You know a lot of vocabulary but

just can't open your mouth and speak?

You take a lot of time to

learn a lot of words every day.

Write them down and repeat them.

Work hard but quickly. Forget them.

If you are struggling with the same situation

and want to know how we can deal

with it, keep watching this video.

Hello my friends.

Welcome to my channel.

If you are new here, my name is Zoe.

I'm a polyglot, I speak seven languages and

I'm doing a PhD in sociology in France.

Besides my native language, Chinese, I have

learned six other languages as adults.

You can find my videos speaking in

different languages on my channel

I always believe that it is never too late

to learn a language If you want to

I'm here to share with you

my experience, encourage and inspire you

in your language and learning journey.

This video is structured by

three common questions people ask me.

How many words do you learn per day?

How do you memorize words?

How do you take notes and repeat?

If you like this video and if you think it's

useful, don't forget to give me a like and share

with your friends and subscribe to my channel.

Let's get started.

Tip number one.

Don't count the numbers.

Digest of them! first and most importantly,

I want to say that learning a language depends

more on your mental skills than your intelligence.

You need to know how to manage your expectations,

know your abilities and limitations, and know

what is reasonable and visible in your situation.

This is the key to staying motivated

and not giving up easily.

So stop comparing yourself to others like how

This person studying to be fluent after six months.

The number doesn't really matter.

But ask yourself how useful that word is

how much this word is related to your daily life.

If you speak another foreign language, just

ask yourself if you use that word

frequently in that language when you speak.

Sometimes I see a word in Arabic or Turkish that

I don't even know how to say in English and French.

Of course, I'm not going to

spend my energy memorizing it.

I always prefer to say that if you use only

five words a day, but they are frequent and useful words, you

digest it and know how to use it during the conversation.

It's better than mechanically

repeating 100 words without understanding, those five words a

day may not seem like much, but that means 150

words a month and 900 words after six months.

With 900 frequency, you can

already hold a conversation.

For example, at the beginning of the learning process,

I'm always a bit in a hurry to learn that 1000 basis words to

be able to talk and practice with people.

I always classified them into different categories.

This is my list of Turkish frequent verbs.

As you can see, there are very useful verbs

like to like to help, to buy, to bring.

There are some examples as well.

This is my list of useful adjectives.

You can see new, enough,

Difficult, easy.

Let me share with you my story.

I was in Egypt, in Alexandria.

I wanted to learn Egyptian dialect.

At that time, I already knew strandard Arabic, but I wanted

to speak Egyptian dialect with people, in the Institute.

They have a textbook, but it's too slow for me.

I want those 1000 basic words to

be able to talk with people.

So I suggested to my teacher, I'm going to

write the conjugation of five verbs every day.

If we just learn the present and past tenses,

I'm going to write in those two tenses and

make sentences of those verbs in both tenses.

And then we will talk about my daily routine,

what I have done, and then we study the textbook.

It's very beneficial and effective.

I used this method to learn Syrian dialect by myself and

I continued to do it with my language partner

when I started learning Turkish in Persia.

If you ask me how many new words

I study every day, I will tell you it depends.

At that time I was only studying Arabic, so

I can do 50 words a day even more.

And now I have to work during the working day.

I can do like ten words a day or less.

If I don't have time, I would just review

the old works and the old flash cards.

The point is not the number, but make sure

you know how to use them and digest them.

Okay if you learn five words per day.

Next step, how to memorize words.

Tip number two, don't memorize them.

Use them.

There are a lot of videos and

books about memorizing things on YouTube.

Personally, I have watched and read a lot about

this topic because I want to learn vocabulary faster.

So I have tried different methods.

Some techniques like Spider webs, mind map,

mind palace, anything you can imagine.

But after that, I realized these techniques can help

me to learn words in a short time.

I can say that I can memorize 50

words in ten minutes and repeat them correctly.

But after one day I forget them all

or I still can't use them.

I still can't speak the language.

Learning a language is not about showing how many words

you can memorize, but how you can use them

naturally and correctly to communicate with people.

