Today, many seek to get abroad not only for recreation, but also for the sake of employment in a prestigious company or even for permanent residence. However, for this you need to know the foreign language of the country to which you, in fact, are going.

Experts assure that if you learn the language correctly, you can master the initial communication skills in a few weeks, and in a few months you can learn the basics of the language. Of course, you will not be able to read complex literature with ease, but it will be quite easy for you to express your thoughts, regardless of the type of activity. And everyone can do it.

Where should you start?

Many people ask themselves the question - how to start learning a foreign language correctly? After all, it is from the first steps that a desire to move on, self-confidence should appear.

The worst thing at the initial stage is lack of confidence in yourself, in your abilities. Many people are afraid to just say words out loud due to incorrect pronunciation or sentence structure. In order to independently learn a foreign language, you need to take risks, not be afraid of mistakes.

Phrasebooks and online courses will be useful only at the initial stage of language learning, when you need to learn words and phrases that help you navigate a new country and communicate with local residents.

The author believes that if the process is approached correctly, after 3 months you can own it in sufficient form. The most important thing he focuses on is to give up perfectionism, that is, not to dwell on mistakes and correct pronunciation. Benny says you shouldn't strive for perfect language skills. Many people are so fixated on good pronunciation that they never reach this goal in the end.

Here are his tips to help you learn a foreign language correctly:
  • don't chase perfection. Many are so fixated on perfect pronunciation that in the end they are disappointed and quit this occupation, because they cannot achieve their goals, and this is most often the case with beginners;
  • first you need to learn simple phrases like "where is the metro?" or "what time is it now?";
  • pay more attention to learning words and phrases, rather than grammar;
  • Be sure to start speaking out loud from day one. This is the main barrier to learning a language, overcoming which, you will achieve your goal;
  • the author does not recommend going to the courses, because the programs there are too general to be useful both for beginners and for those who already speak the language at a certain level;
  • spend as much time as possible on training. Benny believes that it is thanks to training for many hours a day that people learn foreign languages ​​in just a couple of months. If you do not have the opportunity to practice all day long, even a couple of hours will help you achieve great results in the shortest possible time.

How to properly start learning English on your own?

Today English is the most widely spoken language in the world. It is he who most often strives to learn.

It is worth remembering one important thing - there are no people in the world who are unable to learn the language. There are lazy people. If you have a goal, strive for it, forget about fear and shyness, and then you will definitely succeed.

Learning English on your own is easy enough. You can use any means available - from phrasebooks to online training. However, one should not trust seminars that promise huge results in just a few weeks. Most likely, this is a common pumping out of money. Learning a language is a painstaking and long process. As mentioned above, in a couple of weeks, you can achieve basic results that will help you express simple phrases that help you navigate the city and communicate with people.

Learning English correctly, like any other, is very important. Limit yourself immediately in time. For example, set a goal to learn 1,000 words in a month. This is quite small, only 30 words a day. The same rule applies to any other work: if you do not complete it on time, then most likely you will not complete it at all.

Another tip: it's pointless to learn single words. Learn phrases. It is much easier and more efficient. After all, the word, in fact, does not carry the whole meaning that will be embedded in a phrase or sentence. For example, the departure of a train and the departure of mail are completely different things.

Think and speak English. Try to immediately translate your thoughts, describe what surrounds you. You will soon notice that you have already memorized the names of the things you encounter every day.

Teaching a child a foreign language is much easier than teaching an adult. After all, everyone knows how developed the ability of children to grasp everything on the fly. During the game, talking with you, the child instantly remembers information. Therefore, if you want your baby to know a foreign language well in the future, help him learn it from an early age.

Learn a foreign language? Easily!

I hope we answered the question of how to learn a foreign language. The most important thing is not to forget that this activity will help you not only develop, but also achieve more in life.

How best to study is up to you. Today there are many ways available to help you learn any foreign language quickly and in a short time.

The secrets of polyglots are desire, striving, perseverance. Each person possesses these qualities, the main thing is to defeat laziness in oneself.

Polyglot is not uncommon today, because modern people are much easier to adapt and adapt to new conditions, including while living or working in another country.

