#amillionlanguages

Link to the original challenge!

Duolingo

Busuu

Drops

Ba Ba Dum

Clozemaster

Wordbrewery

Wordeys

Mango

LinguaLift

Babbel

Udemy

Lingvist

Anki

Memrise

CoolJugator

Italki

HelloTalk

Fluentify

Coffee Strap

Lang-8

Readlang

LingQ

Mondly

Lingua.ly

LanguagePod101

Radio Lingua

FluentU

MindSnacks

101languages

LingoHut

LingoDeer

Beelinguapp

#1YearOfLangs is a challenge that I created in December of 2018 and did throughout 2019. I’ve had a lot of fun and have learned a lot throughout the year-long language learning challenge, and I’ll be doing it again in 2020 (with some modifications)! I wanted to create a central post with all the info about the challenge, so that’s what this is!

The general premise of the challenge is to learn a new language every month for a year! Yes, that’s a lot, but it helps a lot to learn what languages you’re interested in pursuing in the future. You can also see connections between different languages which is really interesting

Here’s the post with the original guidelines

Here’s my 2019 challenge recap post

Here are some alternative variations of the challenge (with different lengths of time spent on each language)

Here’s a list of resources for the challenge

Here’s a 1-month language learning prompt list for #1MonthOfLangs

Here’s 2+ months worth of language learning prompts

Here’s what a realistic day of the challenge looks like

Here’s what I’m planning to do for the challenge in 2020

I’ll try to keep this updated as I make more posts but here’s what I have so far! Hopefully y’all find this helpful lol let me know if there’s any specific resource that you’d like me to find or make!!!! I want to help you all as much as possible so PLEASE let me know if there’s any way that I can help support you and get you more resources!

Yeah for sure! I absolutely loved learning Italian for a month in January, and I’ll probably learn some more in the future! A lot of these resources are ones I found useful when I was working on Italian:

Langblrs:

@italiany-italian

@theitaliandud

@italianlangblr

@sayitaliano

@soldi-soldi

@italiano-inglese

@myitalianlangblr

@italangblr

@una-ragazza-con-un-flauto

@italstudy

@imparandoilrusso

@apis-really

@italian-lingots

Resources:

Coffee Break Italian podcast

Babadum

Clozemaster

Tinycards

Duolingo

Free Italian workbook pdf

Tips/advice:

If you work well with Duolingo, I definitely recommend it for Italian!

Practice speaking out loud as you read sentences, you’ll improve your speaking and listening skills a lot quicker!

Learn some basic verb tenses and simple grammar concepts first, it’ll make everything else fall into place much easier!

But then I hit a wall. I just couldn't get myself to do language practice. It was like I had art block, but with language learning. And I kept hitting this block until this past week. I haven't done hardly any language practice over the past two months, which has been super frustrating since I absolutely love learning languages and want to keep this blog active, but I truly just needed a break.

So, hopefully I'm back. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be doing now, but I'm going to try and focus on just rebuilding the daily habit of practicing language learning. What got me back into it was that somebody had tried to speak Spanish with me and I couldn't really hold the conversation very well, so I started working on the Spanish Duolingo course. I do eventually want to work on Italian, but I think I'm going to stick with Spanish for now since that's felt more motivating right now, plus that was in my original plan for March and April.

Anyway, thank you all for being patient with me while I took my much needed break. I hope to post more often going forward, but I also need to focus on not burning myself out.

This past year I completed the #1YearOfLangs challenge where I studied a new language every month in 2019! Here’s the original post I made in December 2018 where I explained the rules I followed this year.

I think it would be good to have some updated guidelines since people have said they’d like a bit more flexibility in the challenge, or ways to do the challenge with fewer languages since 12 is a lot!

The main focus is still to work on several languages over the course of an extended period of time, but these variations on the challenge can make it way easier to fit your life! So, here are the variations I came up with:

The Original – 12 languages in a year, spending 1 month on each

Use the tag #OriginalYearOfLangs if you follow this version!

The Extended – 6 languages in a year, spending 2 months on each

Use the tag #ExtendedYearOfLangs if you follow this version!

The Triad – 3 languages in 3 months, spending 1 month on each

Use the tag #TriadMonthsOfLangs if you follow this version!

The Twins – 2 languages in 12 months, spending 6 months on each

Use the tag #TwinsYearOfLangs if you follow this version!

The Soloist – spending the whole year focusing on learning 1 language

Use the tag #SoloistYearOfLangs if you follow this version!

Or any other combination of months and number of languages! These ideas are just to get you started!

I’m also going to be putting out a post for a #1MonthOfLangs challenge that’s a month long challenge for language learners since a whole year is pretty intimidating for a lot of people! Look out for that post soon!

Some other guidelines I’d like to mention are:

Try to post whenever you can but the main goal should be to do at least a little practice every day and to get in the habit of doing so

Tag any posts with #1yearoflangs #1yearoflangschallenge and any of the previously mentioned tags if they’re applicable to the version of the challenge you’re doing

Feel free to message me or send me an ask if you have any questions or comments about the challenge, my experience with it, or anything else you can think of!

2019 #1YearOfLangs Challenge Recap!

Hey everyone! This past year I completed the #1YearOfLangs challenge, which is a language learning challenge that I created a year ago. Here’s the link to the original post if you don’t know what I’m talking about! The basic premise is that I tried to learn as much of a new language as possible every month for the year of 2019, so I tried to cover 12 languages in 12 months!

Overall, I had a really positive experience with the challenge! It was really cool to see and better understand connections between languages and learn both about the similarities and differences between different languages and language families. It was also awesome to learn which languages I want to pursue in the future and which ones just aren’t for me.

I definitely had my favorite languages from the year, but I do want to say that everyone will have different opinions on each language so my experience might be completely different from if someone else focused on the same languages, it totally depends on the person. That being said, my favorite languages ranked were definitely Italian, Romanian, Esperanto, Portuguese, and Danish! I found that Romance languages were way easier for me to pick up which isn’t much of a surprise since my previous language experience has been almost entirely with Romance languages (French, Spanish, etc.)

Here’s the order of the languages that I ended up doing:

January: Italian

February: German (lost motivation)

March: German (2nd try!)

April: Swedish

May: Greek (definitely the toughest one for me!)

June: Polish

July: Portuguese

August: Romanian

September: Indonesian

October: Norwegian

November: Danish

December: Esperanto

One thing I think is important to keep in mind if you’re interested in doing some form of the challenge in 2020 is that it’s really easy to lose motivation. Honestly, the main thing that kept me going was this blog and all the support I’ve gotten over the past year through it. You need to have really clear parameters and a good reason for participating in the challenge.

In terms of how much I really did for each language, that’s a little iffy to be honest lol when I started the challenge I was imagining that I would spend 30-60 minutes a day on language practice but in reality, I’m a busy college student so most days it ended up being 5-10 minutes a day. Definitely better than nothing, but I wish I had had more time to reserve for the challenge. Most days I just did a few exercises on Duolingo, and I found it to be really helpful in keeping me consistent and having a minimum amount of work I’d do for the challenge every day. Definitely helpful to have a set “daily minimum” so that you have something to fall back on if you don’t have much time to work that day. Trust me, I get it!

Depends on what you mean by effective! 

You can definitely learn quite a bit if you focus on studying one language each month, even just with 10 minutes a day! Obviously you won’t be able to become fluent by any means, but you can certainly learn a lot of the basics like greetings and some simple vocabulary and grammar. It’s a great start for sure!