For many people, the opposite of boredom is “having fun” or “entertaining.” For me, the opposite of boredom is “learning”, “seeing the world differently”, “surprising myself”, “marveling” or simply “being interested in something”.

I know that not all people are like that, but if this sounds like something that you have thought, I invite you to continue reading.

Do You Want To Know Why You Are Bored?

If you googled cool things to do, maybe you better understand why you feel this way to cure it once and for all.

Being bored is as if your mind is telling you that something is missing (just like thirst is a message that your body is lacking fluids and motivates you to seek water).

Just as thirst is quenched, boredom can also be quenched if you find that “something.”

You search and look for something that can make you stop feeling bored because your mind is motivating you to find something that is currently missing in your life.

I know that it is not so easy to go from seeing funny gifs to starting to develop a project that you are very passionate about, for example.

That’s why I made a list of activities (that have to do with languages, the main topic of this blog) that can serve as inspiration or even as a cure for boredom.

Let the links take you and surprise you, and give all the items on the list a try before looking for something else.

Change The Country To YouTube

Go to Youtube , ignore all the videos out there, and go to the bottom. You will see two signs with an arrow, one that says “Language” and next to it “Country”.Choose one of the countries where the language you are studying is spoken, go up the screen and in the center you will see an option that says “Videos of the moment”. Go there and play a video that catches your eye, just to see what happens.

If you are very curious about one, you can use it to practice your hearing and put it on play as many times as necessary until you understand it completely.

Optional: Also change the language of the YouTube interface so that signs such as “Home” or “Subscriptions” appear in the language that interests you.

TED

Has YouTube already bored you? TED test . It’s in English, but as soon as you click on one of the videos, a box appears that says: “[number] languages “.

Watch a talk (or many) given by a brilliant person that falls into categories like ” jaw-dropping “, “fascinating”, “inspiring”, “beautiful” or “funny”.

I challenge you to find one that is not, at least, interesting. In case being a passive spectator bores you, you can help translate talks.

Wikipedia

Since we are translating and contributing, the free encyclopedia gives you the opportunity to do so. Start by creating an account and, once you have it, make your user page (just click on your own name, up to the top). You can create a tower of Babel like this:

My Own Tower (Blurred …)

Or you can help proofread and translate articles. To make it a better experience, keep in mind that the texts you correct or translate should interest you.

If you don’t feel like doing that, you can simply click on ” Random Page ” and review alphabets that stand out from the list on the left.

I have thus learned to identify various languages, in addition to finding out where they are spoken and how they sound, the latter thanks to the help of …

Google Translate

I know that you already know the Google translator , but it is very likely that you have not used a tool that it has: the speech synthesizer.

It is one of the best synthesizers that I have news of (there are some very bad ones…).

To bring out its benefits, copy a text from Wikipedia in a language that you have been curious about how it sounds, paste it, and click on the speaker symbol.

Before that you must have the option “Detect language” activated in the box on the left.

The Ä button is also very good , which phonetically writes the words you hear for languages ​​not written with the Latin alphabet, such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

Oh by the way, you can see the translation on the right.