There are a lot of parts to learning a language. Generally, when people first learn a foreign language as an adult, they often aren’t prepared for how many different kinds of things they’ll have to learn. This can cause a lot of people to get demoralized and give up. Or give up in a manner that they’d be putting aside a lot of crucial language learning tasks and just maintaining illusory progress without ever really reaching the point of being able to speak a new language.
So today, we’ll talk a bit about how to manage the many tasks you have to do to successfully learn a new language, especially if you’re learning it in whole or part through a language learning app. So, in short, we’ll talk about concurrent learning in language apps.
Table of Contents
What Are Your Learning Tasks?
You may have many tasks to complete throughout the day. Getting to language learning can be one of them! Thankfully, many language apps allow you to set a phone reminder for yourself in-app for specific times and days of the week to get your practice in.
Still, both in the app and without, learning a language isn’t just one discrete thing. You have to learn new vocabulary, get used to a new sentence structure, learn rules for word formation and agreement, get used to idiomatic expressions, practice conversations, sometimes learn a whole new script, and ensure that you keep up on your listening, reading, speaking, and writing! That’s a lot to remember to do, sometimes all at once!
Multitasking In Language Learning Apps
While you’re practicing speaking in real conversations offline, outside of a classroom setting, you often don’t have time to break down all the things you’re learning or catch all your mistakes. It can feel like a blur. That’s fine, and good! You should embrace opportunities to really speak languages and make mistakes as part of the process.
Don’t Rush Through The Exercises
When you’re on your language learning app, in the middle of a busy schedule, you’ll often feel the same feeling of the questions going by in a blur, with or without mistakes. Try to fight the urge to get through the exercises in under a minute and slow down. Look at each question and try to find out how many things you need to internalize about each question.
Many apps already do some of the work for you by helpfully splitting up kinds of learning to the best of their ability between separate questions. This can only work to a certain extent because so many language features are interconnected. You can’t look at how a sentence is structured without words, can’t have words without testing your vocabulary and subconsciously thinking about how they’re pronounced.
But it is still important to take note of how questions in your language learning exercises are being formatted and phrased to guide you, covering different parts of the process, different tasks, as you go.
The most obvious of these are speaking and writing tasks, where you trace characters (usually in an unfamiliar script) or pronounce words to gain a muscle memory for them. I want to focus less on these, both because I think in some ways they’re less important (your accent tends to improve over time and reading and writing are secondary to speaking and listening in terms of actually grasping the language), and because their discrete nature is so clear in intent and in the action you take that I don’t think there’s too much that needs to be said.
Be More Aware Of Your Mistakes In Fill In The Blank Exercises
On the other hand, you will find some exercises where your task is to fill in the blank, others where you will translate a full sentence, and others where you participate in an example conversation or dialogue, in whole or in part.
Fill in the blank exercises usually (but not always) effectively strip away your need to focus on sentence structure or the forms of words within those structures, and focus entirely on vocabulary. In this, despite appearances, they are more similar to “choose the correct word” style flash card exercises. In fact they are an improvement on them, because they replace a simple equational logic often aided by explicit images with the need to call up a vocabulary item from memory in a facsimile of the context you’d actually need that word in.
But it’s important to focus on them as vocabulary questions. If these are done as multiple choice, you can strengthen your vocabulary practice by translating all the wrong options in your head also. If that’s too easy, you can make more use of the exercise by imagining what would have to change about the already written, non-blank parts of the sentence, in order for each of the wrong answers to be right, before choosing the correct one.
Pay Attention To The Context In Translation Exercises
Translating sentences both is a more advanced vocabulary exercise, and a necessary one (when speaking a new language, you will be translating sentences in your head into a language you already know, often early on word by word, just like how it’s done in the language app). But doing so for a full sentence necessitates translating not only isolated vocabulary but context dependent forms of some words in some languages, and a correct sentence structure in any language.
It’s important to be aware that that’s what you’re doing when you come across such sentences because, as with the fill-in-the-blank exercises, you can increase the benefit you derive from the exercise by imagining alternatives to the correct sentence before checking it and moving on to the next exercise. If you put the words in another order in the sentence, would it mean something different, and/or would it require changes to the forms of any of the words you have? If you changed a word that is correct for an incorrect word, likewise, how would you modify the rest of the sentence so that this became a correct sentence (although not the correct answer to the exercise)?
Zoom Out From Fixed Patterns Of Dialogue Exercises
Of course, one could keep going on with this when doing exercises other than these three. Do note the diverse kinds of each of these “types” I mention. But I think it is worth giving another example to show how you should slow down, think about what you’re being tested on as you’re being tested, and see that there are multiple linguistic tasks you have to do and consequently multiple learning tasks you can tackle within the exercise. Dialogue exercises will often take the form of a multiple choice between two or more full sentences, with or without a “fill-in-the-blank” embedded in one of these.
What’s being attempted here in large part is to get you to “zoom out” from the minutiae of the individual sentences and their individual words, and to learn how to shift from one utterance to the next in a natural way: How we actually communicate.
Use Language Apps With The Broader Goal In Mind
You shouldn’t use such exercises as a license to stop worrying about vocabulary or grammar, but what you should do is see that you’re also not just an engineer or mathematician trying to manufacture a perfect sentence. The skills that you develop in terms of learning how to speak the language properly have to be applied – often imperfectly, or “improperly” – to real discourse, real dialogue.
Depending on how an app has been coded, a dialogue might not grade you incorrectly on a sentence for it being too formal or informal, but during dialogue exercises, try to forget you’re being graded and try to think instead about the fact that there is a narrative and a conversation on display in your app now, not just a grammatical quip. If someone greets you with “Good evening”, it might be odd to reply with something casual like “what’s up”, regardless of whether that’s accepted by a computer doing the grading.
Get Into Action With Roleplay
Try to roleplay with the dialogue on your screen. Whatever choices the app gives you, think about what would make more sense for you to say if this were really happening. If you’re doing a restaurant dialogue and you’re allowed to order one of two items, probably both will count the same for your grade! But really read them and translate them and think:
“Do I know all these words? Can this help my vocabulary? If I do, does one order make more sense than the other based on other things I’ve already ordered, or what I really want?”
Thinking in this way will help the dialogue stick with you more as a moment of actual language practice and not just a thing you can quickly click through on your app to get to the end of the exercises.
Concurrent Learning In Language Apps: Explore Ling
Ling is a great app you might try if you’re looking to move forward in your language-learning journey. The Ling app has a great selection of languages, more than almost any other language-learning app, including many languages you won’t find anywhere else. In particular, if you’re thinking of learning a Slavic, South Asian, or Southeast Asian language, Ling has more to offer than any of its competitors.
But with languages from around the world including Yoruba, Irish, Cantonese, Afrikaans, and Amharic, Ling gives you access to all of the curriculum for dozens of languages if you sign up!
Each language is launched only after a basic and standardized curriculum consisting of dozens of units (each divided into multiple lessons) is ready, so you can rest assured that no matter which language and no matter how many languages you’ll be learning, Ling will provide you with the material you need to communicate on diverse contemporary topics from travel to work, with all the basic vocabulary you need.
Ling is run by passionate language learners and teachers who are always working to improve Ling. New features are being added to the individual languages all the time. Plus, Ling also produces a wealth of video and text content, all to keep you motivated and provide you with the tools you need to keep going on your language journey with all the components thereof.
You can download the Ling Live app from the App Store or Google Play Store, and get a free lesson! So, join us today! We’ll see you on the other side!
