Today’s post is a bit different. Let’s talk about three strategies - or perhaps more accurately - tactics that add passive foreign language learning to our days.

ингредиенты - Ingredients - Tuoteseloste

I have always loved reading product labels, lists of ingredients and used them to add up to my vocabulary. Living in small language area means we often get packaging that has multiple other languages besides Finnish. I think big part of my Swedish/Norwegian/Danish vocabulary comes from reading product packaging.

поп-музыка - Pop music - Pop-musiikki

Pop music, especially the silly kind of pop music is an excellent source of words and pronunciations. Here are some Spotify lists in languages I am currently actively learning:

Russian Pop (created by a Spotify user, not me)

Chinese pop (my own favourites, contains one song in Hakka, a couple in Cantonese and several in Mandarin)

Finnish pop

виртуальные ассистентки - Virtual assistants - virtuaaliavustajat

Something that adds talking in the language we are learning, into our daily routines is using a virtual assistant like Siri or Google Assistant in our target language. Skritter language learning app made this nice video about using them for learning Chinese.

or see their blog post about it: How to Talk to Siri and Google Assistant in Chinese! > Skritter Blog