Foreign Languages: Tips & Tricks

Learning a language is a very complex thing. Having the right approach to this can greatly work to your advantage. Some people can learn a language very fast, as other people seem to struggle for an eternity. The method of learning is crucial. I have learned some languages over the years (I’m a native Dutch speaker, I also speak English, French, German, Japanese and can read Traditional Chinese, Latin/Italian). The thing is, my mind is more a mathematical one. I’ve never been extremely good at learning languages. How so that I’m twenty years old and have managed to learn quite some foreign languages? Yes, that’s right I’m twenty years old. I still have quite some time to learn some more languages, as you learn more languages you’ll be able to learn foreign languages much better. Next in this article I’ll write some pointers as to how to get fluent in a foreign language. Some of them may be obvious, others you’ve never heard of and will have to try out.

Basic Skill

To learn a language you’ll need basic skills. Any language has basics and you need to learn them. You can learn them in two or three weeks. You’ll need to learn the characters or alphabet of the new language; you’ll need to know the basic expressions:

• Hello
• How are you?
• I’m fine
• Good morning
• I like apples
• I am a human
• I live in Belgium
• Where is the library?
• What time is it now?

Without going in much further detail you can catch what I mean. The important thing here is that you need to learn both reading and writing and speaking. (Unless it’s a dead language and even then, it might come in handy)

Skill Expansion

There are a lot of ways in which you can expand your initial skill. I’ll describe some of them.

Vocabulary

By learning additional vocabulary you’ll be able to read, speak and write in more situations. It speaks for itself that a person who knows 300 words will be able to express him or herself better than a person who knows only 100 words. The problem is that a lot of people have difficulty learning lists of words. I myself find it horrible. There are alternatives. The first alternative would be hands on experience. If you can go to Greece and people say “calispera” (Good evening), it will stick better than when you read it in a textbook. Of course traveling to Greece to learn Greek may be expensive/hard for some people. There are other alternatives. You have a lot of language programs, that show you an image and then show you either written or have an audio file of the word in that language. The most famous (although a bit expensive), is the Rosetta stone program. There are free alternatives for example at http://www.word2word.com/coursead.html, but they are free for a reason. Copying words by writing something yourself, reading and watching videos in the language you want to learn also helps, but you need a real firm basis before you can start going down that road.