Introduction
My native language is not English, and I’ve never been to any English-speaking country. Additionally, I’ve not practiced with any native English speaker in my whole life. I’ve had a lot of difficulty learning from textbooks, which I didn’t like. After all that effort, I would forget a ==significant== portion of those words and grammar rules after just one month, and I couldn’t see any progress.
Building a Personalized Learning System
But finally, I built a personalized system for myself to learn a language based on the content I enjoy ==consuming==. This system also helps me remember it in an effortless way using a very unique strategy. Don’t worry, it is totally free, and I haven’t spent even a dollar on this system. You can use it manually and without any software as well.
Revealing the Strategies
So, in this video, I’m going to ==reveal== what those strategies are, how anyone with any amount of time can easily apply them, and how not to forget what you learn during this process. As you can see, the framework I’m going to share with you has a “reviewing system” that you probably haven’t seen before because it is a customization based on my own ==preferences==—my own system. But this system, without proper inputs, is useless. ==Garbage== in, garbage out. Using these input sources, we can add words, phrases, grammar rules, and more to our “reviewing system.”
Understanding the First Source of Input
But first, let’s talk about the first source of input. In many cases, there is a large group of people who can understand a language without any problem, but they cannot speak it. That’s because they have had enough inputs in that language and have reached a good level of comprehension, but they haven’t practiced producing outputs as well. Here is a good exercise for doing so—one of the best practices that I found very useful.
Practicing Speaking: The Iteration Exercise
You should pick a topic. This topic can be a YouTube video you’ve watched, a book you’ve read, a personal experience, something that happened that day, or any other topic you can talk about. After picking the topic, set an alarm clock for 2 minutes and try to speak in front of your webcam. Then, re-watch the video that you recorded and start analyzing it. Which words did you want to use in that 2-minute period that you didn’t know in that language? Go and find them. Which grammar structures were you struggling with? Go and learn more about them.
Let’s call this 2-minute period and the analysis after it an “iteration.” If you want to spend more time practicing speaking, then you can do more of these iterations that day. If you were an algorithm and went through 365 iterations, your current answer would not even be comparable to your answer on the first iteration. But unfortunately, unlike algorithms, we do not learn from our experiences with each iteration. You can also set a weekly or annual goal and start tracking the number of iterations using the “==paperclip== strategy,” which I’ve talked about in one of the previous videos.
The Role of Reviewing System
Based on your analysis phase in the iterations, you’re going to add some words, phrases, grammar structures, and things like that to be processed in that reviewing system, which I’m going to talk about in this video.
The Second Source of Input: Content Types
In the second input source, I’m going to share one of the best content sources for learning a new language, which is my favorite and it is not books. This second source of input can be categorized into three types of content: long-form content such as books and movies, medium-form content such as newsletters which usually have one to three thousand words, and finally short-form content such as tweets and shorter videos.
Choosing the Right Content Type
In my opinion, short-form and medium-form content are the best, especially for beginners. For example, tweets are very small, and you can read them one after another, giving you a sense of success and progress by completing and reading each tweet. Each tweet has a different topic, adding a lot of variety to your language learning process. On the other hand, when reading a book, it doesn’t have that much variety. A beginner may spend days adding different words and phrases to their reviewing system, but still find themselves stuck in the introduction of that book, which can be really boring and demotivating, as they can't see their progress.
Medium-Form Content as the Next Best Option
After short-form content, the second-best option, especially for beginners, is medium-form content such as newsletters. However, regardless of what type of content you consume, it must ==align== with your interests and goals. Otherwise, the process itself will be useless and can sometimes even turn into a form of procrastination.
The Key to Success: The Reviewing System
Now, it’s time to talk about the best piece of the puzzle, which is the reviewing system. It’s my own customization, and you have probably not seen it before. For my reviewing system, I use a note-taking app called Obsidian, which is totally free and very ==compatible== with Right-to-Left languages as well. You can use other note-taking apps or even do all the processes manually without any software. The tool itself is not that important.
Setting Up the Reviewing System
In my note-taking app, I have three pages. If you want to do it manually, you can have, for example, three boxes. My first page is called “Storehouse.” For example, when I’m reading tweets, watching YouTube videos, or consuming other content, if I ==encounter== a word or phrase that I’m not familiar with, I add it to the “Storehouse” page. But adding just the word itself is useless. I copy and paste the sentence in which that word has been used, and also I link to it, which can be a link to the timestamp of the YouTube video or to the tweet, and so on. This way, I’m also adding the context in which I learned that word.
Learning and Organizing New Words
I don’t necessarily study the things in the “Storehouse” immediately. I just add whatever I’m not familiar with and will study it later, which I will talk about in the next step. Let’s talk about the next step. Suppose that every day I want to learn three words. So, I will open the “Storehouse” page and move three of those words to my second page, which I call the “==Queue==.” But this time, I’m trying to learn those words. So, I will add more details to the items that I’ve moved from the “Storehouse” page to the “Queue” page. And tomorrow, I will add another three words, and so on.
Turning Words into Flashcards
By using this specific format for each word and putting a tag at the end of this page, there is a plugin in the Obsidian note-taking app, which automatically turns all of these words into flashcards, which is really awesome. I will tell you how to find the step-by-step tutorial for doing so in Obsidian, but now let’s continue talking about our system.
Reviewing Flashcards
I review the flashcards that are on the “Queue” page. By doing so, every time I review each flashcard, Obsidian is going to add a kind of metadata below each word, which the algorithm uses to show the flashcards at the proper time. After some time, I feel that I’m familiar with some words, and they are becoming easy for me. So, I will move those words from the “Queue” page to another page, which I call the “Main” page.
Managing the Queue and Main Pages
You may ask: Why do you have two pages for your language learning process? Why don’t you put all the stuff on one page? And what is the benefit of having two pages called “Queue” and “Main”? As I’ve mentioned, at first, I add all the words to the “Queue” page. But as time passes and the words become easy for me, I move them to the “Main” page. I cut the words from the “Queue” page and paste them onto the “Main” page. By doing so, all that is left on the “Queue” page are the things I have less mastery over and that are harder.
Cramming for Faster Learning
Now, when I find some time, for example in my ==spare== time, I use an option called “==cram==.” "Cram" basically means "review." This feature allows me to do more reviews beyond the scheduled time. Based on my experience, I realized that at the beginning of the learning process, if I do this, the word becomes easy for me very quickly and can be transferred to the “Main” page much sooner. In those spare times, I don’t try to cram all the words that are on the “Queue” page. Instead, I try to cram, for example, five or ten words. Because it shows the words in a random order, each time each word has a chance to appear in the first ten places and hence has a chance to be crammed in my spare time.
Final Thoughts on Reviewing
So, I review flashcards on the “Main” and “Queue” pages based on the time schedules defined by that plugin in Obsidian. However, I don’t do this cramming for the words that are on the “Main” page. I only do it for the words that are in the “Queue” page.
Conclusion
As I’ve mentioned, I personally use the Obsidian note-taking app to kind of build a second brain for learning a language. If you want to learn more about it, you can watch this video where I will show you a step-by-step process to build
that flashcard system I mentioned earlier. It’s so beginner-friendly that you don’t even need to know what Obsidian is to follow that video!