*If you’re reading this on your phone, it’s best viewed landscape!*

I recently read Fluent for Free, by Maria Spantidi, who I had the pleasure of meeting at this year’s Polyglot Gathering.

Spantidi sets the parameters of learning a language for free not just for economic reasons, but crucially, because in her view, it is simply a more effective method than putting your language fate in the hands of a course. She sees it that googling our way to fluency and making our own resources is something that puts learners firmly in the driver’s seat.

You can access Spantidi’s free resource suggestions for French, German, Spanish and Italian on fluentforfree.com.

This got me thinking about how I would characterise the best way to learn a foreign language:

Approach learning a language as though you’re trying to solve a crime. Maybe you’re a “by the book” copper, set on following traditional methods, or perhaps you’re more of a vigilante type, keen to try something more offbeat. Either way, you’re the Head Detective – the person who knows best how you learn.

The key principles of this angle are as follows:

• One resource/method will not solve the case: for example, you won’t get fluent with Duolingo for a number of reasons, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it as one resource of many if it works for you.
• You’ll need to wear many hats during the learning process: you’re not just a jobsworth going through the bureaucracy of a language; you’ll play detective, police chief, rookie, pathologist and more, in order to crack the language case you’re working on.
• You’ll have to follow a number of different leads and evaluate their effectiveness: you’ll try out some conventional methods and recommendations from others, but may experiment with stuff few others have tried too.
• You’re likely working to a budget: you’re aware that a course promising that you’ll be fluent in 3 weeks as long as you hand over a month’s wages is likely as much of a scam as a struck off private investigator claiming to be able to solve a crime in the same time scale. Sometimes the cheap/free and longer route is more effective than paying a course or teacher to do the work for you.
• You’ll need to rally the troops: along the way, you’re going to need to encourage your old friends called motivation, discipline and persistence, and show compassion to fatigue, disillusionment and lethargy. They’re all in your investigative team and you’ve got to manage them throughout the case process.

• You’re going to want a paper trail: making notes and materials is helpful not just for memorisation, but also as a record to show how far you’ve come. It’s also worth noting that pen and paper boost memory more than smart devices, so go and buy some highlighters and a big notebook!

Everyone cracks a language differently; the way your case unfolds will likely be unique and hopefully, if you’re investigating right, highly personalised to you.

Here’s an example of how you could go about cracking your language:

• Detective: assess the scene

  Where is your target language spoken, by how many people? How much does it vary? What language family is it part of? Langfocus is a great place to start for many languages.

  First decision: which variant you will learn.

  What are the most defining characteristics of the language? If you’re unsure what to look for, simply google “notable characteristics of the X language.” Things worth considering are:

  • The alphabet: how it’s pronounced, how many of the letters do not exist in your native language (my favourite tool for this is the [X]pod101 series: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German)
  • Verb variation e.g. regular English verbs vary only in the he/she form; Mandarin verbs do not vary at all, for person or tense; verbs in Latin languages differ for every person and most tenses
  • Sound and letter shifts: for example, “th” is replaced by “d” in German: to thank = danken; many double letters become singular from Italian to Spanish: frutta –> fruta, bicicletta –> bicicleta, mappa –> mapa
  • Word order: for example, mostly Spanish adjectives go after nouns, whereas German adjectives, like English, go before nouns

  What similarities are there between your native language and the one you want to learn? Simply google “cognates between X language and Y language.” Also google “similarities between X grammar and Y grammar”. Then note them down!

  Finally, visiting restaurants and bars to taste the delights of your target language culture is absolutely necessary.

• 💡Kickstarter: you need to engage with the case (your language) pronto! So choose something to dip your toe in.

  Duolingo is useful for this! It’s a good lift-off tool, which gives you plenty of encouragement starting out. I wouldn’t recommend making this your central learning tool however, as it puts learners back into passive mode, which doesn’t suit our Detective role.

