New words, new worlds: learning a language “like a child”

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People argue about whether adults can, through immersion, learn “like children”. Plenty of people maintain that, textbooks and flashcards notwithstanding, this is the only way that anybody actually learns a language. Without dipping my rather unscientific toes into that debate I will give you the following anecdotal evidence: to me, learning languages as an adult feels the same as the linguistic exploration of my youth, if not quite my earliest childhood.

The first language I ever learnt was English. I remember struggling to learn it. Hesitation when speaking to (other) native speakers, experimentation with words I didn’t fully understand. I remember the joy that I felt in my mid-teens when I realised that I could express complex thoughts without pausing to plan my sentence first, to make sure that I didn’t lose the plot (on reflection I wonder whether this was at least in part an ADHD problem). I remember reading books and understanding all (or most of) the words, without feeling as though I was really absorbing the meaning. I remember saying out loud words that I had only ever read on paper and realising, publicly, that my pronunciation was ridiculous.

Of course I have a lot more context as an adult for some of the concepts in other languages, especially those that are more closely related to English. I don’t need to learn again what distinguishes epistemology from ontology, or why anybody cares about either. But for many concepts, and even for my own emotional connection to them, the exploration feels the same. Even in the closest languages concepts are typically overlapping rather than identical – you have to figure out all over again where they start and stop, with more context this time but with many red herrings for the same reason. If I tell someone I like them am I accidentally saying I love them? Is there a real emotional difference between saying I like something and saying that it “pleases me”? If I say something is “not bad” is it a compliment or an insult?

And when listening to people speak I feel that I am learning over again where my own personal boundaries are – which words and phrases appeal to me, which I dislike, which will form part of my own active vocabulary. I know for a fact that I have expressed ideas in Romanian that I wouldn’t say in English, and some things I would find concerning, because I was repeating words I had heard used by adults.

I am not a person with a huge amount of nostalgia for youth, but this small rediscovery of it – of exploration and new joys – is pleasing. So to what extent do adults learn in the same way as children? I don’t know – a large one, I suspect, with some key differences. Would I recommend learning a language as an adult? Highly.

My goodness is there a world of food out there if you know how to listen

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I have learnt a lot about languages and a lot about cooking from watching cooking videos in other languages. This is partly a point about language-learning, but it is also just an acknowledgement of the fact that the less I am the target of a particular piece of media the more likely I am to learn something from it, and that that is particularly true when it comes to food.

For language learning, cooking videos carry the vast power of repetition. The relatively narrow range of vocabulary video to video combined with the visual context for most novel vocabulary is a powerful natural spaced repetition system. The content is both comprehensible, one way or another, and interesting (at least for me), and is rarely so long that I just zone out. It really has it all! If you are not particularly interested in cooking but you have other skills or special interests, new or old, watching content about them in another language is a great way to find comprehensible input for your target language. This is the case whether is is comprehensible because of visual context or because of your existing knowledge.

For learning how to cook watching cooking videos in other languages is also fantastic. I see a lot of English language cooking content, which at any one time follows a few main trends and introduces cooking techniques from around the world in a few main ways. This is not to deny that there are English language content creators who have knowledge and experience of cooking techniques that are not commonly presented in English language content, but it is a lot easier to find content that really teaches you something new when you look beyond that to content that is aimed at a different audience entirely. Recently I learnt how to make a type of spring roll wrapper from an extraordinarily wet dough and it was very exciting.

If this interests you my main tip is as follows: use search terms in your target language, even if you have to use a translator to get them. For example instead of searching “cooking techniques in Mandarin”, search “烹饪技巧”, in Mandarin! I acknowledge that for many people this will be obvious, but it really makes a difference so I think it is worth saying. Also beware of YouTube’s automatically translated video titles – looking for your target language in the thumbnail can really save you time.

Whilst writing this post I got excited about the possibilities of Hindi cooking videos and watched several videos on Maharashtrian thali. I hope you get as excited as me and get some good language and some good food!

Learn a language slowly

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When I say to learn a language slowly I am making two different, though not unrelated, points. One is practical, the other philosophical.

The first is that, simply from a practical perspective, the primary determiner of a person’s skill in a language is the time that they have spent in the language. Language-learning takes time and trying to rush that process is immensely frustrating and demotivating, and motivation really is your most valuable resource when it comes to getting those hours in.

The second, which to me is extraordinarily motivating, is that time spent in the language is the fun part. You unequivocally do not need to be fluent, or even anything more than the most beginnery of beginners, to enjoy using a language. Enjoyment in multiple forms is available immediately from “I recognised that word!” to “I liked that joke!” or “this show is cool”. There is no delayed gratification here – you are not working hard so that one day you can use the language, you are using the language every moment that you are “working” on it, be that watching a YouTube video for learners, listening to a podcast for native-speakers, or reading your favourite book in translation. That is not to deny that sooner or later this joys will be followed by the joys of “I am really enjoying this conversation” and “I understood that joke and its cultural referents without subtitles!” (and oh man are jokes funnier when you feel a little bit smug about understanding them), but really the language and the cultures it gives you access to are worth it every step of the way.

What this means is, essentially, that you can cut out most of the boring stuff that you would be doing to make the process faster – most of which does not really make the process faster. Being able to recognise common words and grammatical structures can give you a good start at the beginning, but drilling them until you can reproduce them perfectly is neither as fun nor as useful as just enjoying the language.

Cantonese and Mandarin, a foolish commitment?

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I’ve started learning Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, both more or less from zero. By many people’s estimation this is foolish, and I don’t fully disagree. Taking any two languages from zero at the same time is something that I have avoided for as long as I’ve been learning languages, and with good reasons. Confusing your languages is inevitable – when I started learning Polish it always came out sounding like the Russian that I had learnt (to a fairly low level) previously, and nowadays my Russian (which I have not maintained) is basically Polish. Even between languages as different as Hindi and Romanian I frequently mix up words, especially conjunctions, since though they are essential to the sentence they are also not the main point of the sentence, and so don’t keep my focus. It stands to reason that languages with which I am less familiar will suffer more from this kind of mixing, particularly when they have so much shared vocabulary (with important tonal differences).

When I first picked up Cantonese I was excited about taking on what in my mind would be a ten year project. Disregarding perfection, you could learn Cantonese to a very high level in a much shorter time-frame, but it was never intended to be the main language that I study. I have other language projects that are more relevant to my daily life and in which I have more of a footing. 10 years was, with very little commitment to the number, my broad acknowledgement that it would be a fun hobby but not my priority. Since I started learning Mandarin (for pretty unrelated reasons – I now live with someone who is learning it and watching dramas is a fun group activity) my excitement for Cantonese has also grown by a huge margin.

The reasons I am allowing myself to undertake this project are as follows: Language-learning is a long-term project, and I no longer feel much of the frustration that it is not progressing quickly enough. It is a process that can be measured best in hours spent with the language, but those hours are typically spread out over several years, more so when multiple languages are in progress simultaneously. Also, the more I practice my Hindi and my Romanian – often switching between them when I am lucky enough to be presented with the challenge of working with speakers of both languages in the same day – the less I confuse them. Subjecting them to that challenge as often as possible only strengthens them. It stands to reason that the same thing will happen with Mandarin and Cantonese, and I am more than comfortable with the fact that it will take a long time to get there.

And there have proven to be benefits! Those same drawbacks – the similarities between the languages in grammar, vocabulary, and especially in their written form, have also been useful and fun. Being able to parse and acknowledge (to avoid saying “understand”) the dramatic differences between Cantonese speech and its subtitles, for example, has been really aided by learning the language that the more standardised text is based on. For related reasons, it is also immensely interesting from a cultural and political perspective.

