Get the guide
The guide on this website offers you the first few chapters of my eBook, The Language Learner’s Handbook. These chapters provide the essential tools to get you started, but the full guide has even more chapters to help you become a confident and effective language learner.
If you want to access these chapters, you’ll need to download the full guide.
What’s in the guide
In the full version, you’ll unlock valuable insights and strategies, including:
- How to use input effectively
- How to improve the speed at which you learn grammar and vocabulary
- The most effective flashcard techniques and how to create your own
- Practical tips for improving pronunciation and becoming a confident speaker
- Guidance on what to focus on once you reach the intermediate stage
- How to choose activities that will speed up your progress
- How people learn to speak lots of languages and how you can do it too
- And more
The full guide is available right now as a pay-what-you-want download. If you’d like to support my work, donations are greatly appreciated. The suggested price is $7.99.
Not able to pay? No problem. Language learning should be accessible to everyone, so purchasing on Leanpub will let you select a price of $0—no credit card needed.
Where to get it
There are two options:
- If you’d like to choose what you pay, you can purchase it on Leanpub. Select the amount you want to pay, then press add ebook to cart.
- If you’d like help me spread the book to a wider audience, I’d love it if you could buy the book and leave me a review on Amazon. It’s available for $5 here (people outside of the US may need to use this link).
If you’d like to give more, as a thank you I offer language coaching on Buy Me Coffee.
Contact
If you think something is missing, you have any queries, or would just like to say thanks, I’d love to hear from you! Please use the contact form here.
Questions & answers
Why not just put all the chapters on your website?
I used to put it here, however I am constantly making improvements, and maintaining continuity between the website and the ebook was taking a lot of my time. I still want the most important info to be easily accessible and for people to come across it online, so I’m keeping first few sections here, but the overall task is now a lot less of a burden.
Why use Leanpub?
I put it on Amazon to reach a wider audience, and I use Leanpub because it lets people pay what they want.
Can I share the book?
Yes, I’m happy for you to share it with any individuals in your life you think might want it.
How long has this taken you?
Many hundreds of hours. Though you might only see a few words on a page, every chapter has required a lot of thought about how I can best structure it to be maximally useful. Basically every chapter is the result of many hours of research and has has gone through extensive rewrites. There’s always improvements to be made, which is part of why I’m still releasing regular revisions years after it was first released.
I’d like to make a suggestion/reach out
I receive emails from people only very rarely, and feedback is even more rare, so I’d love to hear from you no matter what you’ve got to say. Please use the contact form here.
Why is $7.99 the suggested price?
That number comes from Leanpub; anything below that price uses a different royalty structure, so a smaller percentage goes to me. If you want to give less, I suggest using the donation feature in Buy me a Coffee and downloading it from there.
Why did you make the guide?
I initially made this guide out of a desire to help people in the language learning community on Reddit. The idea started when I saw people were constantly asking how to learn languages, and regular users were having to constantly repeat themselves. I decided it would be a good topic for the FAQ we have there, and began writing up some key steps based on what I’d learned over the past few years running that community. As I kept adding info, it quickly grew to be the largest article in the FAQ. At that point, I moved it to its own page so it wouldn’t crowd out the other articles. It eventually outgrew even the wiki functionality on Reddit, so I then made it into a PDF ebook to take advantage of the enhanced formatting and other features a PDF file gives you. I eventually started my own website and made it available here, hoping to reach a wider audience.
It’s always been a labour of love, and the occasional messages of thanks and donations are immensely gratifying.
Didn’t you have a guide with a different name?
For those of you who have been here before, you might have noticed a new name. I decided the previous name, Teach Yourself a Foreign Language, despite being perfectly descriptive, was not particularly exciting. At the end of the day, I am trying to encourage as many people as I can, and an eye-catching title is a part of that. It turns out that finding a name that is eye-catching, descriptive, and not already taken is quite a challenge! I eventually landed on The Language Learner’s Handbook; I found that name was the best combination of interesting and accurate I could find.