  Any other language app will also gently introduce you; how effective an app is depends on the language you’re learning and what appeals to you. Ask Google and have a play around.

• Police chief at the press conference: state your goals

  This is where you set out your goals. This doesn’t need to be anything more complicated than:

  • Write a fifty-word paragraph by X.
  • Have a 5-minute conversation with a Y speaker by X.
  • Learn the lyrics to, and be able to sing along to 5 songs in Z language, by X.
  • Be able to read an A2 book by X.

  

  You’ll return to the press conference to update your goals as you progress and as your objectives shift.

• Rookie: map out the basics

  Document in any form you like (I like making posters with felt tips!):

  

  • The 20 most common verbs, in the present tense
  • The alphabet (including pronunciation)
  • Diphthongs (the sound two vowels together makes e.g. “oi” in the English word “coin” is not pronounced “Owen” – as in the Welsh name – but creates one new sound)
  • Question words
  • Any other basics that stand out to you in your online research
• Pathologist: identify the skeleton of the language

  This one is mainly useful for anyone who is learning a language for the first time.

  There are 8 parts of speech in English. Here’s a video on these 8 parts, and a written explanation.

  Google how many parts of speech are in your target language. Draw a crazy skeleton, if you wish! There’s not much logic to where I placed each part of my skeleton pictured… Go wild!

  

  Other elements worth knowing – which will allow you to decode unknown words early on – are the most common prefixes and suffixes in your target language. He’s a two-minute explanation of these in English.

• Detective: gather your resources

  This is where things really start to vary, where your goal and learning style will impact the resources you choose.

  Learning style

  Forget all the learning style theory stuff. The reality is that variety is the spice of life. We are all visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile learners to varying degrees. All you need to consider are things you enjoy doing in your native language and try them out in your target language.

  Music fan? Start learning with Lingoclip.	Love podcasts? Check out my podcast recommendations for French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German.	Keen on reading? Try graded readers.
  Like rote learning with grammar activities? I like the Practice Makes Perfect series.	Film fanatic? Install the Language Reactor extension to turn your Netflix viewing into active language-learning sessions.	Love social media? Start following people who post in your target language and comment.
  Avid writer? Write in your notebook about your day, a chapter you’ve read, a past holiday, then type it into LanguageTool to see where to correct your work. Keep a record to see how much you’ve learnt. If you want to learn French, check out my 6 strategies to drastically improve your French writing skills post.	Big on sending voice notes to friends? Send messages in your target language to a friend who speaks it, or use HelloTalk app to find and chat to native speakers. Too nervous for this? Simply record sentences on your phone. These can be organic, or copies of famous lines from films, quotes or whatever you like.	App addict? You’ve got loads to choose from. Busuu, Anki, Memrise are some of the most popular. I’m not keen on memory-based apps however, and instead prefer Chatterbug for listening practice.
  Youtube junkie? Subscribe to teaching, vlogging or topic-based channels as per your preferences.	Enjoy word games? Buy crossword or wordsearch books, or complete word games in any language from French, to Czech or Scots on the Lexis Rex website.	Artsy? Get those felt tips out and make posters with lots of colour on them, about any language point you’re studying at the time.

  There are many many more activity options out there, which is where your role as investigator comes in. You are in charge of finding activities that work for you.

  Goals

  Your goals will dictate which of these you choose to do. For example, if you want to learn a language in order to read about the history of a country, you won’t need to focus on listening and speaking as much, if at all.

  However, if you generally want to learn a language, I recommend practising each of the four skills (speaking, reading, writing, listening) equally. This sounds like a lot, but Spantidi reframes this as:

  • Vocabulary
  • Grammar
  • Pronunciation (and alphabet)

  Simple!

• 💡 Teacher tip: google “[X language] language mat” or [X language] language for learning tes,” to find really useful “cheat sheets” that will give you the absolute basics for any conversation. These are generally made by secondary school teachers (hence the “tes”, which stands for “Time Educational Supplement”).