Noticing the grammatical and vocabulary similarities has also been fun, and I am noticing and remembering words that I recognise from the other language more quickly than I would if I were only learning one. As far as I can tell at this early stage, recalling and reproducing those words reliably in a sentence with the correct vowels and tones will quite possibly take longer than it otherwise would, but I don’t know that speaking fluently will necessarily require additional hours of engagement with each language. I am planning for this to be a long process anyway. Learning another language is living in another language, so I am here for life.

My language-learning to date has shown me that I am, and encouraged me to be, a person who is very comfortable with significant ambiguity, and so rapidly expanding the data points I can engage with is much less scary for me than it would have been if it were my first or even third target language. Learning other languages sometimes makes me forget the right words in English, but that is not a reason not to do it! As I said, confusing languages is inevitable – whatever you do – so I’m not going to worry about it too much.

How much structure do you need in language learning?

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I speak to people about language learning a lot, and occassionally I manage to talk someone into giving it a shot. I always put enormous stress on the joy of it all – let your curiosity lead you! If a textbook is boring for you than do something else! And yet, time after time, people get stuck grinding on Duolingo or trying to memorise every word they come across as though they have heard nothing I have said.

I sound bitter: I’m not, but I am slowly realising just how big of a hurdle our psychological need for a particular kind of structure, nurtured by our language education and education system at large, is for most people at the beginning of their language journeys. Our experience of schooling makes it tempting to think that there are clearly demarcated stages that we need to surpass before we can start the next, like chapters in a textbook, and that we haven’t learnt a word or a grammatical point unless we can easily reproduce it.

What that ends up meaning is that people end up bound up in the grammar of it all or in memorisation at the expense of allowing themselves get caught up in the flow of the language. Being able to recognise (not reproduce) a few major verbs and pronouns, the basic sentence structure, and any frequently occurring unique grammatical features is typically enough to set you on the path to engaging with the language; and engaging with the language in the form of ‘comprehensible input’ – that is to say any listening or reading material that you can understand, albeit imperfectly, whether through knowing the words or through other context up to and including translation – is always going to be the major way you learn.

I don’t mean to imply through my concern that we can’t make our studies more efficient by adding structure, or even regular study of any grammatical points for which you feel you need clarification. It is rather to say that curiosity has to come first, especially for those of us who don’t have a pressing need for our target language and who haven’t undertaken that kind of self-motivated study before. Curiosity is not a distraction, it is both our major motivator and it is how we learn, and for that reason input should be the bulk of your learning time. It will always be easier to remember a word and understand it in context if you have seen it come up in diverse and interesting contexts, than it would be if you have seen it repeatedly on a list or a flashcard that has no context at all. (Flashcards with context can have their place, as long as you aren’t bored out of your mind as I tend to be!)

I also don’t mean to imply that your comprehensible input can’t benefit from its own kind of structure. Focusing on particular kinds of input for a while and then deliberately switching it up as you notice that your needs (and perhaps your interests) change is a great way to spur progress and continued motivation.

It remains for me to illustrate these points with a couple of examples from my own language-learning career. When I started learning Hindi as my first second language, I had a textbook and I religiously went through it, at first refusing to move on until I was able to complete the tests at the end of each chapter. However I was fortunate that I was drawn to learning through watching Hindi movies, and that ultimately I was too impatient to do the exercises before pushing forward, and on reflection I think that led to actually a pretty good balance of unstructured input, structured learning, and curiosity-driven progress.

With Russian, the next language into which I put significant time and effort, the case was different. I had learnt the importance of input, but in my rejection of school-like structure I went a little too far and rejected structured/gradu, and sank a lot of time into input that was almost completely incomprehensible to me, leaving me with few footholds in the language. Pretty silly on reflection but I think not all that uncommon.

With Romanian, by far my best language, I read read read, listen listen listen, and when I need to know a grammatical point or I need more context around a word, I look it up; when I feel that progress is slowing down with a particular type of content I switch to another; and when I feel that my speaking and writing skills are dragging too far behind my comprehension, I warm them up with practice. I structure my learning around my needs and I’m very happy with it!

