Learning a New Language.

It’s not about being good at languages.

I would first like to give thanks to Anthony Lauder for his speech “PolyNot” at the Polyglot Conference of Budapest, 2013. I borrow many of his examples because they are brilliant examples. I do try to give my own twist on some of his explanations — but his talk influenced how I view learning languages in a way no other has ever done before.

Step 1. Guess

It’s not about learning grammar, or learning large amounts of vocabulary. It’s about being good at noticing patterns and guessing. The faster you notice patterns, the faster you can apply those patterns to your speech. The better you are at guessing, the faster you will learn and understand.

The ___ ran away from the dog.

Did you fill in the blank with the word “cat”? Congratulations. You just made a guess. In reality, that blank space could just have easily been “rabbit” or “bird” or “other dog”. Why did you choose the word “cat”? Well that’s because you already speak English so you know how to guess!

Step 2. Important Vocabulary

Many linguistic studies have shown that vocabulary is more important than grammar. What have I learned from most polyglots I follow? They build important vocabulary, learn some phrases, and go out and speak the language! They do not worry too much about the grammar. They let natives correct them or they learn it slowly. They focus a lot on output, not just input.

Important vocabulary. This is something that many people overlook when building their vocabulary. People think having a wide vocabulary will aid them more than knowing important vocabulary. People learn words like “octopus” or “skyscraper” instead of “help” or “hungry”. If you want to learn a new language, you need to identify words that are important.

Studies show that learning the 2,000 to 4,000 most frequent words in a language lets you understand roughly 80% of a language. So why aren’t you learning those words first! Go out their and learn the frequent words!

What do you do after you learn the frequent words? Do you learn the next most frequent words? No. What are you interested in? Research to find frequent words in your areas of interests. If you are intested in futuristic sci-fi fictions, learn technical words. Words like “robot” or “time machine” or “spaceship”. Those words will be useless for someone interested in cooking. Just like knowing the word for “salt shaker” or “rosemary” will be useless for someone who enjoys SciFi.

Learning words in those special interests areas will be more useful for you, because you can then read material that you find interesting!

Step 3. Guessing Vocabulary

See a word you don’t know? What do you do? Do you look it up in the dictionary? Stop doing that. Go back to Step 1. Guess what the word means. Try to infer it from the context. Remember the “cat” example? That was a context clue that you used to guess the missing word. Learn as much vocabulary through context like this. If you aren’t 100% sure of the meaning of the word — skip it. You don’t need to know everything! You can always come back later. The biggest pitfall for people learning a language is they feel like they need to know everything right away. You don’t! Just keep learning and come back to it later.

Step 4. Repitition

Read aloud to yourself. Read things multiple times. Define each word you know after you read a sentence. Guess the words you don’t know. Read the sentence again. Keep doing this until you no longer need to think about guessing new words.

When you learn a word — use it in a sentence. Repeat that sentence. Good. Now make a second sentence. Repeat the first sentence. Oh, but you just made a second sentence? Too bad. What was that first sentence again? Did you forget it? Start over. Create a sentence. Repeat it. Good! Now make a second sentence. What was the sentence you just made? Repeat this until you can create a second sentence but remember the first sentence. Now repeat the second sentence.

Do this with each word you learn. You only need to make two sentences! This is to train your short term memory. You need to not have to think about that first sentence, but instead have it internalized. Do you have time to think before speaking each sentence? No! Thinking is too slow for most real life conversations. So internalize those two sentences so you no longer need to think about them. Eventually you’ll have a better command over your vocabulary and can create more and more sentences without having to think about the vocabulary.

Step 5. 50 words

With only 50 words you can hold small-talk conversation with someone you just met. That’s all you need! Learn how to introduce yourself, how to ask them their name, how to explain your interest in the language, how to say goodbye. Maybe you can do it with only 20 words! The important part goes back to Step 3. Learn important vocabulary. If you are unable to ask and answer several questions in 50 words, you are learning the wrong vocabulary if your goal is fluency and speaking with native speakers.

Step 6. Collocations

Learn words that go together. Learning high-frequency collocations is more beneficial than low-frequency words.

This is one way to fake sounding native. It’s important to know groups and clusters of words that are often used together in a certain way. It is also important for not sounding silly.

For us English speakers, if someone told you “I want some speedy food.” would you think they sound funny? Some of you might even wonder what they mean. I hope many English speakers recognize that person wants some “fast food”. Oh! Now it makes sense! They used a synonym for “fast” but because we describe it as “fast food” as a singular phrase, it sounds very funny!

This is important because even if a sentence is grammatically correct — you can still sound funny because “we don’t say it that way”. Some more examples of this are “Raise an eyebrow”. You wouldn’t say “Bring up an eyebrow”!

Step 7. One Road, Two Locations

There are many different ways to say the same thing. Who taught you the language? Who is teaching you the language? Is someone teaching you the language?

Try to learn how to say the same thing in two different ways and without using a synonym. There are many ways to ask the same question — and if you want to give a proper response, you’ll need to be prepared for as many was as possible. It is important to know how to ask and answer questions in slightly different ways. These sentences will share a lot of vocabulary, which will reinforce it. You will also pick up new vocabulary and can apply that to make new sentences.

Who taught you that? Who is teaching you geography? Is someone teaching you to play the piano?

Step 8. Keep it fun

If you ever get bored — try to mix it up. If you stop having fun, you will lose motivation. If you lose motivation — you will stop learning the language. Keep it fun.