IWTYAL 120: The mother tongue’s role in vocabulary learning

Rocco asks: “What role should your mother tongue play in learning vocabulary?”

In this episode:

• Translation is useful (and desirable) at the early stages of learning a language
• Over time, you should move towards doing as much as possible in the target language
• Being comfortable not understanding every word is an important step towards gaining more exposure to the language

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Alex Rawling's talk on reading comprehension in a foreign language in Berlin:

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Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.