Learning one new foreign language word every day for a year

My method of learning new words in another language: repetition

This is how I’m thinking of doing it:

Method #1: repetition

1. Have Google Translate translate an English word into another language.
   In this case, Google translated “great” into the Estonian “suurepärane”. Here’s how it sounds on Google.
2. Click the audio button 20 times.
   Enter repetition! Here’s how suurepärane sounds 20 times in a row.
3. While I click the audio button repeatedly like a madman, I will also be doing a screencast audio recording.
   I use Camtasia. (I bought this program a long time ago, and it still works)
4. Then I listen to this recording a bunch of times. 
   More repetition! Multiplication of repetition.

I stumbled across this technique while hitting the audio button over and over yesterday. Google Translate speaks the word at different speeds. That was so much fun, that I blogged about it. For the blog post, I recorded Google saying the word over and over. And then guess what? For the rest of the day, I found myself saying suurepärane, suurepärane, suurepärane. It was so much fun to be walking down the sidewalk saying suurepärane, suurepärane.

Thus, I’ll do this roughly every day. Or maybe once a week. Something like that.

Method #2: use

Of course, the best method of remembering these words is through use. So I’ll also teach my three-year-old daughter these words.

This particular example uses Estonian. But I’m not setting out to learn Estonian. That’s too massive and intimidating for me. Every time I start to “learn Estonian” I give up.

Instead I will be learning some words here and there in different languages. Estonian, French, even Ewokese. Just to get a different palette of words. A cross-range.