Pablo: A new country, a new language
Being far from home is not always easy, but it’s also the opportunity to learn more than you could ever imagine. One of the first thing to learn in order to get the most out of it, is the language. It’s quite the opportunity: not only this is the way to integrate, but also it is simply the best context to learn a new language.
And to learn something efficiently, you have to have the need to use it. This is a natural and powerful motivation. And motivation is the only thing you need to achieve such a challenge.
That’s where Pablo comes in. Pablo does one simple thing: store some words and their translation. It’s like a note-pad you would use to write down the expressions you learned this week, and practice them later.
And why does this old school technique works so well? Well because it’s context-based. You are not fed vocabulary from a book, you’re the one feeding him the vocabulary you had to use this week. This way, you focus your learning efforts on words that you will soon need to use again. So that’s the first thing: it filters out what you don’t need to learn for now.
Second thing, you attach memories to each of those new words. Every time you teach a word to your Pablo, you will remember the moment, the place and the people you learned it from. And that’s how memory works best. By creating more than one link to a memory, you make sure your brain remembers it. That’s for example on what the Method of loci is based on, and its efficiency has been proven for thousands of years.
Finally, it’s social. You are going to meet a lot of new people, and they are all a potentially great help. Talk to them, practice this new language, and when they teach you something new, just ask them to write it for you, and even better… Record it!
That’s the little plus that Pablo brings to the note-pad: you can record the words, making sure you’ll be able to pronounce them without any doubt later on. And let me tell you that hearing it makes the memory even more vivid.
Going even further, you can create “shared lists”. If you have a fellow language-learner in the same situation than you are, you can create a list together and exchange your favorite expressions. Even better, create one with a local friend that speaks the language, you can ask him for translations, corrections… And every time it will come with the recording.
Get the app
Ready to adopt your own Pablo? Just click on the button below, and don’t forget to get a Pablo for your friends as well: share them this article!
Pablo is a phone app for Android and iOS to help you keep track of your favorite vocabulary when learning a new language.
> gabriel@teachpablo.com
> http://teachpablo.com
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