DIY Language Learning

Today’s blog is about learning languages. I have been known to write a short story in German, translate it into English, and then submit it to a magazine.

In any case, after a bout of Covid, I ended up having two or three weeks of brain fog. Strangely enough, if you study languages intensively, it will give you brain fog too—especially if you do so right before you go to bed. Then your brain processes the new language while you sleep. I decided to take advantage of the optimal atmosphere of brain fog to relearn all the Swedish I had taught myself back in 2010…and it worked! I now know more than I did after my 2010 study. I just watched Peter SFI’s video on how much it costs to live in Sweden and understood every word.

So…how do you get good comprehensible input (stuff you understand) in a foreign language? Youtube is chock full of it. Svenska med Anja is also good for learning about daily life in Sweden in Swedish. Then there is also the news in easy Swedish. And don’t forget music in Swedish.

I also swapped it up, reading books in different languages: German, Russian, English, and Swedish. Now that the brain fog is mostly over (unless I exercise, and then it comes back), the stuff I learned has stuck around, which makes it easier to keep learning. At one point, I was watching Svenska med Anja, and she switched from Swedish to Russian, and I didn’t even notice it. I could have sworn she was speaking Swedish.

So why is learning other languages important? It actually improves your writing in your native language because you learn how to manipulate it even more skillfully than before. It exercises your brain in producing language on paper.