In 1995, more than thirty years ago, we were preparing to move overseas to Central Asia with our young family — my husband, our two small children, and me. Before we left, we had the opportunity to attend a conference on how to thrive as expatriates living abroad. As part of that conference, there were several sessions on language learning.

I don’t remember much of the detail from those sessions now, but one thing has stayed with me all these years: the acronym GLUE.

  • Get what you need.
  • Learn what you get.
  • Use what you learn.
  • Evaluate what you use.

It’s a simple framework, but a powerful one, and it has shaped the way I think about language learning ever since. (I’ve written more about this approach in my article Language Learning – Get What You Need.)

Fast forward to the present. In Duolingo, I’ve been learning the verbs eat and drink. Because I’m a vegetarian, it felt immediately relevant to learn how to say, “I don’t eat meat.” That sentence wasn’t included in the Duolingo lessons, so I used Google Translate to find it and then spent some time learning it.

I ended up needing it sooner than I expected.

Yesterday we visited a Greek church, and after the service a meal was served. I took a plate and watched as the servers offered pasta, meat sauce, and salad. It took me about ten awkward seconds to retrieve my sentence, but when I did, I used my very first Greek sentence in the real world: “I don’t eat meat.”

They smiled, nodded, and served me pasta and salad.

Success.

I used what I had learned — and in my evaluation, I was understood. This small moment was a simple reminder of GLUE in action: identifying what I needed, learning it, using it, and evaluating the result in real life.