Golden Tips for Learning a New Language – Part 1

Also read Part 2 from this series.

Whether you are learning for business, travel, study or just because you want to – these tips will defiantly be helpful to you. It's from my own experiences along with advices from good people who helped me out =)

Learning a new language is fun and kinda difficult in the same time. At points it can get really handy like when you visit another country of which the language you are learning. Or important, when you go for a study. Business fields aren't less important from all these. In any case you need to put a technique or a plan to catch up this language in a short and understandable way to you.

Here I'm going to write about what I learnt from what it takes to speak with a new language. As I mentioned before they are from my own experiences. I'm no professional teacher but I learn from what I went through and what life has shown me =)

So, let's get started with the tips;

 

1. Determine Purpose: why do you want to learn the language? Is it for business needs? Education abroad? Or just for fun and as a hobby for yourself. 

This is an important point, deciding your goal in the beginning will help you a lot. For example, if you want to learn the language itself just for fun you may skip the writing and reading part if all you need is speaking. On the other hand if you are learning it for your education you may consider taking extra classes and study hours to catch up with the language as fast as you can and so on.

2. Start with the introductory: it will give you a brief idea about the whole language. It's difficulty, sentence orders and other points as well. It's more like a short preview about what you are going to learn.

3. Learn 5 words per day: to put it up simply, when learning a new language you should consider the two most important things: 1.grammar, 2.vocabularies.

Grammar is the base for everything, if you want to express anything grammar will help you to say it in the right tense. That leaves just the words. Like even if you know HOW to say them to need the WHAT to work it out. 

This is pretty simple; there are 365 days in a year. If you get 5 words each day then by the end of the year you'll have a base of 1825 words in your memory and it isn't a small amount as you can tell. 

4. Listen: this is a very important thing. You should listen to whatever language you're learning anywhere you can. On radio, TV, internet. Hearing to native people will teach you the right pronounces of words and sentence. Hearing the language itself has more effect than just reading it on paper or screen. 

Some people say that they don't hear the radio or any other source cause they don’t understand what they're saying. This is the exact reason why you need to listen up!

Remember when you were just a kid of 3-4 months old; did you understand everything you mother used to say?! How about when you were about one year old?! Were you able to talk? Of course no!

This is why you should listen, it's because you don't understand! By listening to native people on radio or other source you'll learn just like you started learning your own language. So, Listen. Listen. Listen. 

 

 

5. Write: okay, this is personally my own experience. Writing letters and words over and over again helps you to memorize them. I believe it has a strong effect than just reading them once or over and over again. In this case, you will remember the way it writes and keep it in mind. Like in type, when you practice that over and over again it's in your mind all time.

6. Read: of course, you're not supposed to read everything and the hard pieces of writing. Just train your reading skills whenever you see a word in an ad, book, site or anywhere else. By time you can notice how much you're improving in your new language.

7. Revise: to revise is to check on your info one more time, every day, week, month and so. This helps you to fixation the language in your mind. In any case or memorizing the info goes through three stages:

A) Reading  B) Memorizing C) Fixation

First you just get the info & take a general look into the whole subject then you memorize. Of course, if you do it just once or twice it may not be there for a long time that will you need to revise it on period of times as you fix them to help you remember the info on the go.

8. Practice: though practice can be with reading, writing and speaking as mentioned before but there's another way which I'm talking here, it's to take a partner to practice with. When taking with a native it helps a lot. They can show you the right way of using the language plus some cultures notes about it. 

You can go to livemocha where you'll find people around the world to practice any language you want. Try to do some chatting and sending PMs to each other to improve your new language.