If you have a goal, go for it. Forget about fear and embarrassment and then you will achieve great success in life!

How do you like this picture? I studied English at school for 10 years, but I never learned anything. I know grammar, I can read books, but instead of talking to foreigners I start to pale and stutter. I have done a million grammar exercises, but I cannot fluently say the simplest everyday phrases. Sound familiar? Change your approach to learning a foreign language! It's easy if you know your capabilities and take into account the peculiarities of perception.

Here are 10 unusual and powerful tips that combine best practices in language teaching, psychology, and therapeutic hypnosis:

  1. Language is not an academic discipline. This is an integral part of life that must be lived, not memorized. Unfortunately, in schools, the language is taught only through dry logic. But the language has a character, an atmosphere, it must be felt, loved, and in no case rejected. Only in this way will you speak easily and without problems.

Tip: When memorizing words, visualize them. Visualize in paints. So you use the right hemisphere of the brain, thereby speeding up the learning process tenfold.

  1. Words are not separate abstract units. Words denote specific phenomena and exist in context.

Tip: Memorize words immediately in phrases and phrases.

  1. Any language consists of speech cliches... We use hundreds of cliches a day without even realizing it. And this is not only "running like a red thread" or "on a silver platter." These are the most common everyday phrases, such as "two coffees, please", "how much does it cost ...", "sorry, what time is it", etc.

Tip: Memorize whole cliché phrases. Notice the difference: when you speak, picking each word in your mind, you are putting together a mosaic of hundreds of small pieces. If you speak in ready-made phrases, you are armed with larger pieces of the picture, and you fill the communication field faster and more efficiently.

  1. Kalke fight! Literal translation suffers most of the students. The grammatical grid of a language, as a rule, does not overlap with another language. Therefore, literal translation is useless. Plus, when you translate, you have to think one thing and say another. This is very tiring and does not add to the speed of your speech.

Advice: Do not translate in your mind literally your speech from Russian into English, but speak immediately "without intermediaries." To develop this ability, you need to follow the first three tips.

  1. Take the whole speech, not just one word at a time. Understand that even in our native language we do not hear 100% of what is said! We grab keywords and reconstruct the big picture of meaning. For some reason, when many people perceive a foreign language, this rule ceases to apply, and while a person is trying to think over an unfamiliar word, he misses a dozen acquaintances.

Tip: Don't try to grasp every word! To quickly understand by ear, grab familiar words and phrases, focus on the general meaning.

  1. Pronunciation is as important as anything else.... Two extremes are often encountered here: some are embarrassed to speak because of an accent, others are embarrassed to speak without an accent. Attention: there is nothing shameful neither in the accent, nor in its absence. Almost any language has a lot of dialects, each of which has the right to exist.

Tip: Repeat the phrases heard by native speakers on the radio or TV, imitating their intonation, sing songs in the target language. Monkey with pleasure!

  1. We perceive the world with many senses at the same time. As a hypnologist working with psychotrauma, I will say that the memory of any event in life is recorded at once on many "tracks". Language can also be decomposed into such tracks: audio, visual perception (moreover, visual text and images belong to different systems), physical memory of the speech apparatus, emotional memory, and many others. Perhaps you caught yourself reading a text in a foreign language, and delving into the process of reading as such, did not understand a word. The secret to better memorization is to mix the tracks. Many people either hear, see, or understand.

Tip: Listen to the songs while following the lyrics with your eyes. Watch movies with subtitles. Read and visualize. Read aloud. In other words, use at least two channels of perception.

  1. If you were born in the Soviet Union or attended a Russian school, most likely you memorize information with your right hand(and probably even if you are left-handed, because left-handed people were retrained). The fact is that in Soviet-Russian education, great emphasis was placed on writing by hand: from school exercises to university lecture notes. That is why, where it is enough for a foreigner to look and enter the missing letters directly into the textbook, for better assimilation, we need to rewrite the entire phrase on our own (by hand?).

Tip: Add a cultural twist to a plus: spell out words and phrases by hand so you remember them faster.

