When i was an engineer, i occasionally travelled to Mexico. Because of the frequent travel to this plant in Mexico, my company at the time offered free Spanish classes on our lunch break. I am trying to bring that idea back now where i work currently. While we won’t be able to get a visiting professor from a nearby university to teach us, having a protected time slot and using it productively for language learning would be a very rewarding use of the lunch break.

As a frequent podcast listener and avid reader, one of the more popular authors and podcasters i have come across is Tim Ferris. He has alot of experience in learning languages and has alot of ideas about learning languages in a short period of time.

I’ve attached a post of his here and recommend reading this first.

My thought is to open every lunch language class by conversing for 5 minutes in the language of interest. While sometimes you may be lunching alone, simply recording yourself speaking the language should be sufficient. Conversing in the language is the biggest reward and practicing the basics should be very helpful.

I will write more. By the way Tim mentions Anki and i think it’s really great. I have used it for physics applications but i think it could be useful for this. Deciding what the top 1000 or so most important words in any language could be a great start on the vocabulary end and it could plugged into Anki (and decks might already exist as he said)