A pretty good thing to know when learning a new language is how to say I Love You in the language you are learning, the following list contains I Love You in different languages from around the world. So if you are feeling romantic take a look. Don’t hold back, remember that people regret things they didn’t say more than the things they did.

How to say I love you in French: Je t’aime

How to say I love you in Spanish: Te quiero, Te amo

How to say I love you in Chinese Mandarin: Wǒ ài nǐ 我爱你

How to say I love you in Chinese Cantonese: ngóh oi néih 我愛你

How to say I love you in Arabic: ahabak أحبك

How to say I love you in Polish: kocham Cię

How to say I love you in Javanese: Aku tresna sampeyan

How to say I love you in Korean: 사랑해 Saranghae

How to say I love you in Vietnamese: anh yêu em. em yêu anh.

How to say I love you in Italian: ti amo

How to say I love you in Tagalog: Iniibig kita

How to say I love you in Igbo: a hụrụ m gị n’anya

How to say I love you in Khmer: khnhom​ sralanh​ anak

How to say I love you in Romanian: te iubesc

How to say I love you in Haitian Creole: Mwen renmen ou

How to say I love you in Shona: Ndinokuda

How to say I love you in Swedish: jag älskar dig

How to say I love you in Hausa: Ina son ka

How to say I love you in Amharic: ewedihalehu

How to say I love you in Dutch: ik hou van je

How to say I love you in Saraiki: mẽ tenū̃ piār kardā hā̃

How to say I love you in Somali: Waan ku jeclahay

How to say I love you in Greek: Se agapó

How to say I love you in Zulu: Ngiyakuthanda

How to say I love you in Ilokano: Ayayatenka

How to say I love you in Hmong: Kuv hlub koj

How to say I love you in German: ich liebe dich

How to say I love you in Welsh: Rwy’n dy garu di 

How to say I love you in Turkish: seni seviyorum

How to say I love you Hebrew: ani ohevet otcha, ani ohev otach

How to say I love you in Portuguese Brazilian: Eu te amo

How to say I love you in Portuguese Portugal: Eu amo-te

How to say I love you in Sioux: Techihhila

How to say I love you in Xhosa: Ndiyakuthanda

How to say I love you in Hindi: Main tumasee pyaar karatee huun

How to say I love you in Kyrgyz:  Men seni syuem

How to say I love you in Hawaiian: Aloha wau iâ `oe

How to say I love you Telugu: nēnu ninnu prēmistunnānu

How to say I love you in Ukrainian: ya tebe lyublyu

How to say I love you in Swahili: nakupenda

How to say I love you in Thai: ฉันรักคุณ Chan rak khun (woman to man) ผมรักคุณ Phom rak khun (man to woman)

How to say I love you in Kazakh: men seni jaqsı köremin

How can you stay consistent when learning a language and not burn out and lose motivation and at the same time perform better when learning and remember over the long term?

Graham Wallas was one of the founders of the London School of Economics. In his book The Art of Thought,

Graham Wallas talks about the four stages of the creative process.

Which are Preparation or what can also be called Saturation followed by Incubation, then Illumination and finally Verification.

In his book the Taipei Lectures, Stephen Krashen the linguist and activist explains how to apply this to language learning which I will talk about more in a moment,

by the end of this post you will know how to use this process and to apply it when learning any language and improve performance.

First lets look abit more into the creative process.

In the first stage we have Preparation,

during this stage the person gathers as much information as possible about a subject,

looking at all possible angles of the subject and saturating their mind with the subject. Then comes the second part of the creative process according to Graham Wallas.

In the second part of the creative process (Incubation) The person, completely relaxes and goes and does something else for a period of time.

The incubation period of creativity is not a conscious thing, it happens unconsciously in the mind while the person is relaxing or doing other things.

During this time the mind is processing the information and doing something with it on an unconscious and unforced level.

Then suddenly the third stage of the creative process occurs which is illumination.

Illumination is when the idea suddenly comes to you after a period of preparation or saturation and after a period of doing something else or resting and not consciously trying to think about the problem you are working on.

Suddenly the idea comes to you.

Then you are ready for the final stage.

Verification, during the verification stage, you test your idea, and check it and apply what you have gained in the first three stages of the creative process.

The final stage of verifcation, is like the first stage of preparation or saturation, a stage of conscious effort and work.

Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning Physicist and genius knew about incubation, he once said,

“You have to do six months of very hard work first and get all the components bumping around in your head, and then you have to be idle for a couple of weeks, and then – ping – it suddenly falls into place…”

and Albert Einstein

“Einstein clearly knew about incubation… Einstein would allow the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems…

…his eldest son said, ‘he would take refuge in music, and that would resolve all his difficulties.’

…’with relaxation, there would often come the solution'”

For more information on this please checkout Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use – The Taipei Lectures by Stephen Krashen.

The creative process as Graham Wallas describes it can also be applied to language learning.

I’m learning Japanese and have applied this process to learning the language.

First you try to learn as much about the language as possible, saturate your mind with the new language,

keep listening to audio on youtube or podcasts, even if you don’t fully understand everything.

Keep reading and looking up grammar points if you like grammar. If not use different apps for learning as much of the language as possible, don’t worry if you can’t understand everything, just keep going and focus on what you can understand.

Then when you have learned as much as possible and completely saturated your mind with the new language, stop and have a break, go and play football, go for a walk, go out with your friends, or do some other thing that relaxes you and don’t think consciously think about the language.

The thing that relaxes you could also be some kind of ordinary task in your day to day life as this lets the ideas sink in on an unconscious level.

Somehow our minds naturally acquire languages, no one really knows how or why, but it is clear that our minds have the capacity to learn languages, this is not just a select few, but all of us, since we all have acquired our first language.

During the incubation stage, somehow something is going on in our minds at an unconscious level, that is allowing us to process the language that we have been learning. So rather than trying to make yourself learn a new language, let yourself learn the new language.

After you have a break, the language will start to ‘click’ into place. This is the illumination stage that Graham Wallas talks about.

Finally during the verification stage, you can test your knowledge by practicing reading and confirming the language has gone in by checking against a dictionary and also trying out your new skills by talking with a native speaker to see if they can understand you.

Keep repeating this process, and your language skills will improve, all the while while taking breaks. Which are not just a luxury but are essential to allow the language to go in.

Once the language has gone in like this, you know it, and as Michel Thomas the language master teaches us,

“What you know, you don’t forget” Michel Thomas

Give it a go, try taking breaks in your language learning journey, and see how your mind is able to acquire the new langauge naturally.

I’ve found this process has really helped me in learning Japanese and also, it has helped me to remember things over the long term as well. There’s more information on this in the blog post I wrote here Keeping healthy while studying to feel good and increase performance, and to remember over the long term.

Recent research into the linguistic capabilities of birds by Dr Kentaro Abe and Professor Dai Watanabe at the University of Kyoto has provided new evidence that birds have the ability to process syntatic rules. This ability is innate and spontaneous and has challenged the idea that only humans have the capacity to understand language.

Just as humans aren’t born with the ability to speak in structured sentences, birds are not born with the ability to sing their songs. They have to learn to sing their songs.

Some people including Noam Chomsky the linguist and activist believe that there is a kind of Universal Grammar (usually credited to Noam Chomsky) which can be found in all languages, and researchers who have been studying bird song have also found that these similar kinds of universal patterns that can be found in human languages can also be found in bird song.

There is a certain order of language that makes sense, and a certain order of language that does not make sense. For example, take this sentence, “I will go to the beach today”. You can say “I will go to the beach today” or you can say something like “today beach I will go” and it makes sense, but if you say, “the go today beach will I to”, it doesn’t really make sense, there is kind of a block in our minds when we try to read the last sentence.

This is something to think about when learning languages, we all talk in a fairly similar way even though our languages on the surface may seem quite different, for example we say things about where we are going, when we are going, what we are doing, what time we are doing it, what we like and what we don’t like etc. At the basis of languages is real communication. If we remember that when if we are learning a language and a culture that seems very different to our own, that

it’s good to remember that under the surface all humans communicate and express things in a real way that is common to all of us. 

This can keep us from feeling daunted when we are learning a new language.

All people share similar dreams, hopes, fears and challenges in their lives throughout the world and express those feelings and ideas in real communication. So even if you are starting out learning a new language, remember to focus on the real communication of what you are trying to say rather than trying remember fancy complicated sentences that sound good but communicate little.

Going back to the scientists who studied birds, what they did to show that birds also appear to follow certain grammar patterns when learning song, is they played different combinations of random bird vocalizations to the birds and what happened the birds when learning new song processed the sounds they were learning and put them in some kind of structured order when they started singing the song they had learned, and what’s more they found that these structures and orders were similar and tended to match the kinds of patterns we find in human language.

The scientists also found that when they studied the brains of the birds, that the same parts of the brain that light up when humans are processing language also lit up in the birds when they were singing their songs.

