How often do you use lack of time as an excuse for not improving your language skills?  We all do it, but the truth is you have far more time available to you than you realise.  The trick is doubling up.

Whilst it’s true that in order to improve your speaking skills you need to practice speaking, you can improve your foreign language comprehension simply by listening more – and the great news is, you can often do this at the same time as doing something else.  Think of all the extra time you reclaim if you were to listen whilst:

There are dozens of hidden pockets of valuable time secreted throughout your day, you just need to get some content on your phone or MP3 player and keep your earphones with you in order to use them.

One final tip: put your audio player on loop.  Repetition is the key to comprehension!

Of course you can transfer our Free Word of the Day onto your phone as one source of audio content, but in my next post, I’ll be giving you some ideas for getting hold of more substantial samples to work with – without spending a penny.

You’ve seen the film right?  Keanu Reeves downloads knowledge of Kung Fu and various other martial arts straight into his brain.  Well, guess what?  You can’t do that with languages. Not yet anyway.  However, I discovered something rather marvellous the other day: The Matrix may be able to help you with your language learning after all…

A French cousin came to visit for a week with her son and one night we decided to watch The Matrix together.  Since her son doesn’t speak much English, I was going to put French subtitles on but I discovered that my Bluray version had various voice-over options in multiple languages.  So instead we watched with French dubbing and English subtitles!  I was then further surprised by just how impressive the dubbing was.  I’ve watched French dubbed films before and some of the voices have been, frankly, comical.  Not so with The Matrix.  Oh no.  Neo sounds like Keanu Reeves, Morpheus sounds just like Laurence Fishburne, and Trinity like Carrie-Anne Moss – all speaking French!  Even Agent Smith has that wonderfully deliberate Carl-Sagan-esque delivery that Hugo Weaving first voiced.

The Matrix may or may not be your first film choice, but how many other films might be in your home DVD or Bluray collection secretly hiding a couple of hours worth of foreign language exposure?  Definitely worth a second look…

Gareth