When you only have 30min to 1 hour a day to learn your target language, how would you spend it to make the most of that time?
What are the best tools, methods, resources, techniques you would adopt?
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I guess it really depends on your level and what you want to practice (speaking/listening/writing/reading).
I personally find having conversations either written on apps like Tandem or spoken using italki for example to be some of the most useful language learning practices.
If I wanted to maximize an hour I would probably take a 30min italki speaking class and then spend 30 min talking to people on Tandem using the new vocab/grammatical structures I learned during the speaking class.
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Just like Nora, I’d do some speaking practice as well, or try to learn or review some vocabulary words. I have been extremely busy lately and trying to fit in some study time myself…
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I use HelloTalk and I would spend about 15 to 30 minutes reading through “Moments” posted by other users. It’s not a chat but more like a mini blog that most users would post in their native and target language.
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I think that one hour per day to improve or learn a new language is already a very good, as long as it is consistent.
Something that helped me to get organised and motivated me has been a book that I read called " MULTILINGUAL LEARNING:
BECOME FLUENT IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGE". Then I searched for her Youtube channel and then her method called Smart Italian for busy People (but I think she has it for other languages too) which I found great for me that I don’t have a lot of time free per day and that combines video lessons, homework, podcasts and live group lessons once a week. She was always there to help me clarifying my doubts.
Here is what I usually do now, I alternate the kind of activity that I do every day, sometimes it would be listening to a podcast, others watch some youtube videos on the target language or about the target language or have a language exchange, but I always spare at least 15 minutes to continue with the method that I bought and 10 minutes to revise what I learned the the before and I am finding that this works.
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I have a pretty long, uncomplicated commute, so I usually use this time to listen to podcasts or do flash cards. Or, you could read a news article or a short story in your target language!
One thing I’ve done that isn’t really study but forced me to learn anyway was setting my phone OS to Japanese! That really forced me to read my notifications instead of just ignoring them, and now that all my apps are in Japanese, I learned a lot of words passively without really “studying”.
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