Science shows language learning can rewire your brain. But can it reshape your personality? Here’s what happened to me.

The day I discovered my “French Self”

It was a lively classe de communication, where we practiced debates and role-play in French. The teacher paired us off, and my partner, Sarah, was a young dessinatrice—an illustrator—who made her living creating Instagram posts. The topic was right in her wheelhouse: social networking. Compared to her, I was a beginner in both language and subject.

When you lack fluency, humor can be your lifeline—make someone laugh, and they might just forget your mistakes. The only thing? I’d never been especially funny… at least not in English. But a few minutes in, Sarah was laughing so hard the teacher gave us the “quiet down” glare.

I was stunned. Was this sudden wit coming from me or from French itself? Maybe it was the years of films, books, and Petit Nicolas stories I’d absorbed, smuggling their humor into my speech. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s how learning a new language changes you.

Can language learning rewire the brain?

I began wondering what exactly was going on in my head. Could a language not only unlock new words but also new parts of myself? Science suggests the answer is yes, and the changes go deeper than you might think.

Just like growing muscles with regular workouts, we can buff up our brain through a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change, adapt, and reorganize itself throughout life. Learning a new language is one of the most powerful ways to trigger this process.

Here’s how it works:

• Structural changes: Studies show that when you learn a new language, both grey matter density and white matter connections increase in brain regions tied to language and cognition. This structural growth strengthens how we process language, focus attention, and move information around.
• Cognitive benefits: Every time a bilingual speaks, the brain has to choose one language and inhibit the other. That constant juggling sharpens executive function, boosting working memory, problem-solving, and even creativity.

So maybe it wasn’t me cracking jokes at all, it was my brain doing push-ups. And the more languages you add, the stronger that workout gets. Neuroplasticity loves a multilingual challenge.

Multilingualism supercharges neuroplasticity

Maybe nothing pushes your neurons and synapses harder than learning new languages. By the time you’re tackling a third or fourth, your brain is doing full triathlons of inhibiting, switching, and rerouting.

In scientific terms, multilinguals show denser grey matter, thicker white-matter highways, and even a bigger hippocampus—the brain’s memory hub. All that extra wiring boosts creativity, sharpens executive functions, and, who knows, might even unlock new versions of you.

Researchers studying the brains of simultaneous interpreters have found that they develop exceptional mental flexibility, able to shift focus and meaning in mere milliseconds. They can be described as the ‘Olympic athletes of the language world.’ Interestingly, even bilingual children show some of the same advantages, scoring higher in creativity and cognitive control compared to their monolingual peers.

Who’s afraid of a bilingual brain?

It sounds absurd today, but for much of the 20th century, many researchers and educators viewed bilingualism with suspicion. They promoted what was called the balance hypothesis: the idea that the brain had a fixed language “budget,” so gaining skill in one language would drain ability from another. Early studies even reported that bilingual children scored lower on intelligence tests.

In 1923, for example, a widely cited study by Canadian psychologist Florence Goodenough examined children in immigrant communities and concluded that speaking two languages “retards the development of intelligence.” Her findings, based on English-only IQ tests administered to youngsters who had just arrived from Europe, helped cement the belief that bilingual homes were risky.

Those conclusions, we now know, were deeply flawed. The tests were often biased toward English-speaking monolinguals and failed to account for socioeconomic factors. Modern research overturns that old narrative, showing that children who grow up with more than one language develop stronger attention control, greater mental flexibility, and often perform better on problem-solving and creative-thinking tasks. Juggling two languages helps build a more adaptable and inventive mind.

Why you feel different in another language

Think of a new language as a new lens that lets you see the world differently. Each language encodes cultural values, from the built-in formality of Japanese to the casual expressiveness of American English. Switching languages can “activate” different cultural frames of reference, sometimes expanding or even reshaping our sense of identity.

Many bilinguals say they feel like a slightly different person in each language. Psychologists call this contextual identity: traits such as confidence, humor, or warmth surface differently when a language activates its cultural frame. A shy speaker might turn surprisingly outgoing in Spanish, where expressiveness is the norm, while the same person feels more reserved in English. These shifts aren’t just in your head; language itself can nudge your personality.

Part of the magic also lies in memory. Words learned in childhood are tightly bound to early emotions, so a first language can feel raw and intimate. A second language, acquired later, can create a subtle emotional buffer. This explains why people sometimes confess secrets more easily or negotiate more calmly in a non-native language.

Neuroscience adds another layer. Brain-imaging studies show that language switching lights up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area tied to self-monitoring and social behavior. In other words, the shifts in personality you feel when using a new language may also reflect neurological adaptation.

Want to test it yourself? Spend a day journaling in each language or try improvising a story with friends in your target language. Notice how your humor, posture, or confidence changes. You my discover facets of yourself you didn’t know were there.

Delay dementia with language learning

Learning a new language doesn’t just change your brain, it can help protect it. Think of it as a kind of neurological helmet you offer to your older self. Research shows that learning and using more than one language is linked to better cognitive health in later life. Bilingualism seems to delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s symptoms by several years, even if the diseases eventually appear.

The Link Between Bilingualism and Cognitive Reserve

Our brains can cope with damage by using alternative networks or strategies. It’s like a mental “savings account”: the more reserve you build, the longer you can draw on it before decline shows. Language learning strengthens attention, memory, and executive function—all key contributors to this reserve.

Constant switching and inhibition between languages exercises executive control, keeping brain circuits resilient. Studies suggest bilingual adults show dementia symptoms four to five years later than monolinguals. Even when brain scans reveal the same level of damage, bilinguals often function better, thanks to the extra cognitive reserve they’ve built. In other words, bilingualism doesn’t prevent dementia, but it can buy you time.

Practical tips for maximizing your benefits

Now that we know language learning can reshape both brain and personality, here’s how to get the most from every practice session:

Learn actively

Passive exposure—music in the background, TV shows on repeat—has value, but the biggest gains come from active use. It’s like training in a higher league of mental athletics. Jump into real conversations, recall words on the fly, and adapt in real time. If travel is possible, immerse yourself; if not, join online exchanges or simply switch your phone and social media settings to your target language so your brain keeps firing.

Challenge your brain

Language learning isn’t about stockpiling set phrases. Create your own sentences and pivot between topics. Debate an issue, tell a joke, order food, write a friendly note, then draft a formal email—all in the new language. This variety strengthens neural circuits and keeps neuroplasticity working in your favor.

Use language to explore culture

Every language carries its own worldview. Experiment with idioms, humor, and cultural references to expand empathy and perspective. Read books, watch films, follow creators online, or join community forums to surround yourself with authentic context.

Favor consistency over intensity

Like physical training, neuroplasticity thrives on steady, repeated effort. You wouldn’t build a strong chest with eight hours of bench press every Sunday, and you won’t become bilingual through occasional marathon study sessions. Fifteen focused minutes every day beats sporadic cramming.

Conclusion

A new language is more than vocabulary: it’s a workout, a mirror, and a small time machine for your mind. Every phrase strengthens neural circuits; every conversation invites a slightly different version of you to the surface; every steady practice session builds the cognitive reserve that may protect your future self.

Whether you’re cracking jokes in French or stumbling through your first Spanish greeting, you’re not just learning to communicate, you’re reshaping your brain, expanding your personality, and giving tomorrow’s you a quiet but powerful gift.

Want to learn more about multilingualism?

• How to Raise a Bilingual Child: The Three Main Strategies
• What learning 12 languages in 12 months taught me
• "Language Laddering", or why you might use a foreign language to learn a foreign language
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Over the past few years, I’ve delivered more than 6,000 English lessons to learners around the world. Most of them were adults, and most came in with a common concern — confidence. At first, I underestimated just how central it was to the learning process. Fluency without confidence is like a car without fuel: functional, but not moving.

Here are the key patterns I’ve seen, along with simple strategies that helped even my shy learners grow confident and get their language engine running.

1. Confidence is a pattern of evidence

Many adult learners believe that confident language use is something you feel first and then do. In practice, it’s the reverse.

Confidence often arises not from a shift in mindset but from a string of small wins. One correct answer is enough to boost confidence. One successful pronunciation. One full sentence spoken without hesitation. When these “micro wins” are noticed and acknowledged they start forming a track record that clearly says, “You can do this.”

One of my students, a woman from Turkey, began with almost no English. Our first sessions were slow and full of miscommunication. Many times we had to revert to translation tools and restart tasks. But from the beginning, I made it a point to acknowledge every improvement. Whether it was a clearer “th” sound or remembering a word from the previous lesson.

That focus on small wins made a big difference. Within a matter of weeks, her progress accelerated because she no longer feared trying. She smiled more, volunteered more, and even joked in English — something unimaginable in week one.

She didn’t become confident first and then speak well. She spoke a little, got some proof she could, and confidence followed.

2. Adults carry fear of mistakes into the classroom

Children acquire languages through immersion and trial and error. Adults, on the other hand, come into language learning with emotional baggage: school memories, harsh correction, fear of embarrassment, and perfectionism.

In lessons, these fears show up in very specific ways:

• Long pauses before answering
• Excessive apologies for small mistakes
• Reliance on first language for reassurance
• Hesitation to ask questions or initiate conversation

Most of this anxiety stems from internal pressure to be perfect — or at least correct. But confidence can’t coexist with the fear of being wrong.

In my classes, one strategy I’ve found helpful is making imperfection part of the process. I use phrases like “We’re getting better at this” or “That’s exactly the kind of mistake we want! Now we know what to work on.” These small changes in perspective help learners accept that confusion, pauses, and errors are a normal part of progress, not signs of failure.

Once a learner sees mistakes just as learning cues, they become more willing to take risks, which is where growth really begins.

3. Meaningful interaction builds fluency

Many learners think their problem is grammar when what they really lack is the confidence to use what they already know.

Early in my teaching, I had a habit of overloading grammar explanations. I thought that a clear rule would solve the confusion. But over time, I noticed something: even understanding a structure perfectly, many learners still froze when they had to use it in conversation.

That’s because fluency isn’t built through passive understanding; it is built through active, low-pressure use.

What works better:

• Guided dialogues using the target structure repeatedly
• Realistic speaking tasks with supportive correction
• Personalised sentences learners actually want to say

When learners feel the grammar working — instead of just knowing the rule — it sticks. And more importantly, they begin to trust themselves to speak spontaneously, even if it’s not 100% perfect.

4. Confidence grows through structure

It’s a paradox I see often. To handle real conversations, learners need to face unexpected questions, changes in topic, and the natural messiness of speech. But if they face too much unpredictability too early, they may freeze or withdraw.

On the other hand, lessons where every answer is predictable may feel safe, but they risk creating dependency. Progress stalls when learners stop being challenged.

The key is finding a balance: enough structure to build confidence and enough variety to prepare for the real world.

The solution? Progressive challenge. Start with predictable prompts, then gradually add variation:

• Week 1: “What did you do yesterday?” (repeat answer patterns)
• Week 2: “Tell me about your weekend — but this time, lie!” (adds play and unpredictability)
• Week 3: “Ask me the questions” (flips the roles, adds cognitive load)

By building confidence through repetition first, learners are more prepared to take on spontaneous tasks later.

5. Lessons shouldn't feel like an exam

Many adult learners arrive with an assumption: “The teacher is here to correct me.” That assumption makes the learner passive and defensive.

If learners see the lesson as a space to explore ideas and work together — not just prove what they know — they're much more likely to take ownership of their learning.

For example, instead of waiting for the teacher’s approval, they start noticing their own mistakes, asking more questions, and even correcting themselves mid-sentence.

One technique I use is saying things like:

• “That was 90% perfect! Want to hear a little tweak?”
• “Hmm, that works...but we can make it smoother. Any idea how?”
• “I love what you’re trying to say. Let’s polish it.”

These cues show that we're working with their effort, not against it. And a shift from teacher-as-judge to teacher-as-coach often unlocks the learner’s full potential.

6. Leaners need emotional safety

Speaking a new language takes courage. You’re often trying to express something meaningful using tools that don’t yet feel natural. It’s like trying to paint a portrait with your hands handcuffed.

This can feel frustrating or even paralysing, especially for adult learners who are used to feeling competent in other areas of life. That’s why creating a safe, encouraging learning environment is essential.

When mistakes are treated as a part of the process, learners are more likely to take the risks needed to grow.

One of the biggest predictors of breakthrough moments in my classes has been emotional safety. The learner feels:

• Not rushed
• Not judged
• Not interrupted unnecessarily
• Seen as a person, not just a level

I had a student from Brazil who froze up during free speaking tasks for weeks. He clearly had the vocabulary and grammar. The block was emotional. So I started using simple warm-ups: talking about his dog, his weekend, his favourite foods — nothing “academic”. In time he relaxed and slowly started taking more linguistic risks.

Two months later, he gave a 3-minute spontaneous talk about his hometown. No notes, no script, and very little hesitation.

7. You need a reason to keep showing up

Many adult learners feel they’re too busy to make progress. But in my experience, consistency beats intensity every time.

Some of my most successful learners did just 20 minutes a day, but they:

• Enjoyed the lessons
• Had specific short-term goals (e.g., “I want to order fluently at my favourite café”)
• Tracked their progress (journaling, apps, or just noticing what felt easier)

When learners care about what they’re saying and feel progress, even in small doses, they return. Progress takes time, but returning after a tough lesson is half the battle.

8. Confidence is contagious

If there’s one thing 6,000 lessons have taught me, it’s this:

Learners often borrow the teacher’s confidence before they develop their own.

If you believe in them, they’ll start believing in themselves. If you treat their progress like something exciting and worth celebrating, they’ll do the same.

This doesn’t require cheerleading. It just requires attentiveness, sincerity, and consistency.

The student I mentioned earlier — the one who began with almost no English — now smiles during our lessons, laughs when she makes a mistake, and celebrates when she understands a full sentence. She’s not “fluent” yet by most definitions. But she’s confident. And that confidence is what’s propelling her forward more than any drill or textbook could.

9. Passive correction builds trust

One thing I’ve done since my earliest lessons is take detailed notes during class. Rather than interrupting the flow of conversation to correct every mistake, I type quietly in the background. Then, at the end of each lesson, I send a short, encouraging message: a quick reflection on their progress and a few areas to focus on, without pressure to review unless they want to.

This creates a win-win:

• The learner stays immersed and confident during the session
• They get personalised feedback to review in their own time
• And they know I’m fully present — not just listening, but paying attention to them

It’s a quiet kind of support, but it builds trust. And when learners feel supported, they stay committed.

