Jamie Lontok  Yes, to be honest, I would never have been able to learn a language this way when I had just started out. In fact, I'm still working on my French and this really wouldn't work for me. I need to learn the grammar implicitly. It's more for the languages that I'm further down the line with where this method works for me.

Fun conversations though 😃

 Jamie Lontok  Hahaha we definitely need a hahaha emoji reaction here. instead: 



 Deborah Gospodarek  Yes, slowing it down is a great technique. Then when you're feeling more able, you can start to speed things up.

Having said that, there are still times when I have to slow things down even in a language I feel fluent in. There was one specific podcast I was listening to and they had an older guest speaker who was using lots of coloquial language and mumbled a lot. Or anything with a strong accent. I still struggle with certain German accents. In fact, come to that, there are even some English accents that native speakers can't understand! 🤣

To be completely honest, I don't sit down and practice my languages every day. I DO take part in things regularly though.

About twice a week I practice my languages online with native speakers and that's usually for at least and hour, often more. It doesn't actually feel like learning for me though, even though I know I'm learning lots from it. For me it's just an enjoyable experience and I also happen to be practicing my listening and speaking, learning now vocabulary and structures too.

I then also spend an hour or so a week practicing the language by completing tasks aimed specifically at language learning.

In addition to that, as a teacher, I prepare and teach lessons so even though I'm teaching at a lower level than I'm capable of producing, there are always things here and there that I learn, even if it's about culture more than language sometimes. Or I research more vocabulary that might be useful for my learners. As a teacher, I don't know EVERY word in the language, just like I don't in my own language. Or I come across new ideas and techniques that I think might be helpful for my learners and then fall down that rabbit hole testing it out myself. We never stop learning, not even teachers, especially not teachers!

Then I also listen to podcasts at least a couple of hours a week. This is great for me because I can multitask AND enjoy the topic being discussed and although I wouldn't call that traditional learning, it can be invaluable to still get that input and learn from it. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea but it works for me.

 Jamie Lontok  And I think in some languages it is even more important to see the words. I need to see them written in French way more than I do in Spanish because I never know whether there's some silent ending on the new French words.

 Jamie Lontok  You know that's a fantastic technique. I do the same and it really helps me improve my listening and grammatical accuracy, espcially if I can then check what I've written against a transcript written by the author. It helps me improve my range of vocabulary too and gives me a real confidence boost when, at the end, I see how much I've acutally acheived or learnt.

Personally, I don't think the vast majority of us are purely 1 type of learner or another. I think we're mostly a mix but maybe with a preference to one or 2 different styles generally.

I do think it is good to be aware (like, as you say,  Tuva Sundström  ) we can trust the "results". But I also think that even if we're not an auditory learner for example, it still helps us to go out of our comfort zone, sometimes at least (but without putting too much pressure on ourselves). Personally, if I were only a visual learner, I still think there's a value to be had in developing my listening. Without that, learning to listen and also to speak would perhaps become a skill I struggled with and was more daunted by???

 Jamie Lontok  Definitely. That's something I would LOVE to change 😃

This is so true for me. I do it with everything 🙄 For some reason I tend to do it less in languages. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I have kept them in my life. That's not to say I don't over think at all with language learning.

Having said that, I'm also a (calculated) risk taker and like to "feel the fear and do it anyway". Quite useful for languages.

I definitely think the chunking thing helps with langauge learning too. That's why (text) books are broken down into chapters. But I think it can also be done at sentence level in langauges. It seems to work well for many of my students and help them gain confidence until they are at the point where they can increase the size of the chunks.