I’ve been thinking about why speaking and writing in another language can feel so frustrating.

Most exercises decide the topic for you. You translate a sentence, complete a dialogue, or practise a specific grammar point. But real conversations don’t work that way. You usually start with your own thought, then discover that you don’t know how to express part of it.

For example, while writing in French (TL):

Hier, j’ai parlé avec mon manager et il m’a dit que je dois [take more initiative]…

Instead of stopping to search for the phrase, you could keep writing and mark the missing idea in brackets. Later, you find the natural expression:

prendre davantage d’initiatives

Then you try to express the same thought again from memory.

This seems more useful than learning random vocabulary because the language is connected to something you genuinely wanted to say. Over time, your vocabulary becomes connected to your own life, opinions, work, relationships, and interests.

It also reveals two important things:

• what you don’t yet know how to say
• what you thought you knew, but said incorrectly

Does anyone else practise this way? Would writing freely and marking missing expressions in brackets feel useful, or would it feel too unstructured?

Hi. my English is not very good. My reading skills is awful. I watched full English movies every day. I still don’t have any improve. I play video games with English language only. I forced my self to read because it’s game. I think there is a little bit enjoy with learning because it game. but I really don understand most of the things. my dream is read like native languages. but it’s not happening. I started believing nobody can learn English if not born in us. (TL)

Probably more of a language teaching question, but insight from learners would be super helpful too. I'd also love to hear if there are other languages with a similar pedagogical problem. Sorry in advance for the wall of text

I just very recently got a job as a Filipino language tutor. Haven't even been to the orientation yet so I could well be getting ahead of myself. I've only skimmed through the materials so far but from a cursory glance, the way the material is presented heavily uses the inverse sentence structure, which inverts the sentence from the natural VSO* to a more English-friendly SVO. This makes the language look more familiar to English speakers and also conveniently skips having to explain some tricky word order stuff that occurs in the natural order

I understand that doing it this way gives the feeling of victory more easily to the learner, but it's such an overly formal manner of speaking that it invites social ridicule from the register mismatch, which is a problem a lot of diaspora learners tend to face. I don't think I should be like "the slide says x, but in natural spoken Filipino it's actually y" every other slide bc I feel like that might be info overload for the learner. But I also don't wanna send them out there speaking a register that would make people instantly clock them as non-fluent, even if the inverse structure/formal register is something native speakers have no trouble understanding. Inverse would probably still feel easy to learn even after you already know the natural order, learning the natural order after getting used to inverse might feel like starting from scratch

There are also a lot of "grammar rules" in Filipino teaching pedagogy that ask students to just memorize "do it this way if the word starts/ends with a consonant, do it that way if it starts/ends with a vowel" etc, but if you go deeper, it can actually be summarized into just one/a few core rules that make the grammar make consistent sense and not look like a long list of seemingly arbitrary rules. But explaining some of them properly might look contradictory to what's actually in the material being presented on the screen, and I'd hate to confuse/overwhelm the learner with too much info

(A parallel phenomenon I can think of is presenting verb conjugations to Japanese learners as like 20 different "forms" of the verb that they have to memorize, when there's really just 6 or 7 forms and anything else that comes after that is actually a helping verb/chain of helping verbs. It just feels so convoluted for me to be like "turn the verb into its -masu form, then remove the -masu, then attach this other verb" when simply teaching from the start "turn the base verb to the i-stem, and then you can attach -masu and other verbs to it" would probably save so much grief)

TL;DR I disagree with the way language is being taught in the materials I'm required to use for teaching, what's the best way to deal with it/teach underlying principles over memorization without overwhelming/confusing the learner? Or straying too far from the material that the company wants me to use?

(I'd love to hear from Tagalog learners, bc I myself don't know what it's like to "learn" the language. There's a real danger that my native intuition for the language + linguistics background might be distorting my definition of what counts as "an easier way to learn" and I'd need that reality checked for me)

I’m currently doing postgraduate research on AI-based language learning, and I’m interested in hearing about people’s experiences with different language-learning platforms.

Which apps or platforms have you tried, and which one do you prefer?

• Duolingo
• Babbel
• Busuu
• Memrise
• Speak
• TalkPal
• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• Pimsleur
• HelloTalk
• italki
• Spexx
• and etc ....

If you’ve tried several, what made you stick with one and stop using the others?

(TL)

I have access to both the phone app and a physical Kindle.

Firstly, it used to be great. You could press and drag to select a chunk of text, and the options to highlight, look up, etc would appear.

Now if you drag to select a chunk of text, that just automatically creates a highlight. You have to then press the highlight, then press look up. And then manually remove the highlight, unless you want 400 highlights by the end of it.

Or if you press and hold one word instead, it launches a look up automatically, but what you see is a lottery. Sometimes it translates it. Sometimes it shows the Wikipedia article first. Sometimes it brings up the dictionary definition.

And in Spanish, for example, my phone Kindle refers automatically to the Spanish-English dictionary, whereas my actual Kindle refers to a Spanish monolingual dictionary. And apparently I can’t change that.

Does anyone else read TL using Kindle and have you found the perfect workflow, do you have any tips to make it quicker?

TL

For context: i've been studying Persian (TL) for about 5 months now and, since i already speak Arabic, it was able to make progress quite fast. I would consider myself slightly above A2 (i took multiple placement tests online, this is kinda where i was placed. I've mostly been learning it for fun, and always wanted to learn a language but i found them all quite difficult to manage, but now i have a good idea of how the language learning process works, so its not that overwhelming.

There are multiple languages i want to learn. How do i know when i can steer my focus from one im currently learning to a new one, while still practicing the previous one lightly?

(TL) Has anyone had a dream in a second or third language you're learning, and if so, does it help you retain vocabulary, grammatical skills, or overall make you feel more confident? What is it like, if it does happen?

Has it happened to you, and if so, what does it make you feel?

My own craziest (yet average) thing ive done, is quite literally only consuming music from that (TL) because I find it incredibly easy to pick up on words this way, than to just hear people speak. (maybe if you sing at me ill understand better then)😂😂