Best APPS for starting a new language

Welcome back to my YouTube channel, I am Camille and I teach English. So in today’s video I’m going to be talking about what I do when I start to learn a new language.

So I have successfully learned and continue to study, kind of, I continue to maintain I should say, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French, and two weeks ago I started to learn Turkish, which is completely different than all of the Latin languages that I’ve previously learned. So I wanted to share with you what I do, how I prepare to learn a new language, and give you some of my favorite free resources and apps and things like that. So let’s get started, so when learning a language it’s so important to be able to identify the reason,

Why are you learning a language?

I always tell people that because motivation comes and goes. Some days you might be super stoked to learn a new language, and then maybe a week, two weeks, a month, two months later you’re like um I don’t really want to do this anymore, so I always encourage my students to find their motivation, so why? And if you can identify why, that will help you later on when the times get a little bit challenging, when you want to give up, I’ve been there. So for me my why with Turkish is, one I am a polyglot, and I have a life goal to learn 10 languages, and so I’m halfway there, I speak five languages including English, and so Turkish is my sixth language, and two new cultures, I love to learn about new cultures.

I have quite a few Turkish friends and followers on my Instagram, and so I thought it would be really cool to be able to connect to them in their native language, and then three my family is going to be traveling to Turkey for at least a few months next year, and so that is a reason why I want to be able to communicate with people in Turkey, and not have to to use English a lot, if I can help it, so those are my reasons.

What am I doing? How did I get started? I want to just briefly touch on mindset when learning a language. I think it’s super important to go in with a positive mindset, a victory mindset, I can do this type mindset. Positivity is so important, everything starts in our mind, and if we’re having positive thoughts, if we’re going and believing that we can get there, then I think we will be able to get there. But if we have these thoughts, like oh I can’t do it, this is too hard, and if that is constantly running through our mind, it’s going to be like we are fighting constantly you know? So positive mindset, super important. Okay so we talked about our why, we talked about our mindset,

I mentioned motivation can come and go, so discipline is super important, just knowing every day this language is going to be a part of my life. So I encourage you to study the language you’re learning throughout the day, I try to include Turkish when I’m on a walk in the morning, or watching a series in the evening, or listening to a podcast in the afternoon, just as much contact as you can with the language is super important, and it will help you to learn it quicker.

People always ask, how long do I need? And it really, you can’t say one number, it depends are you studying only five minutes a day? You’re gonna need many years. Are you studying two hours a day? You’ll learn a lot quicker, so I say just include it in your lifestyle, make it a part of your world. And where do I start? So I usually start with the apps, Duolingo you can’t use this as the only app and it does have some weird sentences, but overall I think it’s a great app because it includes speaking, listening, reading, so all of those things are involved, and then you get to see structure, basic structure sentence, and learn vocabulary, and then it’s very repetitive, so the repetition helps.

So I always do Duolingo, I think I have like over a 1500 day streak on there, and I will probably continue to use that app for a long time I’ve used BUSUU in the past last with French, but they don’t have Turkish that I’m aware of, but I did find this app, mango languages, and there are 27 hours of Turkish, and so I have been listening to that, what I like about it is you’ve listen in English, they teach you Turkish from English which helps me since I don’t know anything, and they come back a lot. So they give you space and they’ll be like how do you say this? And then I have to think, and then I’m like oh yeah, and then in each lesson they kind of refer to previous lessons, so it helps to really test my knowledge. So I plan to do all of this in in Turkish, this whole program and I also love Pimsleur, I think Pimsleur Turkish just has maybe one level. I’ve used Pimsleur in the past for Italian and French, and I found that free on my library app called Libby, so it connects to my library app, and it as well is a listening/speaking app that starts with the basics and then progresses, so that’s also a great app.

And then YouTube, I watch a lot of YouTube when I’m beginning to learn a language and even through the intermediate level, I always continue to just increase my knowledge through different videos, maybe I start out with teaching channels, and then when I get at least uh maybe a B1, I move to Turkish channels or French channels, where they’re Natives, and they’re sharing about subjects that are interesting to me. So YouTube is a great resource as well, and then I don’t start out speaking to natives because I don’t feel like I’m ready. So I start out at least the first couple of months, self-study on my own, with these apps.

I write a lot of things down in my notebook as well. So I’m constantly writing down even the same phrases, because everything is new and sometimes I just need to to write them down many times before they are in my head, and until I remember them. So writing things down, and then yeah later on once I feel like I’m ready to start speaking to natives, which is a key, it’s a key to learning the language, connecting with native speakers, then I mostly go on the apps Hellotalk and Tandem.

So yeah in the beginning anything that is interesting to you, beginner level that you can get your hands on either through, I think it’s so important to have the audio, and then if you can have the words as well, it really helps. So right now I’m doing a lot of listening and repeating but then sometimes I’m like, how is that written? Because writing is super important, writing and reading as well, so I found that the app that I was just talking about mango also has flash cards and things like that. The same lessons I’m listening to are also available to do with flash cards like memory game, and so that’s been helping me a lot. So to recap, when it comes to language learning in the beginning one, know your why, two have a positive mindset, three start using apps and things that you like, and I would say the last thing I would like to touch on is just having a goal, so knowing your goal is also important, because then you have something to work towards.

So for me, I plan to study Turkish for three years which sounds like a long time, maybe I’ll arrive at the two-year mark, and feel like I’m ready for another language, maybe not, but I’m giving myself a longer amount of time, and then I’m saying I want to get to a level where I feel comfortable going live in Turkish on Instagram and with a native person from Turkey, and then I think breaking that down into small goals is, I’m doing at least 30 minutes, but I’m really aiming for one hour a day, and my study is concentrated, focused steady, so it’s not like I’m doing something, doing something else, coming back, no, it’s like all in a row, really focusing and engaging and making it quality study time. So those are the things I’m doing, those would be my tips for beginners, beginning to learn any language, it’s possible you can do it.

There may have been things I forgot to mention, or didn’t mention and so please let me know in the comments your thoughts and what you do when you start learning a language, and any applications that you use as well. Thank you so much for watching this video, and

I will see you next week, Tchau, ciao!

~ Camille