Fluent For Free: How to Learn Any Language at No Cost and Change your Life in the Process

by Maria Spantidi

If you don’t know what kind of sentences to make, you can use Reverso Context or Tatoeba to see how a word is used in context and pick the sentences you’ll most likely use.

you’re tech savvy or if you simply like organization, you can make a spreadsheet (e.g., in Excel) and list the words, the translations, and an example sentence for each word. Then you can separate the words into groups and try to make sentences containing all the words of each group.

It’s a lot more effective to use a new word in context and learn the entire sentence, so that you have an example of how the word works in context from the get-go. As we saw, a beneficial way would be to learn a new word in a sentence of no more than five words that you know already. To find such sentences, follow the guidelines for “Collecting Language Material,” or go to Reverso Context, bab.la or Tatoeba to find phrases containing the word that interests you.

Keep a notebook (physically or digitally) where you can write down words and phrases of interest at all times, especially when searching for a word that you don’t know so that you can find its translation at a later time.

Wordreference forums

STEP 1: LISTEN TO THE SOURCE

STEP 2: COMBINE SOURCE WITH TEXT

STEP 3: TRANSLATE WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND AND REPEAT