Hope is the thing with feathers

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

This poem is in the public domain

Can you imagine feeling completely relaxed while at work or studying? It’s possible and it improves perfomance and with studying it is also a way of improving recall too over the long term. I will explain…

Have you ever noticed that during the end of term when everyone is stressed out studying for the end of year exams, people all seem to get colds.

It’s because stress lowers the immune system and people become more susceptible to illness, especially when they are burnt out and run down.

This applies to anyone who is studying or working in any job.

It’s important to keep healthy and relaxed and not over work so that you can maintain solid and high performance over the long term.

This blog post and the coming posts will cover this, and talk about ways of maintaining high performance but staying relaxed and happy at the same time.

The reason I’m writing it is because I’ve found myself over working many times in the past, in my studies and in my work life which led me to develop a serious health condition and become burnt out. So I’m sharing this so it might help you to feel relaxed.

I was going through a difficult time in my life and I started learning languages, one of the things I found out about learning languages, which even though there are many ways of learning, most of the modern teachers agree on one thing and that is that it is important to feel very relaxed when learning, when we feel relaxed it allows the thing we are learning to go in. Some people feel relaxed in calm environments and learn better when everything is peaceful and other people prefer to study in environments which are more noisy.

Stephen Krashen the linguist and activist, talks about the idea of not cramming, since cramming makes us only remember something for a short time, like passing an exam, and then we tend to forget what we have learned over a long time.

What Stephen Krashen suggests as an alternative, is to learn more slowly and allow the knowledge to sink in.

This is difficult to do if you are at Uni and people are on your back pushing you to work, but if you are learning from home, you have the option to do this.

However even trying to do this from home on your own can be difficult because since being young a lot of us have gone through the school system which pushes us to show, we are making an effort.

It’s the same in the work environment, we have to show we are putting in an effort even if we can do the thing in a relaxed way.

So even when we start working from home as self employed, or learning on our own outside of the formal education system, we still can become stressed by being our own boss or our own teacher and cause ourselves to become stressed which in turn lowers the effectiveness of our studies.

Dale Carnegie the writer talks about it in his book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It’s a really good book, that gives lots of practical tips on how to stay relaxed in life. In one of the Chapters he explains that it’s possible to work in a relaxed way, but in order to do that we have to, “to reverse the habits of a lifetime…” Here is a link to his book, it’s simple but effective information about ways to stop worrying and be relaxed, even when working in a busy demanding job, while running your own business or studying.

What Dale Carnegie teaches us in Chapter 24, is that, we tend to tense up our muscles when working, because this comes from of a lifetime of tensing our muscles and putting in physical strain when we are doing work with our minds.

He explains this is just a habit we can change, anytime.

If we can change this habit, we can feel all the tension leaving us, as we are working and studying, your body will feel completely relaxed, when you feel completely comfortable and relaxing feelings all over you will find yourself enjoying your work and studies more, which is likely to help you to stay motivated over the long term,

and also as Stephen Krashen’s studies have show us, we are more likely to remember what we have learned over a long period of time if we learn more slowly and feel ourselves completely relaxing while we study.

Sometimes we may find ourselves feeling guilty for being so relaxed while working, but that is just our programming we have received from early age.

Relax and feel yourself letting go of all tension and learn languages.

One of the questions I often get when I tell people I’m learning a new language, is how do you stay motivated to keep learning a new language?

Often our experiences of first learning a new language come from our education in school.

A lot of the methods of learning are quite out of date, sometimes old school methods of learning work aswell, but

I’ve found a combination of old school methods and modern methods work the best.

Stephen Krashen’s idea of the pleasure principle in language aquisition is something that is quite useful in learning.

It comes from the idea that if we enjoy doing something, then we will continue to keep doing it.

So when we are learning a new language we should seek ways of learning that we enjoy, rather than ways of learning that we don’t enjoy.

Often we associate learning with only hard grinding work. Although sometimes it’s important to push ourselves while learning, and do old school methods of memorization, but if we only do that, we can burn out, get bored and frustrated and lose motivation to continue.

So when learning a new language, find ways that you enjoy, to acquire the new language.

Some people like reading novels, so you could try reading novels in the language that you are learning.

Some people don’t like reading novels, so if you don’t like reading novels don’t force yourself.

Other people like watching the news, but some people don’t. Some people will tell you, you should watch the news in the language you are learning because news readers speak really clearly, but if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t keep on learning.

