Shannon Kennedy is a language lover, traveler, musician, and writer. She has written extensively for Fluent in 3 Months and Drops, and is also the Language Encourager and Community Manager for the Add1Challenge. In 2018, she co-hosted the inaugural Women in Language event, an online conference to champion, celebrate, and amplify the voices of women in languages.
- Why majoring in music led Shannon to start learning German, Italian, and Spanish, and apply the French she’d already learned.
- What sparked her interest in Croatian.
- How her self-study methods differ from how she had learned languages in school.
- The critical difference between “studying” a language and “acquiring” a language.
- How Shannon got involved with Drops, why she uses the app, and how she surprised the company’s Hungarian founders with the Hungarian language skills she developed using the app.
- Why learning is short, frequent chunks of time is more effective than longer study sessions.
- An ideal day of language learning for Shannon.
- A standard day of language learning and how she fits language study around work, motherhood, and other duties.
- A “minimum viable day” of language learning she sticks to no matter what.
- How Shannon chooses tutors and gets the most out of each session.
- How she creates flashcards for new words, phrases, and structures that come up in her tutoring sessions.
- The importance of including audio in flashcards.
- Why Shannon participates in the Add1Challenge.
- Why kids don’t learn languages better than adults.
- Why discipline is more important than motivation when learning any skill.
Resources, Concepts & People Mentioned
- CEFR: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
- Benny Lewis
- Fluent in 3 Months
- Drops: Play with your words.
- Serial-position effect, primacy effect & recency effect
- Pomodoro Technique
- LingQ: Learn Languages from Content You Love
- iTalki: Choose from over 10,000 teachers for 1-on-1 lessons based on your goals and interests.
- Memrise
- Add1Challenge: Hold a 15 Min Conversation with a Native Speaker in 90 Days.
- Critical Period Hypothesis
- Korean phonology
More About Shannon
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