Seven Tips for Learning a New Language
I have always appreciated the beauty of language diversity, and learning a new language can be a fun and rewarding experience if you commit yourself to it. Or it can go downhill pretty fast if you panic once you reach all those verb conjugations and declensions… Shiver. As someone who has taken classes in languages that tend to go in that direction, I feel your pain.
However, fret not! Because the solution, most of the time, isn’t to just sit with a notebook and furiously gobble down all those words until you can recite them like a poem. And this approach isn’t fun and will make most learners lose interest in learning the language. What you can do, instead, is to follow these tips to keep yourself on track when learning a new language.
Challenge yourself.
Sometimes, when a random thought would pop in my head or I would happen to come across a particular sentence, I would stop and take a second to think if I knew how to say that sentence in my target language. And if I didn’t, that was still okay. I would remember the sentence and check how to say it when I got home. Easy peasy!
Read in that language.
You can make this a fun activity and not stop every single time you don’t know a word. Can you guess the meaning out of context? But the thing is, with reading, the more you do it, the more familiar you will become with the vocabulary and syntax. Even if you didn’t actively learn a word you came across, when you see it again, your brain will be like ‘Hey! I’ve seen this before’, and every time this happens, you are one read closer to absorbing that word as part of your active vocabulary list. Hooray!
Download an app.
There are lots, and I mean lots of apps that can help you learn a new language, but I don’t mean using only the app as a learning tool. I tried quite a few apps, but I only used them as a tool for repetition, whenever I had a few spare minutes. And doing your daily dose of vocab on an app can be more fun than doing it out of a list of words on a white sheet of paper.
Use the language.
I think this is one of the most important tips I can give you, no matter what level of language you’re at. When I took Spanish classes, we only did one and a half hour sessions once a week. So, I basically only spoke Spanish once a week, maybe twice if we had homework. But every single week, it would take me the first half-hour of the session just to accommodate my brain to speak in that language again. So, use your language. Even if you’re speaking to yourself, you’re doing yourself a favor, trust me.
Engage with the language.
Much like reading, this would mean do anything there is you can find that is using the language you want to learn. Listen to music, watch movies, listen to the radio or even play games. And again, don’t worry if you don’t understand something right away. This is not a strict exercise, it’s more of a habit that will let you familiarize more and more with interacting with this language.
Talk without the fear of making mistakes.
This is also a really important one. I have noticed that when I try to use my language in public and I feel under pressure, I sometimes talk really slowly because I’m trying to process the grammar of what I’m saying at the same time, to make doubly sure I don’t get it wrong. But that shouldn’t be the case. Don’t hesitate, making mistakes is part of the learning process, and you want to aim to speak naturally and without the big book of grammatical rules pulling on your sleeve.
Make a habit.
You might want to spare yourself, let’s say, ten minutes every day to do any of the activities mentioned above. It doesn’t have to be the same one every day, choose one depending on how you feel. Maybe today you want to read five pages of a novella. Tomorrow you might want to scroll through an app and check your vocab list. Whatever it may be, making a habit out of it is a great idea to keep in touch with the language.
Easy, right? There are, of course, more techniques and activities you can do than that, but these are some of the simple tips I realized were helping me in my journey of language learning.
What is most important is to not get discouraged when you get something wrong. Keep in mind that learning a new language should be a fun process and not a chore. The activities you choose to do, be it reading, writing or listening to a song in that language, should also engage you without making you discouraged if you didn’t understand that one word.
Move on and next time you might remember it!
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