How to have fun with languages (so you can actually stick to it)

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You want to have fun with languages, but you always get so bored, that you just end up giving up. Let’s talk about why language learning isn’t fun for you and what to do about it instead.

Why you’re not having fun with languages

So why is language learning so boring for you? Well, there are two reasons for this. The first reason is that we learned to learn languages in school with a teacher who has, like however many hundreds of students every single year to teach all the same stuff. This means that whether you like it or not, your teacher cannot make language learning a personalized, interesting experience.

They have to use a certain textbook, teach you certain skills, and track your skills in certain ways. They have to strip language learning down to its most boring features, which means basic vocabulary, basic grammar rules, and a very strict scripted oral exam if you have those.

So you do that for a couple of years, and then once you finish school, you decide you want to learn languages yourself. And how do you learn languages? Well, the way that you were taught with the same boring, stiff methods that work for the intention of educating hundreds of thousands of students to take and pass certain exams. The second reason is for those language learners who decide to expand a little bit past those strategies and go for the more popular language learning resources that are out there.

So these are resources like Pimsleur, like Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo, the most famous, well-known oldest resources. Now, there’s not anything wrong with these resources per se. But they’re not for everybody. It’s not uncommon for language learners who try these resources to get bored. But again, they don’t know any other options or they think it’s their fault. There’s something wrong with them because there are thousands of language learners who use these resources to learn a language.

So if these ways to learn a language are not working for you, what do you do instead have fun with languages so you’ll stick to it? I want to talk about this in three different categories, and these categories are basically what you’re learning in school. I’ll give you some options to branch out of those boring, frustrating strategies that you already know and hate.

How to have fun with languages: grammar

The first one is grammar drills. When you’re learning the grammar of a foreign language and you usually, for example, if you’re learning Spanish or French, you repeat conjugation tables day in and day out. You memorize, ad nauseum, the different conjugations of different verbs, to “you”, “me”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “they”, and “us”. And you just do that over and over and over again. Not only is that boring, but it also doesn’t translate very well into actually using the grammar. So what do we do instead? There are a couple of different approaches.

Implicit language learning

The first approach is the complete opposite of these conjugation tables and these grammar drills, and that is implicit learning. On the one hand, you have explicit knowledge, where you’re going in a textbook and you’re being told exactly what to do and when to do it. And you have to memorize all the rules. On the other side is implicit knowledge where you’re just kind of figuring it out as you go.

The best example of this is Duolingo. Duolingo is well known for teaching you implicitly the grammar and vocabulary that you need to complete the Duolingo tree. There’s not going to be any grammar lessons for you to go through. You’re just given the words, given the sentences, and you have to figure it out as you go. Some people love this, some people hate this. It’s really up to you to decide if this is a method that works for you or if you need something a little bit more direct.

Explicit grammar

Now, if you need something a little bit more explicit, but you want to have more fun with languages than using textbooks, the Internet has given us a ton of less stale activities to help us practice our grammar in a way that will have you having fun with languages. There are so many different strategies out there for learning explicitly, so learning the rules and regulations of each grammar point, but doing that for like 2% of your time and spending the other 98% of your time using the grammar. So you’re learning the grammar rules by practicing it and not just learning the rules themselves.

So for example, we have clozes where it’s a fill-in-the-blank. You have a sentence and you have a blank and you have to conjugate the word correctly or you have to use the right vocabulary word or any number of different activities.

Clozemaster is probably the best resource for this, it’s also available in like a zillion different languages. But generally speaking, the more languages a language learning resource offers, the less in-depth the content is going to be. So Clozemaster is entirely practice. There’s not going to be any grammar lessons or any way for you to explicitly learn.

It’s kind of like Duolingo in that regard, because Clozemaster is just grammar and just repetition and just fill in the blanks. This is opposed to a whole bunch of different language learning resources that are excellent at grammar but only support one or two different languages.