Finding your way through language learning

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There are a lot of methods to choose from, and a lot of prominent proponents of different methods – many of whom have impressive track records in learning languages and so seem thoroughly believable. The advice is there to be listened to, and you should listen to it, but when it comes down to your own study your regime (regimented or not) is going to be a lot more haphazard.

Different people, different languages, different experiences, and different content all demand different approaches – I have never learnt any two languages in the same way, beyond a basic reliance on a lot of input. For example:

  • Maybe you’re a person who used post it notes for objects in French, but now you’re learning Spanish and you’d rather just get on with speaking
  • Maybe your course says you should be learning to use the dative case but you are actually more interested in this weird instrumental case right now
  • Maybe you keep coming across a word ending you don’t understand so you look it up
  • Maybe you read a lot in one language but mostly talk with a friend in another
  • Maybe you are learning Persian, for which there is no Google Translate audio, so you have to find another way to match what you are reading with what is spoken
  • Maybe you’ve found some Russian radio stations that are the perfect balance of good Russian music and interesting Russian chat, but now you are trying out a new language and all of the stations just play English songs
  • Maybe you used Memrise a bunch for one language but are bored of it and need a change
  • Maybe you love the cinematic offerings of one country but are mostly bored by another

This is a quick post just to let you know that you will find your way through, and that that sort of a haphazard approach is a lot of what learning is. You don’t have to learn in a straight line and you can really pick and choose methods. That includes the methods I don’t mention much on this site – I don’t ever use things like the Gold List method, for example (though I do find some kinds of lists useful when I have the right sort of motivation), but if you enjoy that sort of an approach then go for it!

My posts are generally aimed at people who don’t find a sort of course and test model very rewarding, either because they don’t stick with it or just because they don’t find it satisfying, but there are lots of people who love the motivation they get from clear goals and you are welcome to be one – and to be haphazard too!

Beginner language materials are boring, you don’t need to rely on them

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I will preface all of this with the caveat that this is the advice I have found useful for myself and my own learning style – you may find the beginner materials much more rewarding than I do, especially at the very beginning, and I don’t want to discourage you if that is the case! For me, though, especially in my more recent languages, I have relied on them less and less. OK, on with the show…

As an absolute beginner in a language it can be very frustrating to discover that the majority of learning materials directed at you are either boring, or are games (which, in general, I find pretty boring). The moments of excitement that come with understanding somebody speaking naturally, even when you are only catching a few words, are difficult to find when you are relying on one lesson format or another. If you are learning your first second language, it is not necessarily obvious to you that Duolingo, textbooks, and videos/podcasts for absolute beginners (often children) aren’t THE ways of doing things.

They aren’t, though. I have given some suggestions for language learning methods and resources here, but the key is to know that, especially with new technologies, you don’t have to be using material that feels boring and/or childish. You’re learning a language! You want to understand what people are saying! You don’t necessarily want to be learning rules or passing tests.

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When I started learning Hindi and when I started learning Russian I didn’t have textbooks in those languages, and I certainly didn’t have Duolingo. Mostly I watched movies and looked up things on the school computers when I was stuck or curious. I bought some textbooks later, and as reference materials they were extremely helpful, and saved me printer money, but they have never formed the basis of my learning. To be clear, I am definitely not saying that these resources are bad or aren’t useful, but if you want to enjoy language learning and feel like you are really understanding native speakers, even as an absolute beginner it is good to base your learning around immersion. That means listening to and reading interesting materials in your target language – with subtitles or translations first, and perhaps later without (more on how to do this later). Textbooks and google searches are valuable support for that – I’m sure it would have taken me a while to work out the differences between gender and case endings without them and that is obviously an important piece of information – but hearing them used by native speakers in a context not aimed at me was what really helped me to learn.

My Hindi textbook was useful for me in part because I actually really enjoyed the content on offer. It had a story that had an arc across the whole book, and because of that I was motivated to learn the grammatical points that supported the context. Without the fun of interesting content I wouldn’t learn. I would go so far as to describe the textbook as a valuable support to my learning. That is all a textbook can be, and probably all it is trying to be, but as a beginner it can seem like it is the language itself, the test to be passed before you’re allowed to do the fun bits. Interspersing your exposure to a language with grammar study can be great, but just studying grammar rarely is.

