If you are living in North America like me you probably spend a lot of time driving. On average Americans are spending an hour behind a wheel every single day! That’s a lot of time!

You can use the driving time to learn languages. Of course, safety comes first, so you have to pick the right methods and ways to learn a foreign language. Listening and speaking practice will be your best and safest options while you are behind the wheel.

Let’s talk about ways to make the most of your driving time.

Embrace passive and active-passive learning

Broadly speaking, language learning activities fall into two categories: active and passive.

You can think of these categories as 2 distinct buckets.

1. Active Learning

Active learning requires full attention and effort and is particularly demanding. You have to give it your all.

Active learning activities would require you to pay full attention to the text you are reading or listening to, or the words you are trying to memorize.

You should be able to rewind, and reread, navigate around the app, and take notes.

It is not something you’d want to do while driving. Safety should be your number one concern so you should take care not to introduce any kind of distraction. Remember, eyes on the road!

You also don’t want to use any active methods while standing on the traffic light. Please don’t be that guy or gal who doesn’t move when the light changes to green because you are tinkering with your phone.

2. Passive Learning

Passive learning, on the other hand, is almost effortless. It doesn’t require much focus. Learning happens spontaneously, almost unconsciously. It might even seem like nothing is happening.

Passive learning is promoted by methods like AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) where language learners are encouraged to listen to the target language as much as possible (even during sleep).

The idea behind this kind of passive language learning is that the brain is primed to the sounds of the language even when you are not paying attention.

It is like TV or radio playing in the background. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of what is happening, but in general you are not paying any particular attention.

It might seem like listening to the language you can’t understand passively is a complete waste of time, but many language learners have proved it to be at least somewhat helpful.

Passive learning really works only for listening. You can use podcasts, radio, dialogues, Youtube videos and even songs in your target language.

You can listen to material you don’t understand at all but I wouldn’t say it is the best use of your time.

A better use of time at the wheel would be to review what you already studied.

Apps like LingQ allow you to create playlists of lessons and review them in one continuos stream. I’ll talk a bit more about LingQ app later.

You can do the same with Youtube videos for example. Of course, you won’t be watching them while driving, but you can simply let them play and listen to the audio.

Ideally, you should choose to review material that you are well familiar with. You don’t have to understand everything, but if you don’t understand too much you will lose interest quickly.

Same goes the other way, you can understand everything too well. You will get bored of hearing the same old thing again… Your brain will crave something new.

You will have to experiment with material to find something that works well.

One strategy is to change material periodically.

Also you can also combine this kind of passive listening with what I’ll talk about next.

3. Active-Passive Learning

I’d say there is a third bucket of activities, that is not fully passive. Let’s call it active-passive.

There is a host of courses that fall into this particular category. Most famous are Pimsleur and Michel Thomas.

Originally these were audio courses that were designed for hands free kind of learning environment. Because of that they work great for learning a language while driving.

Recently Pimsleur introduced an apps that includes reading modules as well as flashcard feature, but those are extras. I’d recommend you stick to the original audio course at least while you are driving.

At the time of writing Pimsleur course is available for 51 languages, and Michel Thomas for 18.

You can buy Pimsleur and Michel Thomas on Audible. You might be able to find them in your local library.

Another great options albeit with much more limited selection of languages is called Language Transfer. It is great, and it is free! That’s what I use to learn Spanish. More on that later.

Language Transfer is available on Soundcloud and Youtube and also as an iPhone and Android app.

These audio courses are active-passive.

They discourage you from taking notes. But you are encouraged to listen and participate in the conversation, just as one of the students in a class.

In a sense, they don’t require your full attention. It is like talking to a passenger. You have to pay some attention, but it is nothing that should distract you from driving.

Also the courses are designed with lot of repetition, which helps if you didn’t catch something because you were paying very close attention to what was happening on the road (just as you should!).

How I learn Spanish while driving

I outlined general principles and suggested some material that you can use to learn any language while driving.

But it might help if I describe my own routine for learning Spanish while driving.

I have to note that at the moment because I work from home my commute is limited to about 15 minutes a day. Most of it is in the morning on the way from my daughter’s elementary school back home. Naturally, I’d be talking to her when she is in the car.

It is not much, but I found that the little time really adds up quickly as long as you use it consistently.

I started learning Spanish in the middle of September, and it is December now. In roughly 2.5 months of this short commute I accumulated around 600 minutes of study time. That’s 10 hours!

During that time I was able to go through 40 lessons of Language Transfer, and listen to a number of mini-stories from LingQ.

I have to explain my study routine a bit more so you can understand why I focus on these particular resources: Language Transfer and LingQ.

I chose LingQ as my main learning resource because it allows me to listen and read to high quality content, easily look up and save words.

LingQ method is based on listening and reading and learning to notice and recognize patterns of language. There are no grammar explanation provided.

You will be surprised how much you can learn without opening a grammar book at all!

At some point I wanted to learn some grammar, and that’s where Language Transfer came in for me.

I already accumulated some hours of listening and reading to Spanish on LingQ before I started the Language Transfer. And I was listening to it solely during my short commutes from school.

Surprisingly, I didn’t learn anything new, but I got detailed explanations for what I noticed and discovered through listening and reading.

This approach works well for me as a beginner, and I feel like I will continue using it for at least few more months since I am only half way through the mini-stories and Language Transfer course.

Once I finish those, I might continue listening to mini-stories. That will be a good use of my short commute as each story is only about 3-5 minutes long.

BTW, you can use this link to open a free LingQ account. You will get access to the library of mini-lessons they have to offer in a variety of languages as well as 100 LingQs that you can use to save words you learn.

After I am done with mini-stories I can transition to material of interest. I am looking into productivity, creativity, and learning how to learn. I am already collecting some good resources in terms of books and videos that I can study.

I’d apply the same strategy for the next language I learn. First, listen and read to mini-stories. Then add Language Transfer (or similar) course.

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What does your language learning routine look like? Do you learn languages while driving? If so what materials do you use? Please let me know in the comments!

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