  1. The language is not tied to ethnic groups, it is a broader phenomenon. Some languages ​​are spoken on all continents. Respect all native speakers of the target language. If you don't like a certain culture, you will subconsciously resist learning the language. If the Italians are "macaroni" for you, the French are "frogs", and the Spaniards are lazy, do not expect miracles from yourself in learning Romance languages. When you remove the barriers of stereotypes, you subconsciously allow yourself to learn new things.

Tip: Be open to the culture that language brings with it. Think wider. For example, English has long been the language of the whole world, not just the English. French culture is in interchange with Arab and African, all this is part of huge historical processes, and it is certainly not for you to decide how they all live and where to whom to go. Accept the world as it is, and maybe you will find a place in it.

  1. Why do you need to learn a foreign language? For tourist trips? For permanent residence in a specific location? To write a doctoral dissertation? For a promotion? These are all completely different goals that require different approaches. If you need language to order food in restaurants, you don't have to spend dozens of hours practicing classical grammar.

Tip: Decide on a goal and build your learning around it. Learn for results.

To get rid of the psychological barrier in communicating in a foreign language - write to me, I will be happy to help you overcome it using my own method.

Best regards, Cordialement, Your Mitravat

To sign up for a consultation, leave your name and email address in the form in the lower right corner, and click the "Sign up" button.

Image copyright Thinkstock

Imagine a situation: you want to go on a business trip abroad, which you can only dream of. But there is a problem. You need to speak a foreign language that you do not know. And time is not on your side. prepared some tips for you.

The task may seem overwhelming, but according to linguistic experts, basic communication skills can be mastered in a few weeks, and the basics of a foreign language in a few months. You may not be able to reach the level of understanding the great classics of foreign literature so quickly, but you will sharpen up quickly to form phrases and operate with the terminology you need for your occupation, whether you work in the diplomatic service or in a leading multinational company. ...

It won't take most people long to start discussing news with a native speaker in Rome or exchange opinions with colleagues from Paris.

Where to begin

Sometimes traveling the world in search of work forces us to look for our own ways of mastering languages. Engineer Benny Lewis has learned seven languages, including Spanish, French, and German, enough to be used in his work, and has almost achieved fluency in several other languages, including Mandarin or Mandarin.

Learning Spanish, the first non-native language that Lewis took on, took a little over a year, but with each successive language, including Mandarin, things went much faster. His secret is this: when starting to learn a new language, Lewis creates a kind of scenario in which he must learn to answer simple questions from strangers. Gradually, Lewis even acquired the ability to work as a translator of technical texts in engineering.

Phrasebooks and online courses, experts say, can be helpful at the beginning, as they provide the necessary vocabulary and a certain amount of confidence to have a simple dialogue with native speakers. This is the most important first step in learning a foreign language.

“The biggest hurdle in the early days was the lack of confidence,” says Lewis, “but every time it got easier and easier for me to speak.”

Indeed, as experts confirm, it only takes courage to force yourself to speak if you want to succeed in mastering a foreign language.

"A lot of people don't move forward unless they just open their mouths," said Michael Geisler, vice president of the School of Foreign Languages ​​at Middleberry College, Vermont, USA. "If you're not willing to show your individuality, progress will be slow."

Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption How quickly can you communicate with strangers in Chinese?

This means not being afraid to take risks and make mistakes. Lewis recalls that when he first started learning Spanish, he spoke like Tarzan - a man raised with wild animals.

“I said something like:“ My want to go to the supermarket. ”But I reached an advanced level by starting with a beginner. My moment of inspiration came two weeks after I started learning Spanish. My toothbrush broke and I managed to ask for a new one in the supermarket. - recalls Lewis. - Wherever you go, people are amazingly patient. "

Dive Wednesday

Geisler believes that total immersion is the key to successfully and quickly mastering a foreign language. The deeper you immerse yourself in a foreign language - whether you read, listen to the radio, or talk to people - the faster you will be successful in learning it.

Students at Middleberry College in the US state of Vermont are required to participate in extracurricular activities - from sports to theater performances - in the languages ​​they learn. Middleberry offers courses for students in ten languages, including French, German, Chinese and Hebrew.

