People often ask me what the secret is to learning foreign languages quickly and effectively. The thing is, there is no super secret method to learn a foreign language. You don’t need any fancy software, expensive textbooks, or magical pills.
Polyglots, language learning enthusiasts, and people around the world achieve success mainly through the use of a few simple strategies. Here I have listed the basic techniques that have helped me reach fluency in a handful of foreign languages.
Listen, listen, listen
Listening practice is the number one way to improve your proficiency in a foreign language. More than anything, this is the tip that I wish I had learned earlier as a young language learner.
People shy away from listening because they think they’re not good at it. It’s not that you’re not good at it — it’s hard! It’s only natural that listening is more difficult than reading. When you read you can take your time, whereas when you listen to something the passage flies by at the speed of sound, making it hard to catch every word, let alone understand what people are saying.
While listening can be difficult and uncomfortable, don’t allow yourself to get into the mindset that practicing reading is just as good. Practicing reading is also an important and valuable tool for learning languages, but it just doesn’t pack nearly as much punch as listening does. If you need to, you can slow the audio down on many popular applications, including YouTube, Windows Media Player, and VLC Media Player.
Listen as much as possible. Listen to textbook materials, podcasts, YouTube videos, shows on Netflix. Listen while you’re on the bus, while you’re washing the dishes, while you’re folding the laundry. Listen, listen, listen, and you’re sure to get results much faster.
Talk to yourself
Many people talk about how they wish they had more opportunities to practice speaking. The thing is, you don’t need someone in front of you to practice speaking. It may feel a little silly at first, but speaking out loud with yourself is a great way to practice languages.
How do you get started? Think about the conversations that you tend to have with people in your target language. One I frequently practice when I am learning a new language is to imagine that I am meeting a new person. What will they ask me about myself, and how will I respond? I act out each line of the imaginary dialogue and take it as far as I can with my current skills.
If you run into something that you want to say but don’t know how, this is the perfect opportunity to look it up or ask a native speaker. In this way you can identify your own communication needs before they come up in a real situation. When you learn something this way, it’s much more likely to stick with you since you it’s something you have a real desire to say.
Shadowing
Shadowing is one of the most powerful techniques that I employ in my daily life as a language learner. The technique is quite simply taking a listening passage, pausing after each sentence, and trying to repeat out loud exactly what you heard, imitating the speech of the native speaker as closely as possible.
It may seem silly and annoying at first. We tend to think that there is no point in repeating every line we hear if we can understand it well enough. In reality, listening for comprehension and practicing shadowing are two very different techniques that stimulate your brain in very different ways.
There are a handful of invaluable benefits we get from listening and repeating. It improves your fluency, as you exercise your ability to repeat back sentences at the same speed as a native speaker. It improves your vocabulary, as words are more definitively imprinted into our head when you say them yourself. It even improves your grammar, as the grammar forms you listen to and repeat aloud will be slowly be burned into the neural circuitry of your brain. And finally it improves your attention and focus when you listen to your target language.
When we listen without repeating back, we don’t notice how many little words and inflections escape us. Listening and repeating may feel arduous and silly, but it is an extremely powerful exercise.
Translate into your target language
Translation is something that I used to always avoid when studying foreign languages. Throughout the years, however, I have found that there is one form of translation exercise which can be immensely useful, as long as a couple conditions are in place.
Translate text into your target language, not from it. For example, if you’re studying Japanese, practice translating from English to Japanese. This exercise is effective because it tests your active vocabulary and true grammar mastery.
To get the most out of this exercise you should find a text that is available in both your target language and your native language (or whatever language you’re studying through). You can obtain such texts through textbooks that have full translations of passages, through bilingual books (like those from the Assimil series), or by making your own translation of a text into your native language.
Look at the text in your native language, then do your best to translate it into the target language. Once you have completed a few lines, compare it with the original text and notice any mistakes you made. I have found this exercise often proves to be a huge wake-up call, as we tend to overestimate our ability to reproduce vocabulary and grammar that we are comfortable with in passive skills like listening and reading.
This is a relatively intensive exercise which can be quite draining, and sometimes demotivating if we find ourselves making too many mistakes. Rather than trying to work through an entire passage in one go, just work in short spurts. You don’t have to do it every day, and 15 to 30 minutes per session is plenty to get some good practice in.
Read aloud
Whenever I read anything for language study, I always read aloud. I try to imagine that I am reading to an audience, and that I must sound as professional as possible. This means that I practice reading the same passage over and over again until I can read it with fluency and confidence.
As you can imagine, this strategy means I may end up reading the same passage dozens of times, depending on how challenging it is. The best way to prevent this from getting tedious and overwhelming is to break down passages into manageable pieces, and to make sure you’re reading something that’s interesting enough that you don’t mind reading it several times.
Write
This is the one outlier of this list, as it is not something other polyglots typically recommend. Whenever I am studying a foreign language, I write a ton, and I find it very helpful.
When I say “write”, I don’t necessarily mean trying to create my own sentences from scratch. I copy conversations from books, I transcribe conversations I have with natives online, I write out exercises from learning materials — basically I write out any sentence I find fun or interesting.
Not only does it help me stay focused, as it’s harder to space out when you’re physically writing something down, but I also find it super motivating. When I see my notebook filled up with walls of text that I’ve copied down throughout my learning process, it gives me a sense of accomplishment and progress.
And there you have it! The above six activities are all that I do when I study foreign languages. Remember that there is no secret to learning languages — you just need a handful of basic techniques and a lot of hard work.
