Learn English: What Most Language Learners Get Wrong

Nobody ever teaches you how to learn a language. They just hand you a book. This second season is Minea Kapidzic's answer to that. She teaches English as a foreign language, she learned it as one herself, and she is currently working through Italian and Romanian from opposite ends of the spectrum – fluent in one, absolute beginner in the other. That puts her in an unusually honest position to talk about what actually works. She starts with the question most courses skip: why bother at all. Two job offers in a country whose language you barely speak. Scholarships, exchanges, and the sheer amount of the internet that opens up once you stop searching in your own language. Then she goes into the science – what your brain physically does when it learns a language, why interpreters are not superhuman, and why bilingual brains show cognitive decline five to seven years later. The centre of the season is a step-by-step plan. Which app to start with and when it stops being enough. The point at which a grammar book becomes unavoidable. How to immerse yourself through newsletters and interviews, how to read without a dictionary, why writing has to come before speaking, and how to find someone to speak with. It ends with the part nobody talks about: how to keep going when life gets full. Forty-five short episodes, a little over two hours, in clear and unhurried English.