Language Learning Notebook Pdf

[Athina Dollison]

Aforeign language notebook is your own personalized repository of all the most valuable knowledge you gain on your road to fluency, so why not fall in love with the best notebook of all?

Once you have your notebook, I recommend writing down your goals as soon as possible. These can simply be a page, or your goals can have a whole section in your notebook (see the next step for more info!).

For example, every couple of weeks, challenge yourself to write for a longer period of time without using a dictionary. This helps you learn to be imaginative with the language and see where your weaknesses are.

Now, try blocking off the space that you would reserve for each component. Even better, try drawing out the layout on a separate paper of the same size. Look over it carefully and consider points like:

You can color code parts of speech, or use different colors for words in your native language and your target language. Color coding by gender works for languages like French or Spanish, while coding by tone works for Mandarin Chinese.

For instance, use drawings to represent the meanings of vocabulary terms. As you draw, think about the word to help reinforce it. Besides making your notebook more interesting to look at, it also helps you associate the word with its actual meaning rather than the English translation.

In this video, language learner Bia shows off her clean, color-coded journal pages. For another take, check out the notebook of Abigail from Polyglot Progress. Both are full of great ideas and inspiration!

They protrude from a page so you can easily find any section. You can put them at the top, side or bottom of the page depending on your preference and design aesthetic. You can label them if you desire, or leave them blank.

There are specially-formatted notebooks available for purchase that can take some of the guesswork out of your layout. There are also great videos of how some language learners created and organized their own personal notebooks to help you get started.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Me too ? I used to have separate notebooks or folders but I think if you study more than one or two languages it just becomes an issue of space. Definitely one notebook is better for me. Thanks for stopping by! ?

Hi! I know that this was posted forever ago, but I was wondering if you could do a post on your current Mandarin nb? I want to start one, and think this would be a great guideline since I too, am learning Mandarin! Also, I love your name! (wink, wink)

Having primarily worked with nineteenth-century printed documents in the past, this project gave me the chance to try encoding manuscript material for the first time. Because of this, I hoped to create a diplomatic digital edition. I picked a 4-page spread from early in the Slovak section of my notebook that included a variety of notes, sentences, and word lists to try representing a few different text structures in TEI/XML. Working with my own text, I could intuit divisions and structures that seem difficult to parse when working with unfamiliar manuscript material, and I have the added benefit of knowing my own handwriting. Font colours were encoded to reflect writing in blue and black ink and pencil, and lines between sections were recorded. These different features, along with the few cases where I recorded dates, helped to distinguish between textual divisions, which are marked with the element.

While I was transcribing and encoding, I was surprised by the amount of Slovak I could mentally translate. Of course, this is elementary writing and most words that were unfamiliar when encoding were also unfamiliar to me when I was learning the language. Because of that, I had definitions written on many pages that I could refer to. When working on both the Slovak transcription and encoding and the encoded English translation of my notebook, I was reminded of some of the differences between Slovak and English that I struggled with as a student, which I tried to reflect in both TEI/XML documents.

The experience of encoding a diplomatic digital edition of my Slovak language notebook has reminded me of how enjoyable the experience of learning the language was. It was empowering to feel like I understood a little bit more of the world around me after each class, and it was gratifying to show my students that I was making an effort to learn their language as they were learning mine. As a language that is very different to English, I appreciated being able to puzzle through new grammatical structures. In the same way I puzzled through new grammar when I was learning, I had to puzzle through the pages in my encoding. Thinking about the language learning experience through TEI/XML, it was interesting to see how I moved from structured paragraphs, lists and tables and then complicated my pages by adding secondary notes and revisions that made my thinking more thorough and explicit. My focus on creating a diplomatic digital edition helped me better understand the layers of my language learning thought process because of the ways it did and did not easily fit into structured data.

The challenge for you as a language learner is to have a reliable system you can use to filter through everything you write down in a vocabulary journal, and then know what you can do to actually learn it.

When I was looking back through an old language learning notebook recently, I realised that of all the words and phrases I'd taken the trouble of learning, I hardly ever used most of them in conversation.

While it would of course be nice to learn everything, the smart thing to do is to identify the small number of words in amongst everything else that you think you've got a realistic chance of actually wanting to use in conversation.

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You can find plenty of inspiration for your notebook pages on Instagram and Pinterest. I like to follow hashtags like #languagebujo #bujoinspiration #bujoaddicts on Instagram to fill my feed with gorgeous spreads by people who are way, way more creative than me.

This is a great way of keeping track of your daily language learning habits and there are lots of fun examples and templates available on Pinterest. You can also use a tracker to measure your Duolingo or Memrise progress.

My individual language system is my system for color coding all of my languages. For example, I have red as Mandarin, purple as Portuguese, pink as Arabic, blue as Hebrew and so on. Inside my bullet journal, which I use for planning, I use these different colors to know what goals are for which language.

For example, as I mentioned in this post, one of my goals is to finish the Drops Hebrew Alphabet level. I use my blue highlighter to fill in what percentage of my goal I have finished on my little Bullet journal progress bar.

I also use those colors for my language notebooks to keep track of which language is which. For example, since my Portuguese color is purple my Portuguese notebook is purple. Simple but effective for quickly knowing which language my things are for.

I keep a key in my notebook for the different topics. I start by taking my set of highlighters and highlighting a line in one of the front pages. I then write in some of the topics I believe I will be using leaving some blank. That way I can add more topics as I progress in the language.

Basically I love these because they are colorful and diverse in their colors while still staying in the same color scheme and not being crazy and all over the place. Not only that but they stick well and look nice when put into a notebook.

All you have to do is grab a small notebook like this and some good content in your target language. How to get good target language content is a topic for another video, but for the sake of simplicity, let me just make a few quick recommendations:

When I go through a piece of content in my target language, be it an article, dialogue, or even the script of a podcast or video, the first thing I do is mark, highlight or underline any word or phrase that seems interesting to me, or particularly relevant to my life.

After I've marked, highlighted, or underlined all of the expressions that I think I want to remember, I then take a subset of those expressions and transfer them into my portable language learning notebook. To be more specific, I distill my list of expressions down to the most useful words and phrases, and then write them down in the notebook.

I like to refer to this as "density". If your selection of stored expressions is appropriately dense, it contains the cues necessary to help you remember most of the concepts contained in your text, podcast, or YouTube video.

Appropriately dense notes also help you remember the sequence of ideas within the piece of content. If you can go from your first expression to your last, and get a good idea of how the content flowed, then you've done a good job, and will memorize words within these expressions much more easily.

Our memories are built like networks, so if you can keep the expressions you're learning well-connected to the context in which you learned those expressions, you'll have a powerful way to recall them, whenever you need to.

This may sound boring, but it is absolutely essential. If you don't review your stored expressions regularly, you'll NEVER remember them reliably enough to actually use them. And if you can't use them, then, well, what's the point?

If you'd like more information about how I incorporate memorization into my language learning routine (including super-cool ways to use your stored notes for speaking practice!), then I recommend checking out the second course in my Become a Master Language Learner series, Overcoming the Intermediate Plateau.

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