So it's important to change the logic.

Rather than trying to figure out how to

memorize the words, ask yourself how to use

these words as much as possible.

Just think about how children learn language.

Of course, according to cognitive scientists,

there is a window period that allows children

learn faster and easier language than adults.

Moreover, they are surrounded by

that language like immersion.

They hear it all the time at school, at home,

on the street, with friends, everywhere you may be thinking,

of course, I know the best way to learn

a language is to live in a country surrounded by locals.

But unfortunately, most of the language learners don't live

in the country where the language is spoken.

So how can you get the effect of immersion?

If you learn five words today in a book

or an application, anything, you have accomplished your task today,

you learn another five words tomorrow

you put it in your flashcard

and do spaced repetition and review.

This is a very good basic studying routine, but I don't

just put them in my flashcards and repeat them like

how to say"to go","red", "hospital" in Arabic, for example.

In the following days, I would use

these words as much as possible.

When I'm at home or walk in the street.

Every time I see something, I will try to make the

link between what I see and what I just learned.

I will even say it out loud

like, okay, this is "door" "window", okay.

For example, I'm in the street.

I say, oh this is the hospital

library, hairdresser, bookshop.

It's a very good way to review

I even replace the words in my own language.

For example, I don't know how to say

the whole sentence "I want to buy apples" in Arabic

because I just learned the word "apple" at the beginning.

For example, I would just say

"I want to buy some TUFAH "

But next time when I learn the verb "to buy"

I can say the sentence like

I want to buy apples.

Next next time, even add more

descriptions like color, location, price.

For example

Today, I want to buy some

red apples from the supermarket.

From this sentence, you can see there's

time, there's a verb, there's a color, there's

adjective, and there's a place. With the time,

You can say more things and

make longer and longer sentence.

This is really my favorite exercise and

I really want to share with you.

It's the best way to train your brain from

the beginning to get used to thinking in that language.

If you have an intermediate level, it's even better.

Just think in that language.

Speak to yourself in that language

and describe everything around you.

If there are words you don't know, check them directly

on Google and Reverso and save it in your list.

After learning the basic grammar and words,

try writing diary by using them.

I talked about this method in

another video because it's really effective.

If you have a language exchange partner or

native speaker friend, it will be even better.

What I did for my Turkish

I have a language exchange partner Hilal.

We met each other on Python

and we study together regularly.

Every day I would write the diary and send

it to her on WhatsApp she would just correct

me and send it back to me.

I will ask her to read my

diary and send me the voice note.

Normally it takes less than five minutes and I listen

to that voice notes over and over again and repeat.

There is another very effective exercise

which is inspired by the meditation.

Every day before you go to bed or

before you start your daily study routine,

put away your phone, give yourself five minutes asking

yourself what did I learn today?

Or what did I learn yesterday?

And try to review it in your brain.

This is the best way to activate your memory

and really embed the vocabulary in long term memory.

Another immersion exercise.

Listen to that language as much as possible

such as YouTube videos, TV, podcasts, radio, but

try to catch the verbs you just learned

and imitate the pronunciation and accent

To recap, all these exercises are based on active recall.

It's a way to understand how we

use the word in different situations instead

of just repeating and memorizing them.

The more we use our brain,

the better and longer we can remember that.

Tip number Three Don't get obsessed with

one way to take notes and review.

I want to say that there are many ways to do it.

Take notes in the notebook on a computer.

Use note taking applications, flash cards

each of them has advantages and disadvantages.

The first thing you have to

keep in mind is not to be exclusive.

You have to have a toolbox in language learning.

Before you take notes and reviews,

ask yourself what are the main resources

where you can learn different vocabulary?

For example, for me textbook or language lesson

website like articles, news, YouTube videos,

speaking exercise with language partner.

I use different tools to

take notes from different resources.

For vocabulary from a textbook for example,

I'm learning Turkish with this book.

Istanbul B1

If I started with a PDF book or

reading an article, I always copy the new

words or short sentences into an Excel.

Because I can copy the list and get the