Tips On How To Learn A Language

“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.” Frank Smith

This quote illustrates the benefit and even the necessity to learn a new language. To quote only the best known example, a common criterion to land a job is to know how to speak English.

At 10 years old, I started to learn 2 languages : English and Spanish (my mother tongue being French). To be honest, I wasn’t very good and I did not like the way the languages were taught back then. Today, 13 years later, I can pretend to be reasonably comfortable in English and Spanish. I want to share with you some tips that I used for this.

Here are the list of my tips :

• Start watching your series/movies in the foreign language you want to learn.
• If you’re into reading, you should try to read a book written in the language in question.
• To improve your listening skills, start listening to audio books.
• If you take notes regularly (for your job, your classes, …), take these notes in the foreign language. Might be tedious at the beginning I admit but in the long run, you’ll get much more comfortable.
• Find someone who can speak these language on a daily basis with you. There are some apps to do it like Speaky, Hellolingo and many others. If you can’t, speak to yourself for a certain duration every day or every week.

The main idea behind these advice is to immerse yourself into the new language so it becomes natural to you to interact with it.

I must add that these tips are for people who already have the basics of the language they want to learn. Don’t start Russian by reading a 500 pages book in Russian, you’d probably struggle a bit.

I hope these tips can help you. Let me know in the comments if you have some advice/tips of your own that you use when you’re learning a language ! I am always eager to learn new ways 😉

Here is my LinkedIn if you want to join me :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/malo-le-goff-480452170/?locale=en_US