🅰️ Pick your high frequency spots

Your target language should be everywhere, it should be coming out of ears. Your pores. Ok ok, just kidding, because even I don’t meet that mark, but what I do mean is that your language notes, workbooks, and text books should be immediately and easily accessible to you. By your couch, on your dinner table, etc.

In the book “Atomic Habits”, the author talks about prepping your space to set yourself up for success. If that sounds too airy fairy, let’s just say that prepping your space sets you up for ease of learning the next time you want to spend 15 minutes picking up a new word or understanding a new grammar structure.

The kitchen makes the most sense because that’s where we spend most of our time rummaging for something to eat and where a lot of dillydallying happens, but remember, the book isn’t there for our ego. We have to actually use it, but how? Not in the way we were taught, for sure.

🅱️ Study like a rockstar and not an academic

Let me tell you a secret.

The clean-cut, specific chronological order of learning that books put you on is arbitrary. You can learn big words and work your way to the basics or learn the basics and work your way or start in the middle and jump around and you may learn the language faster because you are the captain of your learning ship.

There’s this idea that I see a lot in the learning community where we have to sit with the book, in a quiet space, focus, and do a bunch of homework. With a workbook in hand, it might very well feel that we have to do it that way. Heck, we’re conditioned to look at books in such a rigid way, but I propose something different.

Don’t go in order. Don’t sit and ask the whole house be quiet for your study time. Just pick a page, or what you’re interested in, and do your best to make sense of what’s on that page (vocabulary, grammar, sentence, etc.) for those 15 minutes. Rip the page out and look at it as a single element as necessary.

The book is not sacrosanct and it will be happier to be roughed up, I promise.

✏️ What does this look like in practice?

Well, I have had the same French book and workbook for about 5 years now and I have not put myself under any specific pressure to finish it because I have no exam to prepare for and I learn language for the pleasure and curiosity of it. If that’s the case for you and your target language, cool! Let’s be friends!

I currently have the workbook and its accompanying textbook in the kitchen for me to look at when I’m there. My measure of “success” is this: did I learn a new word today? did I learn a new phrase? can I remember it before I go to sleep? can I make a basic ass sentence with it? If I say yes to all of those, my work for the day is done.

This is what it takes to make language part of your life incrementally. Like a few days ago I was learning the how to say “I was doing x, while doing y” in French. I did a little section of the workbook and corrected myself using the answer key. Then, I tried to make 3 sentences about what I did that day to put the sentences into use.

That’s it, then I called it a day.

Ask yourself these every single day
1️⃣ Did I learn a new word/phrase today?
2️⃣ Can I remember it before I go to sleep?
3️⃣ Can I make a basic ass sentence* with it?

*all basic ass sentences need to be real and relevant to you, otherwise you’ll forget it.

Learning a language is a journey made up of fun little wins in our most private and intimate moments (which often happen in the kitchen). When language learning gets a bit frustrating, coming back to simpler methods can help spark the love back and remind you why you started in the first place.

“It’s hard…”
“This language is stupid because…”
“Why did they make the language this way?”

These are some of the things that we say to ourselves when we’re learning a new language and becoming frustrated with the long and arduous process that it is, but what starts out as a recognition of the challenge can slowly become a handicap if we’re not mindful.

I started out learning Mandarin as anyone else would— with wide-eyed curiosity and big hopes to be able to communicate in Chinese. Spoiler alert, it didn’t happen, and to this day remains a humiliatingly humbling experience. Yes, language learning is hard, but I made it my entire identity while I was living in China.

But now looking back at the three years that I spent in Shanghai, I can see clearly what where I went wrong with my language learning journey. The following three points are confessions of what I did wrong and tips to help you get out of the mental rut that paralyzed me years ago.

Without further ago, here’s what I would change if I ever decided to take up Mandarin Chinese again:

1️⃣ Do not subscribe to the notion that a language is hard. Instead, tell yourself it’s stimulating. Then, when things become incomprehensible, tell yourself that you have to find a way that works for you.

