What other activities do any of you use?
I am just getting started with Lingq, I already do kind of you tube listening for street italian, I also do flashcards, I do parallel reading, and I get my kids to drill me on my pronunciation errors… really wondering how I might incorporate chatGPT into my learning!
I like watching the battle of narratives on news channels. Very exciting. lol
I enjoy watching content (K-dramas) without the use of LingQ (just to enjoy the language for what it is without constantly studying it) and reading books and articles/posts in my native language (English) about Korean culture, history, and language.
I also listen to and make playlist on Spotify of songs in my target language that I listen to for fun and enjoy the music part of the along while more passively listening/dancing/singing.
Things that will basically prolong my desire to learn the language and not get “burnt out”.
P. S. I also work with sentences in Korean using Language Reactor’s PhrasePump feature and observe the way the language is presented compared to English using duel subtitles with their extension.
Turning on the Finnish subtitles when watching English speaking Youtube videos has been very helpful for massively expanding my vocab. Obviously its not so easy without a decent base in the language but when you are just enjoying the story and collating odd words and phrasing the whole process is a lot more enjoyable.
It might be unique to Finnish but the words are phonetic… You can tell how they are said out loud by reading them
For German:
Listen to podcasts - Mostly Easy German Podcast
Listen to youtube channels - Easy German, MrWissen2Go, MrWissen2GoGeschisthe, Tageschau 15 minute update, other youtube channels occassionally
Watch German TV - Mostly Dokfilms, In Namen der Gerechtigkeit (lawyer based soap opera lol)
Magazine - Deutch Perfekt
Deutsche Welle website for news - will sometimes import the articles to LingQ, but often I’ll just read it on the website using google translate web extension popup as needed.
Watch German movies or documentaries - with subtitles I can mostly understand. I’m also going through Babylon Berlin series using Language Reactor which is a great tool.
Also, in LingQ to work on output, I’ve been going through the mini stories in my native language and trying to output the German…not exact, but something that would convey the meaning the best I can. I also will talk to myself. Or after saying something to someone, think about (and look up) how I might say the same in German.
You mention ChatGPT. Here I will occasionally take a sentence from my LingQ reading (or elsewhere) and drop it in ChatGPT and ask it to explain the grammar if I find something particular tricky or perhaps the word meaning I’m getting in LingQ from the online dictionaries there, doesn’t quite make sense (usually it is a colloquialism, idiom, or regional word). I’ve also used Chat GPT to create example sentences for certain words that I’ve seen a lot and have difficulty getting the meaning to stick. I’ve also used it to summarize things (like new articles from Nachrichten & Analysen: der globale Blick auf Schlagzeilen – DW). I’ve also recently used it to take those summaries and create a dialogue between two people. Lots of cool things you can do with ChatGPT.
I like podcasts best, but also other audio only activities like audiobooks and listening to youtube. You can do this while doing other things (commuting, physical work, etc). It isolates the listening away from text or body language clues so I need to focus on the sound to ensure that I’m really hearing the words.
I do use ChatGPT now. I do some basic conversations with it in areas where I want to be able to converse, but mostly I’ll ask it how to say something I might have trouble expressing, ask it to generate targeted stories that I’ll import into LingQ (a story using reflexives, subjunctive, etc), ask it to break down a sentence I’m having trouble with grasping (that can be really useful) and I’ll ask it to review my written spanish and point out errors, or things that might be expressed more naturally in spanish in other ways.
Oh! Another thing I do is type and transcribing exercises in my TL!
I use:
You may consult Olly’s 30 Day Mastery books. He takes one particular grammar concept teaches it with explanations and then uses it in 30 unique story parts to reinforce it. I have used all of his books for my active study in German. His methodolgy is way superior in the sense that he does not use grammar drills (ex: fill in the blanks, cross matching, writing definitions of individual words etc-boring. These are a major part of course books and that is how language is taught in language schools).
Grammar in small doses in parallel will improve your reading experience on LingQ. I think Olly has nailed it down. Worth a look at it if you are starting from scratch. Each story comes with vocabulary explanations as well ex German-English, italian-English etc
Listening and reading to everything that has a transcript.
Speaking practice on Italki
Writing: Texting
Great ideas - I love songs too (lyricstraining is good for Italian)
Cool - so you follow the news and have a simultaneous translation - I don’t think I would trust the auto generated subtitles enough ha ha - but it is really similar to how I read books: I buy a kindle version of both English and Italian of a book/authour that I KNOW i will like and then read the chapter in English (like your news story) - this means I can relax about reading it and not panic that I am missing plot, subtleties or anything. Then I read that same chapter in Italian. If I read a phrase that I don’t think I would have guessed off the bat, I highlight it and email it to me, to be made into passive flashcards. But I think in essence it is similar to your cool idea!
Lots of cool ideas there! I think the work you are doing in building up your German cultural knowledge is MASSIVE. So much of social conversation references things in society, from 90s tv shows, to celebrities, to defunct snacks - no amount of grammar or vocab work is gonna replace knowing who is or was Willy Brandt etc etc!
Yeah that’s good to do focused listening - when I practice my street Italian, I choose comedy videos where they supply the subtitles, then I listen to the 5 minute video, and I can see the main action but the subtitles are too hard to see, then 2nd go I rewatch at 75% speed, and for every phrase or word I don’t know I take a screenshot (later to be made into passive flashcards) - final 3rd step is listening again with my eyes shut hopefully while I write the subtitles on my inner eyelids!
That is a vivid description! I agree. Especially for more challenging audio at whatever level we are at, I think listening and relistening to things we have studied (whether on lingQ, or with subtitles as you say) until it is “burned in” is a very effective way to improve listening comprehension.
I like watching Portugal soap operas with portuguese subtitles.
Netflix allows me to switch language to my target language 95% of the time. I usually watch about an hour of streaming a night in my target language. It is kind of hilarious to do this when the show/movie is very American in nature.
When I have time I book a 30 minute italki lesson, for speaking and listening. They are so affordable. It is fun to try a few teachers to see whose personality and style works best.
There are meetups near me where people drink coffee and speak my target language. I haven’t had the courage to go yet, but it is on my list.
I have a pen pal who is a native speaker in my target language and wants to improve in my language. It helps if the penpal is a super interesting person!
Sometimes I designate a week as a focus week. Each day for 5 days I write a very short story (like something I would tell a friend in conversation). Just 5 or 6 sentences. I force myself to write it without looking anything up. Then I can use google to make it better. Then I put it into LingQ writing exchange and some nice person corrects it.
This summer I hired someone who happened to speak my target language to help me a few hours a day for a couple weeks with my new puppy. I paid her double to spend 30 minutes on conversation. Wow! That turned out great! She was a natural teacher and conversationalist. The puppy slept through it.
I am only a couple of months in. After listening to Atomic Habits and some of Steve and others advice about studying in different contexts, in a systematic way, I’ve settled on the following at the moment:
Will review once I reach the end of Say Something and hopefully get to an intermediate level.
I created a private German-language list on Twitter/X where I added and read interesting people from Germany and Austria. A mix of cultural commentators, news sites, sports journalists, history buffs, and random people. Twitter has a little ‘translate post’ link beneath each German post, which is handy if I get stuck. Great for dipping into a few times a day.
