Menus.

I find a menu from a local place and learn everything on the menu, I try to find a place with disposable menus so I can take home, and once I asked the restaurant if I could take their regular menu home to study.

Food is going to be something I experienced daily anyway when I’m in a new country so it’s practical and helps me form a foundation.

Once I know the food items, common questions become natural extensions of the food items.

So menus are usually my base, and then I expand with a teaching app or YouTube videos and then I talk to people.

An incredibly effective method that is boring but quick is to choose one movie in the language you’re studying, and watch it once per day, really paying attention to all of the speech.

That boosted my Mandarin like crazy in comprehension, but it can be a slog for the four to 6 weeks it takes.

The first thousand, formal learning. The next thousand, informal learning. The remainder, conversation or light reading in the language.

This is true for both of my non-native languages, Spanish and Latin. I never got past the formal learning stage in Japanese and without reinforcement it’s mostly slipped away.

I’ve a smattering of phrases and pleasantries in French, German, Dutch, Lakota, and some Slavic languages, but that’s just from exposure to native speakers.

Have you tried playing video games in the language you’re learning?

There’s a bunch of bilingual people in my life and they told me that’s how they learned English.

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.

It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.

Do a lot of reading and listening to material you find interesting. The learning happens in the background.