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60-MINUTE ONLINE CLASSES WITH NATIVE TEACHERS
Teacher's Corner
A monthly Newsletter entry directly from the Acquire Team sharing our most recent Language news, seasonal Course offerings, and fresh updates about our Platform!
September 2023
Vol. 2
BACK TO SCHOOL!
Acquire Languages Monthly Newsletter
Shifting Back to a Productivity Mindset
Written by Acquire Languages Founder Nickolas Cox
Now that the Summer is coming to a swift end, it’s a great time to reflect on all of the exciting new memories made and stories told. Many of you are beginning your next academic or fiscal work years, so it’s important to also reflect on your goals, especially those language related moving forward. If you’re reading this, then you’ve come to a great place to begin that step!
We hear all the time that young people are too busy to learn a foreign language. Too immersed in the work, “social-life” balance to commit to a goal so daunting…but yet young professionals between 20-35 disproportionately spend their free time on social media compared to other ages. Nearly 3 hours a day is spent scrolling, posting, or watching others live their lives. Imagine if you were to reclaim even a fraction of that time to put towards learning a language–just 1 hour a day. This month we ask you to re-evaluate the time you spend on frivilous tasks that don’t help you get ahead. If you really want to get ahead and deepen your results connecting with others, both domestically and internationally, for travel, business, and many other purposes, then consider taking a Language class with us this September ☀️
5 Easy Steps to Jumpstart Your Learning
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Due to the lack of widespread interest, in language learning, it can be quite difficult to enter the landscape. Many people go the route of apps, which serving important role in facilitating easy, quick practice. What these apps lack, however, is a deeper mode of connecting with the particular language that is being studied. Because of this, it is hard for many students to develop an organic longevity in their desire to continue practicing, let alone the prospective individuals that never muster the motivation to even begin. For that reason we have assembled a short list to help with inspiration. Here are 5 easy steps to jumpstart your Language Learning:
1. Find a Genuine Interest in a New Culture
Acquiring an honest, genuine fascination in a new culture or region of the world is one of the best catalysts for more deeply connecting with a language you'd like to learn. Understand more about a group's customs, traditions, and beliefs is a great way to unlock new perspectives for your mind, a crucial key to more quickly grasping their language.
Naturally, we'd recommend to start on YouTube. Perhaps you can find a travel vlogger that suits you and whose videos are entertaining and digestable. Here is one of our recommendations:
Bald & Bankrupt (Solo Traveler through dozens of countries)
https://www.youtube.com/@baldandbankrupt
2. Spend Time with Friends from Diverse Backgrounds
Meeting individuals from around the world is a proven shortcut to quickly learning about the lifestyles of others, especially from a cultural and social level. Knowing how people communicate with each other: displays of affection, slang, and idioms, is important to acquiring the means to exercise these skills later on. Here are a few resources we recommend to connect with unique people from around the world, with just your laptop:
My Language Exchange (Great tool to fun, language swap)
https://www.mylanguageexchange.com/
Interpals (To make a PenPal from a new country)
3. Watch More International Movies & TV Shows
Who doesn't love watching movies?! For marvelous insights, cultural tid-bits and references, we recommend to start expanding your cinematic favorites to the international scene. Interested in Crime-Dramas, well look into prominent South Korean films from the last 10 years. If raunchy comedy more suits your fancy than look into older French and Italian flicks. There's many gems waiting to be found, and hey it's an excellent way to passively practice language! Just don't forget to leave that original dub ON (with subtitles of course).
For an extensive offering of International Cinema: movies and television we suggest you to check out Netflix:
https://www.nextflix.com/
4. Travel When & Where You Can
Oftentimes the most immersive and engaging experiences with languages come during travel. This is because the stark change in environment, mixed with the high stimulation of the senses (new smells, sights, tastes, etc.), cause the brain to soak up all of the new stimuli. If you think of your mind as a sponge, you can imagine that these circumstances create memorable moments and allow you to absorb more as long as you are open to it.
Many websites offer resources for prospective, even first time travelers to support in the pursuit of accommodation, potential excursions and even travel buddies ahead of a big adventure. One platform we highly recommend because of its reliability and legacy is Couchsurfing:
www.couchsurfing.com
5. Don't Wait, Just Dive into Language Practice!
Likely the most underrated tip on this list is to just dive in to a specific language and try to start learning. There are many different modes; options to learn, but here are a few great online resources that make it easy especially to build your vocabulary in your new language:
Quizlet (Perfect for flashcards and memorization type games)
www.quizlet.com
Acquire Languages (What you thought we wouldn't recommend ourselves!? 😉)
www.acquirelanguages.us/book-online
Current Course Offerings
Now that summer is here in full effect, it's important that we update you on the most recent languages we are offering at Acquire Languages. This summer, you can plan to take a class, or course, in any of the following languages. Click on a flag below to be transported to the respective page to view our options:
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French
Japanese
NEW
Spanish
Ukrainian
NEW
German
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English
Italian
Check Out All of our Available Booking Options Here!
How AI is Changing the Language Learning Scene
For those that are tuned into the latest AI trends, it's incredible to see the fast-paced innovation that is rapidly affecting the Language Learning Landscape. Before, ML modulated practice, live translation, and speech recognition capabilities were scarce, with only a few resources allowing for multiple features across multiple languages (namely Google Translate).
Especially since the release of ChatGPT, however, we have seen a sharp increase in the number of AI-type tools that have been developed to facilitate not only more efficient language learning, but also streamline communication. Overall we think that these tools are important to drive interest in languages by creating more solutions and ways to learn, below we'll talk about one useful technique to get AI to help you improve your languages:
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Live AI Language Conversation
One of the coolest tools we have found so far is Conversation Simulator. In the prompt line, request the computer to serve as a tutor/teacher in a particular language that you want to practice and include any criteria you'd like it to follow for after you begin.
Currently ChatGPT knows somewhere around 100 languages, so there are many different combinations and conversations that can take place, so have a little fun and experiment! We will try to drop more ideas/techniques you can incorporate into your learning practice as we stumble across them.
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Our Upcoming Visit to Italy
Later this month, we will be releasing a new episode to our "Acquire Culture" series, taking you to rural lands of Italia. Designed to virtually transport you to countries all over the world, we've already visited the countries of Japan, Mexico, Germany, and others.
Look forward to an exciting perspective of Italian customs, with the collaboration of an Italian native. Check out past episodes from our series at the link below:
www.acquirelanguages.us/basic-01
An Announcement to Our Supporters
For those that have encouraged our journey to create a connective and integrative language learning platform, thank you. It's been one year and a half since we first started operations and in that time we've had the pleasure of serving students in 5 languages. Slowly we hope to expand both our Course Offerings and Promotional Deals to increase our options to support you in your Language Journey. It's a process, but slowly we're building a team of Native Language Providers, passionate about teaching languages to aspiring individudals. Please follow up on our social media platforms to help improve our outreach:
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Creating a Vision to Progress Forward in your Language
Language Learning can be a daunting goal, with hundreds of tongues around the world, thousands of regional dialects, and innumerable methods of communication. What's important is to have a vision, or image of where you want to be, given a set time period to get there. Do you want to speak French to your friends native to Paris? Or maybe, you'd like to be able to converse with locals in the Japanese street markets. Whatever the goal, it's going to take work to get there and we'd like to be the resource to help you bridge the gap. Fall is nearly here, so don't let it go by without first taking a class with us! ☀️
Thanks for Reading
If you like what we do here and want to support us, consider making a small contribution to encourage our mission to spread the love for languages! Also click the left link to visualize the previous Volume of our Newsletter!
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