Learning a language in the car

Casdawer

Casdawer

Casdawer

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Hampshire
Evening all,

I've recently started a job where I'll be travelling abroad quite a bit, mostly to France and I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions for learning languages while driving.

There used to be CDs that you could use but my car has no CD / tape player so I can only use my iPhone.

Any suggestions?
 
If you're driving the car I'd have thought it's probably not such a good idea to focus so heavily on something else to make it worthwhile :p
 
Duolingo on the phone is great. It has an option for "I can't talk" where you hit your answers on the screen rather than saying them (good for the tube) - I guess with the car you'd want the reverse.
 
To learn it, you'll need to concentrate on it. To concentrate on it whilst driving doesn't sound particularly safe.
 
I don't see how you need to concentrate any more than listening to a conversation on the radio, with a passenger or on the phone (hands free, obviously). So I'm assuming none of the people above ever do anything like that?

My dad learnt French from tapes on his commute. Became pretty fluent over time.
 
Sounds like it would be a great way to learn. One tip I picked up on at school - listening to the news is fantastic. Once you've worked out the context, it helps for you to understand everything they're saying. Watching the news is better, but listening is still really good.
 
Michel Thomas is okay for in the car, but if you can invest some time at the desk I'd recommend building your own vocab cards, your own sentences / conversations, and then recording the required amount of time onto your phone (just use the dictate app) - bearing in mind on a long journey you can easily repeat listening to it several times. I'd say a word or sentence in the target language or in English, pause a few seconds, then speak the translation.

Record it new as often as you can, as the recording is learning too, and you practice speaking, you practice listening, you practice creating sentences and you'll critique your own pronunciation (as you hear yourself again and again, you notice errors more - like watching a film several times you notice things you missed first time).
 
I use Duolingo to help with German but I think it's a tad gamey. It's a good supplement to add to other forms of language education.

I'm having trouble finding any kind of night course to learn German though. There are loads for French and Spanish but it's as if somebody really doesn't want us to learn German haha.
 
Dave M said:
Michel Thomas is okay for in the car, but if you can invest some time at the desk I'd recommend building your own vocab cards, your own sentences / conversations, and then recording the required amount of time onto your phone (just use the dictate app) - bearing in mind on a long journey you can easily repeat listening to it several times. I'd say a word or sentence in the target language or in English, pause a few seconds, then speak the translation.

Record it new as often as you can, as the recording is learning too, and you practice speaking, you practice listening, you practice creating sentences and you'll critique your own pronunciation (as you hear yourself again and again, you notice errors more - like watching a film several times you notice things you missed first time).
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How do you to about doing this? I take it you already need a solid baseline in the language then and go from there to make something up to work on?
 
shroomz said:
How do you to about doing this? I take it you already need a solid baseline in the language then and go from there to make something up to work on?
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Search for e.g. "German high frequency verbs", search for pro-nouns, use search or translate (search can be better - you find a lot of people asking how something is said so get real human responses) for some sentences you want to construct.

You can do this with zero knowledge - it's just admin. Honestly the hardest part is making up sentences (in english) to translate!

On top of learning vocab though, I'd recommend you get a grammar book, it sucks, but you need it to not sound like a donkey. Of course even a donkey can make himself understood better than a mute. Skype tutor will really help but you can save a lot of money by learning some basics and vocab first.

For the car though, you're really looking at practise, repeating, retention. Hence making your own stuff and recording your own voice helps double up your efforts.
 
TallPaul1878 said:
I use Duolingo to help with German but I think it's a tad gamey. It's a good supplement to add to other forms of language education.

I'm having trouble finding any kind of night course to learn German though. There are loads for French and Spanish but it's as if somebody really doesn't want us to learn German haha.
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Plenty here in Birmingham, I'm about to finish my beginners course next week for German. Going to enrolled onto the next course start January for reading and writing in German! That's going to be fun!
 
Just found an bunch of language lessons on Apple Music from a guy called 'Henry N.Raymond'.

He does French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese etc.

Will give these a go!

They're also on Spotify too for people who don't have iPhones :)
 
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