Have you ever dreamed about knowing a new language? It could be that you heard a movie character speak a different tongue. Or you made a new friend who speaks French or Polish—for instance—and now you feel curious. Is it difficult to learn a language on your own? As a trilingual, my answer is that language learning is more about time than difficulty. Staying committed to learning can make a big difference. Below, I’ll provide a few tips to get you started. These tips come from my own experience with language learning. I’m not an expert by any means, but I know what it takes. Here they are:
ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU WANT TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE
As I said, language learning is not a short-term endeavor. Unless you’re an enthusiastic polyglot, you won’t be speaking comfortably in a month or two. For most people, it takes months of constant learning. That’s why you should have a solid reason to learn a language. It must keep you motivated for as long as it takes. Are you learning only because it would look good on your resume? Or did you meet a special someone who speaks your target language? There are several great reasons to learn a foreign language. For instance, I learned French because it sounds beautiful. I’d listened to French music and really wanted to understand the lyrics. That doesn’t sound like much, but it helped me stay committed.
CHOOSE THE METHOD THAT BEST SUITS YOU
Now that you know why you want to learn a language, you should decide how. Are you teaching yourself, or would you rather take a class? I learned French by myself because there aren’t any instructors in my area. And even if there had been, I couldn’t afford a class at the time. If you’re teaching yourself, you need to think about what methods you’ll use. Some people learn better with books, and others with videos. Whatever medium you choose, there is lots of material available. Some of it is even free. You could also use a language-learning app such as Duolingo. Keep in mind that you don’t have to choose only one method. You could study from a textbook and supplement your learning with videos.
LEARN THE ALPHABET OF YOUR TARGET LANGUAGE FIRST
You should start with a foreign language’s alphabet before moving on to words and phrases. It doesn’t matter if the alphabet is the same one as that of your own language. The letters will sound different, so you have to memorize those sounds. That will teach your brain to associate them to your target language. Some languages like Arabic and Russian have completely different alphabets from English. They might look intimidating at first, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. Cyrillic, for instance, only takes a few days or so to master. The beauty of alphabets like Cyrillic is that they’re phonetic. That means words always sound the way they are written. If you learn Cyrillic, you’ll be able to pronounce any Russian word even without knowing its meaning. It’s a far cry from English and the differences in pronunciation between door, cook, and flood.
BEGIN SPEAKING FROM DAY ONE
This is a tip that I, foolishly, did not follow when I started learning French. I’d known English and Spanish since I was little, so language learning was rather new to me. I thought I would speak French once I learned enough words. That proved to be a significant mistake. If I’d started speaking from day one, my French mastery would be better today. It doesn’t matter if you’ve only learned one word. You should focus on speaking your target language, not just writing and reading it. That matters even more with languages like French. It’s not a phonetic language, so you can’t know how to pronounce a word only by looking at it.
CREATE A ROUTINE AND STICK TO IT
One key to staying motivated is to set time aside for learning. If you want to learn a language, you have to study every day. Don’t let anything else interfere with your designated study time. Before long, it will become a habit. I made a point to set aside 30 minutes from my afternoon. That was the time that best worked for me. I’m a time-conscious person, so it wasn’t hard to remember to study. If your routine isn’t flexible enough to study at the same time every day, it doesn’t matter. Simply take half an hour out of any part of the day that you can. The point is to not miss a single day of learning, at least not until it has become a habit. Exposing yourself to your chosen language daily will speed up your learning.
SET CLEAR GOALS FOR YOURSELF
Teaching yourself a foreign language is a long-term affair. That makes the end goal seem far away. If you say “It’ll be years before I become fluent” you’ll give up after a short while. To make it more achievable, focus on small milestones instead. For instance, you could aim to become conversational in your target language in 3 months. Or you could resolve to reach B1-level mastery in 6 months. Those are concrete goals and are certainly achievable. I didn’t know about the CEFR scale when I started learning French. My aim was to become conversational within six months. After that I sought to achieve B1 level by the end of my second year of studying. That helped keep me on track. I gave myself clear goals, and it paid off.
START SLOW AND THEN GRADUALLY INCREASE YOUR PACE
This tip sort of ties into the previous one. It’s good to set concrete goals, but they must be reasonable. If it’s your first time learning a new language, don’t force yourself to learn 20 new words per day. That will burn you out and perhaps put you off from the whole endeavor. The first few weeks I started learning French, I studied 5 new words per day. That was an okay pace to start with. When it became too slow, I increased my pace to 10 words a day. It was easy for me to handle. I maintained that pace because I’d burn out if I tried learning more words. Dividing my goal—learning French—into weekly chunks helped keep me motivated. It worked well for me. What works for you might be different. Experiment until you find the pace that’s right for you.
LEARN THE MOST COMMON WORDS AND PHRASES FIRST
They say that we use 20 percent of a language’s vocabulary 80 percent of the time. That was surprising for me when I found out. There’s a lot of truth to that statement. English, for instance, has over 170,000 words currently in use. That does not reflect the actual size of anyone’s vocabulary. I have native-level mastery of English and am an avid reader. Despite that I doubt my vocabulary is larger than 40,000 words. The average non-college-educated native English speaker knows about 25,000 words. This means that most anglophones use roughly 5,000 words 80 percent of the time. Studying those words first will significantly jump-start your language learning journey.
STUDY COGNATES BUT DON'T LASER-FOCUS ON THEM
Cognates are words from two languages that mean the same thing and are written similarly. You’re very likely to find several cognates no matter what language you’re learning. For instance, English shares a lot of vocabulary with French. These include ideal/ideal, important/important(e), tourist/touriste, and typical/typique. Russian also has English cognates, such as passport/pasport, cafe/kafé, secret/sekret, literature/lityeratura, and sister/sestra. It’s a no-brainer that cognates should be among the first words you learn in a new language. They’ll make your goal (fluency) easier. Don’t limit your focus to them, though. Collecting words for its sake is not a great way to pick up a new language.
DON'T LET YOUR AGE, INTELLIGENCE LEVEL, OR SITUATION STOP YOU
You’ve probably heard that by a certain age, one is too old to learn new stuff. There’s about 3-5% of truth in that. Sure, a 70-year-old might have more trouble acquiring new skills than someone in their 20s. That doesn’t mean old people shouldn’t aim to learn stuff. If you dream of speaking a foreign language, do it. You don’t need to be a particularly brainy person, either. Practice is more important than intelligence. And in today’s world, it’s easier to learn any language no matter where you live. There are phone apps and online courses to teach you foreign languages, and some are even free. So pretty much, the only things stopping one from taking the plunge are doubts. Believe in yourself and the process of mastering a new language becomes easier.
***
Those are my language learning tips. I did a little research, but most of these I learned on my own. I’ve only taught myself one language (I’m not sure my first two count). The experience was fun enough that I’m considering learning another language. I still haven’t decided which one, or if I’m starting again at all. Lately I’ve been thinking about picking Russian. I like how it sounds and it will be a good challenge. Russian seems as common as the three languages I already know, though. I might like one that’s not as widely spoken, perhaps Polish or Swedish.
That’s it for today. I’ll take a little moment to mention I’m changing my posting frequency a bit. So far I’ve been posting one book review a week. That feels too slow, so I’m increasing it to two book reviews a week. They’ll be up on my blog every Wednesday and Friday. I’m also leaving Wednesdays for posts like this, and they’ll be weekly. So, I hope you liked this post. Have a good day, and until next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment