Interested in learning a new language? Meet Akshay Swaminathan, coauthor of our recent Levenger Master Class™ workbook, How to Learn a Language for Life, and read his multilingual greeting and words of encouragement below——in English, Mandarin, Spanish and French!
"I'm excited to share "How to learn a language for life". This is a workbook that I wrote with my friend, mentor, and co-author Steve Leveen as part of the Levenger Master class series. It's meant to be a companion for you to document your journey in learning a new language.
This workbook has a lot of different parts to help you document the various aspects of your language learning process. For example, one of the parts is about muscle memory. Muscle memory is actually the key to fluency. It's constantly speaking, connecting your brain to your mouth. So in this part, you can record how long you've been speaking, how many sentences you've practiced.
You can also find a section here to define your goals, and also write down your progress over time. You can also write about the methods of learning that you like, and you can write about which methods work best for you.
Finally, there’s a space to note the little moments of joy—that is, the discoveries you make throughout your learning journey that bring you pleasure.
I hope this workbook serves you well in your journey to learn a language for life. Thanks so much!"
-Akshay
Listen to Steve and Akshay’s conversation on speaking other languages in Episode 76 of the America the Bilingual podcast, “Meet the Maestro Behind These New Language Workouts.”
Akshay Swaminathan is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and a P.D. Soros Fellow at Stanford University, where he is pursuing an MD and a PhD in biomedical data science. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in statistics
and a minor in global health and health policy. Inspired by the YouTube multilingual community in high school, Akshay has self-studied over 10 languages and has published books and videos teaching English, Spanish, French, Mandarin and Quechua. He is the founder and CEO of Sabaash, a platform to help language learners get to spoken fluency by training muscle memory. (Sabaash is a term in various Indian languages that means bravo!) Learn more at www.sabaash.com.