Three Ways to Help You Learn A New Language

In today’s fast-changing world, communication with people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds is a must. This is why so many people are heading towards learning new languages. Knowing how to speak multiple languages will give you an advantage over anyone else when it comes to scoring a new job, a scholarship or even making friends.

In this blog, I will share with you three steps you can take to make the process of learning a new language easier and more accessible to you.

1.       Listen in order to speak.

Personally, I find that exposing my ears to the sounds of a new language repeatedly is a foul-proof way to become acquainted with its linguistic system. By listening you know how sounds are made in the language you want to learn. In addition, listening will strengthen your ability to identify linguistic patterns and social cues present in the language’s culture.

I always recommend to people to start with watching movies and listen to the spoken language as much as possible. You can use subtitles to help you understand but you should definitely try to watch without subtitles so you can focus on the language itself.

Another great way to improve listening is audiobooks in your target language. Listening to audiobooks will help you identify new vocabulary, grammatical structures, and linguistic patterns. Also, audiobooks are great because you can listen to them on the go. You are not limited by a specific location.

My final tip to improve listening is to listen to music. Songs are the best when it comes to learning new linguistic expressions in addition to cultural references.

2.       Social media is your best friend.

I find it helpful to try and use the new language expressions you’ve learned to communicate with people who speak that language online. I always like to go on Twitter and search for the tags I find interesting in the language I want to learn.

For instance, if you’re into food and drinks and like to discuss new recipes or look for inspiration for your own meal prep, then going on the food-related tags in Spanish or Italian or whatever language you want to learn and start a conversation by commenting on people’s tweets or Instagram posts. You can use a hashtag to tell the person you’re a beginner in the language and see how it goes!

3.       Write to learn how to write.

I know it might seem repetitive to you, but it’s true. The only way to learn how to write is by writing. Try to using vocabulary you learned from listening and reading. Experiment with different sentence structures. Making mistakes is the only way you’ll learn how to improve your writing.

You can show your writing to the friends you had made on social media or do as I once did and get yourself a pen friend (more like an email friend) but you get the jest. I wrote emails back and forth with a friend I made on Tumblr of all places and both of us had fun and I improved my language and writing tremendously.