The first thing I did wrong was almost immediately subscribe to the notion that Mandarin is one of the hardest languages ever to learn. The characters. The strokes. The tones. Its perceived difficulty is what drew me in but my constant reinforcement of that was also what defeated me. The worst part is that each time I got demotivated, I continued to reinforce the idea it was a hard language instead of saying “Okay, this is just another method that’s not working for me. This is not a reflection of my intelligence level, but it’s a reflection of what methods work and don’t work for me. What else can I try?”

What I did was beat myself up for not being able to absorb the information the way my peers did. I compared myself to my friends who could simply speak the language. What I didn’t realize back then is that their entire identity wasn’t wrapped up on their language abilities like mine was, so they were able to take it easy while learning. Guess what? The information stuck better that way. The real nugget of wisdom that I can impart here is that a language is only as hard as you make it in your head. Language learning becomes easier when you feel comfortable with your pace however slow it may be compared to others and truly enjoy it.

2️⃣ Remove your ego from it.

Honestly speaking, Mandarin was an ego project for me and it now makes sense to me as to why I failed so miserably at it. I didn’t really care about the culture and the people as much as I should have cared— all I wanted to prove to the world is how cool I was to be able to speak Mandarin. Some people do it that way, sure, but not me. I have to have a vested interest in the language and culture the way I did with Italian in the past (the poetry), Mongolian (to understand my kin better), French (to know my partner in his native language), and Arabic (again, for the poetry).

I did not have such vested interest in Mandarin— and it certainly showed. Even after having taken countless hours of classes and sitting down in front of the book or daring to speak to my Didi driver, I just couldn’t hack it. In other words, I was in it for the wrong reasons. I think everyone’s “right“ reasons look different, so this will be different for you, but my point here is that language learning can’t be a superficial ego trip to make yourself look cool. Language learning, at least for me, is first rooted in falling in love with some aspect of the language. Then that love carries you through with the humble willingness to try different and creative ways to hack it.

3️⃣ Throw the grammar book away. Focus on lexical patterns first.

Something I would 100 per cent do differently if I ever chose to Mandarin Chinese again is to not start with books. That’s where I personally went wrong. I know people who say they need to understand the structure first before they start speaking to people, but I beg to differ. Is that true or is that something we tell ourselves to postpone interacting with people as long as possible? Looking back, I would have benefited from listening to Mandarin Chinese interviews about topics that I like with the pinyin subtitles in order to begin observing patterns in the language.

If we think about how babies learn language, they don’t start with books. They start with listening to the environment around them since the moment they are born for about two years before they start uttering babbling noises that sound like the melodic patterns of our speech. The babies have then observed their immediate surroundings and the context in which mommy or daddy says certain phrases and words, with specific moods and facial expressions. THIS is what we have to replicated when we’re watching hours and hours of YouTube videos in our target language. We have to sponges and have the ego of a baby—nonexistent— that is.

In summary:

✅ Fall in love with the language and/or some aspect of the culture.
✅ Treat your target language as you would someone that you love— graciously. When things get hard, don’t tell them off about how difficult they are to understand. Rather, recommit yourself to finding a way that works.
✅ Take a break from the books and simply watch and take in the language through different media about things that YOU love in your target language. For example, if you like a specific movie, then watch a movie review in your target language.

After an interaction gets to that point, every individual involved in that project is on a fast track to passive aggressive comments, growing resentment, and performative politeness that will lead to subpar results or total stagnation of the project. No matter the cultural background. That’s where we are the same. We’re just different about the way we arrive at that point of disagreement. In my experience, from having been part of successful and unsuccessful collabs is that across the board, the unsuccessful ones have

• piss poor communication as opposed to effective communication due to poor leadership who is unable to bravely communicate clearly, set limits, clarify roles, set deadlines

• negative feedback loops set off by lack of role clarity, loss of trust when people don’t fulfill expected (or assumed) obligations, lack of transparency of who has done what and for what reason

• weak accountability further reinforced by the absence of safe spaces in which to take accountability. In other words, when a person doesn’t want to admit fault out of fear that they will be socially ostracized or ridiculed.

