The No-Nonsense Guide to Language Learning: Hacks and Tips to Learn a Language Faster
Kindle Highlights
you can’t just study a language – you have to use it.
The only way to get anywhere meaningful is through hard work
A willingness to make mistakes. Tools to connect with native speakers
Listening to the words beforehand on forvo.com is really helpful for this.
An online dictionary like wordreference.com to find words in your target language
You feel really stupid when you try to use a language in situations that are outside of your comfort zone, and that’s precisely why you need MORE of these situations, not less of them.
Life isn’t perfect. If you’re going to sit around, waiting for an opportune moment to start doing all the things you want to do in life, you’ll find you have very little chance of achieving, well – anything!
Many language learners seem to expect that if they spend enough time studying textbooks or watching foreign films, they’ll somehow magically become fluent in their target language. I’m sorry, but this is not how it works.
much better than I was at the beginning of the experiment. I had learned so much because my motive changed from “I really want to speak Spanish” to “I really need to speak Spanish”! This is an extremely important difference.
Wake up to a radio in Mandarin telling me the news and desperately force myself to pick out as many words as I can, and wish I knew what was going on in the world after I understand only fragmented basic words. Start off grumpy.
Instead, spend an extra ten minutes looking back at the notes in the Skype chat box. What words did your teacher type out that you didn’t know? What new phrases should you add to your study list or Anki deck? Were there any conversation topics that you struggled with?
You can find tons of native speakers in dozens of languages over at italki, a marketplace for online language tutors and teachers. One hour of time spent with a native speaker talking in the language and reviewing what you learn in the classroom is always more effective than several hours of self-study at the school library. Use
Use italki to find low-cost online teachers You don’t have to travel to a country to immerse yourself in a language. You can find teachers and language exchange partners online. That way, you can practise your language from the comfort of your own home. No need to buy a plane ticket! One of my favourite tools for this is italki, a marketplace for online language tutors and teachers.
Tip 3: Try the Bingo! Strategy Another way to make the most of your call is use the “Bingo” strategy, which my partner Lauren came up with. Essentially, Lauren writes down a list of possible things to say, and plays a bingo game with herself during the call to try and practise all the phrases on the list. Each time she says a phrase, it gets crossed off the list. If she crosses off all of them, it’s Bingo!.
Stop studying the language; live the language! Incorporate your new language into every aspect of your life. Listen to music in your target language. Watch movies in the language. Play computer games or use your phone in the language. Listen to podcasts in your target language. Sing in the language. Heck, even think in the language. This constant exposure will make it easier to speak the language and recall vocabulary.
The Pomodoro Technique Use this time-hacking method to increase your productive sprints. To use this technique, alternate 25 minute work sessions with five minute breaks. This allows your brain to get some breathing room. Why does this work? If you don’t time-box your study sessions, the more you study in a single session, the worse you get at retaining the information and staying fresh as you get deeper into that session. Take breaks and you’ll be much more fresh!
In The Count of Monte Cristo, the lead character Edmond Dantès met a fellow prisoner, the wise Abbé Faria, who told Dantès that he was constantly improving his Greek language skills. When asked how that was possible in prison, Faria replied, “Why, I made a vocabulary of the words I knew; turned, returned, and arranged them, so as to enable me to express my thoughts through their medium….I cannot hope to be very fluent, but I certainly should have no difficulty in explaining my wants and wishes; and that would be quite as much as I should ever require.”
believe the system that separates language levels most efficiently to be the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) scale. It essentially gives us three ranges we may find ourselves within: A (beginner), B (intermediate) and C (advanced), each of which is then further split into 1 (lower) and 2 (upper). On this testable scale, my fluency goal is the B2 (upper intermediate) level. This means I “can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.”
Here are my suggestions on using a book to learn a language: Tackle the book in segments, such as paragraph by paragraph. Get the book in your native language so you can get the gist of each segment before reading on. Preview the foreign language version to see how much you can understand without studying the text. Select any words you don’t know which appear multiple times and add them to your SRS flashcard deck. Read the passage to your italki tutor to work on your pronunciation and accent Record a native speaker (perhaps your tutor or a language exchange partner) saying the passage in both regular speed and slowly. Alternatively, download the audiobook if it’s available. Review the passage multiple times. First, make sure you understand what’s being said. Then practise pronouncing it.
You can actually supplement your language learning by watching movies, if you go about it the right way. Here’s how to do that: Don’t just watch the movie. Study it. Viewing a movie for entertainment means you aren’t focused on learning the language. Treat the movie like you would a textbook, and study the material. Activate the subtitles (in the target language, not your native one), and note the tricky words. Break things up into consumable, repeatable segments. A two-hour movie is too much language to absorb at once. Break it up into segments of 10 minutes or less, and review them multiple times until you have really learned something of substance. Engage with the material. A movie is an open book on body language, accents, inflection, pronunciation and many other areas of language learning. Don’t just sit on your hands! Get involved in the story, act out parts, repeat lines and body movements and make the language come alive!