Unconventional Methods of Language Practice

[Lucas88]

I often read aloud in the languages that I've studied. I have various novels and philosophical works in Spanish and try to do some reading a few times each week paying special attention to pronunciation. I used to do the same with Japanese too before I fell out with that culture and abandoned the language. I sometimes record myself speaking and then play it back.

I often have phone conversations with my Latino friends and therefore speak Spanish somewhat frequently even when I'm in the UK. I particularly like to speak with my Peruvian ex-girlfriend since we usually have deeper intellectual conversations. This method of language practice obviously depends on my friends' availability. I can't be assed with online language exchange because most people are boring normies.

The above are more conventional methods of language practice but I have some much less conventional ones.

When I'm alone and have no Hispanophone people to talk to, I sometimes lie down on the bed or sofa, enter a light trance state through meditation and then visualize everyday scenarios. For example, walking into a classroom and having a conversation with a teacher. Then I improvise a dialogue in which I alternate between myself and my imaginary interlocutor and verbalize the whole conversation aloud. Thus I practice Spanish by myself without any need for a language partner.

Another unconventional method of language practice that I often use is videogame roleplay. I turn on an open-world game - something like GTA - and either narrate my own actions, emotions, desires and intentions as the protagonist in Spanish as I play through the game or do roleplay with the NPCs. The fictitious environment of the game and its events give me some context in which to speak/narrate. This method is pretty fun. I get to threaten and insult enemy gangsters and law enforcement and hit on female NPCs (those with big knockers) in my target language.

Another thing that I used to do is take things that I've written in English and translate them. Whenever I came across a word or expression that I didn't know how to translate, I'd look it up with an online dictionary (usually wordreference or Reverso). I managed to improve my Spanish vocabulary a lot doing this.

Does anybody else here use any unusual methods for learning or practicing foreign languages?

[galii]

I have a low effort routine which keeps me in the language practicing mode. Sometimes I do have to do it later in the day because it takes mental capacity away for real life activities.

For example this is one cyle:
5 minutes reading loud of a novel
5 minutes reading a novel silent
5 minutes doing loud selftalk
5 minutes doing silent selftalk

I try to do karaoke later in the day becase it lowers my mental capacity. Karaoke songs have a transfer effect to other langauges as well.

My favorite karaoke songs:
Thalia:

Piel morena
No me ensenaste
To Y yo
A quien importa

[Lucas88]

I have another method that I use to keep my Spanish sharp both in terms of pronunciation and verbal inflection:

Conjugation drills

As I'm walking through the woods or wherever, I pronounce aloud all of the conjugated forms of various verbs in all tenses and moods. This serves to keep the tongue agile for the pronunciation of common phonetic combinations of the language and preserve the mental reflexes necessary for speaking an inflected language.

For example:



I go through present indicative (hago, haces, hace, etc.), present subjunctive (haga, hagas, etc.) and then all of the various tenses, compound forms and imperative forms.

I do these drills especially for irregular verbs (e.g, ir, dar, etc.), verbs with a radical stem change (e.g., querer > quiere, poder > puede), and verbs with special infixes in the first person singular (e.g., conocer > conozco, amanecer > amanezco).

With Spanish, I only use this method for verbs since Spanish nouns and adjectives are relatively simple (verb conjugations are the most complex part of Spanish grammar). However, if you are studying a language with complex noun declension like Russian or some other Slavic language, you can do the same kind of drill with all of the noun cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, etc.).