Stephen Krashen the linguist, educator and activist, talks about this in his books on natural language acquistion. He did research into different groups of people and studied how they acquired languages.

He found that a group of students progressed very rapidly when they were reading comics, because those people were really into comics.

People who were into the subject matter, did much better in the long run, he describes trying to learn if you are not really interested in the subject or the other person as just decoding.

So it’s important to have fun and enjoy what you are learning.

So it all depends on you and what your interests are, don’t force yourself to learn from the news or force yourself to learn grammar all the time, actually some people like studying grammar directly, so if you enjoy that then you should do that. I like studying grammar directly sometimes.

Here are some of Stephen Krashen’s books on language acquisition.

This book is great for teachers and for students, as it provides a framework and some good ideas for learning a language, as well as for teachers teaching a language.

Another useful one is Exploration in Language Acquisition and use: The Taipei lectures

and Foreign Language Acquisition The Easy Way, by Stephen Krashen

In these books Stephen Krashen talks about processes of learning languages in an organic and natural way which moves away from old school methods of learning languages.

I think his books are great, and they have helped me alot during my time learning and acquiring languages.

The best thing to do then, is to find a way which works best for you. Then you will stay motivated and be more likely to become fluent.

Another thing that fits in with the pleasure principle in learning languages is the idea of flow, which is a concept recognized by the American-Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is another thing talked about by Stephen Krashen in his books.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that when we are in a state of flow, we forget everthing around us, and we lose track of time, we are totally focused on the thing that we are doing and at these times we experience a state of happiness. If you can find a way to enjoy language learning through doing it in a way which connects to your passions and learn in a way that you enjoy, then you will find yourself forgetting everything that is around you and find yourself in a state of happiness. If you enter these states when learning through your passions you will constantly feel like learning and easily form a new habit of doing something that makes you feel great and your language skills will improve.

If you are interested you can read more about flow in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, ‘Flow The Psychology of Happiness’

Thank you for reading this post

I’m writing this article focusing on Japanese because that’s the language I have been learning, but the principles in this blog post and on the other blog posts can be applied to learning any language.

When I first started learning Japanese, I quickly realized that there was nothing familiar in the words that I was trying to learn when compared to my own language, English. This makes it incredibly difficult to remember new vocabulary when you are just starting out. You’ve basically got no way of remembering the new words.

Mnemonics is a way of linking things together in your mind in a way that helps you to remember things. This can be used in learning languages and has been used in the linkword method from Linkword Languages

It really helps you to remember languages. For example, if you were trying to learn Russian, the word for cow in Russian is Karova, so imagine “I ran my car over a cow”. The word will stick in your head.

Another example is, in Japanese the word for fish is Sakana, so imagine putting a Sack on A fish.

It works best when you visualize the description in your mind and aswell if you use funny and absurb things. This helps you to remember the word more easily.

For example, the word for Duck in Japanese is Ahiru. So, imagine A Duck becoming A Hero.

Using the linkword method is great, especially in the beginning. A lot of the words that you learn will be names of useful things like the train station and post office, taxi and food items when you are starting out, which is really useful if you are heading out soon to visit another country as it will help you to navigate restaurants and eating out.

You shouldn’t rely on it too much over the long term as it can become confusing if you only learn by using mnemonics,

but it’s a really great and fun way to start learning

and once you’ve read a lot of examples of these linkword mnemonics it becomes second nature to start making your own mnemonics up. This can be really useful because sometimes even if you have been learning languages for a long time, you can find that the odd word just doesn’t stick in your mind so applying a mnemonic in these situations is really helpful.

As well as the Linkword website, Edward Trimnell’s book Falling In Love With Carp is great for learning Japanese Vocabulary.

Why not give it a go and start your journey into learning a new language.

Teaching English and other subjects online is a great way to do something you love, meet people from all over the world and often make friends along the way. It also allows you to earn money as you are doing it. Imagine feeling completely free during work and not having a boss breathing down your neck, and not having to go into the office. It would be a wonderful feeling.

All you need to start teaching is a laptop and access to a webcam, microphone, and headphones and a skype account, or other free communication apps like WeChat.

You will need a quiet place to work and you will need to be patient and kind and have a postive attitude and enjoy talking with people.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of the learner, think how difficult it must be to learn something new like a new language or subject that they know nothing about. Then proceed from there.

For example why not try learning a language that you have always wanted to learn and see what kind of challenges you will face as you learn that new language.

Then you will feel how it feels to learn a new language and you will find yourself becoming a better teacher.