Methods & Tools

A cloze deletion card is a fill-in-the-blank flashcard. A portion of a sentence or phrase is hidden — "deleted" — and you must recall it before flipping the card.

This section takes you from a fresh install to a working vocabulary deck with your own custom note type. By the end you'll have a properly configured Anki setup and a clear mental model of how the whole system fits together.

Comprehensible Input (CI) refers to language you can understand — not necessarily perfectly, but well enough to grasp the meaning of what is being communicated. When you expose yourself to a stream of such language, your brain is in the optimal state to acquire the underlying patterns: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and idiom.

Extensive Reading (ER) is the practice of reading large volumes of text in your target language — material that is easy enough to understand without frequent dictionary lookups, and engaging enough that you actually keep going. The key word is extensive : the volume and continuity of the reading experience is what drives acquisition, not the careful analysis of every sentence.

The Gold List Method was developed in the late 20th century by the British polyglot David James (a.k.a. Uncle Davey) , who used and refined it across more than 20 languages. He published the system in detail on his YouTube channel and personal blog beginning in 2006, where it gradually built a devoted community of language learners drawn to its calm, analogue feel.

Five dollars a month sounds like a line item you could skip — but if you're serious about language learning, HyperTTS pays for itself almost immediately. Here's why.

Shadowing is a listening and speaking technique in which you listen to a native speaker and repeat what they say as closely and simultaneously as possible — mimicking not just the words but the rhythm, intonation, stress, and pace of the original. The defining feature is the simultaneity: you are not repeating after a pause, you are following right behind the speaker in real time, like an echo.

You can read a thousand pages of a language, absorb countless hours of audio, and still find yourself tongue-tied the first time a native speaker actually talks to you. This is not a mystery — comprehension and production are related but distinct skills, and production must be trained in its own right.

TPRS — Teaching Proficiency through Reading & Storytelling — is a language-teaching method that uses repetitive, contextually rich, comprehensible stories to drive acquisition. Instead of memorising grammar rules and isolated vocabulary lists, learners absorb the target language by listening to, asking about, reading, and retelling short stories in that language. TPRS is built on the principle that a language is acquired the same way children acquire their first language: through massive exposure to language they can understand.