10. How to build confidence on your own

If you’re learning English independently, confidence might feel like the hardest part — but it’s something you can build little by little. Here are a few ways to start building confidence:

• Speak out loud every day, even just for a few minutes. It helps reduce hesitation.
• Record yourself talking about a topic and listen back — not to criticise, but to notice progress.
• Shadow native speakers in videos or podcasts — repeat what you hear to improve flow and pronunciation.
• Choose a song you like in English and listen to it every day. As the lyrics become familiar, try singing along — start with the chorus, then the whole song. This can be fun.
• Celebrate small wins — maybe you understood a podcast, ordered coffee, or didn’t freeze during a conversation. That’s real progress.
• Keep a language journal — jot down phrases, new words, or moments when you felt confident using English.

The key is consistency, not perfection. Keep showing up — your confidence will catch up with your effort.

Final Thoughts

Confidence isn’t a luxury in language learning. It’s the foundation. And like most foundations, it’s not built in a day.

It’s built through:

• Small, acknowledged wins
• Safe spaces to fail
• Personal goals that make the effort feel worthwhile
• A teacher or partner who treats effort as progress

Every learner’s journey is different, but confidence is always the key that unlocks fluency.

And after over 6,000 lessons, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s this:

If you help learners believe they can speak — they will.

Want more language learning tips?

• Language fossilization: What it is and how to overcome it
• What learning 12 languages in 12 months taught me
• How to graduate from "learner's" content to "native" content
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Many publishing projects seek to translate between minoritised languages and the larger languages that have supplanted them: for example, between Gaelic and English, or between Tâi-gí and Mandarin. But as writers and publishers living between Taiwan and Scotland, we wanted to ask: what if we could build solidarity between minoritised languages by translating from one to the other — allowing readers in Tâi-gí to read stories originally written in Gaelic, and vice versa?

What do such distant languages have in common?

Both Tâi-gí and Gaelic are languages that have been historically under threat. And both have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of these threats.

Taiwanese

Before large-scale settlement in Taiwan, the language landscape was almost entirely made up of a variety of indigenous Austronesian languages. But from the seventeenth century, Tâi-gí, which has its roots in the language brought by settlers from the southern Fujian coast, became increasingly widely established. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was the most widely spoken language on the island of Taiwan.

This only started to change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Japanese colonial authorities sought increasingly to prioritise Japanese, and to suppress Tâi-gí. Then, in the years after the Second World War, the retreating Nationalist regime took control. The Nationalists declared martial law, and imposed Mandarin as the language of public life—a language that vanishingly few in Taiwan spoke. This double blow sent Tâi-gí into steep decline. But in the decades since Taiwan’s transition to democracy, Tâi-gí has undergone a cultural revival. And although still under threat, Tâi-gí has an increasingly high profile, and plays an increasingly central role in Taiwan’s emerging hybrid identity.

Gaelic

In Scotland, on the other hand, Gaelic was well-established by the eighth century. By the tenth century, it was the most widely spoken language in the northern and western parts of the country. Throughout the Middle Ages, Gaelic was a court language, a language of literature and high culture, spoken by communities across Scotland. But in the eighteenth century, when the 1707 Act of Union united the kingdoms of England and Scotland, the language went into decline. Gaelic’s fortunes were dealt a further blow in the nineteenth century, with the rise of English-language mass education.

As Dr Paul Meighan-Chiblow has argued, ‘languages do not just “die”. Rather, language speakers, cultures, and communities are deliberately persecuted, oppressed, and minoritised, either overtly or covertly.’ But as with Tâi-gí in Taiwan, thanks to the commitment of language activists, scholars, and communities of minoritised language speakers and learners, Gaelic in Scotland has seen a remarkable resilience, and is undergoing a continual process of revival.

Are there differences too?

These stories of language decline and revival in Taiwan and Scotland are alike in many respects. The decline in both languages has been the result of deliberate attempts at language suppression; and the movement to revive both languages is tied in with bigger questions of cultural identity, and a growing sense of what it means to be a multilingual nation.

Nevertheless, there are differences, too. Scottish Gaelic’s long tradition of written literature means that, in the imagination of Gaelic speakers, it is recognised as a language not just of the voice, but also of the page. This ongoing tradition of Gaelic literature has been one of the main ways in which Gaelic has been sustained and nourished. In Taiwan, on the other hand, despite the introduction of Romanisation systems for Taiwanese in the 19th century, and a growing contemporary literature written also in Hàn-jī（漢字）or Han characters, many present-day Taiwanese speakers neither read nor write the language, many even erroneously claiming that the language cannot be read or written at all.

Stories that echo each other

For our project we commissioned new, original fiction by contemporary writers, and then translated these stories between Gaelic and Taiwanese. We brought together four writers—Naomi Sím and Kiú-kiong in Taiwan, and Lisa MacDonald and Elissa Hunter-Dorans in Scotland—to create new works of fiction that engaged with the languages and cultures of Taiwan and Scotland.

• Naomi Sím’s story 翠蘭ê情批 (Emerald Orchid Mazu) tells the tale of a young writer who returns home to the village to spend time with her Taiwanese-speaking grandmother. From there, the story leads the reader into the thickets of Taiwanese legend, religion, language, ritual, and history.
• Elissa Hunter-Dorans’s story, A’ Chathair Fhalamh (The Empty Chair) takes place in Inverness, Scotland, at a Hogmanay party—Scotland’s traditional New Year’s Eve celebration. It is the final night of the 1970s, and the party is in full swing when a gatecrasher arrives, an unexpected interruption that leads to a kind of truce between Scotland’s past, present, and future.
• Kiú-kiong’s story, 4.44.44, begins with a prophetic dream, and ends with a terrible incident on the MRT in Taipei.
• In Lisa MacDonald’s story, Saorsa (Freedom), the narrator spots a sheep trapped in the brambles by the roadside. As she gets out of the car, carefully working to free the sheep, she feels as if she is also releasing something in herself, untangling herself from the past.

Apart from the striking imaginative breath of these stories, there were also unexpected resonances between the Scottish and Taiwanese worlds that they evoked. There were grandmothers everywhere (because who else do you learn your Gaelic or Tâi-gí from?). There were undercurrents of violence, as well as truces, moments of solidarity, and flashes of humour.

And there was a recurrent obsession with history, with the past, and how to draw together the broken threads of this history to weave together something new.

What’s challenging about translating between minority languages?

With the help of translator Shengchi Hsu, we collaboratively translated our tales between two minoritised languages via Mandarin and English.

One reason for this was that we wanted the stories to have a wide audience in Taiwan and Scotland, and so we decided to also publish translations in Mandarin and English. But another reason was about the practicalities of translation. Nobody on the project spoke both Gaelic and Taiwanese, but we had Mandarin and English as common working languages. So we translated directly where we could—for example, from Taiwanese directly to English—but where we couldn’t, we crossed back and forth via Mandarin and English until we were happy with the result.

The challenges of translating the stories were immense. These were stories immersed not just in the languages of Taiwan and Scotland, but also in their cultures. We realised that there is a certain flavour to storytelling in Taiwanese, or in Gaelic—one that is difficult to translate. We agonised over the political complexities of using majority languages—Mandarin and English—as conduits for translation of the languages they had historically supplanted. Emails flew back and forth, and we found ourselves tackling questions not just about language, but about politics, and culture, and what it means to translate.    

Small languages are more than local

The book, Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic, was published in June 2025. There is always a moment, after a book is published, when you hold your breath, waiting to see how readers respond. But as the feedback from our readers came in we realised it had all been worthwhile.

Gaelic-language readers in Scotland and beyond were curious about these Taiwanese tales of goddesses and urban prophets. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, readers relished seeing Scotland’s rainy, culturally rich landscapes rendered so beautifully in Taiwanese. Because there is something powerful about translating not from and into minoritised languages, but also between these languages. It is one of the things we love, incidentally, about Glossika: because where else can you learn Taiwanese directly through Gaelic, or vice versa?

And what, above all, this work of translation demonstrates is that smaller languages do not need to speak only to the local, to the contexts of their origins. Sometimes, there is assumption that Scottish Gaelic can only speak of Scotland, or that Tâi-gí can only speak of Taiwan.

But in the crossing back and forth between minoritised languages—with all the gains and losses that entails—there is a break with this assumption. There is a reminder that all languages can speak of all things, even if they do so in their own, unique way. And when we are reminded of this, this is the first step towards acknowledging that minoritised languages deserve to stand on an equal footing to the dominant languages that threaten to supplant them.  

Interested in minority languages? You might also like...

1. The future of Taiwanese Hokkien in a Mandarin-dominant Taiwan
2. Everything You Need to Know About Learning Endangered Languages
3. Taigi Kho: Preserving and Passing on the Taiwanese Language
4. Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook

There’s only so much time you can spend with a professional teacher without breaking the bank. AI, however, is always available, doesn’t get frustrated explaining the same thing for the 100th time, and doesn’t cost a fortune. In theory, it sounds like an ideal learning setup. But how does it work in reality? In this post, we’ll look at how you may use ChatGPT for language learning, what it can and can’t do, and try to answer the big question: should you use ChatGPT to learn a language?

Why ChatGPT?

The AI market in education has been steadily growing in recent years. The compound annual growth rate of generative AI in the education market is expected to grow 39.5% from 2024 to 2033. About 67% of educational institutions worldwide report using AI in their teaching, and 47% of the students say it has improved their academic performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently one of the leading AI technologies. LLMs power popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and many others by using patterns learned from massive amounts of text to predict the most likely next word. This is a simplified way of describing how these models work.

Not all AI language-learning tools rely on LLMs, though. For example, vocabulary quizzes, spaced-repetition platforms like Glossika, or pronunciation trainers may use very different kinds of technology. But when it comes to language learning, the focus is on the language itself, which makes LLMs the most intuitive AI tool to use.

In this post, we’ll focus on free version of ChatGPT 4 since it’s the most accessible to language learners.

How to use ChatGPT for language learning

ChatGPT is very skilled at, well, chatting. It can be a tireless conversation partner, an explain-it-like-I’m-five pro, and it can provide you with endless content. Let’s go over some of the ways you can use ChatGPT in your language learning.

Creating a study plan

ChatGPT can help you create a personalized plan for your studies. Most traditional language learning plans focus on developing skills in speaking, listening, reading, writing, and pronunciation.

If you don’t have a teacher’s support, it may be challenging to juggle all these areas on your own. For example, some learners may engage with content in their target language, but rarely push themselves to have conversations or write. Most self-learners would benefit from having a study plan that keeps them accountable and helps make their language learning well-rounded.

Explaining Grammar

Language learners are famously not very fond of grammar drills. They are repetitive, boring, and most frustratingly, they don’t really stick with most of us for a long time.

Traditional textbooks usually make grammar the backbone of your studies. It’s a logical pathway that guides you from easier things to more complex ones, but it doesn’t always result in meaningful progress. Don’t get me wrong—grammar is essential in language learning. But grammar doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Context is key for our brains to actually remember grammar. That’s why, for many learners, it’s easier when the grammar explanations not preceed but follow contextual learning.

When you encounter new grammar structures in blog posts, social media, or TV, use it as an opportunity to trick your brain into paying attention to the grammar. That’s when you can go to ChatGPT and ask it to explain a particular grammar point with examples and simple exercises to practice right away and make it stick.

Giving feedback on writing

We already use AI in writing daily when we let apps like Grammarly check our spelling or use built-in tools to automatically finish our emails. You can use ChatGPT when you need to write something in your target language and aren’t quite sure if it sounds natural.

Ask Chat GPT to:

• Point out if it’s a grammar, punctuation, or a style issue and explain why.
• Explain why it suggests certain changes instead of what you originally wrote. Be critical when reviewing the suggestions—some tools, like DeepL, might rewrite perfectly correct sentences just for the sake of rewriting.
• Show how the sentence should look, with an example from a trustworthy source.

Simulating real-life dialogues

It’s a great way to practice real-life situations without real-life anxiety. You can ask ChatGPT to chat about random topics as your virtual pen pal. Ask it to create a list of imaginary scenarios where you’ll need to speak, for example, at the supermarket or bank. It’s especially beneficial if you not only write but also record yourself speaking. This way, you’ll be able to actually train your mouth muscles to speak. Next time you have to speak offline, you’ll likely find it much easier with the phrases you’ve already practiced.

Generating learning content

It’s generally easier to create content directly in ChatGPT than to have it search the web and send you links. While some versions of ChatGPT can search the internet, this feature isn’t always available, especially on a free plan. Instead, ask it to generate content tailored to your needs.

Ask ChatGPT to:

• Create learning content from scratch. Let ChatGPT know your current level, the grammar patterns you want to focus on, and the topic you're interested in.
• Turn existing content into an engaging language learning exercise. Upload the content that you’d like to study and let ChatGPT analyze it. Ask it to provide you with reading or listening comprehension questions, highlight the challenging words for your level, and ask to use them in a different context.
• Find suitable content online based on your interests, level, and the skill you want to practice (reading or listening). ChatGPT can create a list for you with short overviews of each link.

Is it actually as good as it sounds?

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. ChatGPT is a powerful technology for language learners, but it has its weaknesses.

ChatGPT has hallucinations

Once, I tried to find YouTube channels in my target language. I asked ChatGPT to compile a list of ten channels with a set of criteria. I was excited to see that it actually found ten channels, only to discover that nine of them were totally made-up.

As OpenAI puts it, "hallucinations" is ChatGPT’s "tendency to invent facts in moments of uncertainty". ChatGPT may often be like this annoying person in a group who has no idea what they’re talking about. Yet they speak so bluntly and confidently that you start to second-guess yourself. That’s exactly what ChatGPT sometimes does; it will tell you the most bizarre disinformation, making it sound like a fact. A 2023 study found that 28 out of 178 research references ChatGPT gave didn’t exist. ChatGPT is always improving, and many prompts that made it hallucinate a year ago now produce a reliable answer. But you can’t take anything for granted.

As a language learner, you need to be extra cautious because if you’re studying a language, you can’t easily catch ChatGPT in a lie. It may be tiresome to double-check every single fact it tells you.

Not all languages and dialects are equally represented

If you’re interested in learning a standard version of a language that is popular and well-established, you’ll be fine using ChatGPT occasionally.

But if you’re learning an underrepresented or endangered language or a particular dialect, you might find that ChatGPT doesn’t help much. It’s trained on a massive amount of texts, and there are more texts available in certain languages. Some languages don’t have a large enough volume of text available to properly train the model. The fewer resources there are in a language, the less accurate ChatGPT’s output is going to be. For example, Spanish model MarIA uses a corpus of up to 135 billion words, while in Catalan (a Romance language primarily spoken in parts of Spain, Andorra, France, and Italy), they are limited to just 1.7 billion words.

