The Personal Radio Station Method: How to Use a(n Online) Language Teacher the AJATT Way, So That You'll Actually Learn Something and Also Get the Best Value for Your Money Instead of Being Bored, Confused and Sucking Forever for No Darn Reason I Mean Seriously WTF, Bro? (Patreon)

What people usually do: sign up, pay money, flirt *poorly* with some girl on Skype for 30-60 minutes while exchanging dumb stories and the occasional phrase.

What to do if you want to actually learn the language, which we'll call your L2 (because reasons) and get the most value out of your teacher's time?

This.

1) Figure out the things you like best in the world. The things you could talk about or read about or watch (about?) or listen to (other people talk about) all day. In my case, it's science fiction, physics, astronomy, AI, Ancient Rome, consumer electronics and certain narrow specialties in positive psychology.

2) Find a WikiPedia article or (better yet) a TED Talk on one of those things in English.

3) Find the L2 translation of that WikiPedia article or TED Talk (this should literally be a click away).

[TED Talks in Cantonese] http://bit.ly/2MrPHog

[銀河系 - Wikipedia] http://bit.ly/2T7W1Tq

4) Have your teacher read the L2 article aloud (single-take, mistakes and all; you want to hear natural, native[-like] self-correction) and record that reading on their smartphone using one of these two apps:

This one is good for Android: 

[Hi-Q Mp3 Voice Recorder 高品質 MP3 ボイスレコーダー (無料) - Google Play のアプリ]

http://bit.ly/2MbuP4n

And this one is good on iOS: 

[‎Voice Recorder & Audio Editor on the App Store] 

https://apple.co/2jO28Pj

If your teacher isn't on either iOS or Android, request that they get with a special thing that is known in applied linguistics as "the programme" (lol).

6) Make sure they record an mp3 format file and send it to you by email.

7) Put the mp3 files on your smartphone and play them on loop, perhaps also adding background music in the way we've talked about before (audio multiplexing).

Now, this where things get really sexy:

8) Split the recording into 30-second segments (tracks) with a 5-second forward overlap using an application like this:

Windows: There may be free alternatives, but I actually paid for this software like grown-up lol. They don't pay me to say this, but it's good stuff. [MP3 Splitter,MP3 Joiner,MP3 Cutter,MP3 Cut,WMA Joiner,MP3 Split,Merge- Split MP3 WAV, Merge MP3 WAV WMA OGG AIFF files] http://bit.ly/2TbIvy6

MacOS: [Free MP3 Splitter - Macsome Audio Splitter] http://bit.ly/2M1oQ2T

[the Mac apps I've found so far don't do overlap. Solution? Create two versions with two different split times. 

Version Alpha: 30-second split tracks

Version Bravo: 40-second split tracks

this way, you'll always have a track that's about right, no "dead space" where the voice gets cut off at an inopportune moment]

9) Attach the recording to the BACK of a Surusu card.

10) Take one to three paragraphs of the text and attach them the FRONT of your Surusu card.

11) Pick a sentence that is covered by the 30 seconds of audio.

12) Look up a word you don't know in that sentence. Place this dictionary definition on the BACK of your Surusu card.

13) Hide the newly learned word as a cloze deletion.

14) Repeat from (8) or (9), depending on whether you change audio tracks.

15) Bored? Tired. Stop. Do reps. Hear audio (just play it, don't listen, just play it so you can hear it). Come back later.

Do you realize what we've done here? You've gone from paying for a lesson that disappears the moment it ends to helping your teacher help you create a personalized L2 radio station that only plays stuff you're interested in and (broadly) understand. Do it enough and you'll have HOURS of awesome content and your teacher will also get lots of repeat business from you. Everybody wins. She can't be with you 24 hours a day, but her voice can. You're the man now, dawg.

This technique may or not be essential in Japanese [if I were a noob, though, I'd totally go for this], which is a content-rich language, but only a handful of languages in the world are at the level of Japanese in terms of FUNBUN (for native, by native)-but-also-learner-friendly audio-visual content volume, variety and quality; Chinese has only recently started to catch up; English, German and Italian are up there (lots of dubs). French and Spanish...decent resource base. Most other languages? Fuhgeddaboudit.

By the way, you don't have to limit yourself to TED and WikiPedia or even bilingual sources. You could have them do a monolingual blog for you. Or a comment thread (comments are often silly but always very natural and slangy). Anything that interests you, really.

Is this more expensive than just buying audiobooks? Minute for minute, of course it is (lol). But not every language is just producing audiobooks like that. Plus, this is hand-picked content that you're guaranteed to (broadly) understand and enjoy: the level of customization is off the charts. As is the likelihood of repetition by you.

Does this take a lot of steps? Yeah. Sure. But I'd rather take these steps than be bored out of my mind while forced to eat whatever the teacher feeds me. If you want things done your way, you do need to be proactive a bit. Starbucks won't make your chai latte your way unless you ask them to. Being proactive isn't for everyone, but I'm personally too weird to just take what I'm given -- and judging by the boredom, confusion and general failure found in standard language classes, I think more people are like me than realize it.

If (American) football is a game of inches, then getting used to a language in a game of seconds. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Very few people in the world can afford to hire a language teacher for the number of seconds it would take to get good fast. Plus, what teacher would have the energy to be "on" that long? No, you'd have to have a team of teachers switching in and out -- you'd essentially build yourself a family, a virtual village to raise the linguistic child that is you; hey, it's an awesome idea for anyone with the budget to try it.

So, back at more modest price-points, even if you were getting tutored 3 times a week for an hour at time, that's, what? 3 hours? Out of 168? 156 hours a year? GTFOH! Nowhere near enough. But 100 hours of personalized content on loop, plus all of YouTube? Now you're cooking with gas!

It's about reusability: everything the Space Shuttle program promised but never delivered. #NASAburn #WeStillLoveYouThoughNASA #どうその林檎美味しいかい

Don't buy your teacher's presence, buy her voice.