Such immersion is most actively encouraged at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, where American diplomats and employees of US missions abroad study foreign languages. Experts in 70 foreign languages ​​work here. The duration of the training courses can be up to 44 weeks. Their goal is to bring students to the "3rd level" of language proficiency. This means that graduates will be able to read magazines like Time in a foreign language and have a substantive conversation on any topic.

Mastering basic speaking skills is achieved in a much shorter time. It only takes a few weeks, experts say, especially with regular speaking practice. James North, director of academic affairs at the Foreign Service Institute, says students are encouraged to meet native speakers.

"It is necessary to invest not only the mind, but also the heart," says North. You can volunteer or participate in the community, such as working in restaurants or organizing community events.

Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The secret of learning a foreign language is to start "living in this language" as early as possible

In large cities, on a regular basis - several times a week - there are meetings in "dive groups". They are attended by people who master practical skills in a foreign language.

We go to the Internet

When you regularly interact with foreign language specialists or native speakers, there is always someone next to you who can check and correct, and this is very important for your improvement.

“Practice is the best method,” North says. “But if your practice is devoid of feedback, you may feel like you are perfect in what you practice. Naive students are deprived of the opportunity to take a detached view of what they are doing. to have someone by your side who could say yes, you are on the right track. "

Be sure to ask those you talk to to assess your speech and don't be afraid of offending you by correcting your pronunciation and grammar (although experts say you don't need to worry too much about correct grammar in the early stages of language learning).

Start using the language before focusing on grammar, advises Lewis. When you feel like it's time to improve your grammar, take advantage of podcasts from resources such as radiolingua.com or languagepod101.com. According to Lewis, these are very useful tools for mastering grammar and organizing your knowledge.

"By this time you already have enough baggage. And when I come across this or that rule, I can already say: this is why they say that way," Lewis shares his experience.

As you learn a foreign language, pay as much attention to the media in that language as possible. If you're a beginner, read children's picture books, the experts advise, or watch films you know well in a foreign language.

If you set yourself any specific goals, for example, to be able to communicate with your partner in a foreign language or use it in your work, this can become necessary and sufficient motivation for mastering the skills of speaking.

But don't set yourself unattainable goals. If you say that you will be fluent in a foreign language in a few months, you will most likely be disappointed. And if your goal is to learn how to conduct a conversation, especially when it is required to complete a job assignment, this is more than possible.

Today we will not try to draw your attention to the main content of this article with an eloquent introduction, because each of us will have his own list of reasons. The importance is obvious. So let's not waste time.

Is it possible to learn the language on your own? The Russian psychologist D. Spivak in the book "How to become a polyglot" provides some tips designed to improve language skills when studying a foreign language. And one of the recommendations is to learn the language better from self-study guides. So everyone will be able to control the intensity of the classes, give themselves the necessary amount of information and regularly return to various topics for consolidation. With the amendment, of course, that the process itself, by definition, cannot be completely isolated.

The starting point is the correct setting. First of all, think about why you need to learn a foreign language - to study, move to another country, revive in memory and improve school knowledge, as a hobby. An honest answer to this question will allow you to create a training program tailored to your needs, focus on the necessary aspects, and contribute.

Another secret to successfully mastering the language is daily training, which allows you to develop the skill of how. In addition, consistency and constancy favorably affect, without which in the study of a foreign you nowhere. It's like exercising - the result comes with regularity. Therefore, strict adherence to the plan of classes by day and hour is so important.

What will contribute to the result?

Immersion

You've probably heard the statement many times that any language is much easier to learn by being completely immersed in its natural environment. But what if you can't go to study English in the UK or Spanish in Spain? The answer is obvious - try to create a suitable home environment. It is, of course, impossible to achieve maximum similarity. But reading books (first adapted), watching films, listening to audio recordings, language practice - all of this is available to anyone who has the Internet. Try to surround yourself with the language you are learning as much as possible, rather than using only teaching materials.