Basque, another indigenous language spoken in Spain, simply doesn’t have an amount of texts large enough to properly train a model. So, if you’re learning a language like Swahili, Kyrgyz, or Assamese, it’s better to stick with traditional language-learning materials.  

ChatGPT has linguistic biases

ChatGPT is definitely strongest in English as it has the most training data available. Right now, English is the most spoken language in the world, counting both native and non-native speakers. However, ChatGPT was trained on the standard versions of English—American and British. Studies indicate that ChatGPT is biased against non-standard varieties of English, such as African American English, Indian English, Irish English, Jamaican English, Kenyan English, Nigerian English, and others. AI produces different responses based on the English dialect a person uses.

Prompts in less common English varieties often lead to stereotyping, misunderstandings, and condescending responses. Something to keep in mind if you’re learning a less established variety of a language.

It may be difficult to get what you want from ChatGPT

When writing this post, I used ChatGPT to help me with learning Serbian to see for myself if the popular advice on the internet actually works. I asked it to create a study plan with 30-minute daily lessons based on my B2 level. It suggested that we start with listening practice. I spent ten minutes of my first ChatGPT lesson going back and forth because the videos it provided for my listening practice were either

• too easy (very basic A1 dialogues),
• or narrated in English with Serbian subtitles (doesn’t really help your Serbian listening skills),
• or weren’t available through the links ChatGPT provided.

It’s possible that with certain tasks, you’ll spend more time explaining, correcting, and specifying your prompt than actually studying.

Another example: I asked ChatGPT to generate a grammar exercise for me on the grammar topic I struggle with. It generated a mish-mash where I was supposed to fill in the brackets in English sentences with the correct forms in Serbian. It doesn’t make any sense from a learner’s perspective:

The same goes for the feedback and corrections. ChatGPT may correct its own sentences in grammar tasks, tell you it found a mistake in your writing, but suggest rewriting it the same exact way it has been written. You will spend time trying to figure out if the feedback is legit, and honestly, it gets annoying fairly quickly.

ChatGPT is simply not human

As realistic as modern chatbots can sound, they are just not human. People are spontaneous and creative in the way they communicate—they joke, invent words, use body language, and do all the subtle things that make using a new language so exciting and challenging.

ChatGPT can’t replace real practice. It won’t be able to represent different people you’ll meet in the wild: from chronically online teenagers you barely understand to business partners speaking corporate. Language is alive and constantly changing. At the same time, there are so many different people speaking their own versions of your target language that were influenced by their backgrounds, upbringings, regions, and jobs.

You can use ChatGPT to help you study, but you need to keep in mind that it just can’t give you the real picture and the real joy of being understood by fellow humans.

So, what now?

ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for language learners, especially the tech-savvy ones who can recognize the limitations of AI and use it in moderation. It’s up to you whether to trust ChatGPT in each situation. But in the end, you may notice it might actually add more work instead of making things easier.

Ideally, work with support from a teacher who can verify the most difficult parts. You can use ChatGPT to your advantage with the strategies from this post, just keep in mind that ChatGPT can’t substitute a real teacher or real human interaction in your target language. For now, the best strategy is to use it as an advanced search tool or a pen-pal when you already have some foundation in a language.

Me? After testing ChatGPT for this post, I’m sticking with a tutor till better days.

Interested in more language learning tips?

• "Language Laddering", or why you might use a foreign language to learn a foreign language
• Grammar in action: mastering language patterns with stories
• Enforced Scarcity: What Wordle Teaches Us About Overcoming Procrastination
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

If you’ve already started learning Russian or spent time around Russian speakers, you’ve probably heard words like “kotik,” “solnyshko,” or “mashinka”. At first, these playful-sounding words might seem childish or just cute variations, but there’s way more to them. Russian diminutives (from the Latin “deminutivus”, meaning “diminished”) aren’t just “mini” versions of words — they’re packed with emotion, warmth, and cultural meaning.

What Are Diminutives in Russian?

Russian is full of diminutives, and they pop up everywhere—sometimes even in places you wouldn’t expect, like blogs, social media, and even serious articles. Some people love them, others find them a bit much, but one thing’s for sure: Russian wouldn’t be the same without them.

For English speakers, diminutives can be both charming and confusing. Why do Russians turn “cat” into “kotik,” “kotyonok,” and even “kotyonochek”?

In simple terms, deminutive is a “mini” or “cuter” version of a word created by adding special suffixes. However, in Russian, diminutives go way beyond just making things sound small. They add layers of emotion, affection, and even playfulness to everyday speech.

Linguistically, Russian has a whole arsenal of diminutive suffixes:

• -ик/-чик,
• -ок/-ёк,
• -очк/-ечк,
• -ишк,

and more. Each one tweaks the meaning just a bit, making words sound softer, sweeter, or sometimes just plain funny.

Examples with diminutive suffixes:

• kniga (book) - knizhka (little book) - knizhechka (small, dear book) - knizhitsa (tiny or cherished book).
• kot (cat) - kotik (little or cute cat) - kotyonok (kitten) - kotyonochek (tiny, adorable kitten) - koteyka (playful/cute form).
• dom (house) - domik (small house) - domishko (shabby/modest house).
• mama (mom) - mamochka (dear mom, mommy) - mamulya/mamusya (dearest mommy) - mamusik (very affectionate mom).

And it’s not just about grammar—it’s about real life. Take my cat, for example. His actual name is Lars, but at home he’s Larsik, kotik, koteyka, pushistik (fluffy), glazastik (big-eyed), ushastik (big-eared), zubastik (toothy)... Each nickname fits a different mood or moment. That’s the magic of Russian diminutives: they let you play with language and express how you really feel.

You can see diminutives everywhere in Russian culture as well. For example:

• In my favorite children's fairy tale, “The Little Humpbacked Horse” the main character is Ivanushka (little Ivan). This diminutive name is also found in other famous Russian folk tales, such as "Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka" and “Sivka-Burka”. And this is not by chance. By calling their favorite hero affectionately, lovingly, “Ivanushka” the Russian people express their affection for him and their emotional connection.
• The classic Russian lullaby “Bayushki-bayu” is a treasure trove of diminutive forms, for example, “bayushki” is a calming, affectionate form associated with rocking a baby, “volchok” (little wolf), “bochok” (a baby's side).

Diminutives are a special part of the Russian language that make it warmer, more affectionate, and emotionally rich.

Funсtions of Diminutives: Emotion and Everyday Communication

Why are diminutives so deeply woven into Russian speech? The answer lies in the fact that Russian linguistic culture emphasizes warmth, closeness, and emotional expression. In a country known for its vast expanses and sometimes harsh climates, language becomes a way to create intimacy and soften the sometimes harsh realities of everyday life.

Parent-Child Communication

Initially, such words were used (and are still used) to communicate with small children. Psychologists note that children who have heard diminutives since early childhood tend to grow up more emotionally mature and self-confident. That’s why calls not to “coo” at children aren’t entirely justified.

Diminutives primarily express and convey emotions of tenderness and affection that the family feels for a baby. And the baby perceives them exactly as speech signals of love and care. The sound and intonation of diminutives mark objects as safe and even pleasant for a child. For example, a mother, putting her baby to bed, might say: “глазки” (glazki—little eyes), “кроватка” (krovatka—little bed/crib), “подушечка” (podushechka—little pillow).

Emotional Shades: Affection, Irony, Teasing, and Care

In conversations between adults, diminutives play a similar role—they convey warmth and tenderness, helping to create a friendly, positive atmosphere.. They also mark people or things as part of a personal, close circle.

That’s why you’ll often hear diminutive forms when people talk about their hobbies or their pets or when they want to show sympathy or affection toward someone. Even names get a makeover: “Anna” turns into “Anechka,” and “Dmitry” becomes “Dimochka”.

A striking example of the frequent use of diminutives for personal names can be found in a classic work of Russian literature — Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The character Alexei Karamazov is referred to by a range of affectionate diminutive forms, such as “Alyosha”, “Alyoshka”, “Alyoshenka”, “Alyoshechka”, “Alekseychik”, “Lyosha”, and “Lyoshenka”. Each variation carries its own emotional nuance and reflects a different level of intimacy. For English-speaking readers, this variety can be both confusing and enriching when exploring Russian literature.

Diminutives Can Be Annoying

Diminutives are a natural part of the Russian language. However, many people find them irritating. Everything is good in moderation. Some bloggers or writers get so carried away with diminutives—unconsciously expressing affection or trying to charm their readers, that these words start to feel overwhelming or even off-putting. For example, you might see words like “blozhik” (a small blog), “postik” (a small post), “pechal’ka” (a small grief), or “chelovechek” (a little guy).

When people hear diminutives from strangers or people they barely know or read them in blogs and posts; it can create a sense of psychological discomfort. For some, using diminutives feels like an invasion of their personal space or a way of treating them like children. This is why, despite their warmth and charm, diminutives can sometimes backfire and annoy rather than endear.

Diminutives in Action: Funny and Unexpected Diminutives

Russian diminutives can be a lot of fun and very surprising! Take the word “гриб” (grib)—it means “mushroom.” But when you say “грибок” (gribok), it sounds cuter, like a little mushroom. Funnily enough, грибок also means “fungus,” which isn’t so cute!

Or look at “жук” (zhuk), which means “bug”. The diminutive “жучок” (zhuchok) sounds like a small, friendly bug. It’s often used when children talk about little bugs they find outside. It’s so cute that even adults sometimes use it to sound playful. Interestingly, secret service agents and security services use this harmless word to refer to a listening device, in much the same way as “bug” is used in English.

And then there’s “мышь” (mysh)—“mouse”. The diminutive “мышка” (myshka) is very popular. It means “little mouse,” but it’s also the word for a computer mouse! So, depending on the situation, “мышка” can mean a tiny animal or the gadget you use every day.

Challenges and Pitfalls for Learners

For English speakers, Russian diminutives can be both adorable and confusing. There are tons of different endings, subtle emotional vibes, and creative ways to make them—all of this can make it hard to know when and how to use them right.

One common mistake is using diminutives too much in formal or unfamiliar situations. For example, calling your own cat “kotik” is fine, but calling a stranger “Andryusha” (little Andrei) might come off as too familiar, rude, or even a bit patronizing. It’s best to save diminutives for close friends, family, kids, and pets—or when you’re sure the mood and setting are right.

Another tricky part is understanding the emotional tone. A diminutive can sound sweet and loving, but it can also be sarcastic or teasing, depending on the tone and context. For example, the Russian word “сыночка” (synochka) means “little son.” It can sound different depending on how you say it.

• Sweet and caring: A parent might say to a child, “Synochka, come have lunch,” showing love and kindness.
• Teasing or sarcastic: Among adults, the phrase “сыночка-корзиночка” (literally “little son – little basket”) is often used in a joking or slightly mocking way to describe a man who is overly pampered or protected by his mother. In this case women might say, “His mom called and he rushed over immediately. He’s such a synochka-korzinochka”.

Finally, learners often struggle with pronunciation and spelling. Russian diminutive endings can be tricky, and some words don’t follow the usual rules. The best way to get good at them is to listen carefully to native speakers and practice, practice, practice.

Tips for Mastering Russian Diminutives

So, how can you, as an English-speaking learner, get the hang of Russian diminutives? Here are a few tips to help:

1. Listen and imitate. Pay close attention to how native speakers use diminutives in different situations. Notice the little things: the tone, the mood, the context, and how people react.
2. Practice with friends or tutors. Try using diminutives in your conversations and ask for feedback. Russians usually love it when foreigners pick up on this part of the language—it sounds really cute to them. Build your own vocabulary. Start with common words and names and learn their diminutive forms. Make a list of your favorites and try them out. Keep adding new ones as you go. This will make your Russian sound way more natural.
3. Be mindful of context. Use diminutives mostly with people you know well and avoid them in formal situations or with strangers. Using them at the wrong time can feel awkward or confusing. When in doubt, just use the standard form.
4. But don’t be afraid to have fun with them! When you’re with friends or in casual settings, feel free to play around and even invent your own diminutives—Russians do this all the time. It’s a great way to get a real feel for the language.

So, you’ve seen that Russian diminutives make the language warmer, more playful, and more emotional. They help you sound more natural and allow you to connect with people on a deeper level.

Learning Russian? You might also like...

1. Laughing is Learning: Five Cartoons for Russian Learners
2. An Overview of Russian's Case System
3. Tips to Hack Slavic Vocabulary
4. Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook

A language is, famously, a “dialect with an army and a navy.” Which is to say that languages, and how they are categorized, are always subject to ideological influence. As a result, these linguistic boundaries are far more fluid than they may appear at first glance. The question of “is this a language or dialect?” is primarily a political rather than linguistic one.

Language as National Identity

The idea of a national people being defined by a national language is a comparatively new one. Across many parts of the world, it was common to switch frequently between languages without strongly identifying with any one in particular. You might have used one language with your parents, another at the market, and yet another in spiritual worship. Latin, as one notable example, was reserved exclusively for scholarly and religious pursuits.

Yet today, we take it for granted that language is seen as a marker of belonging to a particular nation of people, just like flags, currency, and passports. This is at the crux of these “language vs. dialect” complications.

Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian: One Language or Four?

A few decades ago, the languages today known as Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian were considered a single language, Serbo-Croatian. When Yugoslavia fell apart, so did the idea of a unified language.

Key word being “idea,” because the speakers of Serbo-Croatian’s current successors still understand each other completely in speech, and almost always in writing. But the name of the thing is sometimes just as important as the thing itself. The question of whether these are four languages or simply dialects of one language is a topic of ongoing debate.

Dialects can gradually branch off into their own fully-fledged languages from geographic isolation. That was definitely not the case here. Renaming the language was a way of claiming it as one’s own and not anyone else’s, regardless of any objective linguistic reality. This is a bit like if the United States were to decide that the country will no longer use the English language but instead adopt the more patriotic “American language.”

Language and Ideology

Just as politics played a role in breaking up Serbo-Croatian, it also helped spark its unification in the first place. In 1850, two linguists —one Serbian, one Croatian— led the formulation of a “literary agreement” around a set of grammar and orthography conventions that later formed the basis of standard Serbo-Croatian.

Notably, these linguists all shared a common political goal of greater national unity among the South Slavic peoples, a school of thought that would soon evolve into Yugoslavism. Their document opened with the assertion that “one people need one literature.”

Once you make the association of nationhood with a single national language, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. The same logic that once brought the language together would later be used to divide it.

Hindustani, Hindi and Urdu: A Colonial History

The situation is strikingly similar with Hindustani, an umbrella term used for the Hindi and Urdu languages as well as a range of colloquial registers that lie somewhere between the two, all of which are mutually intelligible in spoken form. Even today scholars often refer to Hindi and Urdu as “one language with two scripts,” separated mainly by modern political and religious identities.

The separation began in the 1800s, a period when British authorities in northern India were constantly tinkering with official language policies around local variations in speech and writing. Their efforts at standardization ended up sparking a bitter rivalry over which variety, Hindi or Urdu, should be the official language of education and administration.

Advocates of both Hindi and Urdu positioned themselves in relation to the elevated status of English under British rule, each seeking to expand linguistic influence by promoting theirs as the more legitimate historical language of the people. Hindi in particular also came to be strongly associated with the Indian independence movement.

In time, appeals to non-Western or non-colonial tradition would dovetail with religious demarcations associating Hindi with Hindus in North India, and Urdu with Muslims in Pakistan.

The linguistic divide grew in symbiosis with political developments that would lead to the eventual 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan along religious lines.

Print Media and the Power of the Written Word

The main contention was over the writing system: Devanagari-written Hindi versus the Perso-Arabic script of Urdu. For a long time, this was a marginal distinction. Script use did not always correlate to dialect or language, and most literature was passed through oral tradition anyway.

But as new technologies enabled the spread of print media, written language became a far more powerful tool of influence. The first stages of the Hindi-Urdu rivalry took place primarily in journals and newspapers, as well as educational institutions. Mass-produced literature facilitated the mass production of a standardized language (or dialect, or register, or… you get the point).

The Chinese (Counter)example: Political Cohesion as Linguistic Unity

The “dialects” of Chinese are in some ways a mirror image of the two earlier examples. The main varieties of Chinese are not mutually intelligible and certainly much further apart than, say, Serbian and Croatian or Hindi and Urdu, but remain united under the cultural banner of China and the Chinese language.

Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are said to be around as different as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet while many European nations redrew their borders throughout the centuries, China continued to, for the most part, maintain cohesion as a single political entity.

Still, Mandarin was only standardized as a national lingua franca in the last hundred years or so, with the goal of national unity.

Navigating Dialects as a Language Learner

National or regional dialect distinctions are common among a wide range of languages — Spanish and Arabic being the best known, along with German and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish).  

Additionally, almost every language has a more formal, standard variety that is taught in most textbooks and learner-oriented materials. This official standard can sometimes differ wildly from how the language sounds in daily conversation.

Start with the standard version of the language

As a language learner, there’s nothing wrong with starting with the standard language, which will have more resources available for self-study. In fact, this is almost always the recommended method. Even in remote areas, most native speakers know how to converse in both standard and regional dialects, having learned the more formal standard at school.

But you can (and should!) still work on comprehending the local dialect(s) of your interest, even if you can’t fully replicate them yourself. You only need to know how to say something one way, but you need to be able to understand all the different ways it may be communicated to you.

As a beginner, focus on just one language or dialect

The one you choose is up to you, of course, but avoid switching it up for at least the first few months until you get to a comfortable A2 level. It will be much easier to decipher the nuances between various dialects once you have a solid foundation in one of them.

This is the same logic behind avoiding “resource overload” at beginner stages. It’s better to choose one or two methods and stick with them to the end, rather than starting seven different textbooks and never finishing any.

Unless…

One big exception to the above is if you are learning a smaller language or dialect without many learning materials. In this case, even as a beginner, you may want to incorporate additional varieties that offer more robust resources for self-studiers.

Learners of Bosnian and especially Montenegrin will struggle to find sufficient resources without supplementing their studies with better-established Serbian and/or Croatian options. Some Urdu learners selectively use Hindi materials for grammar review or listening comprehension. Valencian learners might fall back on more widely available Catalan courses. With smaller languages, it’s hard to be too picky.

A word of caution: this method only works when there’s sufficient overlap in both grammar and basic vocabulary, which does not always correlate with mutual intelligibility. Afrikaans and Dutch, for instance, are largely mutually intelligible but have too many fundamental grammar differences for learners to be able to mix resources effectively. For example, Dutch has three grammatical genders, while Afrikaans has none. The same is usually said for Czech and Slovak, where differing verb conjugations would likely confuse beginner students.

Talk with native speakers, regardless of their dialect

These in-person interactions are typically the most rewarding moments in any language learning journey, so cherish the opportunity!  

People all talk differently anyway, depending on age, class, social circle, and myriad other factors beyond regional or national background. Be ready for diverse, even conflicting opinions on grammar and vocabulary from both your teachers and everyday speakers — this is the reality of languages, which are always shifting and evolving, even if some would prefer that they didn’t.

Don’t worry too much about using the “wrong” word. Most people really will not care, especially since you’re learning the language from scratch. That said, you’re probably better off not disputing any “corrections” you receive, even if you know that it’s actually only a regional distinction.

As an intermediate learner, introduce more regional variety

Now that you have a base in the language, it would be a shame to miss out on its full cultural breadth. If you’re studying a language on Glossika with multiple regional or national variants available (including Arabic, Croatian/Serbian, Portuguese, Spanish or Vietnamese), consider choosing one course for focused study while dabbling in another on listening-only mode, selectively introducing specific topics for passive familiarity.

Once you begin absorbing content in your target language, you’ll also find that these national or regional delineations are not so clear-cut after all.

Reggaeton from Latin America is heard all over Spain. Bollywood films from India enjoy a massive following in Pakistan despite official government bans. North Koreans risk prison to watch smuggled South Korean dramas.

Conclusion

Who gets to define a language? Government officials? Academics and writers? Our contemporary reality shows a murky mix, but as learners, we would do well to consider the biggest group of all: everyone who uses it.

Whether it’s the songs they sing along to or the people they talk to, it turns out that native speakers rarely confine their language to strict geographic borders. Learners shouldn’t, either.

Interested in learning more about dialects?

• The Diverse Voices of Korea: An Exploration of South Korean Dialects
• The Future of Taiwanese Hokkien in a Mandarin-Dominant Taiwan
• Differences Between Kurmanji (Northern) and Sorani (Central) Kurdish
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

I have to admit it, I used to be one of those people who thought that memorizing grammar was the key to becoming fluent. I wrote all the rules on tiny post-its and taped them all around my room. Eventually, I could recite them even in my sleep. I was proud of myself… until I wasn’t.

I remember when I first tried to actually speak with a language exchange partner… well, let's just say it wasn’t pretty. Then I stumbled upon something that completely changed my approach to learning languages: stories.

In this article, I’ll explain why stories are the perfect tool for absorbing grammar patterns effortlessly, how to create a simple action plan to make the most of your reading and how to choose the right kind of stories.

Why Your Brain Learns Grammar Better in Context

Do you remember how you learned your native language as a kid? Your parents didn’t hand you a chart explaining the past perfect tense. You heard "If I were you..." in conversations until it just made sense. Your brain naturally absorbed it all.

Stephen Krashen identified this pattern back in the 1980s with his comprehensible input theory. The basic idea is that we acquire languages by being exposed to content that's slightly above our current level. Krashen called this "i+1" — your current level plus one step up. You need to understand the overall message even if you don't know every word.

This was huge because it explained why traditional methods felt so painful. When you're memorizing conjugation charts, you're learning about the language. When you're reading a story, desperately wanting to know if the main character survives, you're acquiring the language.

Research backs this up from multiple angles. One study found that students learning grammar through contextual games made way fewer errors than those using traditional methods. Their brains were processing grammar as part of meaningful situations… exactly like Krashen predicted! Another study compared contextual learning and memory retrieval for long-term retention. They found that context helped people understand grammar during practice sessions. Having to use those patterns from memory led to a huge improvement in long-term retention.

This research matched exactly what I experienced when I started learning through stories instead of textbooks.

How Stories Make Grammar Easier to Learn

I used to avoid reading in other languages because I always felt the pressure of knowing each and every word. Eventually, I got bored of looking up every third word and decided to try Krashen’s approach. I picked an engaging short story above my level, hid my dictionary, and just started reading for enjoyment.

It was hard at first, but gradually I found myself understanding grammar I had never studied. Past perfect would just consistently appear in sentences, and somehow I'd know what it meant because the story context made it obvious.

It felt like cheating because I wasn’t “studying” hard enough. But then my speaking improved more in a month than it had in the previous year of traditional study. That was enough to convince me.

Let's see how exactly stories help you to absorb grammar efforlessly.

1. Stories Repeat Patterns

Stories do one thing that grammar books can't: they keep repeating the same patterns in different situations without you even noticing. A good mystery uses past tense hundreds of times, but you're too busy figuring out who did it to realize you're getting grammar lessons.

Let's compare that to conjugation charts now. I'll use a Spanish example here: 'Él habló, ella habló, ellos hablaron' (he spoke, she spoke, they spoke). You can try to memorize these and forget them the next day and start over. Or you can discover them in stories where the detective habló to witnesses, the mother habló about her missing son, and the neighbors hablaron about what they saw. The grammar is the same, but your brain remembers what it cares about. And nobody really cares about a chart.

2. Stories evoke emotions

Emotions make new grammar patterns stick better too. Which sentence would you find more interesting to read: "María went to the store to pick up her prescription" or "María sprinted to the pharmacy, panicking, knowing it closed in three minutes and her kid's life-saving medicine ran out hours ago...”? The second example grabs your attention because suddenly you are emotionally invested in the story, wondering if Maria’s son will survive. Grammar isn’t just a rule anymore, it’s a tool that brings stories to life.

3. Stories make grammar intuitive

Let’s take a traditional grammar explanation:

"Imperfect describes ongoing past actions while preterite describes completed actions.”

Same thing in a story:

"Ana cantaba en la ducha cuando sonó su teléfono. Era su jefe con noticias terribles." (Ana was singing in the shower when her phone rang. It was her boss with terrible news.)

Observe how stories teach you exactly when to use each tense: one sets the scene (singing) while the other crashes into it (phone rings).

This is exactly what Krashen meant by comprehensible input: you're absorbing grammar naturally through meaningful context. The story makes the grammar intuitive because it matches how we experience life.

When my students encounter the imperfect and preterite tenses through stories, they don't memorize rules. They develop an intuitive feel for when each one sounds right. And that intuition stays with them long after they've forgotten the textbook definitions.

Your Grammar-Through-Stories Action Plan

Here's the system I developed:

Phase 1: Story-First Reading

Just read. Don't analyze anything yet. If you're thinking about grammar while reading, you're doing it wrong. Your brain needs to fall for the story first. Care about characters and wonder about what happens next.

Goal: get hooked. Will she solve it? Do they end up together? Who's lying? When your brain cares about the outcome, pattern recognition will follow.

Phase 2: Grammar Detective Work (The Spotlight Method)

Now the fun part. Go back and start hunting those patterns.

Pick one grammar structure you want to focus on. For example, past tense. Now, grab different colored highlighters or use digital color-coding. Yellow for preterite, blue for imperfect and green for past perfect.

Each time you spot one pause and ask yourself: why this tense here? What if the author used the present instead? How would that change the story?

Phase 3: Active Practice

Now’s the time to use what you found:

• Story Timeline Reconstruction - Create a simple timeline of the story's events using the grammar patterns you colored. This will force you to understand why the author switched between different tenses at different moments.
• Character Perspective Switches - Pick a scene and rewrite it from another character's viewpoint. If the original said "Juan llegó tarde a la reunión,"… how would Juan tell that story? "Llegué tarde porque el metro se retrasó..." This helps you to actively use the grammar patterns instead of just recognizing them.
• Retelling the Story - Tell the story to yourself in your own words using the structures you've been studying. Please don't worry about being perfect because perfection is the enemy of progress.
• Spaced Repetition Practice - Create your own spaced repetition system with the sentences you highlighted. Review them periodically to reinforce the patterns you discovered through stories. Platforms like Glossika also focus on learning through sentences rather than isolated vocabulary, which aligns perfectly with this story-based method.

Phase 4: Create New Stuff

Final step: write your own story. Write what happens after, before, or change the ending completely.

When you create original content using those patterns naturally, they move from conscious knowledge to automatic processing. You stop thinking about grammar rules and start thinking about communication.

How to Choose the Right Stories

Not all stories work equally well for this approach. Skip the "educational content disguised as entertainment." You know, the "Pedro visits the bank to practice polite conversation" stuff. In short, if it was written by grammar committees… run.

Instead, pick stories that you actually want to read. The engagement factor is what matters most. If the story doesn’t excite you, you shouldn’t waste your time reading it.

Often, students obsess over finding stories at their “exact level”. Don’t do that. Go one level above what feels comfortable but slightly challenging at the same time. One that makes you keep turning pages. This will stretch your brain and help you pick things up naturally.

Bonus points for stories with built-in learning support:

• Comprehension quizzes that assess your understanding of the plot
• Vocabulary flashcards that show you words in the story context (instead of random lists)
• Writing practice prompts that let you create text using the grammar patterns of the story

If you’re a beginner, start with graded readers that have engaging plots and characters. Choose the stories where you actually care about what happens next.

As you improve, gradually move to authentic materials written for native speakers. That's when your brain shifts from studying the language to using it. When you're having genuine fun, that's when learning happens effortlessly.

Conclusion

When I think about how much time I wasted memorizing grammar rules that I couldn't actually use in conversation, I wish someone had shown me the story approach sooner.

Grammar isn't something to be memorized because your brain is designed to absorb it through meaningful contexts like stories. I’m not saying you should throw away your textbooks completely. But they shouldn't be where your learning starts or ends.

The next time you find yourself struggling with a grammar concept, put down the charts and pick up a story instead. Your brain will thank you, and you'll finally experience the joy of using the language rather than just studying it.

Interested in more language learning tips?

• "Language Laddering", or why you might use a foreign language to learn a foreign language
• Busting Myths about Language Learning at Home
• Enforced Scarcity: What Wordle Teaches Us About Overcoming Procrastination
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Have you ever thought of learning a “dead language”? It may sound like a waste of time since no one speaks it anymore.

Latin can help you to study not just Romance languages like Italian and Spanish but even German. German is actually among the modern European languages whose grammar is most similar to Latin. In this post I'll talk about studying Latin and how it's connected to modern European languages.

The cultural legacy of ancient Rome

Together with ancient Greece, Rome is arguably one of the cultures at the roots of today’s Western world. The impact of ancient Romans on modern political structures, as well as on philosophical and literary thought, is impressive. Try reading Cicero’s De Re Publica, and you’ll find reflections on the concepts of ideal government and justice that are no less relevant today than they were centuries ago. The word “republic” itself comes from the Latin res publica, meaning “public affair.”

In Res Gestae, Emperor Augustus describes in the first person his accomplishments, presenting himself as a just and magnanimous leader. This text provides a unique testimony to how the emperor built his political persona and is still worth analyzing today to reflect on the mechanisms of propaganda and leadership.

What about Stoicism? You’ve probably heard of this philosophical school, but you may not know that, although it originated in ancient Greece, it was ancient Rome that embraced this philosophy and brought it to its fullest expression. Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae (On the Brevity of Life) is a passionate and timeless reflection on how to best spend the time you have and how to live according to nature’s principles.

And if you’re more of the romantic type, you can’t miss Catullus’s love poems for his beloved Lesbia (he’s the one who coined the world-famous expression “Carpe diem!”). Let’s not forget the epic: in Virgil’s Aeneid, a powerful female character, Dido, takes her own life after being abandoned by the hero, who had to pursue his mission of founding what would later become the great Roman Empire. Anyone who’s ever had their heart broken can’t help but shed a tear for the image of the mighty Queen of Carthage, who cannot bear the injury to her dignity and prefers to kill herself rather than live with heartbreak and dishonor.

How to study a language no one speaks today

When studying a language that only exists in written form, there are some significant differences. Much more emphasis is put on grammar and translation than on conversations and communication. Translations are usually only done from Latin into a modern language since there’s no point in translating something into Latin.

This kind of study focuses more on the explicit knowledge of grammar rules and structures. While learning English or Spanish, you may aim to improve your conversation skills and not always worry about getting the verbs and prepositions right. But with a language like Latin, the fastest and most effective way to approach written texts is by really getting confident with grammar because many conversational clues  —  context, mimic, tone of voice —  are absent. This necessity to become confident with grammar is at the same time the greatest challenge of learning a dead language, but also the main advantage because the grammar systems and structures you learn may come in handy when learning other languages.

The cultural references are completely different from those we’re used to: familiar situations like “At the restaurant” and “Booking a hotel room” are going to be replaced by much less frequent contexts like “In the senate” and “At the temple.” That makes for a good challenge!

The two tools that are going to guide you through the mysteries of ancient Rome? A good grasp of grammar and a close relationship with the dictionary will provide you with a variety of examples and help you notice all the different meanings the same word can have when used in different situations or collocations.

Those two skills are going to be dramatically helpful when learning modern languages, too.

This may not sound like a lot of fun to many learners, but do you know what may change your mind? The relationship Latin has to modern languages, many of which inherited a lot from it.

What modern languages inherited from Latin

Here are some grammar structures, vocabulary elements, and general characteristics Latin shares with four of the most widely spoken modern European languages (apart from English): French, Spanish, German, and Italian.

Declension of nouns and use of cases

In Latin, a noun can be declined in four different cases based on its grammar function in the sentence:

If you’re an attentive reader, you may already have found out something peculiar about Latin: it has no articles.

The identical declension system is still in place today in the German language, but with a difference that makes it even more complex: not just the noun but the article too varies based on the grammar role the word plays in the sentence.

In some cases, the difference is only visible in the article: “Die Rose ist schön,” “The rose is beautiful” becomes “Die Farbe der Rose ist schön” in the genitive.

In other cases, the noun changes too: “Der Student ist nett,” “The student is nice,” but “Das Buch des Studenten ist rot,” “The student’s book is red.”

In Italian, French, and Spanish, there are no grammar cases, meaning that the noun itself and its article don’t change based on their role in the sentence. However, nouns are still declined for gender and number and are generally accompanied by different articles:

Not only nouns that refer to people or animals are gendered, but also those that describe objects with no obvious masculine or feminine characteristics. That’s why you should always learn new nouns together with their articles in Italian, French, German, and Spanish. Unfortunately, there’s no general rule. And here’s something even more surprising (and frustrating!): the gender of nouns isn’t always consistent across these languages, as shown below:

Latin nouns are gendered too. Not only that, but in Latin, there are not just two, but three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Of all the modern languages we’re analyzing, only German retains the neuter, as evidenced by nouns like “Das Buch” (the book) or “Das Auto” (the car). An ironic note: “das Mädchen,” meaning “the girl,” is actually neuter, not feminine!

Declension of adjectives

Just like nouns, adjectives also change based on gender, number, and case in Latin, as well as in German. In Italian, French, and Spanish, only gender and number play a role because there are no cases.

In English, we only decline nouns in terms of number (singular and plural), while adjectives are invariable: we’ll say “The nice friend” if it is singular and “The nice friends” if it is plural. We don’t care if the friend is female or male, nor do we worry about whether they’re the subject of the sentence, the object of the verb, or play a different grammar role.

Now, let’s take a look at Latin.

All four were written assuming the friend or friends are the subject of our sentences. If they’re the object or part of a complement (for example, a genitive), both nouns and adjectives take a different suffix!

The same happens in German:

If the friend or friends are no longer the subject of the sentence, articles, adjectives, and possibly nouns all take a different suffix. Funny, isn’t it?

In Italian, French, and Spanish, we don’t need to worry about the grammar role of the friends, but we still need to take their gender and number into account:

Verb tenses

Latin has a complex system of verb tenses: present, three different forms of past (imperfect, perfect, pluperfect), and two futures (simple and perfect). All of them are composed of a single word built with different specific suffixes, for example:

Verbs change depending on the subject:

This is true for all verb tenses. Thanks to these differences, in Latin, you don’t need to always express the subject like in English (the same holds for Italian and Spanish).

The verb system in the modern European languages we’re analyzing differs from the Latin one, especially in that they employ auxiliaries to form compound tenses. Let’s have a look at the past in Italian and German, for instance:

However, both Italian and German resemble Latin in the fact that verb forms change depending on the subject, unlike in English (“Io ho/Tu hai,” “Ich habe/Du hast,” “I have/you have”).

The same happens in Spanish and French: both use “have” as an auxiliary and change form according to the subject.

Note that all four languages can use both “to be” and “to have” as auxiliary, depending on the verb (for example, in Italian, “Io ho mangiato,” “I have eaten,” uses “to have” as an auxiliary, but “Io sono andato,” “I have gone,” uses “to be” as an auxiliary). The auxiliary “to be” is mostly used with verbs that indicate movement or a change of state, like to go and to grow, but there is no fixed rule.  

Subjunctive for hypotheticals

Latin used the subjunctive mood to express wishes, possibilities, doubts, and actions not realized.

The same happens today in Italian, German, French, and Spanish, while it’s less common in English: the verb in the hypothetical if-clause “If I had money…” in English is the same we would use in a sentence that expresses a reality in the past: “I had money.”

The distinction between reality and hypothesis is only evident with the verb “to be”, in fact, we say “I wish I were rich/If I were rich…” and not “I wish I was rich/If I was rich…”

Instead, in Italian, German, French, and Spanish, the distinction exists for all verbs. For example, to say “If I had money…” in Italian we would say: “Se avessi soldi…” (subjunctive) while “I had money” translates to “Avevo soldi” (past tense).

However, there are differences in the way we form a hypothetical sentence. In Latin, we would use subjunctive in both the if-clause and the main-clause because Latin has no conditional: “Si dives essem, multa dona darem” (“If I were rich, I’d give many gifts”). The same happens in  German, with the double use of Konjunktiv II: “Wenn ich reich wäre, würde ich viele Geschenke geben.”

On the other hand, French acts a little differently because it has a subjunctive mood, which is used to express doubts, necessities, or unreal conditions, but in an if-clause, it uses the equivalent of the past as English does, while it employs a conditional in the main clause.

Finally, Spanish and Italian employ subjunctive in the if-clause and conditional in the main clause, for instance: “Si fuera rico, daría muchos regalos.”

Order of the elements in a sentence

In English, the order of the elements in a sentence is rather rigid, exactly because the declension is so meager: we can only say “The dog eats an apple” and not “An apple eats the dog” because if we vary the order, the meaning changes.

Thanks to grammar cases, however, Latin doesn’t have to worry about misunderstandings: if “the dog” is in nominative (the case of the subject) and “an apple” is in accusative (the case of the object), we can safely vary the order without altering comprehension.

The same happens in the German language. However, in a German affirmative sentence, the verb must usually be at the second place. The order of elements in a sentence also varies depending on whether it is a main clause or a subordinate clause.

Spanish, French, and Italian no longer have cases, which means that the sentence order is rather rigid.

Vocabulary

A lot of words we use every day come from Latin! Let’s take a look at some examples from various categories.

• Medical lexicon: Did you know that “medicine” comes directly from the Latin word “medicina”? So do the Italian “medicina”, the French “médecine”, the Spanish “medicina”, and the German “Medizin”.
• What about politics? Words like “senate” and “congress” come straight from their Latin counterparts “senatus” and “congressus” (Italian: “senato, congresso”; French: “Sénat, congrès”; Spanish: “senado, congreso”; German: “Senat, Kongress”).
• The names of many job titles come from Latin, like “engineer,” from “ingeniator”, “he who invents”, or “professor,” from “professor”, “he who teaches” (Italian: “ingegnere, professore”; French: “ingénieur, professeur”; Spanish: “ingeniero, profesor”; German: “Ingenieur, Professor”). The -or suffix is in fact used in Latin to indicate the person who performs the action: from “ingenio”, “to invent”, we get “ingenior.”
• In the economic field, from the Latin “mercatus” and “creditum” we get our “market” and “credit” (Italian: “mercato, credito”; French: “marché, crédit”; Spanish: “mercado, crédito”; German: “Markt, Kredit”)

These are just some examples. Do you still think Latin is a dead language? Think again! Even our words for “computer” come from the Latin verb “computare”, “to calculate!”

Prefixes and suffixes

Many prefixes and suffixes we commonly use in our languages come from Latin. Just to mention some examples:

• “anti-” to indicate the opposite of something: antibody (English), anticorpo (Italian), Antikörper (German), anticuerpo (Spanish);
• “re-” or “ri-” to indicate a repetition: reread (English), rileggere (Italian), relir (French), releer (Spanish)
• “dis-” or “un-” to negate something: disagree (English), disaccordo (Italian), désaccord (French), disacuerdo (Spanish); disconnect (English), disconnettere (Italian), desconectar (Spanish), déconecter (French);
• “pre-” to indicate that something comes first: prepare (English), preparare (Italian), praparar (Spanish), préparer (French).

Final take

That’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? And we’re just scraping the surface! It’s fascinating to explore how closely connected languages are. All this complexity may seem discouraging at first, but if you think about how many similarities and recurring structures are there, you’ll easily see that the more you learn, the easier it gets!

Latin is directly or indirectly at the root of many European languages, so knowing Latin will make it easier for you to recognize and understand the grammar structures you’ll encounter when studying other languages.

Interested in learning more?

• Hack Foreign Vocabulary with the DNA of Language
• Latin's Lifespan: How Do Languages Die Out?
• How to Understand Language Families
• Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Learning Spanish vocabulary can feel overwhelming. There are thousands of words to memorize, and each word has its own nuances and uses. But what if there was a way to learn multiple related words simultaneously, creating natural connections between words that stick in your memory?

Enter the power of word families! These word families are groups of related words with a common root, which lets you learn new words more efficiently. This approach doesn't just help you memorize more words; it also transforms how you understand and use Spanish vocabulary.

Learn Smarter, Not Harder

Our brains are pattern-recognition machines. When we encounter new information, we automatically try to connect it to concepts we already know. This is why learning vocabulary through word families is so effective: it mirrors how our brains naturally process and store information.

Think about how you understand words in your native language. When you hear the word “photographer”, you might instantly connect it to “photograph”, “photography”, and “photographic”. Later on, this type of natural grouping helps you understand new words even if you've never encountered them before. The same exact principle applies when learning Spanish vocabulary by using word families.

Common Root Words & Their Word Families

Imagine that each root word is like the trunk of a tree. From this trunk, we get branches of related words that share the same core meaning but take on additional forms and functions. As you explore each word family below, notice how simple root words grow into rich networks of meaning, giving you multiple vocabulary items for the mental effort of learning one.

Action & Movement

Movement is fundamental to human experience, and Spanish captures this through rich word families that express motion, direction, and change. For example, the versatile root word caminar means “to walk”, the most basic form of movement. This root opens up a network of words that express not just physical movement, but also intangible aspects like companionship and progress toward goals.

Below are some words in the caminar word family, with each tied to walking in distinct ways:

• camino (noun; road) - the physical route you walk on
• caminante (noun; walker) - someone who travels by foot
• caminata (noun; hike) - a longer, more purposeful walk
• acompañar (verb; to accompany) - to walk next to someone
• encaminarse (verb; to head toward) - to direct oneself toward a destination

Similarly, the root construir, meaning “to build”, reveals how Spanish conceptualizes creation and building — both literal and metaphorical. This word family showcases the language's use of prefixes and suffixes to modify meaning, allowing speakers to express everything from the act of building to destruction.

Each word in the construir word family modifies the core concept of building:

• construcción (noun; construction) - the process of building something
• constructor (noun; builder) - a person who builds
• reconstruir (verb; to rebuild) - to rebuild something
• destruir (verb; to destroy) - to take apart what was built
• constructivo (adjective; constructive) - building something in a positive way
• infraestructura (noun; infrastructure) - the fundamental systems built for society

Emotions & Human Experience

The language of emotion in Spanish is particularly rich, with word families that capture subtle gradations of feeling. The root word reír means “to laugh” and exemplifies how Spanish expresses joy and amusement across a spectrum of intensity. From gentle smiles to uncontrollable laughter, this word family demonstrates the precision with which Spanish describes positive emotional experiences.

These related words stemming from reír capture various aspects of joy:

• risa (noun; laughter) - the sound or act of laughing
• risueño (adjective; smiling or cheerful) - someone who laughs easily or is close to laughter
• sonreír (verb; to smile) - a gentler form of laughte
• reírse a carcajadas (verb phrase; to laugh out loud) - intense, uncontrolled laughter
• risible (adjective; laughable) - something so absurd that it makes you laugh

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, dolor means “pain” and its word family explores the nature of pain and suffering. This word family encompasses both physical and emotional pain, showing how Spanish often blurs the line between bodily and emotional experiences.

The dolor word family below expresses pain in different ways:

• doloroso (adjective; painful) - causing pain
• doler (verb; to hurt) - to feel pain
• indoloro (adjective; painless) - without pain
• adolorido (adjective; sore) - experiencing an achy, persistent pain
• condolencia (noun; condolence) - an expression of sympathy for pain

Nature & Environment

Nature provides some of Spanish's most productive word families, reflecting the deep connection between language and environment. The root flor means “flower” and opens up a collection of practical terms surrounding the growth and cultivation of flowers.

Some of the words in the flor word family are:

• florero (noun; vase) - container for flowers
• florecer (verb; to bloom) - the act of flowering
• florista (noun; florist) - person who works with flowers
• floricultura (noun; floriculture) - the propagation of flowers
• floración (noun; flowering) - the process of blooming

The root mar means “sea” and reflects everything from natural tidal phenomena to human maritime activities. The derivatives demonstrate how deeply the concept of the sea has influenced Spanish vocabulary, even extending to metaphorical uses describing abundance or vastness.

Maritime vocabulary words anchored by mar includes:

• marinero (noun; sailor) - person who works on the sea
• marea (noun; tide) - the sea's movement
• marejada (noun; swell) - strong sea movement
• submarino (noun; submarine) - under the sea
• ultramar (noun; overseas) - beyond the sea
• un mar de diferencia (noun phrase; a world of difference) - a difference as vast as the sea

Daily Life & Objects

The objects we interact with on a daily basis generate some of Spanish's most practical and frequently used word families. The root casa, meaning “home”, builds a word family that extends beyond shelter to also encompass social relationships.

The casa word family expresses the concept of home in various ways:

• casero (noun; landlord, adjective; homemade) - related to home or house management
• casita (noun; cottage) - small house
• casona (noun; mansion) - large house
• caserío (noun; hamlet) - group of houses
• casamiento (noun; wedding) - the joining of households

The libro root means “book” and gives us multiple terms that connect to the world of ideas and learning. The derivatives demonstrate the different ways literary culture has influenced Spanish vocabulary.

The libro word family includes multiple similar words related to books:

• librería (noun; bookstore) - where books are sold
• libreta (noun; notebook) - small book for notes
• libresco (adjective; bookish) - characteristic of books
• bibliotecario (noun; librarian) - person who manages books
• libreto (noun; libretto) - book containing opera text

Abstract Concepts

Abstract concepts generate some of Spanish's most intellectually rich word families. The root tiempo, meaning “time”, flows through Spanish vocabulary to connect temporal concepts to weather patterns and human experiences. This multifaceted word family reveals how Spanish speakers conceptualize time as a force that shapes events, weather, and opportunity.

The tiempo word family generates:

• temporal (adjective; temporary) - lasting for a time
• temporada (noun; season) - period of time
• contemporáneo (adjective; contemporary) - belonging to the same time
• tempestad (noun; storm) - time of severe weather
• contratiempo (noun; setback) - something that works against time
• intempestivo (adjective; untimely) - happening at the wrong time

The verdad root means “truth” and anchors a word family that explores truth in all its manifestations. This collection of related terms reveals how Spanish approaches the concept of truth not just as factual accuracy, but as a spectrum of certainty and believability.

The related words in the verdad word family:

• verdadero (adjective; true) - aligned with truth
• verificar (verb; to verify) - to confirm truth
• veraz (adjective; truthful) - speaking truth
• verosímil (adjective; plausible) - appearing to be true
• verdaderamente (adverb; truly) - in a truthful manner

Practicing Word Families Effectively

To master these word families, you can incorporate them into your routine in various ways by grouping them in your learning process and testing your understanding of them together.

Contextual Learning

Read Spanish content that focuses on specific themes. For example, if you're studying nature-related words, read articles about hiking, gardening, or marine biology. On the other hand, if you’re interested in a particular hobby, like photography, cooking, or chess, seek out Spanish content focused on these topics. You’ll often find that many of the new words you learn will sound very similar to each other since they belong to the same word family. This method exposes you to word families in their natural habitat and helps you understand how native speakers use related terms together.

Creative Writing Exercise

Write short stories or paragraphs using multiple words from the same family. For example, create a story about house hunting using various words from the casa family, or describe a marine adventure using words from the mar family. This active practice helps cement the relationships between words by reinforcing their shared roots in a memorable context. Additionally, crafting narratives around themed vocabulary can help you to explore subtle differences in meaning, usage, and connotation within the word family.

Strategic Flashcard Creation

Create themed flashcard decks that group related words. Instead of random vocabulary lists, organize cards by word families. This helps your brain create stronger connections between related terms and improves long-term retention by leveraging your natural ability to associate linked concepts. Structuring flashcards this way also encourages deeper engagement by helping you compare nuances and spot patterns in prefixes or suffixes, which further solidifies mastery of new words.

Building Your Spanish Fluency

Learning vocabulary through word families creates mental “folders” that make both learning and recall more efficient. Start with themes that interest you most, whether that's food, travel, or technology, and watch your Spanish vocabulary grow exponentially as you discover new connections within each word family. Before long, you'll find yourself naturally recognizing and using related words, thinking in Spanish more fluently, and expressing yourself with greater precision and confidence.

Learning Spanish? You might also like...

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4. Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook

A little over a year ago I set out on a challenge to learn 12 languages in 12 months. I’m a linguist by training, but I realize that even for a linguist it’s a little bit of a crazy challenge. The thing is that I love learning languages and I find that I do it better and enjoy it more when I’m spurred by a tight deadline.

A journey without a blueprint

Originally, I thought I’d stick with the more familiar languages to make it more doable but I discovered that I needed diversity to keep my mind going and excited, so I ended up studying languages as distinct as Finnish, Thai, Arabic, and Yaqui (an endangered Uto-Aztecan language), to name a few.

I didn’t have a clear strategy when I started. But over time, some patterns emerged.

1. Immersion was inconsisnent across languages:
   With languages that don’t have very complicated grammar, like Thai, I was able to jump straight into listening, right after learning to produce and recognize the five tones. With Finnish, on the other hand, I needed an in-depth overview of the grammar before jumping into native content.
2. Maintaining all the languages also turned out to be impossible:
   At first, I tried to keep reading/listening in the previous languages after I jumped into a new one, but that quickly became unsustainable, so I had to say goodbye to each previous language before embarking on a new one.

My original motivation was to share my passion for linguistic diversity with the readers of my newsletter, but I also learned more about the language learning process than I could ever imagine.

Here are the main takeaways from my year of languages.

Mindset is everything

I have found over and over again that mindset is everything. If you approach your learning journey with the growth mindset (i.e. “I don’t know it yet but I will know it”) things will flow. In scientific terms (according to HubermanLab and others), consciously cultivating a growth mindset lets you leverage dopamine dynamics and helps you make the effort the reward itself.

The best way to cultivate a growth mindset, I’ve found is by having a goal that is motivating enough and through practice. When you set little achievable goals over and over again, your mind learns to get excited just from seeing the challenge because it knows it will achieve it.

Create an environment of need

Our brains and bodies have evolved to conserve energy and will not make unnecessary efforts unless in an environment of pressing need. A baby acquires her first language because she needs to communicate with the world. That’s true for adults too. If you end up in a place where no one speaks your language, you will have no choice but to learn the local language to get around.

Granted, not everyone can move to a remote village in Southern France to learn French, but you can always create little immersion bubbles throughout your learning process. Whenever possible, I tried using learning materials that didn’t babble at me in English and didn’t make life easy for me by offering translations but left me to figure things out from the context.

Set the right goal

It helps to always have a goal, no matter where you are in your learning journey. But this goal can’t be “learn Italian by the end of the year.” Fluency is a vague concept that makes for a very frustrating goal. You can have “finish the Polish textbook by March” or “listen to all A2 sentences on Glossika in Portuguese” as your goal but an ideal goal would have something to do with language use. For example “learn enough Thai to place my order in Thai next time I go to that Thai restaurant” or “understand one episode of Peppa Pig in Finnish” by the end of the month.

Make it enjoyable

Watching learner videos and listening to boring scripted beginner dialogues just didn’t do it for me. I preferred to go straight for the material that was way above my level but interesting. When you’re watching your favorite series in your target language and on the 5th listen you can suddenly understand what the main character is saying, it is very rewarding.

Of course, going way above your level is not going to cut it either. You have to understand what’s going on even if you don’t understand everything, and even if you have to strain to understand it. But if you have zero knowledge of Thai, just sitting there and listening to Thai and not understanding anything will not make your brain magically soak Thai.

You get better at it the more you do it

I am lucky enough to always have been pretty quick at figuring out and internalizing grammatical patterns. But I found that no matter your starting point, you can still get better at it the more you do it. With Finnish (my first language for this particular challenge), it took me weeks before I felt confident reading, but by the time I was learning Kurmanji Kurdish (my tenth language), I felt confident jumping straight into reading after just a day or two with the language.

Learn about how you learn best

No one learning method and no one tool is gonna work for everyone. It can be very frustrating to embark on a program developed by someone and touted by your friends only to find out that it doesn’t work for you. The thing is, just like we have different bodies, we also have different brains. What works for one person will not work for another.

Some people learn best in the morning, some in the afternoon. Some people jump straight into speaking, others prefer to read and acquire extensive vocabulary first. Some people need explicit grammar instruction, other people can’t stand it and would just rather learn by doing, reading, listening, and internalizing grammar intuitively. Learning how you learn best is just as important as learning itself.

Memorizing word lists doesn’t work

Memorizing random vocabulary items doesn’t work. Our brain is designed to make connections between things and is really bad at remembering random pieces of information. Sentence memorization is better because it lets you remember words in context, and even then what you really need is repetition. Unlike individual words, sentences, repeated at strategic intervals (spaced repetition), stayed in my memory, making it easy to form new sentences based on the ones I already knew.

Hardwon knowledge is retained better

At the beginning, I would write down words in pretty notebooks and organize conjugation tables in visually compelling ways, hoping that the process of writing would help me remember them better. But the opposite happened. The minute I’d write something down, it seemed that my brain would decide, “Ok because it’s on a piece of paper now, we don’t need to make an effort to remember it.”

I’ve found that information that your brain worked hard for is retained better than information that has been spoonfed to you.

For instance, when you read or listen to something, it is tempting to look up every unfamiliar word. However, I found that when I resisted that temptation and let my brain figure things out from the context, it retained that information better.

Learning scientists call this phenomenon “desirable difficulty”, the idea being that intentionally making things more difficult makes your brain work harder and improves long-term learning outcomes.

More hours doesn’t equal better learning

In addition to being a language-learning enthusiast, I happen to be a working single parent, meaning I didn’t have unlimited hours to devote to language-learning pursuits. But what I’ve found out this year is that you don’t need many hours. In fact, many hours can be counterproductive. Consistency and intensity are important. But the most I could ever do in one session is 2 hours, and the ultimate most I could do in a day is 3-4 hours. After that, my brain would be too exhausted and any additional learning would be counterproductive. That applies not only to active studying but also to listening to Glossika sentences, and watching content in my target language because while the latter is mostly fun times it’s still mentally taxing.

Treat it as a game, embrace imperfection

Most of the obstacles in language learning are psychological. We’re afraid to form a sentence in a new language because we don’t want to embarrass ourselves. To overcome these, I found that it’s best to approach learning as a game, and embrace imperfection.

Not just that. Embracing imperfection is important at all stages: when you’re just starting out, but also - and especially -  further on, when you’re not a beginner anymore and when you think you should be able to speak better. Just let yourself make mistakes, wherever you are in your learning journey, and celebrate your own child-like audacity in getting out there and trying no matter what.

It's ok to learn a language and let it go

I’m not going to maintain all the languages I’ve learned this year. I’m ok with that. Maintaining the language is a lot of work, and I don’t have time in my day to maintain 12 new languages. So apart from a few favorites (perhaps, Thai, Arabic, and Yiddish) the rest of them will probably slowly fade away. Does it mean I just wasted hours of my life? I don’t think so. I love the thrill of learning a new language, and I will always enjoy this journey even if I know it’s not forever.

Besides, learning a language gives you so much more than the language itself. You learn how to learn better, you learn not to be afraid of making mistakes, and you learn not to take yourself too seriously. Not just that: every new language shows us a different way of viewing the world, teaching us that nothing is set in stone and that every assumption we have about how the world works can be questioned.

Want more language learning tips?

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French has always been a popular choice among language learners, and it is currently still ranked as the fifth most widely spoken language in the world.

When it comes to the features of the language, its unique pronunciation is distinctive and particularly melodic, so much so that French is considered the most romantic language in the world. Learners are eager to tackle the challenge of mastering it, aiming to capture the allure of native speakers.

However, studying French is also riddled with pitfalls that many learners encounter sooner or later, and in this post I'll share what they are and how to overcome them with the best self-study strategies you can start using right away.

Common challenges

Like many languages spoken nationwide with a rich history, French boasts a number of variants, including various dialects and local accents. The common challengaes for all French learners, despite the dialects, are:

• Fast Speech

Keeping up with the fast speech for which Romance languages are notorious is a wild ride; in this aspect, it is no different from Spanish or Italian. Anyone who has ever tried to tackle these two will know what I am talking about.

• Pronunction

Closely connected to its fast speech, that appealing pronunciation comes with a set of intricate rules as well as numerous exceptions. For instance, determining whether or not to pronounce the final consonant of a word can feel confusing. While the final ‘s’ in Paris is silent, in a word like bus it is pronounced.  In plus, the ‘s’ is usually silent unless it appears at the end of a sentence, where it is pronounced. The rules of liaison (the practice of fusing sounds between words) and certain exceptions add to the complexity, as pronunciation can vary depending on the word sequence.

• Spelling

To complicate matters further, there is little correspondence between the spelling of words and how they are pronounced.

• Grammar

Moreover, French grammar can feel especially overwhelming, particularly due to its abundance of particles and its complex verbal system, which is full of exceptions and strict rules regarding the subjunctive mood.

My personal journey learning French

Like many learners, my experience learning French has been a bumpy road filled with difficulties. I studied it at university, where the courses were firmly grounded in linguistic theory but included only one hour of speaking practice per week. While this theoretical knowledge helped me understand the intricacies of the language, I struggled to make progress in my conversational skills and speaking confidence.

My classmates agreed, so we arranged to have a couple of extra hours for independent conversation sessions. I was also fortunate to have a native speaker in my household; my French-born grandma often switched to her native language without warning to ensure I would get some extra speaking practice.

Aside from the additional sessions with my peers, I also sought effective strategies to give that extra boost to my individual study sessions.

Activities

Drawing on advice from trusted professors, my grandma's hands-on approach, and my own trial-and-error experiences, here are the activities that worked best for me in building confidence in processing and decoding sounds on the one hand, and in consolidating and broadening my vocabulary on the other.

• Dictation

Dictation exercises are often included in the curriculum of French courses, and they highlight the importance of proper spelling in the language. This is especially important given the frequent gap between pronunciation and orthography (the way sounds are written), which is often one of the biggest challenges not only for learners but also for native speakers themselves.

In fact, should you ever feel confident in your abilities, you can even participate in one of the many dictation competitions that attract both learners and native speakers.