• absence of a way for team members to celebrate wins and thank each other for their efforts

In some of my best work experiences, we kept the environment positive with constant reminders of what we’ve done well and appreciating the teammate’s individual efforts while also creating a safe space to receive constructive criticism. Regardless of the culture (though what is considered enough praise might differ from place to place). When disagreements inevitably cropped up, I remember knowing that the manager would always back us up against unfair backlash when we owned up to dropping the ball at work and costing us money. (Again, what is considered back up and when its needed differs across cultures, but it’s always there).

To avoid the breakdown of social collaboration in your team projects and make sure snide remarks don’t infect your team, I recommend the following steps:

• Communicate role expectations and work out the meaning of the details. Really have a good chat about it and make sure to do something fun later to really make sure the interaction was a good one.

• Communicate deadlines, set limits, and give both positive and negative feedback where necessary as the project goes along. This is an ongoing process. This might be via weekly checkups or end of day notes. Set a standard to follow and expect.

  • Create a way that wins will be celebrated and credit will be given for people’s efforts. This will build up the morale necessary to buttress a future setback.

• Do not judge your employees and teammates without having first spoken to them about an issue and given them the opportunity to rectify it in mutually beneficial way. If they fail, it’s because you’ve failed. You’re on the same side.

Then, of course, the communication becomes even more crucial in cross-cultural team collabs and it’s important to make sure standards are set before the project begins, not midway. There are power dynamics at play in cross-cultural settings. For example, should the American culture prevail when working with Chinese counterparts just because the company is an American company? Sure, but that attitude is never gonna, and never has, inspire China-based employees to do their best. In fact, I’ve seen it breed resentment right in front of my eyes. I don’t know that the company ever recovered.

And they certainly won’t be fooled into thinking anybody cares about them. Genuine empathy and understanding can’t be faked. It wasn’t until I advised an American employee to throw out some words in Chinese that his teammates opened up. Here’s the thing: the actions listed above start a positive feedback loop that generates the most important ingredient in any collaboration— trust— and that’s universal no matter where you are from and what language you speak. And I think that good managers can get that positive feedback loop for themselves and their team through tactfully expressed empathy.

“So what? Who cares? Just quit whining and do your job”

And I get that sentiment, however, we are dealing with people and us people are complex. If we want to churn out good work, making sure the relationships that surround the work are in tip top shape are paramount. Imagine the drudgery of being undervalued, now imagine your teammate or your employee feeling that way. Now multiply it by ten more people. Yeah, the project will start to suffer. To address communication needs is not whining. Addressing communication issues and rectifying them is standing on business and something that we should all do so that our passion projects, volunteer work, and business ventures succeed.

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How to play the game

To ramp up for some education reality TV binging: Set a date. Bring some snacks. Something to take notes on. I’ve observed that Matangi and I are more notebook kind of gals while the boys prefer their phones or raw dog it with the sheer power of their memories. Is this grade school all over again? Matangi and I are happy to share our notes.

During the show, feel free to pause, rewind, and discuss however many times as necessary. What our group ends up doing is enjoy the show for a good fifteen or so minutes before someone is like “What’s the word?” and someone else goes “Yeah, I noticed it too, let’s go back and watch it again”. We take notes, share an anecdote, or take a moment to look up definitions on the phone. We also laugh at the scenes.

According to a study about how humor affects memory recall, humor is one of the most effective ways to remember information regardless of what mood you’re in (Badli and Dzulkifli 2013). I take that to mean that even if we are in a crummy mood about your language learning journey, laughing about words on TV in your target language along with friends is still worthwhile if at least for the company.

