Hello everyone! I recently had an epiphany, and I want to share it with all of you! Hopefully, it helps some of you on your language-learning journey! I had spent several years learning to read a language (It's called Malayalam for those curious). I got a tutor, bought children's book etc. but nothing worked. I would quickly lose interest, stop learning, and then restart after months or even years.
Eventually, I recognized the cycle: Motivation → Learning the letters → Getting bored → Quitting halfway. So, I decided to try something unconventional. Instead of focusing on learning individual letters first, I started reading simple words in Malayalam. Whenever I encountered a word I couldn't read, I would look up each letter online. To my surprise, I found this approach far more engaging. My brain felt that it was a useful and practical exercise, and I no longer got bored.
I then created a small web app originally just for my own laptop that turned learning into a quiz-based game. The app would display a letter along with four possible pronunciation options, and I would be scored based on my answers. In essence, I gamified language learning, and it worked wonders!
I am sharing this here because it is unintuitive to learn something via quiz. We think of quizzing as something we do after we learn to test ourselves. But in my case and hopefully in some of yours, it may not be its only use case! I leant while quizzing myself. Initially I would 0 answers right obviously. Then I would recognize a few patterns, then get a few more right. I felt motivated seeing myself go from 10/50 to 20/50 to eventually 50/50. Gamifying helped me enjoy the process and learning the language felt like a nice side effect of the game. I will strongly suggest everyone to try a similar approach.
I also deployed the webapp that I mentioned earlier here learn-malayalam.org. It is for Malayalam language. I am sure most of you won't be interested in learning it but I am sharing the link here for reference. You can create a similar quiz app for whichever language you are learning and I promise for a lot of you it will be helpful and more importantly fun!
[link] [comments]
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/4lr9AU5
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment