What I Did After Duolingo
I think this is one of the biggest struggles of the langblr community because once you’re done with duolingo it’s kind of like you’ve just been thrown out on your own with no direction. In all honesty it took me a LOOONG time to figure out what to do with myself and how to keep progressing once I finished the tree, but now I’m at a point in my language journey where I speak my L2 every single day with my native friends. I wouldn’t consider myself fluent, but I’m definitely conversational.
Do the reverse tree
I seriously cannot stress this enough. Go through and do the reverse tree of your language (if it’s available, of course). What I mean by this is when I finished the Italian tree for English speakers, I went through and did the English tree for Italian speakers. It may seem redundent, but at least for those two trees, the vocabulary the two trees offered was actually quite different and I ended up learning loads of new vocabulary. Not just new vocabulary, but you’ll have access to the duolingo forums in your target language. You can ask questions to an unrestricted amount of natives, and you could possibly offer help to a bunch of natives who have questions. Also for all of the brave ones out there learning more than 1 language at a time, try to see if there’s a duolingo tree for your L2 to your L3 (for a while I was learning French for Italian speakers)
Flashcards & Vocab
Remember to be SMART about the vocab you learn. Learn words that you’ll actually use in day-today conversation. IF you never speak in your native language about a topic, don’t waste your time learning the words in your target language. Vocab isn’t just about acquisition of words, it’s about acquisition of words you will actually need and use.
Memrise is my go-to for new and GOOD vocabulary. All of the vocab lists are user-submitted, so you’re guaranteed to get good, commonly used, and NATURAL vocab words that have been put into lists created by native speakers! There are so many thousands of lists for hundreds of languages and it’s honestly a gold mine. They have a mobile app for which you can download lessons so that you have access to them when you’re offline (aka perfect when you don’t want to use cell data or you have crappy service) AND THE BEST PART IS THAT WHATEVER YOU DO OFFLINE GETS SAVED AND YOU CAN JUST PICK BACK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF. Not only that, but they have an “ignore” option so that you don’t have to repeat any words that you already know. I love memrise. I’ve even made a few of my own lists just because I’m a hoe for a good deck of flashcards and I love the repetition method of memrise. Also, Memrise is a lot like duo in the aspect that you can add a bunch of friends and it keeps track of your experience points so that you can compete with people if that’s something that helps keep you motivated. They even have different rankings once you accumulate a certain amount of experience (personally, this is a HUGE motivator for me). All in all I love memrise. ALSO it has lots of other things completely unrelated to languages, so even if you dont study languages I would still check it out!
ALTERNATIVELY: Anki! Just find somewhere to MAKE FLASHCARDS AND STUDY THE DAMN THINGS. I’ve never used Anki before so I can’t really give a good review on it (however if someone who has used anki wants to shoot me a message, I can add their review to the post or smth). I, personally, used an app called StudyBlue (there’s a desktop version as well) when I was making flashcards because it would let me make decks of like 1,000 words and then I could take quizes (you have the option of doing multiple choice, true/false, and fill in the blanks) and it’ll keep track of your progress and stuff. Also, you have access to other user-submitted flashcard decks so it’s pretty cool in that sense!
LEARN THE DANG GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES
(Honestly you’d think this one would go without saying)
I think people get too caught up in the accumulation of new words to stop and realize that knowing 8,000 fancy words is completely pointless if you don’t know how to put them in a sentence. To me, this is 900000000% more important than vocabulary, because if you don’t know a word you can quick do a simple search for a single word and slap it into a sentence, but if you don’t know an entire sentence structure you’re dead meat, kid. Please make notes and try to form simple sentences for all of the grammatical conventions, different verb tenses, etc. Also, don’t just learn HOW to use them, but WHEN to use them. — A really good website for explaining grammatical conventions in super simple terms is about.com. They have AMAZING resources! Lots of vocab lists, information on grammatical structures, verb conjugations, verb charts, etc. Plus, you can even sign up for newsletters, “word of the day” emails, and things of that nature. Here are the language subsections of the website that I’m aware of: Italian About, Spanish About, French About, German About. There might be more, but I’ve never checked. It should be easy to find out if they have a subsection for the website that you’re looking for, just type in “LANGUAGEHERE.about.com” into the browser and try your luck! — If there isn’t an about page for your language, google is your BEST FRIEND I PROMISE.
Switch to your target language
This one is pretty simple: change your phone and all of your social media over to your target language. If you’re feeling really brave; change your entire computer over to your target language. This one didn’t particularly do a whole lot for me as far as learning new vocabulary and sentence structure, but I’ve always been really bad at trying to remember days of the week, names of the month, telling time, etc. and changing my phone over to my target language helped solidify that information in my brain and now I can throw out dates and times like I was born to do it. – ALSO: Since I know you’re on tumblr if you’re reading this post, FOLLOW BLOGS THAT POST CRAP IN YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE. I follow so many Italian blogs, and honestly it’s just super great exposure for my dash to be half Italian, half English.
YOUTUBE
God I frickin love youtube. There are LOTS of super great language-learning youtubes out there, and lots of channels that have subtitles. BASICALLY YOUTUBE IS AN UNLIMITED BOX OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LISTENING SKILLS. You like watching monthly favorites videos? Plug the line “my monthly favorites” (in your target language ofc) into the search bar and BOOM. You like watching pokemon letsplays? FIND U A DAMN POKEMON LETSPLAY SERIES IN YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE. You wont understand everything at first, but trust me just hearing the language makes life easier. One thing I like to do is listen to asmr videos in my target language because people tend to speak more slowly in ASMR vidoes and it’s far easier for me to understand them.
NETFLIX
On the note of listening skills, WATCH NETFLIX IN YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE. There’s this really great google chrome extension called “Hola!” (the picture is a little flame with a face on it) that is basically a proxy extension so you can change what country you’re browsing the internet from, and–in turn–access netflix in different countries. This lets you have access to web-series’ and movies that might not be on the netflix in your country (fun fact, the first two Kung Fu Panda movies aren’t on America’s netflix list, but they’re on Italy’s netflix list in case you want to watch), and also access to films and series that were CREATED IN YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE!!! Not to mention access to subtitles, which is always a wonderful thing. (p.s. you can use Hola! for any website you want to, and it doesn’t slow your internet down ;) )
MUSIC
PLEASE LISTEN TO MUSIC IN YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE. Not only will you feel super cool and empowered once you can start singing along to songs in a foreign language, but you’ll feel even MORE super cool and empowered when you start understanding the lyrics of the songs you’ve learned. Also: please, please, please look up the lyrics to the songs you’re listening to. It’ll prevent you from singing along and mis-singing (is that a word lmao) lyrics and making silly errors, you feel me. A big bonus of listening to music is that you inadvertently pick up pronunciation skills! It’s great fun, I love music. – One way you can find foreign music is through spotify. You can go to the top 50 charts of different countries, and that’s a great way to get exposure to boppin’ tunes in your target language. Just go to the main menu then to charts, and then click “top 50 by country” and find the country you’re looking for and TADA. // CONVERSELY: If you don’t like spotify, use pandora, or find some songs you like in your target language and plug them into the youtube search bar and then weed through the recommended videos on the sidebar and find new music that way!
Children’s books
This might not be for everyone, but sincerely googling and reading children’s books in your target language is a great way to get used to sentence structure. You might not know all the words, but sometimes it’s just such a wonderful thing to read such simple sentences and to just practice that sort of stuff. – If reading children’s books isn’t your style, then read books that you ARE interested in. Read translations of your favorite books, read books that were written originally in your target language, just read books man.
ASK QUESTIONS PLS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
This one can get to be a little tricky because it might be hard to find someone to ask questions to, but please keep in mind that there are lots of different native languages in the langblr community and we’re all here for the sole purpose of helping each other out so please don’t be afraid of asking a native (or even someone who’s fluent) to explain something or to correct your sentences, etc.
Find speaking partners
Personally, I think this should be the LAST thing on your list of priorities. I KNOW LOTS OF PEOPLE WILL DISAGREE WITH ME BUT HEAR ME OUT: I think it’s rather discouraging to try and pressure yourself to speak your target language and realize “wow I’m not as good as I thought I was”, or to feel like you’re bad because you know so many words and you study your verb tenses but you still can’t make good conversation, etc. I THINK YOU SHOULD WAIT A WHILE BEFORE FINDING A SPEAKING PARTNER, but you definitely need to do it. I would wait until you’re comfortable reading and understanding your target language as well as forming basic sentences and stuff like that. JUST A WARNING, FINDING A LANGUAGE PARTNER IS HARD AS HELL. IT’S LITERALLY A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK ORDEAL. I used Hellotalk to find all of my language partners, however you could probably just as easily find language partners on other social media outlets like tumblr, facebook, twitter, etc. (Actually, using those types of social medias might be more comfortable for most people). A good way to find people on facebook is to join a bunch of language groups on facebook, and even if you don’t find language partners you can still see posts in your target language. REMEMBER IT’S ALL ABOUT EXPOSURE FOLKS. The more exposure the better. Like I mentioned: I do think you need to hold off a bit on finding a speaking partner, but I will say that for absolute certain speaking partners are astronomically more helpful than anything I’ve mentioned on this list. You can listen and read and make flashcards and write sentences to yourself, but at the end of the day is netflix REALLY going to fix that grammatical error you made?
Last but not least:
please don’t be so hard on yourself. Making mistakes is ONLY NATURAL. Just think of learning a language like any other kind of skill; you make lots of mistakes when learning how to do anything but you learn from your mistakes and soon enough you stop making those mistakes and keep refining your skills. a quick vote of confidence for you all before you leave: I once confused the italian word for panties(mutande) with the word for snacks(merende) and basically told my friend “I BOUGHT SO MANY PANTIES IM GOING TO EAT THEM UNTIL I DIE”. And like two days ago I mixed up the word for the color lavender(lavanda) and the word for laundry(lavanderia) and told my friend she should wear a laundry-colored dress to her sister’s wedding.
OKAY– in all seriousness, it’s really important to remember that mistakes are natural and they’re nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, once you learn that making mistakes is totally normal to do, you’ll enjoy yourself much more and learn way better. HAVE FUN AND STUDY HARD I BELIEVE IN YOU ALL.
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