Photo books can be very helpful in language learning, especially as a secondary material during the first six weeks of lessons. If you set them up right, they can make for hours upon hours of useful practice in both vocabulary retention and sentence construction. Most likely, you will want to use them as you build up a recognition vocabulary of around 1,000 words, all while learning enough grammatical structure to construct basic communicative sentences.
When collecting photos for your collection, aim for images with at least one person in them as the main character. Rather than merely standing, they should be doing something involving other people or objects within the shot. This will allow you to not only identify characters and items, but construct complete sentences with nouns and verbs for each photograph.
Like all secondary practice materials, photo books are best employed while also participating in regular language learning sessions. As always, we recommend either live classes (with a group instructor or a private tutor) or a comprehensive language software as your main method of learning, with the photo book as a resource for additional practice sessions. Allot regular time for the photo book sessions, so that you get consistent practice from them. We recommend 15 minutes a day.
When scheduling your photo book sessions, work first towards identifying main characters in the photos, listing down simple sentences such as “This is a man” and “These are children” in the language you are studying. After that, move towards identifying objects they’re interacting with, such as “This is a dog” and “This is a guitar.” Once you get those down, you can move on to more complex constructions, such from using simple transitive verbs to active verbs to full-on compound sentences.