3 Essential Tips for Language Learning

There’s a lot of advice out there for how best to learn a language. After studying several languages over the course of 12+ years (mostly independently), I’ve figured out a few essential things I wish I’d understood when I began all those years ago. I’ve rolled them here into 3 basic points, which usually aren’t (exactly) the first things you read when you search for language-learning advice.

1. Learn via context.

The first time I tried to read a book in French was a disaster. I bought a young adult fantasy novel that I thought would be relatively easy to read. But then I spent about two hours trying to read the first two pages. I looked up every unknown word I came across in the dictionary, and then I’d get so caught up in doing that that I had to re-read the paragraph to remind myself what I’d just read. Then I found I had to look most of the words up again because I’d already forgotten the meaning by the time I got back to them. And on and on. I was going in circles.

Then I looked up some advice on how to read in a foreign language, and it was perfect: don’t look up every word you come across. Try to understand the meaning of new words via context, and only look up a word if you’ve come across it already 5 or 10 times and still don’t understand the meaning.

I did this with that novel, and suddenly I was breezing through it. I understood the gist of every major thing that happened in the story, and my vocabulary and reading skills improved enormously by the end. I finished reading the book in about the same time it takes me to read a novel in English.

It makes sense. This is how we all learn our native languages: via context. When we’re toddlers, we don’t look up every word in the dictionary. We only occasionally even ask for the meaning of a word as we grow up. The rest we understand through context. This, of course, applies to listening as well as reading.

2. Practicality.

We all know that we need to practice a language in order to learn it. We all probably also understand that we should start with a few words and phrases that will be immediately useful, such as greetings, good-byes, thanks, etc. But not everyone seems to realize how to study a language in a practical manner.

Just look at the vast majority of language classes in high school and college: they’re really focused on a one-size-fits-all curricula, which doesn’t really fit all. The result is that the vast majority of students come out of 3+ years of these classes barely being able to hold a basic conversation or even read a news article, and a year later hardly remembering a thing off the top of their heads. I had this experience with language classes in both high school and college.

I was successful in teaching myself French and Romanian to a solid oral and written conversational level (which I still remember many years later) because I studied vocabulary and grammar in the order that suited my personal practical needs. That is, the order in which I could actually use and practice the language, immediately. I did not study the language to prepare myself for some hypothetical and unlikely (in my case) year or two later when I would be spending months or years in Romania or a Francophone country. Which is what formal language classes will force you to do, and which I did for my Spanish, Japanese, and Swahili classes.

So what does this look like for me? Well, when I started studying those languages independently, I used them predominantly to: text chat with people online in chat rooms and IMs, and to read news/magazine/informational articles. Since I barely had anyone to chat with orally, I used text chat instead. Thus, the first vocabulary and grammar I learned was (mostly) highly applicable to those purposes. And thus, I was able to practice them thoroughly before moving on.

Whereas I could hold a 3-hour conversation entirely in French with a native speaker after four years of study (and now), I’m not sure I could properly go to a restaurant in Paris and order dinner by myself tonight without either some serious brushing up on how to do so, or a bit of struggle. But I’ve studied lessons online about how to order from a restaurant in French. I simply don’t remember the nuances, all the course names, the words for all the table items, etc.—I’ve never needed to. I’ve had extremely few opportunities to use this part of the French language thus far. (Although, side note: I recently have started learning a lot more of food-related vocab by watching cooking how-to videos on YouTube.)

A formal language curriculum will probably involve you learning lots of similar scenarios that you’ll promptly forget. Unless you are planning on being in the target language community within the next year, or dining at a lot of French restaurants (for example), I’d skip these bits or at least not dwell on them until you’re pretty advanced in the language. Instead, you could start chatting with people online and think of what you want to talk to them about—and create your own lesson to that end.

3. Immersion can be simulated.

Immersion is something you’ll see mentioned in most decent articles on how to learn a language. This isn’t my forte, as I’ve never really been able to go to another country and immerse myself fully in a foreign language in this manner. If you have the opportunity for total immersion, by all means, take it!