  You may find some free ones but they’re more often payable these days. Copy the parts you like and adapt some areas to suit what you want to talk about; you’ll learn more doing this anyway. Here’s one I made for German, which I had in front of me during my very first Italki lesson:

  

• Detective: plot a timeline

  You’ve only got a certain amount of hours in the day to crack your language, so instead of making time in your already busy day, integrate your learning into what you already do.

  Spantidi gives an amazing example of this in Fluent for Free. She explains that she listens to the radio in her target language whilst she eats breakfast, listens to music in the language whilst she waits for the bus, reads in the language on her Kindle on the bus, catches up with friends and reads interesting articles on social media in the language after work, then watches a film or reads in the language before bed. Nothing about her routine has been disrupted in this process.

  If this sounds like a lot to you, then you’re spot on. If you’re not a polyglot, you may be unaware that polyglots are like junkies with a non-destructive addiction. You don’t need to go full throttle if you’re not yet “addicted” to your target language. For example, I always listen to French podcasts when I’m on the train, Spanish podcasts when I walk the dog, and Brazilian music when I’m cooking. I’ve also recently started either listening to a beginner German podcast or doing beginner German crosswords before I go to bed.

  Start by introducing your language learning into dead time.

• Detective: jump into the investigation

  Whether you create a designated space for your learning materials on your phone, a bookcase or your wall, you now have the task of trying each method you’ve selected.

  Here’s my wall of resources for German:

  

  If you really want to nerd it up, you can rate how effective you find each method out of 5. Eliminate methods that you score really low; read my “Can I learn a language in my sleep?” and 9 other language tips to ditch to see why being ruthless is a good thing. Just because other learners swear by a particular method, it doesn’t mean that you have to use it.

  The key is variety; if you get bored or frustrated with one method, don’t persist until you hate it so much you don’t want to return to it. Try something else for a while.

• 💡 Energy boost: maybe you’re flagging a bit.

  A fun activity I like to do at this point is to find the most beautiful words in your target language.

  With some languages, this is not only motivating, but also gives you tools to “deconstruct” future unknown words.

  

• Detective: interrogate your suspects

  If you haven’t yet ventured out to try to decode the elusive native speaker, now’s the time.

  Learning how speakers tick is part of the learning process that learners sometimes forget, and it’s something that can keep you motivated.

  Comedy is a great way to understand a culture. Some of my personal favourites are Laura Ramoso for German, Tatty Macleod for French and Paul Cabannes for Brazilian Portuguese. I’m not even learning Dutch but am endlessly entertained by letsdoubledutch sketches. Whether the sketches are in the target language or not, they’re a window into linguistic and behavioural habits and norms.

  If you haven’t already made friends on HelloTalk, it’s time! Get chatting, either texting or sending voice messages. If you’re ready for something more official, try Italki classes.

• Detective: stay focused on the case

  From this point forward it’s simply a case of continuing with the process, giving yourself a minimum of five minutes a day to learn some more of the language, and staying motivated with extra little treats.

  Things that keep me going include:

  • Creating a playlist of favourite songs on Spotify.
  • Booking a trip (or at least planning one for the future) to a country where the language is spoken.
  • Cooking some native recipes and getting into the drinks of the culture.
  • Googling beautiful words and writing them out with really nice pens (creatives will get this one).

One thing that’s worth noting is that language learning is always a bit of an open case. I find that the more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know. Don’t let this deter you. It’s natural. Remember that none of us know all the words in even our native languages. You get to decide when you’ve cracked the language, which can vary from:

• Being able to have a simple conversation with someone.
• Being able to understand the words at an opera.
• Passing a language exam.
• Getting onto a university course in the language.
• Being able to make and understand jokes in the language.
• Literally anything you like.

For more practical tips on language learning for free, I highly recommend Fluent for Free.

I let my imagination run a little wild for this post… I’d be interested to hear what you think of it… Comment below!