7 Simple Tips on Learning a New Language
By Eli Morey
If you are like most people, you have dreamt about learning to speak another language fluently. You imagine impressing friends and family with your skills, travelling the world, meeting new people and learning about new cultures.
However, most people never take action to realize this dream. The main reason is that learning a new language is a long-term project and can seem like a daunting task. It is easy to get overwhelmed and give up, particularly in the early stages of learning, when even formulating and understanding simple phrases can feel like pulling teeth.
If any of this sounds relevant to your experience, then the following tips are for you. Mastering a new language will never be easy, but anyone who has done it will tell you that it is worth the pain. Here are our tips to help you power through the most difficult parts of your language learning journey.
1. Practice with other people!
As much as the introverts among us might beg to differ, humans are social creatures, and we learn socially. This is particularly true of language. Keep in mind that our first language is always learned via socialization and is constantly being changed and redefined in different social contexts.
Ideally, we would all like to meet fluent or native speakers of our target language to socialize with. However, this is not always possible, nor is it always the most productive way to start learning a language.
Even practicing with other novices has its benefits, as it allows you to work through questions and difficulties as a group and provides you with much needed encouragement to keep practicing even when you aren’t feeling 100% up to the task. Consider starting a study group with friends or peers and meeting once or twice a week.
2. Don’t obsess about the “right” order of operations
One common way to get overwhelmed when learning a new language is to try to plot out your entire language learning curriculum from the start. You might find yourself googling syllabuses from courses or making a list of which things you want to learn in which order.
The problem with this approach is that it fails to take into account the fluidity of our human brains, which have evolved to learn and solve problems in a myriad of ways and in different orders.
It also fails to consider that we all have different interests and needs. For example, someone who plays music might find it beneficial to learn vocabulary related to instruments and music theory long before learning vocabulary related to healthcare or government.
Here is an easy piece of advice to follow: learn about what you are passionate about first, then fill in the gaps!
3. Speak and listen
If you have studied languages in a school setting, you may have noticed that there is an extremely strong emphasis on reading and writing skills, with little attention paid to speaking or listening.
However, as we noted in tip #1, we all learned our first language by speaking and listening to parents, family members, schoolmates, etc. In fact, our brains are hardwired to learn everything about a language just by hearing and speaking language, making small recalibrations every time we take in new data.
Instead of spending hours poring over lists of vocabulary or flashcards, try watching a television show in another language, or chatting with a friend who is also learning.
4. Take it slow but steady
Impatience can be a great motivator to help you push yourself, but it can also be an obstacle to healthy learning habits. Instead of random, occasional heroic study marathons, try to spend a few minutes every single day practicing a new language.
Make a small goal for yourself each day or week, such as learning 5 new vocabulary words and how to use them in context or spending 30 minutes listening to a Spanish language podcast.
Small, achievable goals serve as milestones that help you feel that you are making progress, and prevent burnout.
5. Review on a regular basis
As a now fluent speaker of Spanish, I sometimes find myself embarrassed to have forgotten a very basic word. For example, the other day I was speaking to an Argentinian friend, and I forgot the Spanish word for spoon.
This is a great example of why review is important. Even once we achieve a high level of language proficiency, it is always helpful to go back and review things that we think we know.
This is particularly true for new learners, whose brains haven’t yet started to form patterns that help them to recall words and phrases in milliseconds.
6. Don’t be afraid to sound silly
This advice falls under the general category of not being afraid to make mistakes. However, it is particularly applicable to features of language such as phonetics (that is to say, differences in sounds and pronunciation).
When starting a new language, people often feel embarrassed to even attempt to make new sounds because they feel so unnatural. Regardless, you should keep in mind that by not even attempting to pronounce new sounds correctly, you probably sound even sillier to native speakers. Making a good attempt and failing over and over will eventually help you get it right.
7. Find a teacher
For all of the hype these days about internet autodidacts, there is a reason why formal education always involves instructors. There is no replacement for learning from someone who has already gone through the process of learning a language and understands from experience how to help you through common pitfalls and obstacles.
If you are looking for a teacher to help you with English, Spanish, French, or Arabic, don’t hesitate to reach out to Midwest Language Services.
Click here to browse our language classes and tutoring options!