I will admit that I was very skeptical at first, thinking dictation was an activity best suited for children just beginning to learn a language by playing with its sounds. I believed that, for adults, reducing listening practice to dictation could be too simplistic an approach.

However, I quickly discovered the numerous benefits of dictation and realized how misguided my assumptions had been.

First of all, it addresses the oral aspect of French from a different angle: since it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by fast speech and lose track, regular dictation practice helps you develop an intuition for how the 'wall of text' you hear can be broken down into smaller words.

This, in turn, allows you to gradually fill in the gaps for the parts you missed, helping you get closer and closer to the overall meaning of the text or sentence. Developing this intuition is an extremely reliable resource and will prove a very useful stepping stone in your journey toward mastering listening proficiency.

And the best part is, you can practice all on your own! There are plenty of online resources available (e.g., by typing ‘dictée français’ on any search engine of your choice), and you can easily adapt classic listening exercises to fit this task.

• Memorization of example sentences

This technique was championed by French author and teacher Daniel Pennac, who, in his autobiographical novel School Blues, shared numerous strategies he uses with his high school students to prepare them for their exams.

He noticed that students tended to make the same grammatical mistakes in their essays and began to wonder how he could help them overcome the issue. After some trial and error, he realized that having the students memorize excerpts from authoritative literary sources equipped them with a stable reference for correct particle and accent usage.

I adapted this approach for myself while learning French by keeping a record of formulations and expressions that were particularly challenging for me, such as the use of the ne explétif.

Obviously, there is no need to go through entire excerpts from philosophical volumes. However, if you gradually compile a collection of example sentence related to language points that you find especially elusive, it can become a valuable learning tool. While it may require significant effort initially, this exercise definitely pays off in the long run.

• Speech shadowing and repetition out loud

This technique involves mimicking and repeating after native speakers in real time, focusing on intonation, rhythm, and accent.

This exercise, for example, helped me unlock the secret to pronouncing nasal vowels — there's no nasal consonant at all after! The vowel and nasal consonant merge into a single nasal vowel, so there’s no need to add the m or n.

• Listening practice reading along subtitles

Watching films with subtitles is a useful method for improving listening skills, as it helps you develop the ability to keep up with natural, fast-paced speech. Similar to dictation, the goal is to pick up the sounds, the separation of words, and the correspondence between the way words are pronounced and the way they are spelled.

This involves picking out TV series, films, or any type of native content. Once you’re familiar with the plot and dialogue, you could give it another go by watching it again without subtitles to further reinforce your listening skills.

This might seem like a given, but it’s especially useful when it comes to the news. If you can find access to official news channels like France 24, this can be very beneficial because news broadcasts often repeat their segments.

Additionally, journalists are typically trained to speak with a neutral accent, as the content is intended for a nationwide audience and for non-native speakers as well.

Moreover, you'll learn relevant vocabulary to discuss and understand current topics, helping you stay up to date with the latest social conversations. The benefits are countless!

• Warm-up activity before every session

Finally, let me state the obvious: by regularly dedicating 5 to 10 minutes to reviewing previously covered topics, I was able to consistently reinforce what I had learned.

Warming up offers several benefits, as you can tailor this activity to your own needs and preferences. It could be a quick grammar exercise using various online resources, or you might write a short text about a topic you covered in your previous session. The sky's the limit!

Final thoughts

I encourage anyone looking to master this beautiful language to persevere and seize every opportunity for practice. Whether it’s watching French films or utilizing any online resources, every little effort can contribute to your success.

Consistency and curiosity are key!

Learning French? You might also be interested in:

1. Le Subjonctif: The French Subjunctive Made Easy
2. How Many Languages are Spoken in France?
3. French Object Pronouns: What They Are and How to Use Them
4. Follow us on YouTube / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Learning a language from home sounds like a pretty ambitious goal. What makes it difficult is that you basically don’t have to, and all our expired vegetables in the fridge and unused gym memberships prove how hard it is to do something when you could just spare yourself the stress.

And yet, many people decide to learn a foreign language at home and successfully follow through. When I first started learning German online, I had no idea how far I could come without leaving my home country. I ended up being able to understand most resources intended for native speakers and speak relatively fluently. It certainly took a lot of effort, but I felt a deep sense of pride for finding ways to connect with a place I had never lived.

But to succeed, I had to find out firsthand that not everything people say about language learning is true.

Common myths that hold you back

Myth #1. You have to be there!

When you’re not living in the target-language-speaking country, it takes a lot of intentional effort to recreate ideal conditions.

Thirty or twenty years ago it would admittedly be very difficult to do so, and that’s probably why to this day we keep hearing that you have to be there to really master a language. Personally, I’d say you have to be there to be forced to learn the language. In the absence of such compelling conditions, you will need much stronger commitment to incorporate learning into your routine and stick to it. Keep it sustainable and varied! Tired of videos? Pick a novel. Find podcasts boring? Try a comedy show. Depending on your level, there’s a lot of accessible materials you can turn to. Even without living abroad.

Myth #2. You need to watch TV series!

TV series are the omnipresent go-to recommendation for people learning a language from home. I recently immersed myself in the German language completely, yet I have watched no more than a couple of TV shows in German. Why?

While visual cues can help you access content that is above your current level, you need to be able to follow a conversation based on language alone and podcasts in this case are a sustainable, time-saving alternative.

Another problem with TV series is the overwhelming abundance of accents, dialects, fast-paced dialogues, colloquial expressions, cultural references and so on. All those elements are present in podcasts too, but in a limited, learner-friendlier way. Most moderators have a neutral accent, while actors prioritize emotional expressiveness. This often means that clear articulation is not their top priority.

Finally, TV series do not usually follow a common thread throughout the episode. Every few minutes, there’s a change of scene, with different characters and overlapping storylines. In contrast, a podcast typically has a clear theme for each episode, making it easier to get back on track if you get lost.

Myth #3. You have to study for the test!

Obtaining a certification can represent an important milestone and a stimulus not to give up your learning journey, although it is by no means necessary. I believe that having an exam date to look forward to can serve as a motivation to keep going — at least it works for me.

However, many students believe that drilling exam-like exercises is the only way to improve their language skills, as if these specific types of activities were the sole path to reaching their target level. The truth is that any kind of practice is valuable! You don’t need to perfect your ability to write formal emails to make progress. Writing a diary entry or an authentic letter to a friend can be just as effective — and definitely more engaging.

Incorporating variety into your practice exposes you to a richer vocabulary and strengthens your overall ability to understand and express yourself, which in turn will help you succeed in your exam. Plus, you won’t feel so bored and discouraged that you actually risk giving up!

Although I found it useful to work through two German certifications during these years — therefore, I needed to familiarize myself with the exam format and recurring themes — I ultimately spent much more time simply writing, speaking, and reading about anything.

So, how did I actually learn German from home?

I decided to learn German at the end of 2022. My goal was to become proficient enough to be able to read articles and express simple concepts, and my first step was to buy and start using the Assimil German course, combined with traditional grammar books. It may not have been particularly fun, but I was looking for the fastest way to confidently employ grammar structures and acquire a decent vocabulary. After about five months, I was able to read and write acceptably, but listening and speaking were still a weak spot for me – that’s the downside of learning by yourself.

It was only after reaching the intermediate plateau that I was able to add variety and entertainment to keep my learning strategy effective and motivating. Here’s what helped me the most:

1. Flashcards

Whoever has experience with the German language knows this: long words, three genders, and an extremely detailed and specific vocabulary. I tried to memorize words by writing them down in a notebook, but after a while, I realized that some words had been noted multiple times because I kept forgetting them. So, I started writing them on small pieces of paper and reviewing about 20 of them every day. Instead of single words, I wrote down common combinations (adjective + noun, verb + preposition) to create sensible chunks of language that I could actually use in sentences.

The best part?
I ended up with about 700 flashcards, and the best part is that I actually memorized and used those words!

 2. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is very good at correcting grammar mistakes and providing example sentences. I would input a text I wrote or the transcription of a three-minute audio file I had recorded and ask it to correct it.

The best part?
Asking why it had replaced a certain verb with a synonym or why my ordering of the complements in the sentence was incorrect. It wasn’t always able to provide satisfactory answers, but it led me to ask the right questions, and then Google and grammar books would do the rest.

3. Instagram accounts

I started following German Instagram accounts related to themes I find interesting, such as languages or science, and the main newspapers and magazines. Reading an Instagram post only takes a couple of minutes, and the content is purposefully catchy, which makes it easier to identify important information and memorize the key words.

The best part?
Reading and writing comments – it is as close to authentic native speakers’ language as it gets, but in written form!

4. An online conversation course, but making the most out of it

I had been studying German for about a year when I decided to enroll in an online conversation course, as I had no one to practice with at home! Unfortunately, most conversation courses tend to be quite unstructured, and if you’re shy or lack confidence, you might find yourself listening to other students without actively participating. If you’re considering joining a course, I recommend selecting one that allows you to get prepared in advance. For instance, knowing the topic of the meeting beforehand allows you to spend time reading articles or watching videos to form your own opinions and familiarize yourself with the relevant vocabulary. You might also consider practicing conversations with yourself by recording and listening to them, so you feel ready to speak up when it’s your turn. It may seem a bit forced and like a lot of extra work, but this is the best way to build the courage you need.

The best part?
The exhilarating feeling of being able to express your own ideas!

5. Conversations with myself

If you don’t feel ready for a conversation course or don’t want to invest money, it doesn’t mean you have no way to practice your speaking skills. I’d suggest trying to speak to yourself! I found it helpful to formulate short monologues on various personal and general topics. Talking to myself allowed me to take all the time I needed without feeling under pressure.

The best part?
Recording the audio files, having the AI correct them, and experiencing firsthand how I became more confident and fluent week after week!

6. A lot of podcasts…but not just any podcast!

The first podcast I listened to was aimed at German learners, and it did wonders for my self-confidence: there I was, sitting in my hometown in central Italy, listening to actual German people speaking their language! And I could understand it! That felt exciting.

After a while, I was ready to jump into the world of podcasts for native speakers – but there’s an overwhelming abundance of free resources in the ARD Audiothek!

How to choose?I focused on podcasts about psychology, sustainability, and science—topics I personally find interesting. I also prioritized podcasts with two moderators to have the chance to listen to a conversation rather than a monologue — featuring spontaneous elements like interrupting each other, making jokes, and so on. Interviews are particularly helpful, because the question-and-answer structure helps follow the conversation even if you don’t understand every word.

The best part?
There’s no limit to the number of interesting episodes you can find, and it never gets boring!

Summing it up

I know – that’s intense. But you don’t necessarily have to do all of those things, or all of them at the same time. It’s ok to focus on what interests you more, or what fits best into your busy daily schedule. I just think that there are a lot of effective ways to actually be surrounded by language without leaving home, and I hope these tips and suggestions will be useful to convince you to try the experience!

Interested in more language learning tips?

• "Language Laddering", or why you might use a foreign language to learn a foreign language
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• Enforced Scarcity: What Wordle Teaches Us About Overcoming Procrastination
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Betty was born in the USA and has lived there her whole life. She started her language-learning journey with Spanish and later tried her hand at French, German, and Russian. Speaking a different language was a big challenge for her, but she never gave up. We asked her how she overcame her mental block speaking Russian, and how Glossika helped her along the way.

Ok, this is stupid:

I was driving and crying so hard I couldn’t see the road. It was yet another meeting with a community of Russian-speaking immigrants where I couldn’t say anything despite having learned Russian for so long.

Everybody was socializing after the meeting. I was sitting there mute and dumb. The feeling was so overwhelming I drove away crying. And then the voice of sanity in my head reached out and said, OK, this is stupid. You either have to make up your mind to go and deal with it how it is and how you are, or stop.

I have voluntarily subjected myself to the immigrant experience in America for just one hour a week. For one hour a week, I am the one with the funny name and the funny accent who can't speak properly. They have to walk into the room and grope for words all the time and they can't drive away from it. That was my wake-up moment when my inner voice told me to stop feeling sorry for myself and just work with what I have.

I turned around and drove back to the meeting. Of course, I was met with total kindness and empathy. I started to work harder, and eventually, things got much better with my speaking. But let me first tell you how I got to that point.

It all started with Spanish

I grew up in an exclusively monolingual environment and personally I knew people who spoke only English. The whole idea of people speaking in a foreign language wasn't completely clear to me.

Early in school, I chose Spanish as my second language. Our school Spanish program seemed to consist of singing. It worked in a way because the words of that song still come back to me even now. But I liked Spanish and I did a lot of studying after school.

When I was in my senior class, a guy sat down next to me once and he was answering the teacher in perfect Spanish. I was stunned by how well he spoke because he was a regular so-called American with a regular American name. And I was like, where did that come from? He told me that he had gone on a sister city exchange program for students. That summer, I applied for it and went to stay with a Mexican family.

It was an amazing experience because I showed up there not understanding spoken Spanish at all and left understanding almost everything. I knew the grammar by that point and had a decent passive vocabulary, but I'd never spoken Spanish with anybody outside of a classroom. After two weeks there things started rapidly improving. It was like when you turn the dial across the radio and it hits and the sound is suddenly clear. That exact experience happened to me with a language.

I was in Mexico for only six weeks, but it changed my life. I began the summer only being able to do uno, dos, tres and came back truly understanding Spanish.

Taking on Russian

When I was at college, I wanted to use my Spanish skills somewhere, and I applied to become a bilingual tour guide at Disneyland. I passed the test but I needed to wait another year before they could find a place for me. When I started working there I asked another guide how long she waited to get her job. I assumed everybody signed up and waited anxiously until they got the call for quite a while. She goes, oh, they took me right away. And she was the one with the Russian language.

It was another turning point for me because I realized that in Southern California a lot of people speak Spanish to some extent. But who speaks Russian? It was back during the Soviet times, and we didn’t have a lot of Russian speakers around. So I applied to the University of California right away to study Russian.

I had no idea what was in store for me.

My class was composed of people whose parents were immigrants living in California. So they already spoke Russian or at least were used to how it sounds. I was in for a really big shock because I had taken a conversational Russian class when my vocabulary consisted of words like vodka and sputnik. I got the fastest set of poor grades I'd ever gotten in my whole life. I realized I had to apply myself.

I put in a lot of effort and I ended up graduating with decent grades, but I didn't understand spoken Russian despite all my efforts. I understood the teacher, but he was speaking in really slow, distinct Russian. However, a couple of times when I tried to talk in Russian with the local shopkeeper, they would just stare at me. In the real world, I couldn’t communicate in Russian at all. I hated this feeling and eventually stopped trying.

