Icelandic Noun Master - an app with an appreciative audience.

Do It For An Audience

It’s nice to be appreciated. And sometimes, an appreciative audience can be just the boost you need to get back into gear.

I received some lovely feedback this week about an app I’d almost completely forgotten about. It all related to a very active Icelandic phase I was going through a couple of years back. At the time, I was enjoying a particularly fierce battle with noun declensions, but suffering from a dearth of resources to help (fellow Icelandic learners will relate).

There’s a good piece of advice in this situation. If there’s no help forthcoming, help yourself.

To get a handle on those noun tables, I put together a quick ‘n’ simple app to drill those declensions. I used Java and Android Studio (it’s my job, after all), but there was no prerequisite level of tech – it’s something that could just as easily take life in a site like Quizlet or Educandy.

The idea was basic: a set of multiple choice activities to drill Icelandic noun endings, separately by gender, or altogether. It just needed a bit of time to put together questions and prompts from the grammar guides I had available to me. And the result? A really effective five-minutes-a-day app for getting those endings into memory.

The added benefit of putting it together as a mobile app was that it was ready-bundled to share on to others. I released it as Icelandic Noun Master on Google Play as a free app, and watched the downloads slowly clock up. It’s still there, quietly helping anyone who needs it.

Learning by Making

DIY resource production – for yourself and for others – is a language learning strategy that can yield surprisingly positive results. For a start, resource creation gets you thinking deeply about your learning material, and how to transform it into a clearer, easily testable format. To make questions from it, you have to step away, look at it from a different angle, turn it inside out, think about it in ways that perhaps weren’t obvious on first glance. It’s like turning a jigsaw puzzle upside-down for a fresh perspective, and suddenly spotting where a piece goes. That see it in a different way benefit, incidentally, is why teaching to learn is likewise such a good strategy.

But there’s another intended side-effect, an almost hypnotically effective one. In the creation of resources, you can drift into an almost automaton-style collating of material, sourcing and listing sample sentences, questions or tabular data. It’s a kind of flow state that encourages foreign language material to bed itself in almost by a process of osmosis. Even if it doesn’t quite become active knowledge in one fell swoop, it lays the ground for it to become so later.

Keep ’em Coming

So, in these ways (and probably many more), an appreciative audience can be a useful tool for a language learner. And of course, there’s also that feeling that what you’re doing has impact and usefulness – and that can work wonders for your motivation. In any case, it’s got me thinking that there’s a bit of life left in the trusty old Icelandic Noun Master yet. I’ll be returning to it now, to spruce it up, and revise my own Icelandic. And maybe I’ll even add an iOS version to the mix, too.

Have to keep that audience happy!

Building languages into your daily routine as habit is the first step to polyglot success!

Essential habit-forming apps for language fluency ⏰

Efficient learning hinges on habit. A little, every day, will go a long way. “We become what we repeatedly do” writes motivational mogul Sean Covey, and this could not be truer for linguists. If you want to become a polyglot, languages must become a regular fixture in your daily routine.

Inevitably, we are all human, and most of us need a helpful nudge now and again. Fortunately, there are some excellent self-organising tools to build those nudges digitally into your day. Here is an updated list of some favourites I couldn’t do without!

Evernote

Probably one of the most fully-featured and best-known note apps, Evernote has earnt its status as essential app. It also has a free, basic plan, which will suit many users; this limits note upload size, but as linguists, we deal mostly with words rather than pictures – handily making most of our notes pretty small! You can also access it on pretty much any of your devices (although you will have to choose just two on the basic plan).

At its simplest level, it’s excellent for storing your lists of vocab. You can tag notes with language / topic titles, making them easy to search through later on. The ability to have multiple digital notebooks is great for the polyglot, too – you can set one up for each language.

Habit-boosting Evernote

But in terms of habit-forming, there are some brilliant extra tools in here too. You can create quite rich to-do lists using the checkbox feature.

Example of an Evernote productivity list to help create a routine for your language learning - ideal for forming a habit

Creating language routines with Evernote

I’ve had great success organising my time using Evernote with Brian P. Moran’s 12 Week Year system. Evernote allows me to create weekly to-do lists as part of that plan. For example, these include tick boxes for things like:

  • listening to foreign-language podcasts
  • reading a certain number of target language articles
  • doing my Anki flashcards
  • getting my daily Duolingo fix

At the end of a week, I score myself on my completion rates, aiming for 75% or above. In the same Evernote note, I can also note down comments such as ideas for improvement or amending tasks. It’s a great way to stay on top of projects like multiple language learning.

Incidentally, I use this system to organise my work and fitness projects too. I’ve really noticed a difference since I started!

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is another staple app with a superb free tier. This is to-do organisation as its very best; the tick box is the very heart of this service.

