Our days are busy, so making meaningful changes in our lives—be it getting into shape or learning a new language—necessitates shoehorning them into our daily routines in a way that feels as natural as possible.
In this blog post, we’ll give you tips on how to fit language learning into your daily schedule, so you can finally start speaking the language you’ve always dreamed of speaking. 😉
Speaking a language requires fewer words than you think
Your past experiences in school might make you think that learning a new language is a process that requires all of your spare time. But the first step of integrating language learning into your daily schedule is understanding that speaking a language requires much fewer words than you think. ☝️
You probably know by now that Speakly teaches you words and sentences based on their real-life relevance. This unique approach ensures that each word and sentence that you learn is optimally suited for everyday conversations. You won’t learn anything unnecessary.
This rational approach, which is very different from the approach used in schools worldwide, means it takes significantly less time to reach a level at which you can easily speak a language.
This, in turn, means that you can forget about having to spend hours upon hours on your daily language studies. Instead, you can rely on learning new words easily with the Speakly app, spending just 10 to 15 minutes per day building your vocabulary. You can do it from anywhere—all you need is your smartphone. 🚀
Learn naturally with daily listening
When learning a language, the importance of daily listening can’t be overstated. Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced learner, daily listening has several key effects, not least of which is that creating a natural language environment trains your brain to acquire information related to the language. ☝️
The best part of daily listening is that it can be done in the background while you’re doing other things. In fact, research suggests that it makes little difference to your brain whether you’re focusing on the text or listening to it in the background. Language acquisition happens in both cases.
The next logical step here would be to find suitable things to listen to. I recommend using Speakly listening exercises. We’ve made sure that our listening exercises have been optimized to use the most relevant words and sentences of the language. With each pass, the knowledge is solidified in your memory to be used in real-life conversations. It also works to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos in your target language, but the effect is not as strong due to the higher probability of encountering words that might not be as valuable for real-life conversations.
So pop on a Speakly listening exercise and listen to it each day for three to five days in a row. Research shows that repetition plays a key part in acquiring speaking skills faster. 🚀
You don’t need to stress about grammar
When thinking about learning a language, it might seem like you have so many things to do that it’s impossible to fit them all into a single day or even a week. But again, if we look at the research conducted on the efficiency of the entire language-learning process, we see that learning grammar separately—as it’s often done in schools—is highly inefficient for beginners. Even for more advanced learners, grammar should rarely be approached without meaningful context.
The reason for that is simple: Learners often memorize grammar skills that they can’t yet use. By the time those skills become relevant in their studies, they will have forgotten them. ☝️
The reality is that the most efficient way to start speaking a language is through learning the statistically most relevant words, and fussing over grammar proves to be counterproductive to speaking skills, as it’s a trait for perfectionists who never “feel” ready to speak before they’re perfect.
