This guide outlines smart strategies to learn a language faster.
Learning a new language isn’t always easy. This is especially true if you’re planning on mastering a challenging dialect or something that’s far removed from your mother tongue. Thinking about learning Arabic or mastering Mandarin? For English speakers, these languages can seem impenetrable without applying a few savvy hacks to streamline your learning.
Tips to learn a language
Planning on undertaking a language learning challenge? Read on for some essential tips and techniques to make your life easier.
Choose an Accessible Language
Unless you have a pressing need to learn a specific language, avoid anything too far removed from your native tongue. For English speakers, this means sticking to something that can trace its roots to Indo-European languages. The differences between English and Spanish are far less pronounced than the gulf between English and Mandarin.
Target Common Words and Phrases
Your time is valuable, so don’t waste precious hours learning new words you’ll never use. Instead, focus on the most frequently used words in any given language. As a rule, you should target the most popular 1000 words to give you a firm grasp of a new language. These words are more likely to crop up in casual conversation and formal exchanges. Meanwhile, literature written in a foreign language will be dominated by these words.
This is particularly useful if you’re studying a language with a large vocabulary. English has around 171,000 individual words in the dictionary. The Spanish dictionary is relatively lean with a mere 93,000 words. However, the Japanese dictionary currently boasts more than half a million entries, while the Korean dictionary includes more than 1.1 million words.
Get a Handle on Grammar
Generally speaking, it’s new grammar rules that language learners struggle with, rather than new words themselves. Before you start experimenting with grammar, you’ll first need a solid vocabulary at your disposal. Then, once you’ve added to your word inventories, you can get stuck in.
Some experts recommend looking for patterns in sentences and phrases. However, this approach isn’t universal. After all, some languages have wildly different takes on word ordering and sentence structure.
Let’s compare English and Spanish as an example. In English, adjectives are placed before nouns. By contrast, adjectives are usually positioned after the noun in Spanish. Verb tenses also need to be considered. In English, there are past, present, and future tenses to consider. In other languages like German, past tenses are rarely used.
Use Your Language Skills Regularly
It’s never too early to start deploying your foreign language skills. Using your newly acquired vocabulary early and frequently is essential for mastering fluency. In the United States, around 13% of the population are Spanish speakers. If you’re looking to learn Spanish, you’ve ample opportunity to immerse yourself in conversations with native speakers.
With other languages, you may have to pursue other avenues. Think about meeting with expatriate groups so you can practice your language skills and ask for feedback. Alternatively, immerse yourself in foreign cinema and printed media produced in the language you’re planning on perfecting.
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