It is through the fun of so many movies, TV shows, websites and podcasts that I have learnt most of my vocabulary. They are also how I learnt how to actually care about and use the grammatical points, which I occasionally look up when the content has made me curious. Recognising and imitating a flow of words is, for me, a far more effective way of deepening my use of grammatical constructs than actively trying to learn and remember them. And interesting videos and texts are available to you as a beginner, you don’t need to wait until you have passed a certain number of tests. If you are lost in a piece of audio, just recognising the patterns of sounds and slowly starting to match them with subtitles, then great! You are doing it, and besides, the show is good!

Finding interesting (and useful) content

It seems as though there is rarely an opportunity, as a beginner, to feel as though you are engaging with the interests and materials of native speakers, which is very likely what motivated you to start learning in the first place. But there are ways, and those ways are getting better! I have written about beginner methods in more detail here, but the relevant points are below

  • Videos – if you are an absolute beginner (or if you aren’t) videos with subtitles are a great way to go. Listen, pay attention, see what you can learn. Then, if you enjoyed something, watch it again – and again, and again. The key is to enjoy yourself, so if you don’t like this repetition – which I’m not suggesting you have to do all in a row -you can skip it. However, I have found it very useful for really starting to hear through the blur of fast dialogue and thick plot. If you are inclined to, repeat the things you really enjoy – perhaps, when you are ready and know the video well, repeat without subtitles.
  • Reading – with LingQ or the opensource but slightly clunkier equivalent Learning With Texts. If reading material is more up your street, LingQ and LWT provide audio for each word through Google Translate. LingQ also has separate recordings for a lot of its user-provided materials, many of which are transcribed podcasts and news broadcasts. If you find your own material for LingQ (and I think that is where the fun comes) you can upload associated audio. There are also, significantly, translations for each word to help you through a piece even as an absolute beginner. When you have learnt each word you can mark it as known, until then you can select a word to see translations. I learnt the Russian alphabet using LingQ by playing each word of a book aloud until I knew all the letters. If you use my referral link to LingQ you get some free LingQs (words you mark as recognised) as a referral benefit, and I get a small commission if you upgrade. I have found this site, especially with texts displayed in classic mode, so much easier to operate than LWT that I have been very happy recommending it above LWT on this site even before I discovered the referral benefits. It really has been the bedrock of my Russian study, more than any other resource – though shout out to masterrussian.com for having the answers to the questions I came up with while reading. The major advantage that LWT has is the greater range of languages available – usually if you can find them on Google Translate, you can find them on LWT.
  • Podcasts – I will throw in a quick note in favour of a type of podcast that I find too difficult to find, but is perfect for me as a beginner who doesn’t want to explicitly learn grammar or repeat every syllable slowly. That is, I love podcasts that take sentences on a theme and say them once in English (or your best language) and twice in your target language, as they are neither patronising nor needlessly slow. They provide a good opportunity to hear how related words work in context. Certainly check out the other podcast offerings for your language, though – you might not be as impatient as me and sometimes you have to commute!

Especially when you have subtitles and/or translation software, you don’t need to restrict yourself to reading/watching/listening to material that is at or only a little above your level – you absolutely can if you feel you are getting something out of it, but I habitually work with (enjoy) content that is significantly above my own level because it is what is interesting to me. As I have said, I didn’t know the alphabet when I started reading a book in Russian. I tend to avoid particularly descriptive texts with vocabulary that I will rarely use, but that is a personal preference – again, do what feels best for you! If you have subtitles, LingQ, or LWT to support you you should be able to make your way through difficult material anyway, and have a good time along the way. When you find the material that is really interesting, it is valuable even if it is hard.

What do you want to do with your language? Speaking and/or listening.

