Maggie:
• I like to add a French news app on my phone to practice French in my downtime. Big carriers like LeMonde or Le Figaro offer about half their articles free, or you can look for your preferred newspaper.
• On that note, I like to set my phone language to French. My Facebook account is set in French, too. It helps switch my brain into French mode outside the classroom, and also taught me some new vocab.
Nathan:
• I like listening to Podcasts in German while cooking or driving. Some of my favorites are “Fest & Flauschig,” or “Lage der Nation.”
• German newspaper apps, like the Süddeutsche Zeitung or Spiegel,will push notifications of headlines to your phone, which gives you a number of one-sentence comprehension challenges throughout the day. I like to try to look up any words I don’t know in the headline, and make sure that I know exactly what it means.
Martha:
• My biggest thing is reading! Reading in your foreign language is a great way to see subconscious improvement in your own writing, stylistically and grammatically. Especially when I’m not in a French or German class, I’ll make sure my ‘fun’ reading is a novel in one of those languages. The library also has great databases of free online French and German literature on their website!
• When I see an advertisement with a tag-line, or a sign somewhere, I’ll practice translating it into either French or German, and then I’ll look up the way that company self-translated the same advertisement and compare! This has led me down some funny and interesting roads looking at cultural intersections.
Lucía:
• I will never be convinced that Harry Potter is not the best way to start reading a foreign language. Right now I am in chapter 2 of The Sorcerer’s Stone in Japanese, or “ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石.”
• Watching movies in a foreign language is great, but I think it is even more helpful to watch foreign language TV shows. You get used to the ways character speak and benefit from listening to their accents for many hours.
• Also, downloading flashcards on my phone and having vocab sets that I can flip through while wasting time on my phone is great.
Liliana:
• My favorite way to keep up with/learn new vocabulary is listening to music in the target language! I find that learning the lyrics and the melody help me to understand words in new contexts and in a way that I know I’ll remember.
• Writing and practicing flashcards is also my go-to classic, especially for Mandarin because of that extra writing practice!