Once we finish the episode, we go around the room and share what words jumped out at us and think about when or how we could use the terms in real life. The only caveat is that we can’t share words that our friends have already shared, so as to keep the variety of the word hunting. It’s a lot of fun. Even if I don’t remember EVERY word I wrote down, I consider it a success to walk away with one term from one sesh.

Using the Language Reactor Google Chrome Extension

Brian introduced us all to the an app that all language learners need: Language Reactor. This Google Chrome extension gives you the subtitles in both the languages you need. In our case for Love Is Blind: Mexico, we have the English and Spanish subtitles on so we can all keep up. For my own uses, I would be using English and French subtitles.

The benefit of having two subtitles on the screen is a lot and not at all the visual clutter one may think that it is. The brain is an amazing thing: it can keep up with two subtitles just as our left and right hand fingers can play the piano. Reading, listening, and understanding more than one language at the same time (or attempting to) works the codeswitching muscle.

Having two subtitles running also saves you the hassle of having to stop and look up every single phrase that causes some doubt. Sometimes the English subtitle right above it (or whatever your native language may be) is enough to give you the gist of the meaning in order to keep on enjoying the rest of the show. Yeah, that’s right, sometimes the gist of the meaning is enough.

Types of listening in language learning

Back when I was doing my INTESOL training to become an English teacher in China, I learned about how to administer listening exercises for my students. It was simple, really, in that teachers are supposed to play any kind of audio material, but to coach students on what to listen for so that they didn’t get overwhelmed by the audio content: Are we listening to the gist of things or specific details?

Being able to listen for the gist of the, say, 5 minute clip would mean to simply understand what the dialogue is about. For Love Is Blind, that might sound like “Oh, their conversation in the pod right now is about work, past relationships, the city they come from”. That’s a win. Listening for gist is a fundamental skill that gives room for the brain to detect all sorts of stuff that goes with language acquisition such as

• recognizing where the stress goes in the sentence

• distinguishing between just words versus entire lexical phrases

• identifying discourse markers (well, so, you know…)

• observing the interactions between the characters and make inferences about their relationship based on their communication

To be able to listen for details is, of course, somewhat different. The teacher is supposed to give a word bank or, say, a part of speech and ask the student to only listen for those things. That way, the student doesn’t get overwhelmed by everything they don’t understand and have a clear, focused mission to listen for all the adjectives that come up in that segment.

In our case, as a band of enthusiastic language learners, we’ve made our own choices about what we are interested in based on our specific Spanish level. When we share our findings, we all get to learn or review a little bit from each other. HA! We come together in time for the curse words and insults, though. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re never gonna forget:

¡y me mandaste a tomar por culo!

Now, I’m not a fan of reality TV per se. As a native English speaker, shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians just don’t stimulate me enough BUT when you don’t live in the country of your target language, reality TV is really the next best thing to being a fly on a wall around native speakers. All the rejoinders, colloquialisms, and speech acts you’ll ever need in daily conversations are right there! You just have to be a keen observer and know what to look out for. That’s where I come in 😀

I have recently stumbled upon the wonderful world of Love Is Blind and I am obsessed. You guys know I love Arabic language and music, so it was only natural that I picked Love Is Blind: Habibi to watch. Though I only know no more than ten words, I couldn’t help but make a whole language learning experience from it. Then it hit me: Hey, maybe this thing I am doing could be fun for others.

1. Have a sketch pad ready.

No, not a notepad with lines or dots. Unlined and undotted paper is best because you can doodle and jot down whatever you think you hear in a messy and liberated way. You’re not gonna be writing things down right away, so don’t worry about being ready to write either. Simply listen, watch, and immerse yourself into the silly drama you see unfold before you. Eventually, you’ll start seeing patterns.