Breakthrough in Speaking

I didn’t pursue languages after my graduation. I just kept reading in all my languages, but I didn't have any outlet to talk to anybody for a long time.

At one point, I started going to a community spiritual meeting that was held by immigrants who spoke Russian. I don't think they understood why I was going but they were kind and tolerated me. I went there once a week for six months. At around the six-month mark, the same thing as in Mexico started happening: the dial turned and I started getting them more and more!

I started wanting to speak but I had a block. So I would ask one guy there, how do you say this thing? And he would tell me and I would write it down and memorize it. So little by little, a sentence at a time, I memorized how to say things, but the progress was slow.

Around this time, I stumbled upon Glossika on the web. I saw the interview with Michael Campbell (founder of Glossika) where he was telling a story about riding around in a bus and recording what people said in Chinese. He came to Taiwan as a very young man and he didn't speak Chinese. So he would get on the bus and just ride around all day and take notes about what people were saying to each other. Things like when is the next stop? Can I get a transfer? I have to go shopping etc. Glossika does the same kind of thing for me. After doing that for a while, I got used to hearing the structure of the language, which is critical. I thought it was incredible to get this kind of random exposure to a foreign language.

I can feel like it made a difference. When I’m doing a Glossika session, I feel like I'm sitting on a bus and people are randomly talking about everyday life. Hearing random sentences over and over is what happens to you in life.

I run the app on my way to my Russian-language meeting, and that's enormously helpful. I was at the meeting last Saturday and I was talking and I suddenly realized that I had uttered things I had never said before, and without any second thought! It was the first time in my whole life I said something like this spontaneously. And I know that's Glossika because weird things float around in my head all day long which is great. Things like “these bags are heavy” - I realized that I own that sentence now.

There’s no substitute for speaking

Over the years, it's become clear to me that if you want to speak, you just have to speak. There's no substitute. I used to think that if I just kept studying more grammar I eventually would be good at speaking too. However, I realized that's never going to happen.

One of my friends who is a PhD from Harvard said he learned Russian by reading Anna Karenina. Isn't that crazy? Early on, after I graduated, I copied him and read Anna Karenina in Russian. I was on the first page for hours. However, eventually, I realized that knowing the word for haystacks in Russian is not going to get me anywhere speaking-wise. By reading classical literature you just acquire words that do not come up in conversation. So reading isn't going to cut it if you want to speak. You have to find a way to actually speak.

My outlet for speaking has been the spiritual meeting which I've gone to for many years at this point. I love the people and what happens there. But speaking up there didn’t come easy. My friends think that I’m crazy because I spend so much time on languages. They assume it's easy for me, but the truth is I study all the time. It makes me happy and lights up my brain. It’s an activity I enjoy the same way some people enjoy running or playing an instrument.

Now I’m back at university again, 10 years past the normal retirement age, studying to become a teacher of English as a second language. Now I got a glimpse of how hard English is. I have never understood it before. So I plan to connect my life with languages even more in the future and get an opportunity to travel and teach.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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• Opera Singer to Polyglot: "No character opens their mouth to speak unless they want something"
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Have you ever found yourself staring at a Spanish word, feeling like it looks strangely familiar? You might be looking at a cognate — a word that has a common origin with a similar English word. While some cognates are obvious (like the English word “office” and the Spanish word “oficina”), many more cognates have surprisingly subtle connections. Understanding these etymological connections can significantly boost your Spanish vocabulary acquisition.

In fact, recognizing cognates between English and Spanish is like uncovering a hidden treasure trove of vocabulary that’s been right in front of you all along. And once you start forming deeper connections between Spanish and English, you can transform your language learning experience, making it not only significantly more efficient, but more engaging as well.

Whether you’re just starting out with Spanish as a beginner, or you’re an advanced learner hoping to broaden your vocabulary, the world of cognates can open up more opportunities for fluency and deepen your appreciation for both languages.

The Historical Connection

You may know that Spanish is a Romance language, and English is a Germanic language. But despite belonging to these different language families, Spanish and English share deep linguistic roots: both languages were shaped by Latin, the language of the ancient Roman Empire. This common Latin influence is the primary reason for the remarkable number of cognates between Spanish and English

The Roman influence on Spanish is quite direct. In fact, the term “Romance language” comes from the word “romanicus”, which is a Latin word meaning “of Roman origin”. Beginning in 218 BC, the Romans conquered and ruled over the Iberian peninsula for roughly 600 years. During this time, Latin gradually replaced local languages and would eventually  evolve into the Spanish we know today. This is why Spanish, along with other Romance languages like French and Italian, is considered a direct descendant of Latin.

On the other hand, English has a more complex history with Latin. The Romans began conquering Britain in 43 AD and ruled for nearly four centuries, but their linguistic influence was more limited. Old English, a Germanic language, became dominant after the Anglo-Saxons invasions in the 5th century. However, Latin continued to maintain its status as the language of learning and religion. Many Latin words entered English through scholarly and religious texts, so many English words with Latin roots tend to be longer and more academic.

Albeit through different historical paths, this shared Latin influence has resulted in numerous cognates between Spanish and English. Understanding this historical connection not only explains the existence of cognates but also provides a fascinating look at the evolution of both languages.

Some not-so-obvious cognates

You're probably already familiar with some common Spanish-English cognates, like "familia" and "family", or "agua" and "aqua". These easily recognizable pairs often give early Spanish learners a head start by providing “free vocabulary” that demand  little effort to remember.

However, the world of Spanish-English cognates extends far beyond these obvious examples. Many Spanish words have English counterparts that, while not exactly identical, share both similar sounds and meanings due to their common Latin roots.

Consider the Spanish word "duro," which translates to "hard" in English. At first glance, these words seem unrelated. However, "duro" is etymologically connected to the English word "durable." Both come from the Latin word "durus," meaning “hard” or “lasting”. Understanding this connection can help you remember the meaning of "duro" and its various uses in Spanish, such as in phrases like "trabajar duro" (meaning “to work hard”) or "tiempos duros" (meaning “hard times”).

Let's explore some less obvious cognates that can expand your Spanish vocabulary in surprising ways:

Lumbre - fire or light

The Spanish word “lumbre” is related to the English word “luminous”. Both words are derived from the Latin word “lumen”, which means “light”. While “lumbre” is often used to refer to fire, understanding its connection to light can help you remember its meaning. You’ll find this word in phrases like “hacer lumbre” (meaning “to make a fire”) or “¿tienes lumbre?” (meaning “do you have a light?”).

Indignación - indignation

This noun showcases how prefixes and suffixes often correspond between Spanish and English. Both "indignación" and "indignation" come from the Latin word "indignatio." The prefix "in-" in both languages means "not" or "without," while the suffixes "-ción" and "-tion" denote a state or condition. You might hear this word used in phrases like "expresar indignación" (meaning “to express indignation”) in Spanish news or literature.

Circunspecto - circumspect

This adjective, meaning cautious or reserved, relates to the English word "circumspect", and it is another example of corresponding prefixes and suffixes between Spanish and English. Both words are derived from the Latin word “circumspectus” meaning to consider something carefully. The prefix in the Spanish word “circun-” corresponds to the English prefix “circum-”. In both prefixes, the meaning is “around”. You might describe a careful person as “una persona circunspecta” (meaning “a circumspect person”)

Siniestro - sinister or left

This Spanish adjective might surprise you with its connection to the English word "sinister." Both derive from the Latin "sinister," which originally meant "left" or "on the left side." In Spanish, "siniestro" retained both meanings; it can refer to the left side or to something evil or ominous. You might hear "a diestro y siniestro" (meaning “left and right” or, alternatively, “on all sides”) or "un presagio siniestro" (meaning “a sinister omen”). The connection becomes clearer when you consider that in many ancient cultures, the left side was associated with bad luck or evil. This linguistic link offers a fascinating glimpse into historical superstitions and their impact on language.

Labrar - to work (land) or to till

While “labrar” is a verb, its connection to English is through a noun. It’s related to “labor” in English. Both words are related to the Latin word “laborare”, meaning “to work”. In Spanish, “labrar” often refers specifically to “working the land”, a phrase which can help you remember its agricultural connotations. You might hear phrases like “labrar la tierra” (meaning “to work the land”) or “labrarse un futuro" (meaning “to forge a future for oneself”). The English word "laboratory" also shares this Latin root, originally meaning a workroom.

Tinieblas - darkness

This poetic Spanish word for darkness is a cognate with the more obscure English word “tenebrous”, which means “full of darkness” or “gloomy”. Both words are derived from the latin word “tenebrae”, which also means “darkness”. You might hear this word used in phrases like “en tinieblas” (meaning “in the dark”) or “príncipe de las tinieblas” (meaning “prince of darkness”).

Tips for Recognizing and Using Cognates

Look for patterns

The words I shared above weren't just random examples; there are actually tell-tale signs you can look for to predict if an English word will also have a cognate in

Spanish. Here are several examples to get started with:

You'll also notice patterns in other ways:

• Some grammar points will feel similar (adding -ando to a Spanish verb is similar to adding -ing to an English verb; Spanish also literally says "going to" (ir a) to talk abou things you'll do in the future)
• Many phrases are shared between the languages (judging by → a juzgar por)
• Many cultural conceptions of how the world works are similar (for example, something far in the future is "long term" in English and "a largo plazo" in Spanish — but in Mandadrin, the future is "down!")

Look for English words derived from Latin

Many English words have Spanish counterparts, but given the historical context we discussed above, you’ll may find that the words shared between English and Spanish tend to be more advanced, technical, or literary in nature. The Latin words that entered English tended to come through scholarly and religious texts, so you might have to dig a little bit to find the English counterpart to a Spanish word.

For example, while the common word “dark” doesn’t have a Spanish counterpart (“dark” is Germanic in etymology), the Spanish word for “dark” (tinieblas) does exist in English — it’s “tenebrous”, as we discussed above. There’s a connection there, after all, but you have to look at more advanced English words to find it.

Beware of False Friends

Be aware of false friends: not all similar-looking words have the same meaning. These false cognates can sound so similar, but have entirely different meaning. For example, "embarazada" in Spanish means "pregnant," not "embarrassed."

The Advantages of Etymology For Spanish Vocabulary

Exploring the world of Spanish-English cognates can be a fascinating journey that not only accelerates your Spanish learning but also deepens your understanding of the history between the two languages. By leveraging these linguistic connections, you can also use cognates as a memory aid. When you encounter a new Spanish word, try to think of any English words that sound similar. There's a good chance they might be related!

Interested in history? You might also like...

1. Latin's Lifespan: How do languages die out?
2. Your Alphabet: The History of the Latin Script
3. How to Understand Language Families
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We're sharing insights from an interview Glossika's founder Michael Campbell gave on the Im Learning Mandarin Podcast. Michael has dedicated a significant portion of his life to understanding and mastering languages, and he's lived in Taiwan for most of his life and become proficient in many Chinese languages and dialects along the way.

Listen to the podcast below or read our main takeaways from Michael's story.

I moved to Taiwan at a fairly young age and started with a little bit of a challenge. I wanted to learn Chinese within a certain period of time and see if I could get anywhere with it. My first year in Taiwan was dedicated to learning Chinese. I couldn't afford any formal courses or schools, so I studied on my own. This was happening decades ago, so I didn't have access to the internet. It was just paper and books, and my attemts to communicate with people on the street.

But having an immersion environment for a whole year really took me a long way. I ended up staying in Taiwan, studying Chinese and various dialects of it, working as an interpreter and teaching students.

And here's what I've learned from my decades of experience with Chinese.

Conquer Chinese Tones

Tones are not really a huge obstacle that people make it out to be, because we actually use tones quite extensively in English. You need to shift your mindset about tones, and think of it as of something you're already familiar with. There are some languages that are very much less tonal than English, like French or Spanish, they have their pitch accent on a very specific syllable in a word. In English, we tend to have a lot of ups and downs throughout the sentence.  If you step back and listen to your own speech patterns in English, you can actually start to hear a lot of tone contours that you're using naturally. It's part of the syntax of English.

To master the Chinese tones you need to:

1. Pick a tone you're working on.
2. Repeat it out loud until it starts to sound natural.
3. Combine the tones you're comfortable with into two syllable words.
4. Practice relaxing while speaking to sound more natural.
5. Get as much immersion as you can.

Adopt a specific accent

If you're just starting out with Mandarin, you don't really need to worry about which one you're learning at the moment. However, once you get to the point where you're really refining your pronunciation, you'll need to choose a place you want to identify with. Are you going to speak like a Taiwanese person, or a person from Shanghai or Beijing?

Once you get into that root rut, you start speaking a certain way, and it defines the accent that you're going to use. I once met a Taiwanese person who spoke English with a half-Texan, half-British accent, and it was very confusing. I think she had teachers from various places. It was kind of hard to follow what she was saying. So I think it's really good to have a consistent accent and choose a place you want to identify with.

Forget vocabulary lists

The mistake that many learners make is to kind of cram vocabulary lists in isolation with the direct translation from English. Then they try to put the words together artificially relying on the English sentence structure and logic.

One of my friends who teaches Thai says that when you learn a language so different from your own, you need to "download" the operating system for the new language. I found that to be quite applicable to how I went through the initial stages of learning Chinese, along with the tones and everything else. You try to think in a Chinese context. You have to put everything you say into the Chinese frame of mind. You have to rearrange your thoughts starting with the major things and then go more and more into the details of the sentence. You start with the big and you go small. The same thing applies to anything you add into a sentence in Chinese.

Focus on sentences over words

Sentence learning is an excellent way to learn any language, because without context it's really hard to know how words are actually used. You could memorize a thousand individual words in Chinese, but that doesn't mean you'll get anywhere speaking the language.

I've probably met thousands of Taiwanese people over the years. They've memorized the whole English dictionary, and they can't hold a single conversation. If you don't have the sentence training, then it's really hard to say anything. I know thousands of words in Slavic or other European languages, but I wouldn't be able to speak them at all. The speaking part of a language is always going to be the hardest because you have to pull it out of your head fast enough and your tongue has to be used to making those dance movements and spitting it out fast enough for a native speaker to have the patience to actually wait for you to finish saying what you want to say.

Nothing Beats Immersion

I don't think anything actually beats immersion. It's pretty hard to replicate immersion because that experience gives you so many visual and audio clues around you, the environment that you can learn from.

I can start some basic conversations with people that are always centered around just having a handful of verbs that I could use and some modal verbs like I can go, I can do, I want to get, I want to buy, I want to look at. So when I go back to Europe, I'll kind of use the same kind of conversational hiccups and just start using the local language, even if it's super basic. I don't know if I actually make a lot of progress while I'm there, but it's just fun to be able to get to use it.

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