We all have different reasons for learning a foreign language. It may be for work, family reasons or just sheer pleasure (strangely enough!). It’s not a easy process though, it’s not just a question of learning a body of words, a language is also a culture and a way of looking at the world.
1. Don’t be afraid of ridicule. It’s part of the process of learning a language. If other people don’t point out your mistakes, who else will?
2. Listen to as much as you can. The Internet has made every language in the world easily available to anyone that wants to learn it. It doesn’t matter how much you understand, put it on for background. Just listen to the sounds of the words and the music with the rhythm of the langaue. When I was learning French, I only had long wave radio to turn to. I listened to RTL for a couple of years on and off and learnt how to do the accent.
3. Vocabulary lists. When you first start learning, the main obstacle to having any kind of conversation is a lack of knowledge of verbs and nouns. Unfortunately, if you want to grow your vocabulary fast, there’s no real substitute for buying a basic address book, writing new words down in alphabetical order and learning them. This can also be done on a spreadsheet. Of course, if you’re living in the country of the language your learning, you’ll have the advantage of hearing new words in their context repeatedly and they’ll be learnt quite naturally.
4. Use any excuse to practice. Seek out foreign community groups, go on holiday, learn the language with someone else. Talk to anyone – even if they don’t understand you. When you’ve reached a decent level of proficiency, you could try watching foreign language films with English subtitles to improve your skills. Or if you’re exceptionally gifted reading books to learn from scratch.
5. Patience. Learning a language takes a long time. It took you three years to learn your mother tongue. Even then, you were missing a lot of vocabulary. It will take you a lot of time to reach any kind of fluency, especially if you don’t live in a country where the language is spoken. A few years ago, there was a headline in one of the British tabloids bemoaning the fact that Claudio Ranieri, erstwhile manager of Chelsea, had been in the country for two months and STILL didn’t speak English. As the saying goes, the difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
It must be said that the best and some would say only real way of learning a language however is to live and work in a country where it is spoken once you have the basics.
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