Language-learning isn’t an activity I have engaged with periodically, but rather a constant, underlying process my brain has been subjected to throughout its whole existence. Having been moving to new countries just like one might change one’s local hangouts, I have continually been in need to learn how to communicate in the prevalent tongues of my novel environs.
Over time, what began as an exigency evolved into one of my most cherished avocations. There are few things that amuse me as much as making a cup of coffee and going over a grammar book of a new language I intend to enrich my communicational capacity with, relishing this most fulfilling journey through my brain’s labyrinth.
Throughout my roving years, I have taught myself to speak satisfyingly well in six foreign tongues (apart from my native Greek which I learned still roving toddlingly around my nan’s house). On occasions, I have also spoken in numerous additional languages, at a very basic, yet practicable level.
If you are anything like the people I commonly touch on this subject with in real life, you are now probably wondering what languages these are. But this isn’t what this post is about. My sole aim here is to employ my experience to (hopefully) help you, languages student, to learn more effectively.
Although I have in the past briefly worked as a language tutor, my perspective here won’t be the one of a teacher, but rather the one I am more familiar with: the perspective of a fellow student. I am going to list and expound on the six components of efficient language learning that have helped me, and I sincerely believe can help you too.
Lastly, before we move on to the actual, promised tips and methodology, I deem it important to shed some light on a fact that, although fairly intuitive, many people seem to fail to comprehend: To learn a second language is ten, if not a hundred, times harder than to learn a third one. Every language you learn makes it exponentially easier to then learn yet another one.
This is so because, when you study a language, be it Spanish or Mandarin, what devours your studying resources isn’t so much the difficulty of that particular language, but the inscrutability of the language-learning modus operandi in itself. And that’s exactly what I now aspire to communicate: the very process of learning any language.
Real-Life Practice (ideally out of necessity)
This is the single most important habit you have to acquire in order to learn a language, to the degree that it probably outweighs all the rest of the following studying elements combined.
The most common obstacle that I have observed preventing people from learning a language is their failure to overcome their shyness and speak it. They think that others live through their days waiting for an opportunity to judge and mock someone’s defective speech. They expect to somehow first master a language before they put it to use.
But this is absurd. Would one become a pro tennis player without starting to play tennis first? Would one learn how to play good chess by reading theory books alone? How would one learn how to speak a language without actually speaking it?
It may be a little different for English speakers, who have over the past few generations grown accustomed to assuming that everyone worldwide ought to know their language. But as for the rest, rest assured that no-one else makes this assumption. People around the world do not generally expect that foreigners can speak their language. And as a rule, they get very happy to hear others trying to do so, no matter how badly.
Attempting to communicate with people in their own tongues not only helps you practice but also sparks intimacy between you. It is amazing to see how one foreign person’s disposition towards you instantly warms up by speaking to one in one’s native tongue, even if all you can say is a mispronounced thank you.
As I hinted in this section’s heading, to practice speaking with maximum efficacy, you ideally have to do it out of plain necessity. This basically means that you should be endeavoring to carry out the communication of your everyday needs—be it to order a meal or find your way around—with people who do not understand your own language.
Setting up these circumstances obviously involves moving to another country. But the results you’ll get aren’t quite the same for every country and language. Moving, for example, to a non-touristic region of France, Italy, or China, you are rather guaranteed to be forced to use the local dialect for getting by with everyday survival. But if you are trying to learn a language like Dutch or Norwegian, you will find practicing on the spot much harder, as locals tend to know excellent English even in the remotest villages, and will keenly employ it as soon as they understand that you are a foreigner. A tactic you could use in such cases is to simply pretend that you don’t know English and carry on.
Of course, I totally understand that not everyone can easily quit one’s life at home and move to a new country just to study a language. I won’t lie, real-life practice is by far the most essential action you can take in order to learn a language, and everything else that you can do is but a supplement. But if you absolutely have no chance to relinquish your base, do not be dispirited. You can still go for the next best thing. Join live or online conversation groups, perhaps take a practice holiday now and then, and keep studying according to the following methods.
Grammar (meaning like grammar in itself)
If I speak to you about concepts like transitive or intransitive verbs, comparative or superlative adjectives, direct or indirect objects, perfect or perfect continuous tenses, active or passive voice, imperative or subjunctive mood, and so on and so on… would you have an idea what I’m talking about?