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For some of you learning a language, communication is your primary goal. For others, it is the ability to understand the world around you a little better. Both are good and valid, and if you are comfortable that your strategies for language learning give you what you want, then they are valid too! No matter what anyone says.

There is a lot of pressure from within the language learning community to attain fluency measured by the ability to speak fluently – including a lot of YouTube videos of polyglots that alternately inspire would-be language learners, and reinforce their lack of self-belief. The Speak from Day One method is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but it does drive home the idea that language-learning is ultimately about speech – especially your own.

But when people give advice it is often just advice for people whose goals and habits resemble their own. People take their own experiences and make them general – because it feels validating! I’m a chronic advice-giver, trust me. (For more detail, see this song.) But your priorities in the language learning process should be organised according to your own goals and with sympathy for your own ways of learning – for what you actually find valuable.

So what do you want out of learning a language?!

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If you don’t want to speak yet (or at all!)

I have been learning Hindi for years but almost never speak it, partly through lack of opportunity but mostly because I’ve been pretty happy just listening. It has been more important to me to pay attention to others than it has been to be heard by them. Combining listening with other activities may make you progress quicker, in the sense of being able to understand better, but whether or not you do anything else, listening and paying attention to material you really value is the good of language learning. It is not just learning, it is using the language. I have found it hugely valuable!

In fact, for most (but not all) of the languages I learn being able to listen and understand has been my primary goal. As a result, however, my Hindi speech is a stilted and infrequent. I take a a while to find vocabulary, so haven’t felt confident doing it in conversation with a native speaker.

But here’s the great thing: now I have Hindi-speaking flatmates and I have been trying to talk to them, and the rate at which I am turning words I understand into words I can use in speech is really exciting, and faster than it could have been without the underpinning I have acquired through so much listening. (As I have started to be more creative, I have found this method useful to get me forming more sentences and to remind me of words I have never used – if you are beginning to speak maybe try it, but do what works for you!)

If you are just starting to learn a language and you are too nervous to speak, or just not motivated to, that is absolutely OK! If you want to speak later, you will have given yourself an excellent grounding for it. If you never want to speak, you never have to! As I have said over and over, it is way more fun to be bad at a language than not to speak (read: know) it at all!

If you really want to speak…

If, however, you really want to speak, find ways to do it! If fear is too demotivating in a public setting and you can afford to find a tutor, or just find a language buddy, then that is a great alternative.

If being on the spot is scary, I suggest allowing yourself to use translation technology. For Russian I found it very useful to be able to use Google Translate whilst talking to my tutor – some teachers will complain when you do this but I was way more motivated and way less nervous when I had that option. If I tried not to rely on it too heavily and always considered the words to double check that they are appropriate, the result was to speed up conversation while also exposing me to new vocabulary and grammar points, and I don’t think that’s any bad thing!

Oh! Also talking to yourself is great, in whatever language. I mean, I guess I should add the “advice is for the advice-giver” caveat, but who doesn’t love chatting to themself a bit? It’s a great clarifier.

But not quite yet…

If speaking is too scary for now but you still want to prepare to communicate in the language, try combining a lot of listening with a lot of writing. It is especially good if you can have your writing corrected by native speakers on a site like italki (or anywhere else you can find them! I find italki is a really great resource when you don’t know where else to look for correction or are worried that people are being too polite to correct you).

I reckon you could talk to yourself too. Also, while I know I would find asking for comments on a recording of me more scary than actually talking face to face, I know that there are many people who don’t feel the same. Maybe see what YouTube can do for you!

What it all comes down to is this: there are lots of ways to get what you want from a language. Maybe for you that will involve speaking, maybe it won’t. Listen to yourself before you listen to anyone else, and find strategies that work for you!

A Hindi starter kit

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My route into Hindi was a roundabout one. Everybody finds their own path into language, and for some that path is a textbook. But for most people (an in my opinion anybody who wants to have fun) that is not the beginning and end of it. I absorbed as much Hindi content as I could, long before I understood much of what was being said. For the most part that meant movies. Often the same ones over and over again (if you are inclined to repeat watch it really helps, as you stop focusing on understanding the whole meaning and get a chance to pick up on smaller parts of speech). I owe most of my vocabulary to movies.

