Over a year ago now, I deactivated my principal Facebook account after growing sick of the mindless hours passed scrolling through my news feed and the catty arguments with strangers. Deactivating did wonders for my mental health, but I’m an English teacher in Mexico and at the time I was still learning Spanish. A work colleague, an American, told me “Dude, I’ve got a fake account in Spanish. I’ve got about 200 random Mexican friends and they post memes all day.”
Anyway, a year and a bit later, I’m now a student in a Spanish-speaking university and teaching Spanish makes up about 50% of my income. I’ve just opened my third Facebook account - this time in Catalan.
Obviously I have done a ton of work across a variety of activities to reach this level, but having a Spanish-speaking Facebook account was definitely a significant factor.
Here are a few of the key benefits of social media for language acquisition:
Comprehensible input. According to Stephen Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, language is acquired by consuming content that you can understand. Social media is full of genuine content, the majority of which is fairly simple and easy to understand. As you progress, you can begin to consume more complex content through the countless links to online articles that are shared on social media.
Register. If you are looking to obtain a very high level of communicative proficiency in your target language, you will need to acquire various levels of register. What is register? Think about the language you use with your dad, your boss, your teacher, your girlfriend, your friends, or a stranger in the street. It’s not the same, right? The subconscious adjustments that you make to your level of formality depending on your audience are known as register. Facebook generally offers a lot of informal content, which is great because language learning textbooks generally don’t offer informal language, or only very contrived examples. This is useful for developing a social register which can help you form friendships in your target language - yet another source of comprehensible input. Furthermore, those links to online articles that I mentioned before, if they are from a respected news outlet, will probably offer the opposite end of the spectrum - dry, formal language appropriate for business situations. Again, most language learning textbooks don’t deal with a lot of formal register.
It doesn’t feel like work. If you’re reading this article, you’re already a social media user. This isn’t verb drilling, gap-fill exercises, flashcards, or any of the other boring crap that people do to learn languages. This is simply taking advantage of time that would probably otherwise be wasted on social media. Combine your compulsive scrolling with language acquisition!
Some possible pitfalls of social media for language acquisition:
You will be exposed to “incorrect” spelling and grammar. You shouldn’t be scared of this. A considerable part of achieving communicative efficiency is being able to understand non-standard forms that native speakers use. Besides, if you’re learning the language in a classroom, you will be surrounded by learner errors anyway, and even these can be useful for acquisition. As long as you are aware of correct spelling and grammar due to textbook study, these forms will not affect you, and can in fact be useful.
It won’t necessarily be a monolingual environment. Around 10% of Mexicans speak English, and if we count the ones who are wealthy enough to have a device to access Facebook, the percentage increases. Obviously, some of these people want to use English for whatever reason; social status, communication with foreign friends, access to English-language entertainment. That's fine. I have that account set to Spanish and also that I don't understand any other languages, so it auto-translates everything to Spanish. With my newly opened Catalan account, the issue is that Catalan is not a lingua franca in Spain, so many Catalan speakers will favour Spanish over Catalan on Facebook. You’ll just have to work around this. I’ve been searching for Catalan friends that favour Catalan, which means stalking their profile a little.
How to do it.
You can probably do this on Twitter or other services, but I don’t use them so I’m going to be focusing on Facebook only.
You can begin from about A2 and up, I would say. In both cases, I’ve done this after completing the Duolingo course and studying a textbook to have a general idea of the structure of the language. So about A2 in both cases.
You need an email or phone number to use; a throwaway email is fine. Create an account, and do the initial setup in a language you already know.
For your personal information, say that you live in a city where your target language or dialect is spoken. For example, my new Catalan account says that I live in Barcelona. I also added that I study Catalan philology in the Universitat de Barcelona, even though I obviously don’t really study there. These details will ensure that Facebook suggests relevant content. In my mini biography underneath my profile picture, I wrote that the account isn’t real, and I’m just looking to learn Catalan.
After you've finished setting up, change the language of Facebook to your target language. You know your way around Facebook enough that you don't really need to understand the words on the buttons anyway, and they will end up serving as comprehensible input.
You should follow a few pages in your target language. You’ve probably already become aware of a few key institutions during your early studies, or you can also simply search for governments or news services in the places where your target language is spoken.
Now you need to search for friends. If you already know one or two speakers of your native language, you should definitely add them to your new account. As soon as you have one friend, you’ll begin to see friend suggestions in your news feed. You can also add people who like or comment on the posts from the pages you’ve followed. Be fearless! When you send a friend request to a perfect stranger on Facebook, one of three things can happen:
- They accept you. This is the most common outcome.
- They ignore the request. No consequences whatsoever for you.
- They send you a message asking you who you are. You tell them that you want to practice their language, and they’ll usually be delighted to accept you.
You can quickly build up a base of 100 to 200 friends, which will be enough to fill your feed with an insurmountable stream of native content in your target language. Enjoy!
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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