2. Keep subtitles on in your native language but listen carefully.

You will learn to listen intently and read the subtitles. Every time they say “No way!” in the subtitles, do you hear more or less the same expression? Rejoinders are quick spontaneous responses that we have. In English we might say “Right!” or “Not really” or “I know right!” Paris Hilton famously used to say “That’s hot” back in the 2000s. Yep, those are all rejoinders. They’re super basic, but don’t let that fool you.

Rejoinders are super important in building confidence during conversations.

Think about it: you might not know what is exactly being said in the conversation, but you might be able to detect when to say “right” or “not really” or “I know right!” to make it sound like you are listening. We do this in boring work meetings a lot, right? Well, if you can detect these in your target language and use them effectively, it will boost your confidence because you’ll learn that you can get by and still look cool 😎

You’re not gonna be picking up on rejoinders right away especially if it’s your first time doing this exercise. It might take you a couple of episodes to start picking up on patterns. That’s when you’ll start jotting stuff down. Don’t go and start using your phone to translate. It’s super stimulating for the brain and fun for you if you make this a game of deciphering with context clues. The phone can help you confirm later.

3. Make some notes, but keep it meaningful.

Don’t worry about the words being misspelled or not quite right. The idea here is to jot down whatever your brain absorbed, brain to paper, as intuitively as you can. Perfection is the enemy of the language learner, so don’t ideas of correct spelling or having many words hold you back from having fun with this linguistic journey. Quality over quantity. Write down words that really speak to you.

When you write them down, write down an equivalent in English. For example, when I was watching LOVE IS BLIND: HABIBI I began to notice everyone said “ya’ani” a lot. Almost like a crutch word. Resisting the urge to pick up my phone to look it up, I wrote down “ya’ani = I mean?” in my notebook and then waited a few more episodes to see how it was used.

4. Play around with the new words and phrases.

Did you learn to say something cool? Say it. Write it down. Pretend you are Robert De Niro in front of the mirror in Taxi Driver and get comfortable saying these foreign words and making them your own. If you’re keen, you might even write down a few sentences that express your real feelings about something. How much you love your spouse or how you don’t want to do the dishes. The realer the better.

Rinse and repeat. It’s that easy.

By the way, it doesn’t matter what level you are in your target language, you can still do this exercise, enjoy it, and learn something. In my case, I know maybe ten words in Arabic and don’t understand the first thing about its grammar. I don’t even study it very seriously because French is currently my priority, but I do like to dabble in Arabic for the sake of tickling my brain. Arabic is for pure pleasure.

For example, I watched all ten episodes of LOVE IS BLIND: HABIBI with English subtitles on and what I could decipher from TEN episodes was no more than one page of rejoinders. I’m not even at the level of understanding full sentences much less expressions so I didn’t bother with those. Learning to react in a language by using rejoinders is as important as learning to speak. Don’t let its simplicity fool you.

If your target language has a different writing system and you’re not quite confident in it yet, exercise your ear anyway and write down what you hear in the alphabet you know. In my case, I’m still a beginner with Arabic letters so I just wrote down everything just as I heard it in our Roman alphabet. If you’re learning Mandarin, pinyin will do just fine. We just have to dedicate time apart to practice the writing 😇

Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

On the other hand, I’m a native Spanish speaker, but Spanish is probably at middle school level because 1) I left Mexico when I was 8 and 2) I grew up in the United States. At best I’m probably a B2 in Spanish. I lack a lot of the eloquent phrasing and rich vocabulary that a Mexican citizen at 33 years of age should have. This is where LOVE IS BLIND: MEXICO comes in.

That’s it. Simply rinse and repeat until things start clicking.

All the passive listening and random note-taking like this will eventually pay-off especially if you’re taking weekly lessons with a teacher. My advice to my students is to never forget that language learning should spark the kind of awe and wonder that we used to have as kids when we went treasure hunting or found a secret code to decipher. That’s the magic.

All the grammar rules, books, exercises, and the pressure to be “fluent” sometimes have us forgetting that learning a language is meant to be fun and a way for us to love, fight, gossip (much like we see done in those reality TV shows). Reality TV might not be the most high brow form of entertainment, but as far as language learning goes, it is a student’s best kept secret.