I did use a textbook, though, and it would have taken a lot longer to absorb the grammar without it. I still think Rupert Snell’s older Teach Yourself Hindi course is one of the best textbooks I’ve used, and I have a lot of fondness for it. Grammatical points are laid out clearly and structured around genuinely enjoyable dialogues that actually kept me reading the book. It is certainly better than the other Teach Yourself offerings, which take you more slowly to a lower level, but I can’t compare with too many other Hindi textbooks.

To be clear, this post and most of the content on my site is primarily for people who want to build a solid grounding in a language, however patchy it may be depending on your own interests. For people just looking to learn a few phrases so their travels run a bit more smoothly, this phrase book looks promising (but not released until 2019 – others in the series are well-reviewed but I haven’t used any of them). Other than that, though, I think the best resources are online. Why not do some of the other stuff in this post anyway? Nothing to lose in a bit of fun!

Also, this list is absolutely non-exhaustive! The basic point is to find content you like at a level you feel comfortable in – which may or may not be ahead of your actual level. If you have an idea of what that might mean for you then you needn’t read on. If you don’t, then go ahead.

Hindi movies

A lot of people are put off watching Hindi movies because of their reputation for all-singing all-dancing drama. For most of the films I watch that’s no exaggeration, but it is not all that India produces! I’ve collected below a few examples of my favourite movies of various styles. As I mentioned above, I’m not suggesting that watching films is a quick way of getting the grammar of a language, but if you are paying attention and willing to rewatch the same films a few times you will definitely pick up a lot – especially in more quotable movies with less varied vocabulary. For that, the cheesier the better! A lot went into my Hindi education but I think most of it was Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Piku – a much more naturalist movie than is typical (with no dance numbers), and a genuinely lovely story about a woman, her father, and his constipation. The difficult but loving family is experienced by the owner of a taxi stand, who has to drive them from Delhi to Kolkata when all of his employees refuse to get in a car with Piku.

Fanaa – a movie that has it all. I have heard Aamir Khan describe it as a masala movie, and it is definitely that, but I found it much calmer than most. It is set largely in Kashmir, and there is a deliberate shift in style between the more colourful scenes set in the capital and much bleaker tones in Kashmir. There is cheeky love story, but that doesn’t form the bulk of the film. I won’t say too much, and I recommend you don’t find anything out. I may be rare in having known nothing about it before I went in but oh boy was that fun.

Kal Ho Naa Ho – for the full on Bollywood drama experience (“Bollywood” is a contentious term and I avoid using it, but I think if it applies anywhere it is here). Again, I would recommend not knowing much going in, but it boils down to a love triangle and a strained family. Shah Rukh Khan’s character is surrounded by a lot of not-so-subtle angel imagery, but very little in the film is trying to be subtle.

Don – there is no hiding the cheese in this one. You could go either for the Shah Rukh Khan remake or the Amitabh Bachchan original, but I’ll admit I have only skim watched the original (so far), so I’m talking about the remake. It is a film about Vijay, the perfect doppelganger of a crime boss who is roped in by the police to infiltrate his gang. Events unfold and 70’s pastiche blends seamfully in with bad Matrix stylings. My guess is that the remake is more entertaining if you have already watched the original, for the comparison (avoiding spoilers is hard!), but it is kind of fun watching it with fresh eyes and having no idea why Kareena Kapoor is dancing like that.

Podcasts

For a beginner there are things like HindiPod 101. I find it difficult to find the right episodes things for my level, but if you enjoy them they can be a good way of getting some input guided. I have little patience for guidance, but there are plenty of people who are much better with authority than I am!

If you’re at an intermediate level then I highly encourage you to search for the Hindi-Urdu flagship.

