How should I study a new language?
Language learning tips
Cassandra Bilyeu published
about 5 years ago
Davi published
about 5 years ago
Ciao 😀 good question but with many possible answers. Let me try to help you out!
1. Set your goal
Setting a goal is extremely important in order to improve more quickly. If you don't have a specific goal in learning a language, you will just wander trying to do a little bit of everything ending up in learning much less. Your goal can change over time but having one each time is very important. Don't have too big goals, be humble. Start with just a "Being able to have some basic conversations" then move to "Being able to speak a little bit of everything except for politics and science" etc.
2. Ask yourself what you like
Do you like astronomy? cooking? videogames? business? Movies? You certainly know what you like to do. And what you like is the main topic you should read, listen, write and talk about for most of the time. The reason is that if you don't, you'll get bored very quickly. Every now and then you can pick some harder and more boring topics but don't make it too important.
3. Use a to-do list application
Having a to-do list application helps you to have a clear idea of what you should work on. Even planning what to do exactly (like what article, what videos etc.) is great.
4. Work on everything
Speaking, listening, writing and reading. When learning a language you should always balance all the skills involved in doing so. Improving each part of them is very important to speed up your learning. The more you listen, the more you can speak and viceversa. The more you can read, the more you can write, the more you can speak and the more you can listen.
5. Find a tutor or a teacher to work on your speaking.
Speaking is something hard to train alone. Therefore having a friend, or even better a tutor or teacher is very important.
6. Read and listen with Repeto!
Repeto offers a great variety of contents to read and listen with also transcripts. That's the best combination to improve your grammar, vocabulary, reading and listening skills all at once!
7. Write anything.
Even a little diary every now and then with some sentences will help you a lot to enhance your grammar and vocabulary. Writing might not be so important for you but it definitely helps you to improve your overall language knowledge and let's be honest, writing is a big part of communication nowadays.
8. Don't focus on grammar
Grammar is like the glue of a language. But only having glue without any pieces and any idea of what you should make is not productive. Grammar highly depends on context and the words you use. Spending too much time on grammar makes your language skills too mechanical and therefore less flexible, less fluent and it makes everything harder to improve. Grammar needs a lot of practice and context to be fully understood. Trying to learn all rules by heart is a waste of time.
9. Be careful with language courses
Language courses are often a business made to take as much money as possible from you by teaching to many different people at once using an overall program without considering the individual case. I don't mean that all courses are like that, but as long as you teach to many people using forced and standardized programs that the teachers are forced to follow, the results aren't any promising.
10. Make a list of the things you need to do
Making a list of the things you need to do, like sub-goals, for reaching your main goal is also very important. If you want to be conversationally fluent, you should focus on starting to speak with tutors or teachers as soon as possible and to do watch or listen to contents focused on general conversations.