So if, for example, you are a Spanish language learner, then I would recommend Ella Verbs for literally just the conjugations because I know a lot of Spanish learners struggle with conjugating verbs. Ella Verbs is the best way to do that. And if you’re looking for something a little bit more intermediate, or advanced, and you’re looking to expand your knowledge of grammar, then Kwiziq is excellent for Spanish and French.

And German language learners, German grammar is like, it’s hard. It’s completely out of left field. You have to learn so many different things, and my favorite option for learning German grammar in an engaging, interesting, not boring way is German with Laura.

Vocab

Now let’s talk about vocab. So the way that we learn vocab in school is translation. You have your word in the target language, you have the word in English, and then you learn to connect the word to its translation. And that’s how you learn vocabulary. This is great for taking tests, but unfortunately in real life, this doesn’t work at all because it introduces an extra step to you using that vocabulary word.

Basically what happens is you have a conversation in the language, but then you have to translate in your head and link each word to every word in your native language and then re translate your responses. It’s a mess. It takes like five steps. Instead, there are tons of resources for vocabulary as well, and learning it in a way that’s engaging, interesting, and useful for using it in real-life conversations.

And there are kind of two different approaches that I would say for this topic. It’s intentionally or unintentionally learning new vocabulary words. And I completely just made that up right this second. So it’s like, that’s not an official term or anything, but I feel like there is a difference.

Intentionally

The first one, intentionally picking up new vocabulary, is when you are learning new words, kind of one by one, you’re picking and choosing different themes, different categories. Maybe you need different types of vocabulary for different types of situations that you’re going to be in. It’s basically like when you start out learning a new language and you learn the greetings, saying hello, introducing yourself, all those things, that is intentionally picking those words because it’s more important to learn how to introduce yourself in a new language than it is to analyze a news article about climate change. You know that it’s it’s just being really intentional and specifically seeking out new vocabulary words.

These resources are generally a little bit more basic because, as I said, it’s like when you first start out learning a new language, you need to intentionally look for that beginner vocabulary. So this is resources like Mondly and Drops.

Lingvist as well is really good about this, and Lingvist is the only one out of those three that goes beyond beginner levels. So there is that room for growth.

Unintentional

The other side of the coin is unintentional, where you are consuming media, you’re reading or listening to something, you’re watching TV and a new word pops up and you can learn it within that context and you can search for more context, learn definitions, learn translations, all that jazz. But it’s within the context of a story, a TV show, or a song. This doesn’t mean that you’re not specifically looking for vocabulary, but it means that you are picking up new vocabulary more naturally within the context of the media that you’re consuming.

So this is, for example, LingQ, where you’re reading a bunch of stories and you find new words and use those words to build up your vocabulary or something like Language Reactor if you’re watching YouTube or Netflix for the show and then also happen to be picking up new vocabulary in a much more engaging way than just sitting there and copying down translations.

Speaking

And the final category I want to talk about in this video is speaking. So in school, this is so boring because it’s either just like a call and response kind of thing where your teacher is repeating words or saying things in English or whatever it is, and your job as a student is to just repeat the translation back.

Or if you have oral exams, those are super fun (they’re not), you literally just like have a script of a handful of words and your job is to put those words together and speak them and prove that you can speak a language. It’s horrible and boring.

The thing is, learning to speak a new language isn’t about showing off your ability to use a lot of words. It’s about communication and expressing yourself effectively. And if you’ve ever tried to speak a new language, you know this for a fact. It’s not as simple as putting words in your brain and spitting them out. It takes some time to change the process of how you’re using the language.

That said, it’s more fun with languages to use a resource that encourages you to express yourself and state your sentences, think about what you want to say, and learn how to say it in a new language. So something like Speechling, where you have the option to look at a picture and describe the picture and have a pronunciation coach listen to your speaking and tell you if there’s anything that you can improve upon or if you’re doing great.

Speakly is also really great for this. The entire intention behind the Speakly app is to get you speaking quickly. And it does because Speakly is very true in the fact that you don’t need to learn a whole lot of grammar and vocabulary and all that stuff. You just need to get speaking.