Sophie Austin, Author at The Mimic Method

How To Get Out Of Your Language Learning Rut

September 5, 2017 By Sophie Austin 2 Comments

It’s a familiar situation for many language learners.

Maybe you learned a language at school that slowly ebbed out of your mind. Maybe you’ve picked up a language as an adult and found yourself stranded on a language plateau – feeling uninspired and unmotivated to move forward. However you arrive at a language rut, understand that it’s a place that most language learners have been at some point in their journeys.

In this post, we’ll look at 4 ways to kickstart your progress back into language.

14 Crucial Questions to Keep Conversation Flowing in a New Language

August 24, 2017 By Sophie Austin 17 Comments

(And their pronunciations…)

How do you learn new words in your target language?

Do you read books? Do you watch movies?

Or do you ask your friends?

Depending on how far along your language journey you are, you might already be doing a combination of all of these. If you’re quite new to a language, chances are you may be making the mistake of reading new words and hoping they’ll sink in.

Wrong.

Flashcard apps might be fun, but they teach you how to memorize words out of context.

They also won’t help you make the leap between those words and the real-life conversation, which is the whole point.

With The Mimic Method, you develop the ability to acquire new words just by listening to and mimicking people in real conversation.

It happened to me today.

24 Ridiculous Foreign Language Idioms (and their Pronunciations)

August 15, 2017 By Sophie Austin 10 Comments

French idioms

The Oxford English dictionary defines idioms and phrases as:

A group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.

Put another way: idioms are sentences that sound ridiculous to everyone but the native speakers who use them.

That’s why it’s always fun to learn idioms in a foreign language. If you randomly bust out one of these idioms in conversation with native speakers, they will be pleasantly surprised.

Then in that moment of surprise, they may realize for the first time just how ridiculous that idiom sounds. Then they will laugh, and think you’re even cooler than you already are.

But you won’t get your desired effect on the audience unless you nail the pronunciation.

That’s why we’ve included slowed down audio and phonetic transcription for 24 idioms in Portuguese, Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, French and German.

Why The Fear of Failure Stops You Succeeding

August 1, 2017 By Sophie Austin 6 Comments

Language is about communication. You learn a language to speak with and understand others. Likewise, we want to be understood.

It’s frustrating when someone doesn’t understand you. It’s even more frustrating when you don’t understand them. It creates a communication barrier that one or both speakers then need to try and bridge.

Often, it’s the fear of this barrier that prevents us from even trying to talk to someone in the first place.

But why?

This fear is illogical. This becomes clearer when we put language into the context of another skill we might want to learn. Let’s take skiing for example. You’ve never skied before. Some of your friends ski though, and you’re starting to think you might want to try it out.

How would you go about this?

Would you read books to try and understand the movements your body needs to make?