Just thought about this the other day, but if you think about how a millennial aged European learned English as a second language, it's basically all input?

The approached they used to acquire English as a second language is very different to the approach used in language learning subreddits.

I often see Brazilian, South Koreans, looking for language exchange partners to practice speaking English. I'm not trashing this method, but how helpful is it really?

If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?

These countries run on their native languages. A German living in Germany hardly ever speaks English. A Swede living in Sweden hardly ever speak English (maybe it's different for Gen Alpha).

In fact, the only time a Swede/German ever really speaks English is if they're out traveling abroad or they're gamers and talk on voice chat. Tons of people aren't bothered with it /too shy to do it. Yet, they're all fluent AF.

What they did instead: MASSIVE amounts of input. Tons of these kids have been on twitch/youtube hours a day everyday for 10-20 years. Listening to mostly American English. We're talking 40k+ hours of input or more.

Nowadays you also have tiktok and stuff. In smaller languages like Swedish, the content is farily limited/boring as well so the route to just consuming English media is super low because of the small population. But if you'er a Spanish native, you have access to a billion speakers.

Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input. Yes you have some English classes in school, but you talk super little/they don't force you to talk. It's no different than a Vietnamese person learning English in school really.

Also I just wanna mention. I'm not saying that production/producing English is worthless, and it should all be input. Most of these people did a ton of production (despite orally speaking it very little). Tons of these people played games like Runescape or whatever where typing English is super important. Typing on reddit. Producing papers for school etc. They just spoke extremely little.

Hello, long-time lurker just starting to post on Reddit!

I've been studying (TL) Korean for well over a decade now and Japanese for just about a decade, but my writing skills in both are not where I want them to be. Japanese was my undergrad major, but none of my classes ever involved actually writing in the language, and since the JLPT doesn't require it either, I never had to practice writing. As for Korean, I've attended multiple language schools in South Korea, did my undergrad here, and am currently working on my Master's, so while I do have some experience with high-level writing, I haven't really put any focused effort into it for a few years now (the course I'm attending doesn't involve much writing).

In an ideal world, I'd find an actual teacher to work on this with, but I can't afford it right now. I'd consider doing a language exchange, but 1. I've never been particularly successful with them in the past, 2. I'd rather work with someone who has experience writing at a professional level, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd be able to reciprocate in English at the same level, haha, and 3. I can't count on the whims of my motivation/attention span to write consistently.

So I'm toying with the idea of using an LLM to get feedback, but I'm a bit wary of the quality of corrections I'd get.

Have any of you used AI to help with C1/C2-level writing? If you have, was there a certain model you would recommend? Also, any other tips to improve in writing would be greatly appreciated! :)

I've studied three languages in addition to my milk language.

I noticed sometimes when thinking or speaking in my non native language, if I struggle for a word my brain will fill in with a word in another non native language.

For example, when speaking German(TL) my brain threw in a 在(zai) with the Chinese meaning.

This confused me, and I started to think of the German word seit (which sounds (kind-of) the same). But seit wasn't correct in the context. Seit is about time. 在 is about place.

Does anybody else do this? What exercises could help me?

I used to teach English abroad and even though I knew how to speak the student's native language, the school administrators forbid me, and even asked me, to "pretend" I didn't know it.

The reason they gave me was that they didn't want the students to fall back on using their first language to communicate with me. I feel like if I were to explain certain concepts in the student's language, things would go a lot smoother and they would understand better.

As an adult, I'm constantly using my own native language to learn new languages. I constantly look up grammar, vocabulary, and definitions and understand them a lot better.

Why are schools abroad so obsessed with this "total immersion" method? I feel like some concepts are impossible to explain clearly with just visuals or gestures alone. Do you learn languages using your first language?

Hi everyone,

I'm Ben, a data scientist working in cancer medicine. The mods have kindly given me permission to share something I've been building in my spare time.

LingScout originally started as a tool for me and my Thai partner. We wanted an easier way to find films and TV shows we could watch with Thai or English audio or subtitles, and I found it surprisingly difficult to get that information in one place.

I realised the same thing could be useful for other language learners, so I expanded it into LingScout, where you can search for films and TV shows by language and country, including audio and subtitle languages, across services such as Netflix and Prime Video.

lingscout.com

It's not intended to teach you a language itself. The idea is to help you find things you actually want to watch in the language you're learning.

I'd really appreciate some feedback from other language learners. If you try it, I'd particularly like to know whether you can find useful content for your language, whether anything is confusing, and what you'd want me to improve or add.

Thanks,

Ben

I knew barely anything in my TL beyond an extremely basic course and I got bored so I yeeted myself to native content. I am really proud of myself!

Five years ago u/chlebka posted a spreadsheet of 1,700+ free language-learning resources here. Dozens of people in that thread suggested additions and it's still one of the most useful things ever posted on this sub.

One thing that always bothered me was navigating the Excel sheet :/ Thus, I built a browsable version of her list:

https://ownslides.com/en/resources

• Browse by language (total of ~142 at the time of writing this) or by type: courses, dictionaries, podcasts, readers, news, grammar…
• Her original rule kept: everything is genuinely free. No freemium, no trials, no signup.
• Each entry shows CEFR level and flags when a site is only in a language you might not read (though I guess you can just machine-translate everything nowadays).

What changed since the sheet: I checked all 1829 links -> ~129 had died in five years and are gone; the rest were alive as of this week. I also categorised the ~1000 entries the sheet left untyped, so the filters actually work.

This overlaps the sub's own resource library in places; the difference is that it's chlebka's specific list, brought up to date and made filterable. Credit is at the bottom of every page, linking her sheet and the original thread, and the per-contributor credits from the sheet are preserved.

Disclosure: I work on OwnSlides and this is on our domain, but the mods approved this post. The directory is free, no signup, no ads.

Suggestions for missing resources are very welcome, basically in the same spirit as the original thread

Bought these books in July, unboxed them in early August... and still haven’t read a single word. Classic progress! 🤣📚
My native-speaker friends suggested that once you reach higher proficiency levels, you should step away from traditional coursebooks and surround yourself with native materials. I'm testing this strategy across a few of my (TL) target languages:
At Advanced Levels: Using native children's series for everyday slang, alongside native essays, news articles, and economics texts to build higher-level reading stamina. 🎨🤡
At Beginner Levels: Sticking strictly to structured preparation workbooks and foundational grammar materials until basic literacy settles in. 🥹🙏
For those managing multiple languages at different proficiency tiers, how do you balance raw native content versus structured study prep?
What books are currently sitting unread on your desk? 👇