5 Tips For Learning a New Language
Learning a new language is a wonderful opportunity to expand your mind to new horizons. However, you’ll need the right amount of tips under your belt to ensure that you have a successful endeavor. Fitting a new language into your brain isn’t always easy for everyone. Whether you only speak one language right now, or you’re looking to learn a third or fourth, here are some of the best tips to help you advance as quickly as possible.
Practice Makes Perfect
Ideally, you should practice speaking your new language as much as possible. If you don’t have the luxury of living in a country where the language is spoken natively, then you’ll need to find other ways. Whether it’s hiring a tutor or talking to people online from that country, the most important thing is that you get practicing.
Even though you may be initially shy to make mistakes, it’s critical that you allow yourself to. It’s only through making mistakes that we learn how to break habits, particularly when it comes to learning a language.
Read
Even though you might not understand everything perfectly, it’s important that you read in the language you’re trying to learn. Reading will significantly help your vocabulary, and help you progress at a faster rate. Whether it’s looking at blog posts or buying a book, the important thing is that you allow your brain to process that language visually at least once a day.
Turn on Subtitles
A terrible habit of many cultures is turning on dubbed versions of foreign films and television shows. However, if you’re trying to learn another language, you should always turn on subtitles and watch shows in their original version. Not only will you get more out of the overall meaning of the plot, but the language will go directly into your subconscious. Hearing the language with subtitles provided simultaneously significantly boosts your comprehension level in a shorter amount of time.
Travel
If you are truly committed to learning a new language, then you should consider traveling to a country where they speak it. Get to know the culture inside and out, from the language to the customs. The more you can expose yourself to what it is that you’re trying to learn, the more successful you’ll be at mastering it. Even though you may be nervous about traveling somewhere new, particularly if you haven’t done much traveling in your life, you should seriously consider it for your progress!
Accept Corrections
One of the most common issues people have with learning a new language is the unwillingness to be corrected. It can be downright embarrassing having to be corrected for grammatical mistakes. However, you have to be open to feedback in order to make progress. Accept people’s corrections, and take notes. You should see each mistake as an opportunity to learn rather than a failure.