Process gamification

Patience and work at any age

Among the people around you there are always skeptics who raise their eyebrows in amazement when they learn that in your 30s, you intend to learn French, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish from scratch (substitute or add what you need). "How?", "Why?", "This should have been done earlier, now it is too late." Do not let such formulations sow a grain of uncertainty in your mind and, moreover, disappoint in your own abilities. Patience and a little effort. Learning for the sake of a result, by definition, is never easy, so persist in pursuing your goal. Yes, at a younger age, due to linguistic flexibility and orientation towards the intuitive assimilation of linguistic norms, it is relatively easier to learn a foreign language. But research confirms that you can start learning a language and achieve success in this matter at any age.

Incredible facts

1. How to start speaking the required language today;

2. How to master fluency and succeed in this business in just a few months;

3. How easy it is to impersonate a native speaker of the target language;

In this case, it is more appropriate than ever to use the Pareto principle, which says that 20 percent of the effort spent on developing a new vocabulary will help you understand 80 percent of what you hear.

For example, in English, as in many others, 65 percent of any text consists on average of 300 repeating words... Such a set of words is found in almost any language, and it is often native speakers who use it.

Language learning cards

It doesn't cost you anything to find pre-prepared flashcards with this set of the most frequently used words (or with words on the topics you plan to talk about).

For example, the application can help you with this. Anki , which can be easily downloaded both to a smartphone and to a computer.

This application is convenient work with cards, the mechanism of functioning of which is combined with a system of repetitions after a certain period of time.

That is, instead of trying to memorize words using a dictionary, and repeating them in the same order, the user can view them at specified intervals, specially selected so as not to forget the learned words.

Many people like to make cards on their own.

How to quickly learn a language

2) Your friends in a new language are related words

Believe it or not, even now, when you are just planning to start learning a new language, you already have a huge base of words at your disposal.

You know a few words from each language before you start learning it.

In other words, a person does not start learning a language from scratch, because he already knows a sufficient number of related words.

Related words are what you need initially because they are - best friends of words that sound similar to words from your native language and mean the same in a foreign language.

For example, the languages ​​of the Romance group have a lot in common. That is why many words from the English language are so similar to French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, etc.

During the conquest of England, which lasted several hundred years, the English borrowed many words from the Normans.

The number of borrowed words in languages

For example, " action "," nation "," precipitation "," solution "," frustration "," tradition "," communication "," extinction ", as well as a huge number of other words that end in -tion are also written in French, but you quickly get used to a slightly different pronunciation.

All you have to do is change –tion to –cion and it's Spanish, –zione for Italian, –ção for Portuguese.

Many languages ​​share common Greek, Latin, or other roots. They may be spelled differently from each other, but you will have to try very hard not to recognize, for example, "exemple", "hélicoptère" (French), "porto", "capitano" (Italian), "astronomía", " Saturno "(Spanish).

The German language has gone somewhat ahead, it shares a fairly large number of words with Old English.

To find common words in the foreign language being studied, you just need to set the search conditions - "related words (or borrowings) x (x is the name of the language)". So you will find the words that were borrowed.

Of course, look also for "x (x is the name of the language) words in your native language". This is how you know that your language took from a foreign one.

This system works very well for learning European languages, but what about when it comes to more distant language families?

It turns out that even languages ​​as distant as Japanese have a lot of words that are familiar to a native English speaker.

To prove this, just watch the video below where the song is "sung" in Japanese, but a person who knows English will still understand a lot of what it is singing about.

And all because there is a fairly large number of languages borrowed words from English, adding them to their own, only changing the stress or pronunciation.

Therefore, in order to greatly facilitate the process of learning a new language, it should begin with the analysis of borrowed or related words in a foreign language. There are quite a few of them in almost any language pair.

How to learn a language on your own

3. You need to communicate every day in a foreign language, and for this it is not at all necessary to travel

This is another reason (or reason) that people voice, explaining their unwillingness to learn languages. They allegedly have neither money nor time to travel to the country of the language they are learning.

It is important to note that there is absolutely nothing in the air of a foreign language country that will make you magically speak in a new language.