If yes, you may as well skip this section. If not, you should rather postpone studying a foreign tongue and go back to your own language’s grammar book.
Although grammars of different languages vary in their details, grammar per se is the universal logic behind the human ability to produce and comprehend meaningful speech. In fact, the word logic itself is derived from the Greek word (logos) for speech, and early study of logic wasn’t but scrutiny of grammar. Just like you wouldn’t go about designing a combustion engine without understanding the laws of thermodynamics, it is plainly logical you shouldn’t attempt to learn a new language prior to possessing a cogent grasp of the universal principles of grammar.
Here you may object that, before you even heard of the word grammar, you learned how to speak your native tongue just fine. And that’s true. But you did it over a long period of constant exposure to that language whilst your brain was at its most absorbent state and your emotional need to communicate was at its highest. This is not repeatable. Sure, given enough time and habituation, you may eventually become able to drivel in a foreign language without studying any grammar. But this is all you’ll probably ever do.
You may intuitively tinker with an instrument and play a couple of campfire songs, but learning music theory alone can advance your playing to the next level. Likewise, building a solid grammatical foundation will not only make it immensely easier to learn any language but will also vastly expand the ways you can use your native one.
Listen and Read
Think again of how you learned your native tongue as a kid. You did that by sheer, mass exposure to it and subconscious adoption of stimuli from your environment. Now, as an adult, you can employ the tools of systematic study. But this doesn’t mean that you should neglect your brain’s innate proclivity to learn spontaneously from experience.
Especially if you live in an area where the language you try to learn is spoken, your surroundings teem with stimuli your brain will promptly ingest, only if focused on them. Take in all available information voraciously. Pay attention to the chats of people around you, the announcements on the subway, random shit on the TV… Read signs, ads, menus, instructions… Read everything you lay eyes on and try to decipher it. You will be surprised by the visceral fashion in which your brain begins to understand.
Living in a foreign country, you will likely often find yourself in companies of people who speak a language you don’t understand. This is a common cause of frustration; you feel left out. But if you only leave your egoism aside for a moment, you will figure out that you are presented with an excellent opportunity to practice your comprehension. Keep quiet, ignore the green-eyed monster’s ranting in your head, and listen. Two birds with one stone, not only do you spare your serenity, but you also gain something out of such an otherwise distressing interaction.
If, again, you do not reside in an environment where the language you study is prevalent, recreate such an environment. Change the language of your computer and your mobile phone; listen to the radio and watch the news; write your notes and grocery lists; tag your kitchen containers and—why not—all objects in your house… Let the language infiltrate your brain in the background.
The Art of Memorization
Generally, I’m not a proponent of brute-force memorization. In most fields of studying, memorizing plays but a trivial role if anything of essence is to be learned. In history, for example, there is little substance in parroting names and dates if you can’t recognize the causes and effects of events. Or in mathematics, there is little use in writing and solving equations by heart if you don’t know where to apply them practically.
Language, however, constitutes a notable exception. What you are basically striving to do when you learn a language is to ascribe meaning to heretofore random successions of sounds. And that can solely be done via the raw power of memorization. Your best weapon to unravel this formidable randomness is to refine your memorization techniques by devising smart tricks of association.
Our brain capacity to retain patterns is determined by the twofold contribution of repetition and association. It is primarily defined by the former that you remember the faces of your family members but not the ones of random people you cross paths with in the streets.
But have you ever wondered why you sometimes altogether forget people you spent a considerable amount of time with, while you vividly preserve the memory of a face you happened to exchange a momentary glance with years ago? It is not because some faces are more memorable than others. As far as your brain is concerned, faces are but random patterns. It is because of other, often irrelevant, sensory inputs or mental phenomena you happened to be subjected to simultaneously with seeing those faces. Brains have an almost uncanny ability to remember by, often accidental, association.
Likewise, you are surely going to memorize a foreign word after a certain number of repetitions. But a better way to do it is by forcing such associations into your brain.
Sometimes, this is straightforward to achieve. Take, for example, the Spanish word mar. By relating it to English words like marine and maritime, you are guaranteed to once-and-for-all engrave in your brain that it means sea.
