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Did you ever think about learning a language from scratch? Trust me, the process is not that difficult, and it could surprise you how actually this is as easy as baking a cake. It is fundamental to understand that a language consists of four main components: – listening, speaking, reading and writing – and to add each of them to your study plan. So, here are five tips to introduce these components in you day life, making your learning faster and easier of any language of your choice.
1. TRAIN your LISTENING
Watch movies, series or even documentaries in their mother tongue. You can also listen to music and podcasts of your choice. At the beginning, you may need subtitles to help you, but after acquiring more knowledge about the dialect, you must remove then. Pay attention in the way native speakers pronounce the words, their accents and the slangs they say that may not appear in your grammar book.
2. Keep SPEAKING
It is kind of weird to be talking to yourself in a foreign language, but is exactly what I am advising you to do. Just for ten minutes a day, about a subject you like, and record yourself, it will help you monitor your development. If you know someone that speaks the language you are learning, it is even better.
3. READING always
Read books, journals, magazines or any text written in the language you are studying for around twenty minutes per day. Mark all the words you don’t understand, search for their meanings and then create a list of new vocabularies, this activity is going to be very useful in the next two tips.
4. Practice WRITING
Train your writing, and you will be able to write anything: from a narrative of your day to a review of a movie you watched following the first tip. Write a text per day and use the words you marked while reading, this is going to help you memorize new vocabulary easily than studying it in the boring way schools say we should.
5. Study GRAMMAR
I know you don’t like studying grammar – me neither – but try to see this with another perspective. Following the last tips, studying grammar will be faster and easier, it would be advisable to do so for around forty minutes, and apply everything you study to your writing, speaking, reading and listening abilities.
Trust me, if you manage to work all the four components plus studying a little bit of grammar everyday, you will make a lot of progress in just one year and you can learn any language of your choice.
The article above was edited by Camila Lutfi.
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