about B1 for you CEFR people). I used to think that it’d be a waste of time and money to hire a language tutor as a total beginner.

Book Review: The Language Secret by John Stedman

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 05:00:00 +0000

If you’re a language nerd like me, you probably waste hours reading books about languages that you could have spent actually learning one. And now you’re reading a review about a book about language learning instead of actually learning a language. So it goes. Anyhow, this is my first book review for the blog.

How I Passed the Goethe B2 German Exam With a Nearly Perfect Score

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 11:19:22 -0500

Last week on Monday I officially went from monoglot to… duo-glot? Bilingual sounds wrong. I didn’t grow up speaking two languages. Anyways, as a newly minted official Goethe Institute certified B2 German speaker, I wanted to stop and share how I prepped for the test—and really, how I didn’t prep for the test.

How to make better language flashcards by combining writing practice with spaced repetition

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 15:40:24 +0600

Writing is one of my favorite ways to actively study German. It is great for vocabulary building and grammar practice, and in the absence of speaking opportunities, it is the only way to get practice with production skills. But beyond simply being a great way to practice on its own, writing is a key component of how I use flashcards and spaced repetition to learn German.

10 Great German Science Youtube Channels

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 15:40:24 +0600

German science videos were some of the first “real” German media that I could understand. It might sound like a tough place to start, but thanks to the overlap between English and German scienctific vocabulary, science videos can actually be a great entry into authentic German content (especially if you’re a nerd like me).

The best German Anki template ever. Probably.

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 15:40:24 +0600

After almost a year of experimentation, I’m finally satisfied enough with my German Anki template to dare to think it might be useful for others. So in the spirit of Mads Mikkelsen advertising a pretty mediocre Danish beer as “probably the best beer in the world,” I’ll say that this is “probably the best German Anki template on the internet.

11 ways to practice writing in your target language

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 15:40:24 +0600

Learning to write in a new laguage can be intimidating, especially if you’re learning alone. Like speaking, writing is a productive skill which makes it impossible to learn passively. Reading will improve your writing, to be sure. But if you want to write, you need to write! But what to write?

A candid review of Pimsleur Danish

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 15:40:24 +0600

I received a lot of reccomendations of the Pimsleur language programs from family members back when I was preparing to head to Denmark in 2019. So naturally, I picked up Pimsleur Danish 1, never finished it, and forgot about it until about a month ago when I found the little blue Pimsleur logo lurking in my app drawer.

Is Duolingo bad?

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Is Duolingo bad? You’ve probably heard a lot of criticisms of this popular app if you’ve been hanging around language learning communities online. Duolingo gets a lot of flack, and there’s good reason for that. Nobody is going to reach fluency in a foreign language just by using a game app, and a lot of Duolingo users seem to think they can. Still, I think many critics miss an important point: Duolingo scratches the phone itch. And that’s no small thing.

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