6 Easy Passive Language Learning Techniques and a Warning

Relax and enjoy this part of the process

Learning a language is hard. Or at least that’s what we’ve been told and experienced in school. But it doesn’t have to be! It shouldn’t be!

When we think about learning a language, we picture textbooks, dictionaries, exercises and a whole lot of practice. However, you didn’t learn your mother tongue through textbooks as a child. You experienced it. You lived it and internalized it by having fun.

So here are 6 ways to do the same with that new exotic language you’re trying to learn. Some you’ll have heard about, some you might not have. But be careful about the warning!

1. Watch movies and TV Shows

Now, that’s the obvious one so I won’t develop it much. The gist of it is to just watch a whole lot of videos. That’s it.

But there are tricks to making it even more effective. After all, that’s how I went from a low-intermediate level to fluency in English in one year.

What you can do it to start watching a show in the target language with subtitles in your mother tongue. After a few months, switch to target language subtitles and give up full understanding. As long as you can follow the plot, it’s enough. When this becomes easy, certainly about 5–6 months later, get rid of the subtitles.

2. Talk to people

Do you feel an obligation to talk to your friends? Probably not, right? Well, then you just need to find friends who speak the language you are learning. Why do I consider this as “passive”? Because even though you are actively talking (or texting) someone, you would probably do it either way in your native language.

For this reason, you don’t have to find someone who is a native speaker of the language you learn. Even someone who is learning it, just like you, can be of great help since you will exchange and sometimes words you don’t know can be brought up by the other.

3. Read “graded readers”

Reading a book in your target language when you a beginner or at a low-intermediate level can seem daunting. You open the book and by the end of the first page you’ve looked up 50 words and 30 minutes have passed. (I speak from experience here.)

Graded readers are a great way to keep interacting with the language without it becoming a strain, without ending up tired like after a study session.

There are tons of graded readers for all levels and languages so find interesting ones and dive into those. You might see a word here and there that you don’t know but the context will teach you its meaning. Some graded readers even have the translation so you can look it up and move on for now.

4. Listen to the radio

Or a podcast, or the news. It doesn’t really matter. Whenever you have a task to do and just want some sound around you, listening to the language is a great way to get used to the flow and intonation of the language.

For this specific reason, I would advise on doing this mostly at the beginner level. From the intermediate level onwards, you’d be better off watching TV shows (with subtitles or not — see 1.).

5. Play an adventure game

Not a multiplayer game or a fighting game. An adventure game such as Zelda or Final Fantasy or even Mario.

In most cases, you can go forward without knowing too much of the plot but you’ll probably naturally end up looking some words up here and there, picking some others thanks to the context.

That could be considered as active too, but since the vast majority will just be playing the game, it shouldn’t even feel like it.

Of course, you might need to do quite a bit of research at the very beginning so you understand the basics. Yet, that shouldn’t take too long and, anyway, you do need to study actively at one point or another.

6. Immerse yourself

Again, a bit of quite common advice here. But it cannot be avoided. Immersion, whether through changing as many things in your life in your target language or moving to the country altogether, is a solution.

You get to see and hear the language in many various contexts and that’ll teach you different usages for similar words, among other things.

However, be careful! Being immersed is not a full-course solution. And neither are any of the others.

WARNING: Stay Curious

No matter how much passive learning you do, it will never be enough on its own. We all need to actively study, practice and fail in the language we learn. It is part of the process and what truly makes us absorb and integrate a language.

No amount of passive learning can replace active learning. It is a need you cannot avoid. Of course, there are ways to make it fun. To enjoy the challenge. And you’ll need to find what that is for you.

Don’t skip active learning to do some passive learning. Use passive learning as a way to complement your study session and spend bits of time during your day, when you couldn’t possibly sit down and learn seriously.

And of course, even when passively ingesting the language, don’t ever forget you still have the right to look things up, to write things down or even just to note something you’ll want to dive into during that later study session.

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