I’m happy to answer any questions related to learning languages in the comments, so feel free to ask. This is my bread and butter 💗

⭐ OTHER NETFLIX MENA STUFF I HAVE COVERED ⭐

The million dollar answer is… build relationships in that language. As many as you possibly can and as meaningfully as possible given the cultural, linguistic, and physical barriers that there may exist. Building relationships where you, um, relate to each other as people, is the whole point of speaking clubs. I actually believe that building pedagogic relationships is the point of teacher/student dialogue.

One of the challenges in my B1 conversation classes is to maintain the boundaries between teacher and student while also trying to get them to relate in English. I start off about the basics: work, hobbies, daily commute, current events, weather, and all that mundane stuff. If we make it past this point, which takes about 10 classes or so, we move on the real stuff: childhood dreams, current disappointments, hopes.

Wait wait wait, but why so personal? Isn’t that unprofessional?

Well, first of all, I believe that I respect my student’s personal lives and that I tread as carefully as I can as far as cultural differences, etc. Nevertheless, to truly ever communicate is to risk miscommunication and to get my students to the point where they can confidently communicate and miscommunicate in English with conviction even if not always perfectly, is my goal.

But I mean, I guess it is kind of unprofessional to talk about personal topics like one’s family troubles or conflicts at work, but that’s why I try to develop a rapport first. Utmost safety and respect, like in a counselor’s office. The ones who sign up to be my students are the brave souls who give me the privilege of witnessing their stream of consciousness develop in English. Others trail off after 10-ish generic lessons.

The students who stay with me stay because they did the books, passed the interviews, even the tests, but somehow they’ve plateaued in their learning. Well, the big fat secret is that now my students have to foster friendships in their target language and retell the story of their lives over and over until they can narrate ever cranny of their life in that language. Just like I had to, so I help do exactly that.

How can I have a such a strong conviction about this?

Well, as you know, growing up in three different countries during my childhood made it so that I am “native” in 3 mother tongues which amazes a lot of people like it’s some kind of unique voodoo magic. The truth is that I was just an awkward kid having to explain, rather badly, the story of my life in each language over and over again until I got it right. The fact is that you can do it, too, and with far less displacement trauma.

And by “got it right” of course I mean that I was able to finally be received by my target audience of, say, Mongolian people, as I wanted to be received. It took a lot of trial and error, using the wrong words, wrong intonations, overexplaining what I meant, lyrics, digging into old pop culture, teaching myself to read as if I were deciphering hieroglyphs, and the list goes on.

Yes, I also made a few good friends who were more than happy to correct and enrich my vocabulary. (Sup Zul!) Now that I am living in Mexico as an American English teacher, I also have these awkward moments in Spanish. They’re usually undetectable to the average foreigner to Mexico, but to local Mexicans? My slip ups stick out like a sore thumb, but being peculiar and misunderstood is not new to me. But I digress.

Anyway, what does this mean for the language learner?

To put it bluntly, it’s always time to find people you care about in your target language. Care about them so much that you want to know about them through their language (even if they speak your language) and then relate to them by making yourself known to that person in their language. What does it mean to “relate” to a person? It’s this!

For students at B1 level of a language, such as my English students, it means that all the passive listening of the documentaries, podcasts, movies, or the reading of articles, restaurant reviews, Trip Advisor comments, now have to be positioned as material for the student to explain their interests, motivations, dislikes, likes, so on and so forth. Just think about how you got good at your native language.

For example: We might talk about a book in my class, but I’ll turn the question back on the student’s way of thinking and seeing the world and why… and we very quickly find gaps in the vocabulary to work on. At the risk of sounding far too simplistic, the whole point of language learning is to learn to assert your Self into the world so that you can begin to make a change.

It’s only then that the target language becomes a part of your soul.