It’s the New Year, and if you’re like many people, you’ve made a resolution to better yourself by learning a new language. With dedication and practice, you can do it on your own, but even the best of us need some tips to help us out in any new endeavor. We’ve compiled a list of great tips and tricks for learning a new language to keep you on the right path. Over the course of the month, we’ll share these tips with you: everything from how to learn vocabulary to getting the hang of tricky verb conjugations.
Let’s start with some general tips to help get you on your way.
1. Find Your Pace
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you should always proceed at your own pace. Don’t feel pressured into thinking that you only have one chance to digest information before moving on to new material. Read and listen to parts of lessons or entire lessons as many times as it takes to make you feel comfortable with the material. Regular repetition is the key to learning any new language, so don’t be afraid to cover material again, and again, and again!
2. Take Notes
Use a notebook or start a language journal so you can have something to take with you. Each lesson contains material that you’ll learn much more quickly and effectively if you write it down, or rephrase it in your own words once you’ve understood it. That includes vocabulary, grammar points and examples, expressions from dialogues, and anything else that you find noteworthy. Take your notes with you to review wherever you have time to kill – on the bus or train, waiting at the airport, while dinner is cooking, or whenever you can find the time. Remember – practice (and lots of review!) make perfect when it comes to learning languages.
3. Make a Regular Commitment
Make time for your new language. The concept of “hours of exposure” is key to learning a language. When you expose yourself to a new language frequently, you’ll pick it up more easily. On the other hand, the longer the intervals between your exposure to a language, the more you’ll forget. It’s best to set time aside regularly for yourself. Imagine that you’re enrolled in a class that takes place at certain regular times during the week, and set that time aside. Or use your lunch break. It’s better to spend less time several days a week than a large chunk of time once or twice a week. In other words, spending thirty or forty minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday will be better than spending two and a half or three hours just on Saturday.
4. Don’t Have Unrealistic Expectations
Don’t expect to start speaking a new language as if it were your native language. It’s certainly possible for adults to learn new languages with amazing fluency, but that’s not a realistic immediate goal for most people. Instead, make a commitment to become “functional” in a new language, and start to set small goals: getting by in most daily activities, talking about yourself and asking about others, following TV and movies, reading a newspaper, expressing your ideas in basic language, and learning creative strategies for getting the most out of the language you know. Functional doesn’t mean perfectly native fluent, but it’s a great accomplishment!
5. Don’t Get Hung Up on Pronunciation
“Losing the accent” is one of the most challenging parts of learning a language. If you think about celebrities, scientists, or political figures whose native language isn’t English, they probably have a pretty recognizable accent. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming celebrities, scientists, or political figures. Really young children are able to learn the sounds of any language in the world, and they can reproduce them perfectly. That’s part of the process of learning a native language. As an adult, or even as an older child, this ability becomes reduced, so if you agonize over sounding like a native speaker in your new language, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. That’s not to say that you can’t learn pronunciation well. Even adults can get pretty far through mimicking the sounds that they hear. So, listen carefully to audio several times. Listening is a very important part of this process: you can’t reproduce the sound until you learn to distinguish the sound. Then mimic what you hear. Don’t be afraid of sounding strange. Just keep at it, and soon enough you’ll develop good pronunciation.
6. Don’t Be Shy
Learning a new language inevitably involves speaking out loud, and it involves making mistakes before you get better. Don’t be afraid of sounding strange, or awkward, or silly. You won’t: you’ll impress people with your attempts. The more you speak, and the more you interact, the faster you’ll learn to correct the mistakes you do make.
What are your favorite tricks for learning a language? Feel free to hop on over to the forums to share your experience!
