Daily quick tip to learn languages Part1: Wash your dishes!

Daily quick tip to learn languages Part1: Wash your dishes! 

Hi, guys! Today, I'm here with the start of a fresh new blog post series that just came out of the oven. I'll be sharing quick tips that will help boost your language learning. All of these tips are ones I've applied to my own life, and they've helped me become fluent in English. Without them, I wouldn't be here today, writing this article in English. Since these tips are supposed to be fast, let's jump right into the action without further ado!

First of all, who hates washing dishes? If I could hear you guys right now, I bet it would be a resounding "me too!" I definitely hate washing dishes as well. While it's an easy task, it takes way too long, and it always feels like there are better things you could be doing with your time. At least, that's what my boyfriend says when he's avoiding doing the dishes. As if I don't have a life of my own! But since I was so fed up with this daily problem, I figured out a way to turn the useless time of washing dishes into a language learning opportunity:

You simply wash the dishes while you are listening to language learning materials! Yes, that's right! Listening is a fundamental and passive way to acquire knowledge in a language. According to Renukadevi (2014) in the paper "The Role of Listening in Language Acquisition; the Challenges & Strategies in Teaching Listening," it's impossible to learn a language without listening skills. Listening can help you become familiar with different accents, indirectly pick up grammar rules, and make you more comfortable overall with the language (YURKO & Styfanyshyn, 2020).

Now, you've probably heard this piece of advice before: to always listen. However, I will guide you through some basic steps that you should make sure you do to maximize your learning while specifically washing your dishes, since I'm kind of an expert on that.

1- Don't choose materials that are too challenging. Remember, your attention won't be fully focused on listening and learning since you still need to properly wash the dishes. Yikes, dirty utensils!

2- Make sure you're learning something new while listening. As I mentioned earlier, the material can't be too difficult, but it also shouldn't be too easy.

3- Choose interesting material to listen to while washing dishes, or you may find yourself zoning out and thinking about your next meal or bill to pay.

4- You may want to repeat the content. This may not work for everyone since some people may get bored of hearing the same thing repeatedly, but if you don't mind, I recommend putting the same video on repeat to ensure that you're learning everything you can from it.

5- Don't listen to songs. Some people might use the excuse of choosing a song in the language they're learning to wash the dishes and call it "learning," but we both know better than that. You'll probably just groove to the music and not pay attention to the lyrics!

That being said, when I was learning English, I absolutely loved listening to this specific podcast for beginners, called "Let's Master English", by the youtuber "coachshanesesl". The host uses very basic language, so you will probably understand him just by being an A2 level student. The best part is that he is very entertaining, and I never got bored listening to his podcast. It felt like I was listening to a real radio show. I don't even know him, so this is not a promotion, but I just can't recommend him enough. He was an important part of my language learning process.

That's it for today, guys! I hope this post was as useful as always. If it was, don't forget to share the blog with your friends and leave a comment. Your opinion and presence are very important in keeping me motivated to produce more content.

Ha Det!