If you approach learning a new language with the idea that you need to know every word and every grammatical structure and verb conjugation, it will become a wildly daunting task, and likely one that you won’t follow through with.
Have you ever decided to start working out? Or pick up a sport? Maybe you wanted to start cooking or painting? If you have, you know that you start slow, and you focus on basic movements or recipes that you can learn right off the bat. Maybe in a few weeks you get good enough to play basketball with a friend in a park or bake some stuffed mushrooms in the oven. You can use the same approach with learning a language. Here are a few of my top tips:
- Sticky notes. Grab a bunch of em and a pen and write down the word of the language you’re learning for objects around the house. Stick them on those objects. Being confronted with that every day will make it tough to forget that the word for window is ‘“ventana”, or that mirror is “espejo”.
- Practice small, basic sentences for things you actually want to say. Perhaps you want to tell your partner, “You make me happy”, so you’ll learn just how to say “Me haces feliz”. Or maybe you want to get more practical with saying “Quieres pollo para cenar esta noche? Yo voy a cocinar”, or “Do you want chicken for dinner tonight? I’m going to cook”. When you can use the language you’re learning, even if briefly, it encourages you to keep practicing so you can use it in other fun and engaging ways.
- Watch kids’ television shows in the language you’re learning. Podcasts that mix English with the language you’re learning are also super beneficial. All of it helps the language sound more familiar and slowly you’ll begin to recognize and pull-out common words or phrases and piece larger concepts together.
- Grab some signs one might find in a country that speaks the language you’re learning. They could be traffic signs or informational posters explaining what the process is when you’re taking out money from an ATM for example. Similar to sticky notes, having these signs/posters up will force you to be confronted with the language on a daily basis and increase your familiarity.
Of course, if you can travel to the country where the language you’re trying to learn is spoken and stay there for an extended period of time (3 months minimum) — that is certainly ideal, and a great deal of fun since you’ll meet people you might never otherwise and become fully enmeshed in that culture. If not, try some of these tips and see if they help! Focusing on trying to use the language on a regular basis, even in seemingly small ways, will go a long way. Rather than attempting to learn the full language perfectly without ever making any grammatical mistakes, try thinking of your main goal as connecting with people around you.