However, so long as you are studying the language from afar, you can simulate immersion to an extent (depending on available resources for the target language). Yes, this means practice and use the language, but there are some nuances here. I’m talking about variety, massive consumption and use of the language, and persistence.

Think about how you use and learn a language when you are fully immersed in it. You use it in a wide variety of contexts. From what others have told me about immersion, it generally takes at least six months to become fully fluent in a language that way, and possibly considerably longer without prior study. Use this information to gauge how much you might gain from spending 25% of your “spare time” to use the language in a variety of ways.

Listening is one of the easiest methods of immersion because it can be done relatively passively, via multi-tasking. I’ve been listening to the French news radio, Radio Française Internationale, the entire time I’ve been writing this article. Well, sort of. I’ve mostly just had it in the background. This is a practice I’ve taken up over the last few months: to listen to as much French as possible, even if it’s just in the background while I’m doing something else.

This is only secondarily about subliminal absorption; primarily, it’s about using the moments in between other tasks to pay attention to the spoken language and improve my listening comprehension. Am I waiting for a web page to load? Now I’m listening to French. Am I between tasks? Now I’ll spend ten minutes just listening to French because I’m already doing it. Am I playing a computer game? Well, now I can actually be productive at the same time: by turning down the sound effects and game music and instead listening to French in the background the entire time.

I’ve started doing this recently because I noticed that listening was my weakest of the four language skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening. I’ve listened to RFI.fr for 10+ years now, but over the last few months I’ve finally graduated to being able to comprehend a lot of YouTube videos in French without subtitles and without needing to play them more than once. This is key because now I can listen and learn via context through the visuals in the videos. And I can tell that my French listening comprehension is slowly but surely improving.

My final point about simulating immersion: persistence. This sounds obvious, but there were so many times when I wanted to give up learning French. At times, in fact, I did. I got stuck many times — it took me 11+ months of off-and-on study to get from complete beginner to scoring “Advanced Beginner” on the French.About.com self-assessment test.

If you pack your bags and move to Paris for a year, you’d probably have a hard time giving up learning the language. Even if you got frustrated and felt helpless at times, you’d probably keeping trying to improve your French while there. That’s sort of how learning French was for me. I took breaks, sometimes not thinking I’d come back to the language. But I did. I kept coming back, and I can’t say that of every language I’ve studied. I know French much better than any other language I’ve studied for one reason above all: persistence. When I try to study other languages, I still get frustrated (thinking of Chinese here), but then I think to myself: I can do this, and I know how. If I seriously want to learn Chinese on my own, what I need above all is persistence. The rest I will figure out in time. The learning how to study Chinese will come in time.

What I didn’t know when I began studying languages was that I was learning not only a language, but a process of how to learn a language. It’s cliché, but true in this sense: where there’s a will, there’s a way. If you really commit yourself to learning a language on your own, you’ll figure it out. So even if you get stuck and quit—if you’re serious about learning, just take a break and come back.

One of the things you get from persistence in independent study: you find better methods and resources and lessons that will revive your desire to learn the language. This is certainly true of listening to the French news in the background. I had hardly studied or improved my French at all for 6-7 years, and now I’m listening to it every day and seeing consistent improvement for the first time in a very long time. For the first time, I no longer believe it’s impossible for me to become fully fluent in French without full immersion, and that’s all because of where I see this practice taking me.

Conclusion

Whether I’m right or not, this seems like a major shift for me, and hence why I’ve finally managed to write an article summing up what I know about learning a language. I think I’ve found the missing piece in my language-learning puzzle!

I hope someone will find this advice useful and save themselves months or years of feeling daunted by a language. Good luck and happy language learning!

P.S. The background image is just paying homage to famed linguist J.R.R. Tolkien, who studied many languages and created his own. I don’t recommend trying to learn Elvish—trust me, I’ve tried!

I always appreciate writing advice—if anyone has any ideas on how I can improve this article structurally, I’m all eyes. Feel free to leave a note. Merci d’avance !