But in most cases, there won’t be such a clear-cut association to be made. That’s when you need to get a bit more creative. Let’s look at an example from Turkish, a language lexically very distant from English. Kuş is the word for bird. What is the first thing you think about when you hear this word? I think about couscous. I then produce the mental image of a little bird pecking at a bowl of couscous. And that’s it. If the association was imprinted lucidly enough, every time I hear of a kuş or try to recall the Turkish word for bird, this mental image automatically resurfaces in my consciousness and leads me to the sought-after answer.
These were, of course, just two simplistic examples. Memorization by association is truly a fine art that can take an infinitude of forms, bounded only by one’s imagination, and be further illustrated in a series of volumes. Experimenting with it in inventive ways will not only help you to learn a language quickly, but it will also take you on a most satisfying journey through your brain’s intricate paths.
Prioritization
A very important constituent of a language-studying process, which I believe most courses don’t get totally right, is the aptitude to prioritize what you learn. Quite self-explanatorily, this means directing one’s studying resources to what is most useful while, for the time being, omitting the rest.
What is useful naturally differs subtly from one person to another, as well as between different languages to some degree, but the main principles are the same. The importance of prioritization holds valid in all aspects of the learning process, but especially so in vocabulary.
As an example, I have noticed many courses and autodidactic methods focusing early on on names of animals or comestibles. Unless you work in a zoo or a restaurant, I don’t see why you should care that much about what giraffe or this-and-that-and-the-other traditional dish are called.
Another example: When I used to resort to such coursebooks to teach Greek, the first lesson we had to go through was on the alphabet. That’s entirely correct; the first thing one has to learn in a new language (save Chinese or other languages with ideogrammatic scripts) is how to read it. But besides learning the characters and their sounds, they also expected my students to memorize their names (alpha, beta, gamma…). That’s a waste of resources. The only conceivable occasion on which this knowledge would be practicable is spelling out words verbally. They wouldn’t need to do that before knowing any words, to begin with. And even later, if they needed to, they could still call the letters by their sounds.
When I begin to build my vocabulary in a new language, I prioritize in strict terms of usability. As usual, I’d start with greetings (that’s what initiates every conversation) and numbers and such. But then I wouldn’t go about collecting random nouns that may appear in one out of a hundred or a thousand sentences.
I would rather concentrate on what appears in sentences most often: pronouns (I, you, her, ours, this, everybody…), conjunctions (and, or, but, until, while…), and question words (what, where, when…). Only after I’m done with the most basic ones of them, I will move on to learning verbs, nouns, and adjectives, starting with the most elemental and gradually moving up to the more complex.
Apart from vocabulary, prioritization also applies to grammar. Firstly, you have to give grammar its due emphasis as contrasted with vocabulary. If your goal isn’t to be blurting out odd words, but rather to be structuring meaningful sentences, you should let grammar outweigh vocabulary during your early studying efforts.
Secondly, you should also prioritize what rules to learn within grammar itself. For example, gender isn’t as important as tense. If you say in French le langue instead of la langue (the language), it will be grammatically wrong but perfectly intelligible nevertheless. But if you say j’ai parlé (I spoke) when you intended to say je parlerai (I will speak), you will most likely be misunderstood.
Routinization by Gamification
Lastly, I’m going to give you a general tip that applies to every studying field. In order to learn anything efficiently, you have to study steadily and systematically. This is best achieved by making a routine out of your studying course. There isn’t much point in learning something today that won’t cross your mind again for the next week or month.
Constancy and frequency matter. I believe it is greatly better to study for one hour every day than ten hours on Sundays. Set aside whatever time you can afford to devote to studying on a daily basis and stick to it religiously.
But as routines tend to get tedious quickly, it is always a good idea to gamify them. Set little daily or weekly goals and missions. Devise your own exercises, count points, and strive to break your records. Define some kind of personal reward you can treat yourself to when you keep up to your expectations.
If you went through all this long post and are now reading this concluding paragraph, I assume you do indeed have a serious ambition to teach yourself a foreign language. I hope some of the information I strove to put together here will prove valuable. And I want to wish you every success in your endeavor.
