Activities

Now you’ve got an overview of the resources available to you, we’ll now look at the 6 top activities you can start using today to build your language ability.

There is no “correct” way to learn; I am trying to cover as many different preferences and goals as possible, but I can’t encompass everybody or cover every useful exercise. If something I recommend here doesn’t feel right, or you feel like your circumstances merit doing something more or less than the percentage ranges I give, go with your gut. If you need more guidance beyond these activities, skip to the Building Your Own Method chapter for more info.

A reminder: we are trying to build our vocabulary, grammar, and the four skills. There’s overlap with each activity, meaning you can swap out or drop them. For each activity I will highlight what we are trying to do, so if you decide to mix it up you will know what you need to compensate for.

In each section you will be shown:

How to do the activity
What it’s teaching you
Approximately how much time learners typically spend
Where in the guide you can find more info

The 6 key activities

I recommend you try to dedicate at least an hour per day to your language study. Split that time between these activities based on your own preference/interest.

The first four directly map on to the three core resources from the previous chapter. The next few are the key “extras” that will help you really take your language skills up a level.

Study with your course

There are two reasons we generally need a course:

They structure your learning
They teach you grammar

Your course will likely teach you more than just grammar. Every course is different in this aspect. You can keep this in mind when thinking about how much to do the other activities. With that, how you use your course is up to you, as there’s too much variety for me to give useful guidance. All I will recommend is that you avoid the temptation to use your course the whole time. Learners generally use their course for around 50% of their study time at the start, and this gradually decreases over time.

More detail on grammar learning will be covered in the chapter Grammar.

Flashcard study

At this early stage, think about using your flashcards for two outcomes:

Building a large vocabulary so you can understand content
Learning some key phrases so you can communicate

These will correspond to the two flashcard sub-activities below. How much of each you do will depend on what you enjoy and your goals. Go with what feels right.

If you’re not sure how to get the decks to show the cards the way you like, you may need to read the chapter Flashcards for more guidance.

Build a passive vocabulary

For this activity, find a shard deck online that has a lot of example words or sentences (I recommend sentences) in order of frequency. Use the target language side first, meaning you will see the word or sentence in the language you are learning, and need to understand what it means in English (or your native language) before you press good. Around 5-20% of your time spent on this activity is appropriate.

Learn key phrases

Similar to the above, find a deck online with words or sentences (I recommend sentences), but focus on the kinds of phrases you need, such as travel phrases or basic phrases. Use these with the English (or your native language) side first, and make sure you know how to say it correctly in the language you are learning before you press good. Some learners don’t do this activity, others spend up to 15% of their time doing it.

Mass input

As we saw in a the resource section, input takes many forms, YouTube, TikTok, books, podcasts, etc. Whatever you use, make sure it is comprehensible and interesting to you. The mass input activity is simple: use the input while simply trying to understand as much as you can. Avoid pausing or looking things up until after you’ve finished (and only if you want to). This will give you the exposure you need to start building an intuition for how the language works, covering both vocabulary and grammar in one.

Key tip: Use a variety of different content
Make sure your content has a lot of variety in terms of the context and skills it uses. It is surprisingly difficult to translate your language ability from one skill into another without a lot of practice. For example, reading lots will help you learn a lot of words, but you will struggle to recognise these words when you hear them until you’ve done a lot of listening practice. In addition, using a range of resources will give you exposure to different vocabulary, accents, and degrees of formality that will help your overall ability.

Input is critical for an effective method, but usually requires a bit of baseline knowledge to be much use. For that reason, beginners usually start with 0–10% of their time with input at the very beginning. This commonly ramps up to anywhere from 20–70% of language time, depending on interest, lifestyle, and priorities. The chapter dedicated to input will help you use input more effectively.

Conversation practice

One of the best language exercises you can do is conversation practice with a native speaker. It gets your brain using the knowledge you already have, improves your speaking fluency, exposes you to new forms and vocabulary, and lets you get feedback in real time.

How to get conversation practice

The best way to practise speaking is to find a native speaker and start a language exchange, an activity in which you each spend time speaking each other’s language. There are a few options available to you to find native speakers:

Find someone in your personal life who is willing to help
Use the language exchange resources in the previous chapter
Use a community or group such as meetup.com

Similar to input, conversation practice takes a bit of baseline knowledge, so learners usually spend 0–10% of their time with conversation and it usually stays around that level due to constraints accessing conversation partners. Use the Language exchange resources section to find a method that works for you. You can also pay for a tutor to get conversation practice, either online or in real life if available. If you need more help, the chapter Speaking provides more guidance on the topic.

Intensive reading

This exercise comes a bit later, once you’re already feeling comfortable with the basic structure of the language and know enough words to use some content. It is more common among intermediate learners, but is perfectly useable for beginners. This is basic, very common form of this exercise. More detail and variations will be covered in the chapter Input.

Find a piece of written content that you already understand 90–98% of. Ideally it won’t be long, but if it is, focus on a smaller section of it. You will then read your content multiple times. Each time you will read more carefully and try to gain new insight. Start just by skim-reading, then read again more carefully. Next, read again focusing on the parts that aren’t clear to you. Look up words and forms that are blocking your comprehension (don’t worry about anything else). Read it again one last time, and notice how the bits you have learned are now more clear to you. Aim to spend 20–40 minutes doing this.

This exercise can be anywhere from 10–40% of your study time, if you choose to do it.

Drill the writing system

If you already know the writing system of your target language, you can skip this section. If your language uses a different writing system, I recommend you learn it well and early. It will pay off in the long run. You can use flashcards to learn, but there are also apps and courses out there that can teach you too. Choose based on your preference.

I can’t give you a hard rule for how much time to spend, but if your language uses characters (Chinese and Japanese), you’ll need to spend a consistent 20-40% of your time throughout your study for a long while. If the symbols of the writing system correspond to sounds (think Arabic, Russian, or Hindi), you might want to start with >50% of your time, quickly reducing it once you are familiar with all the symbols.

Moving forward

With these key activities out of the way, we then move on to your routine. In the next chapter, we’ll talk some key ways to integrate your language into your life, keep yourself motivated, and spend the time necessary to ensure you succeed.