However, here is the real magic: Wunderlist can supercharge your language habit formation with its recurring to-do items. Is there something you need to build in daily, like vocabulary testing? Add it as a repeating item, and Wunderlist will remind you every day at the selected time. You can even have shared to-do items with linguist buddies, using the app’s social features.

Creating a regular language routine with Wunderlist

Creating a regular language routine with Wunderlist

Streaks

The Streaks app lends itself so well to languages, that ‘Practise Spanish’ is one of the examples on its home page. This is a to-do app with a difference; it borrows gamification ideas from educational apps as a motivator.

The premise is simple – the user is motivated through the challenge of maintaining an unbroken run of successful regular task completions. In this way, it will be instantly familiar to fans of language systems like Duolingo. Streaks allows you to add this feature to any area of your life and learning.

Streaks is currently only available on iOS, and costs £4.99 / €5.49 / $4.99USD.

Coach.me

A free alternative, and one available on Android as well as iOS, is Coach.me. Unlike a standard to-do tracker, Coach.me has several achievement paths that you can sign yourself up to. These contain standard milestones for you to tick off as the app digitally ‘coaches’ you with regular reminders. There is quite a handy one titled “Learn To Speak A Foreign Language”, which contains twelve steps to get you started on any language path.

If you struggle with self-motivation, the app even offers the option of paid coaches. Although none are language-specific, there are a few study specialists on there that may fit the bill.

Hidden gems in the everyday

These are just a few of the sea of organiser apps that stand out for me. Honorable mentions must also go to Google Keep and Todoist, apps not specifically aimed at linguists, but perfect for learning languages. This is often where the best language learning gems are found; very general, everyday apps that can be repurposed for polyglots.

Are there any other favourites that make your top list? Please share them in the comments!

An owl, much like the Duolingo mascot!

Duolingo: Five reasons it’s a show-stopper for linguists

I was quite late to the Duolingo party. It might be a wee bit of jealousy, perhaps; as an educational app developer, you look at software like Duolingo and think: wow, that is an educational app. But lately, I’ve bitten the bullet, and have become completely hooked on the green owl (a euphemism everybody should become familiar with).

As one of the most popular apps – let alone educational ones – the web isn’t short of reasons to love it. But here are a few of the very special things that make Duolingo the golden standard for me.

Perfectly paced

The Duolingo environment uses a health system, borrowed from video gaming, to monitor how well you’re performing in a topic. If you start making lots of mistakes, you deplete your health reserves and have to wait until later to continue.

Now, as frustrating as this sounds, it’s a brilliant way to stop language junkies like me from overloading the brain. We all have our limits, and when you enjoy what you’re doing, you can forget where the most efficient place to stop is. The health approach is genius at forcing breaks when learning falls below optimum.

Silly sentences

I’m a huge fan of silly sentences as a memory aid and motivator in language learning. Playing with words in funny ways builds flexibility in a way that learning set phrases doesn’t. And Duolingo embodies the spirit of this to a tee.

No, I hope I will not need to say “cats are not food” if I visit Korea. But having translated that in the app, I’m unlikely to forget the words ‘cats’ and ‘food’, remembered with a silly smile.

Incidentally, a whole Twitter feed has sprung up to celebrate Duolingo’s comedic bent!

Unique content per language

Duolingo avoids a cookie-cutter approach to language learning by providing unique content in each language. Proceeding in exactly the same way in each language might not suit every tongue; instead, each course seems to have been put together from scratch by separate groups of subject experts. It’s quite refreshing to have multiple, bespoke paths available across the (ever-growing) range of languages on offer.

Deductive learning

Duolingo breaks free from the traditional presentation-practice mode of language learning. Sometimes, questions will contain a word or two that you haven’t come across before. As such, it can seem a bit more challenging, like ‘deep end’ learning.

However, rather than frustrating the learner, it encourages a bit of deduction. Can you make an educated guess? Or can you research the mystery word elsewhere? If you’ve had to work to find out the meaning rather than have it handed to you on a plate, it may well be more likely to stick. It highlights the unpredictability of language and the need to experiment and think on your feet – skills that are missing in many more conventional courses.

The Duolingo Universe is growing

Finally, Duolingo wins just on sheer choice. From a few initial language offerings, the app has grown to take in many more, bursting out of the traditional French/German/Spanish bubble. Finding apps for learning Polish – let alone good apps for learning Polish – was tricky in the not-so-distant past. Given the Duolingo treatment, there’s now an excellent solution for learning the basics.

What’s more, the app keeps growing; new languages are being worked on, while existing languages are expanding with new topics. It’s Aladdin’s Cave for a language junkie, and will spark some polyglot roving for inquisitive minds of all ages.

Duolingo has set the bar very high for educational apps in general, and language apps in particular. That certainly keeps educational app developers on their toes. But as a model for digital, self-paced learning, it’s an inspiration for the industry as much as it is a gem for linguaphiles. I’m already looking forward to the next languages to be added!