Earlier this morning I went on a whole rant about this concept: that science can tell us how to learn a language. Here's the article I was reading.

When every single one of the resources mentioned has created problems with at least one of my clients! Everything from Duolingo to Pimsleur to Talk to Me in Korean (which  Tuva Sundström  was telling me about).

What do you think about the resources mentioned? Rosetta Stone, Babbel, iTalki, Netflix...it's like a who's who of the most popular names out there.

Shout out to  Sarah Newton  for keeping tabs on Lirica, an app for learning languages with music. Apparently, there are more and more issues as time goes on now!

Don't worry though, we've still got Lyriko, which is really similar. I don't have a review of it on the blog, but I do have an old YouTube video walking through it!



By popular demand on Instagram, this week's blog post was about tracking apps: the most popular ones used by language learners, and the differences between them. Read it here!

This is just a tiny snippet compared to the entire lesson on tracking in Confident Language Learning.

What do you like to track? How do you like to track it?

After taking a few weeks off for family and health issues, I'm back on YouTube! And it's for the video I've been asked to make so many times: me speaking in Spanish!

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/VDqu8ME9ebo



I have a lot of opinions about Duolingo, but one thing's for sure: they are constantly updating! Just announced: learn the writing systems!

It's not available for Yiddish yet but this is definitely interesting.

Read about it here: https://blog.duolingo.com/learning-other-writing-systems/

I had a conversation with a friend of mine today about why we are so afraid of failure and making mistakes. In the end of our conversation we agreed on one thing, we blame our schools. The older I got, the better my schools became at letting me know that mistakes are good, mistakes are welcome. Even though I am grateful that my 19-year-old self heard that the first day of university, my 14-year-old self needed to hear that so much more. My 20-year-old self still needs a reminder from time to time and I probably will need that for a long long time.

Making mistakes and failure have always been extra hard for me and I think it always will be. But it is okay, and I need to keep reminding myself of that. My friend and I watched this video so I thought I’d share it with you in case you need to hear what we did: https://youtu.be/pwnWFNoe7Pw


/ Tuva

Speaking seems to be the skill that language learners struggle with the most and we tend to assume that to be good at languages, we have to be fluent at speaking. For most of us, our first opportunity to practice speaking a language happens at school. It did for me, anyway. Our experience at school has a massive impact on how we feel about our ability to speak and sadly, I think many language learners leave school thinking “languages are hard”, “I’m no good at languages” because they don’t feel confident to speak. I just don’t believe that though. No one is by nature a “bad” language learner. No one.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not saying that it’s our teacher’s fault we don’t feel capable in languages. Sure, a teacher can have a massive impact but the school environment just isn’t the ideal one for teaching speaking skills for so many reasons.

The way see it, the main thing we need to improve when it comes to speaking is confidence, not ability. Ability will come naturally (with time and effort) if we have the confidence to give speaking a go. On the other hand, no matter how able we are, if we don’t have the confidence to speak, our speaking skills will never improve.

Some of the most common issues that affect our confidence in to speak are:

· Not getting enough / frequent enough practice

· Not having (or thinking we don’t have) a wide enough range of vocabulary or structures

· Worrying about making mistakes (which has been covered in another post here)

· Being worried that we won’t understand a question when asked one

· Being daunted by how quickly native speakers speak as well as their accents

· Not having the confidence to cope with the unexpected

· Lack of thinking time in comparison to reading and writing practice

· Not being confident in our pronunciation

What strategies do you use to overcome these issues? What other issues affect your confidence to speak? I’ll post some of my ideas below later but would love to hear your thoughts too.

It's Monday, which means there's another app review up on CrashedCulture.com/blog! This time it's 3-in-1, actually: 3 ways to practice Spanish conjugations. Read it here: https://crashedculture.com/practice-spanish-conjugations/

I know I'm not alone in learning to study conjugations the old fashioned way, with tables and exams. I really love these simple tools to get the patterns into my brain quickly and easily.

How do you like to learn/practice conjugations?

I don't pretend to know much about stocks and all that, but I found a helpful article (you can read it here).

Not to say that this is a bad move for us - having more financial support does mean that the courses could get better! Duolingo only recently shifted from unpaid volunteers creating their trees to paid employees. Good for the quality of courses, but not great for keeping language learning accessible.

❤️With the hearts system, lots of users have been complaining for a while now that it's too difficult to use for free, so they've left.

I also just realized that they changed their motto! It used to be "Learn a language for free. Forever", but now it's "The free, fun, and effective way to learn a language!". Not a huge change, but it's very telling 🤔

Regardless, it's pretty close to impossible to make a quality language learning resource with literally zero income (especially with millions of users).

What do you think?