I am a Mandarin Chinese speaker, and I’ve learned many languages so far, including English, Japanese, Russian, French and some Chinese dialects like Cantonese. I host my multilingual language learning notebook here on my website. I’ll introduce my motivation and usage. Hope this will help you in your language learning journey too.
Why a Language Learning Notebook?
Speaking about languages, I’m a believer of the idea that language is culture. We are basically learning cultures, values, and ways of thinking of a particular group of people when we learn a language, which is the knowledge part of language learning. And the language itself is a tool to communicate with people, so we certainly need a lot of practising, which is the skill part of language learning.
I treat them as two separate parts, because in my early times in the UK as a visiting student, I truly felt dumb at spoken English and found what I’ve achieved in China at English learning had nothing to do with what I was struggling here. That leads me to focus on the skill part. I was then convinced that my English would naturally get better as long as I use it more (since more skill practices are injected into my life), but not really. After months, I found I still didn’t know what I didn’t know, if I can’t figure out what they mean that I received from the environment. I kept encountering a lot of simple and common things that I didn’t know at all, and still have no clue even at the end of my time in UK.
That makes me realise I have to learn something proactively, which is exactly the knowledge part again. I probably received English education in China without authentic and real stuff that naive people use, so I need to learn them from now. I hadn’t got time to do this during my time in the UK, but I started to think about it after I came back to China. The beginning is a language learning notebook embedded in my website that acts as a knowledge base. I’ve established many similar knowledge bases in this website like cooking, music, and I enjoy the process of organising and categorising knowledge, and of course, learn from it. This notebook would be an ideal platform for me to explore English culture and broaden horizon, amazing.
I’m going to introduce you to this language learning notebook, so we only talk about the knowledge part here. (For the skill part, you know I am not very good at it.. please don’t expect me a lot)
What is in the Notebook
I am the kind of person who like to learn things in a systematic way and enjoy exploring the hierarchy of knowledge, so the notebook is organised in a same way.
My process of learning a language is like this:
- Start from learning the spelling and pronunciation system.
- Learn the grammar.
- Start to accumulate vocabulary in a word list after a relatively good understanding of the grammar.
Therefore, the notebook is organised in three parts: phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. The first two parts are my personal notes on the phonetics and grammar of the language. The vocabulary part is a collection of words that I have encountered in my life, which I think is useful and worth remembering. For each language, I have a separate vocabulary notebook; and reversely, I have a Chinese vocabulary notebook that contains words from all the foreign languages I have learned, which offers a good view of similarities and differences of close languages. Each word has its own page, which contains my personal detailed notes.
How I Use the Notebook
The phonetics and grammar of a language are summarised after I have learned them, so that I can pick up the knowledge quickly from my past learning instead of getting confused by another set of online resources.
I add a word to the vocabulary notebook when it has left an good impression in my mind. The words ready to be added are collected in a convenient place like Notes on my phone, and I will add them to the notebook when I have time. Adding a word to the notebook takes a lot of time, but it is a process of summarising and organising my understanding of the word, which helps me to remember it better.
I review the words in the list regularly. I implement some features that can help me to review the words I have learned: toggle the visibility of the definition, example, and synonym table, so that I can test myself; and a random word button to help me review words randomly. The words also have category tags so that I can filter different categories of words to review easily.
This is a notebook of my personal knowledge, so I don’t expect it to be useful for others. However, I hope that the idea of a language learning notebook can inspire you to create your own notebook, which can help you to learn languages more effectively.