When you have some basics down you can also go for podcasts made for native speakers. For this you’ve gotta go with what interests you (searching something you’ve google translated is probably more effective than putting “Hindi” in the search bar), and trial and error is key. Since there won’t be subtitles, you will want something with a heavy English component to start you off – they aren’t hard to find, as a lot of the Indian audience is English-speaking.

Reality TV

If you are happy to watch reality TV in your regular day, switching that out to Hindi is a great option for you! I have spent many an hour watching an Indian dance competition with Hrithik Roshan but I’ve forgotten the name! I will come back to this post later with better examples when I find good content with subtitles.

Soap operas

I haven’t spent much time watching Indian soaps outside of hotel rooms in India – probably four full evenings’ worth of viewing. From what I remember, there was a lot of dead air as characters glared at each other, but I definitely encourage you to look into it. If it turns out to be something you’re into then great!

 

This post needs work, and I’d welcome your help! I have included what has been valuable to me personally – though I have left out the shopping network for shame – but if you have suggestions that I’ve missed that would be accessible for someone at a beginner level (i.e. with subtitles or whatever other help is available) let me know!

Learning in phrases

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This is an expanded and revised version of a recent tumblr post I made. If you like this site please consider supporting me on Ko-fi!

I see a lot of vocabulary lists and rarely find them useful, except as a reminder of words I’d forgotten. Without any other context a word will slip quickly from my memory. What is much more useful is to learn words as part of phrases – ideally as part of phrases you have heard or read, or possibly created yourself. I use the word “phrase” vaguely here to mean a memorable string of words. When I speak in my own language I often notice that my speech is just collections of learnt/altered phrases – pretty unoriginal but super useful!

Collecting phrases may seem like an extra step in your way to learning vocabulary quickly, but it is really helpful in a few different ways. If I use the phrase “я ненавижу свою работу” (I hate my job) to remember the word “работа” it does three things: firstly, it helps me remember the word with a context, meaning that I am much more likely to remember the word in future – if I need the word on its own it may take me a half moment longer to extract it from the sentence, but I have a much smaller chance of completely forgetting it.

Secondly, it helps me to remember a number of grammatical points with a natural rhythm – I remember to say свою (one’s) instead of моя (my), and I get a feel for the appropriate word endings when saying that I hate something. In Russian more than any other language I have studied, I have not terribly had terrific success with conjugation tables, so listening for rhythm combined with this more active noticing has been really useful for me.

And thirdly, building off the second point, it helps to build up a repertoire of phrases from which I can swap out the verb, the noun, or both on demand. This means that I can quickly form new sentences without having to actively recall different grammatical points. Even for people whose comprehension and grammatical understanding is advanced this can speed up speaking.

I hope that by now the merits of learning phrases are clear! I’ll lay out a quick methodology below. I have found it very enjoyable to be active in my collection of phrases because it means a lot of rewatching movies and TV shows I love, and also because progress is exciting! The third step is great for actually being able to recall and use these words in conversation rather than unnecessarily sticking with simpler vocabulary. As ever, best practice is the practice you are motivated to do.

  1. Watch/read something interesting, ideally something you already know and enjoy (because it makes it more memorable).
  2. When you come across a phrase that has one or two new words in it, write it down. I have only done this with one or two new words at a time more because of practicality rather than efficacy  feel free to experiment.
  3. You can pause watching or reading now, or collect a number of these and wait until the end. Either way, it is good to activate your knowledge of the new words by creating your own sentences with them. This may require some googling for usage, that’s fine! I would advise that you avoid complicating it with every usage and just stick to things close to the phrase you took.

OK, I hope that’s useful! For a brief example of how I do this in practice, check out this tumblr post in which I show you using my millionth rewatch of Kal Ho Naa Ho.

 

This blog uses affiliate links – if you click on one and go on to buy something I will get a small commision, at no extra cost to you. You may have noticed that there actually weren’t any links to products in this post! Well, that gives me the perfect excuse to recommend a book that is not really to do with languages at all! Allow me to introduce (if you aren’t already acquainted) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. It’s real interesting.