How to Learn Language Basics

Learning a language is not necessarily a tedious and slow process. Most people fail because they adopted an inefficient and boring method to capture the language. Sooner or later, when your passion dies out, you gave up learning too.

Here are a few tips to keep your language learning on track:

1/ Learn the right words

Each language consists of at least a few thousand words. To learn all the words at the beginning sounds like an impossible and discouraging task.

Instead of learning all the irrelevant words, think about what words you need the most at the beginning of the journey, depending on your language goals.

For example, if you just want to learn a language for travelling, learn all the words related to location, bargaining, greetings.

Learn the high frequency words that are common in everyday conversation. You can google ‘the most frequent words in a language’, once you get that important list, use some online flashcards system such as Anki to help you remember the words.

2/ Language goals

‘To be fluent’ is an abstract goal in learning a language. Because fluency can mean different things to different people.

Set up some short-term measurable goals so you know where you are in your language journey. It’s a good idea to review your goal every week to make adjustment to fit your needs.

For example, if you fall short of vocabulary learning, then set your target this week as vocabulary expansion.

Learning a language can be daunting and it’s a long journey before fluency. Divide your long journey into small goals will help you come across struggles and battles along the way.

3/ Learn the cognates

If you are an English speaker, congratulations, you already knew a lot of words in other languages, especially French. France and England has a long history of shared culture.

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the language of the elite in UK.

For about 300 years, French is commonly spoken in courts, educational institutions and high-middle class to differentiate themselves from the lower class.

This is the main reason 30% of English words has French roots. For example, chic, attention, information.

Cognates are words in another language that is very similar to words in your mother tongue.

Learn the cognates will increase your efficiency in mastering vocabulary in the new language.

4/ Use the language every day

Language is created for communication. Instead of just drilling on your textbooks, go talk to people from the target language. In this era, we are all connected by the internet. It’s easy to find a language partner from the other side of the world.

Language learning has never been so easy and fun before.

If you can not find a language partner, try to think in the target language for 15 mins a day and give yourself some topics to talk about in the target language.

Only if you use the language, you will be able to improve it over time. You can also find out what your weaknesses are and adjust your learning focus along the road.

Conclusion:

Language learning is a skill to master. The first language is always the most difficult. The more language you speak, the easier the learning process it becomes.

At the beginning, it’s all trials and errors. But after some experiences, you will find out what methods fit you the most.