From Beginner to Advanced Level in a Foreign Language

I created a method that I'm going to use in my language learning. It's based on my own product, which is the Ultimate Language Notebook and all the other notebooks I'm creating currently for other languages. The notebooks have more than sixty topics and the left pages have lists of most important words and phrases as the right pages are empty.

Here is the plan:

1. Read one page a day and learn the words

The plan is to read one page a day and learn the words. I could also google more information or see the grammar section in the end of the notebooks to understand some things that I don't understand first. So this step is for Ultimate Chinese Notebook and all others in which the left pages are filled already. So all except the Ultimate Language Notebook in which you have to fill everything yourself.

2. Write new words one page a day

The second day I would write new words about the same topic on the empty page. I would find all the possible words and phrases about that topic that are important for myself, because the left page was about the words that are almost mandatory, because they are so common that you couldn't survive without them. They are part of the foundation of any language.

3. Speak out loud one page a day and record your voice

I would speak out loud and record myself on the third day. I understood how powerful this method is when I started learning Portuguese in 2012 when I was still a med-school student in Turku, Finland. We listened to a taping and after that read it out loud from the text book and listened to the recording. It's really important to practice the motorical skills of your mouth to create the correct sounds and you can't learn it without practice. All of my notebook versions will have recordings in youtube some day, where you can listen to how all the words should sound. Currently you just need to find it out from other sources how different words are pronounced.

4. Listen your own recording or find something to listen to about the given topic

So the fourth day I would listen to my own recordings or just listen to anything which will give me the understanding of how the language should sound. Going through one topic in four days gives enough time to learn the vocabulary well, but of course you could do it also in one or two days. Like one day you could read and write and the second day speak and listen. The important thing is to find a good rhythm for yourself that you can maintain for months and years without getting exhausted or losing motivation.

If you do these steps you will complete the notebook in 8 months. After that you could revise what you've learned and also add more words and phrases to pages where there's space. The notebooks can fit up to 5000 words or even more. At that point you will probably be at quite high level in your target language and all that you have learned would be inside the pages of one light A4-size notebook.

On top of the aforementioned method you can use the following simultaneously:

1. Learn how to ask and answer one question a day

Do this and you will be able to form 365 questions and answers in one year.

My notebooks should be used together with all the other language learning resources, because it's important to find a right combination of resources that you enjoy using. You would add new words and phrases learned from other sources inside the pages of my notebook products. These notebooks are meant to be centers of all the knowledge of your target language.