There are countless examples to demonstrate this. For example, the author of this article, the famous polyglot Benny Lewis, whose native language is English, during his life in Brazil, he learned the Arabic language.

But there are also people who have lived abroad for many years and do not even try to master the local language. Living abroad and immersion in the language - these are not equivalent concepts.

If a person needs to hear and use language in order to permeate it, then wouldn't communication via the Internet be just as effective?

The answer is unequivocal - it will be. Today's technologies allow you to easily immerse yourself in a foreign language without spending money on buying an air ticket.

How easy it is to learn a language

For, to develop audio practice, it will be useful to look, for example, with the helpYoutube , which is now in trend in the country - a native speaker.

On Amazon or Ebayyou can purchase your favorite TV series or films with dubbing in the desired language.

Various news sources offer a variety of videos on their Internet resources, translated into a variety of languages. You can refer to for example, to France24, Deutsche Welle, CNN Español and to others.

To practice reading practice, it is worth reading not only news sites, but also interesting blogs and other popular sites in the country of the language you are studying.

In order to achieve complete immersion in the language, you can, using the Chrome browser, download special pluginsthat will help you translate any page into the required language.

Language learning methods

4. Start speaking on Skype today to build your daily practice

You are already watching, listening, reading and perhaps even writing in the target language. You do all this without leaving the walls of your home. It's time to take a new step - talk live with a person - a native speaker of the desired language.

This advice is, in the opinion of the author, the most controversial, but, nevertheless, he always gives it to beginners. It is necessary from the very first day of study to start speaking the language if your goal is to be able to speak, not exclusively understand.

Communication for language learning

A lot of different language programs and courses do not work according to such a system, and this is their big mistake. There are only seven days in a week, and among them there is no one that would be called "one fine day."

Use the tips above to work out basic vocabulary and understand which words you have already memorized. This should be done for a few hours.

After that, you should be ready to talk to someone who has been speaking the language you are learning for a lifetime. You only need to learn the words for the first conversation.

If you start using them right away, you can immediately understand what you are missing, and begin to gradually add what you need. You cannot and should not learn a language in isolation, trying to "prepare" for communication.

For the first communication, it is better to learn words, such as "hello", "thank you", "I don't understand", "can you please repeat", etc. You can find many of them in a special list.

This raises the question of where exactly to find a native speaker if you are not in the right country?

This is not a problem today because thousands of native speakers are already waiting to speak with you. You can take private lessons from such people who leave their contact details on special resources.

For example, one of these multifaceted resources - italki.com... Here everyone will find something for their pocket.

If you feel that you are not yet ready for Skype conversations, then think about this: the faster you start speaking, the easier it will be to move towards your goal. During a conversation, you can always keep the window open, where the necessary words have already been loaded.

First, you will pry through this window until you finally memorize the vocabulary. You can even refer to the dictionary during a conversation to learn new words as you need them.

Some may think that this is a deception. But in reality this is not so, because your goal is to learn the language, and not to imitate obsolete teaching methods.

How to learn a language for free

5. Remember that the best resources don't cost money. Save your money

There is no point in wasting hundreds of dollars to learn a foreign language. It is only appropriate to pay for your communication with a native speaker of the required language.

The internet is full of various sources that, besides being great, are also free. Moreover, they are constantly improving.

Websites for learning foreign languages

An excellent example is Duolingo ... The resource provides an excellent selection of European languages, the list of which is constantly being updated.

There is a lot of information here to help you start mastering the language without spending a penny. Here are some more very interesting alternatives:

If you search, in fact, you will see that there are a lot of options for free resources, so it is best to test several and choose what is right for you.

For example, the aforementioned Italki is excellent base of language exchange and lessons, however, no less interesting will be My Language Exchange, and Interpals .

You can also work offline, find or create language meetings in your city, or go to a meeting Couchsurfing, Meetup.com, Internations.

Meetings like this are a great opportunity to meet native speakers and international enthusiasts.

But that's not all. You can improve your language skills absolutely free with the help of a huge database. Here you will hear any word or expression in different languages, and everything is recorded by native speakers. This is a resource - Forvo .

Moreover, you can check your written text for errors free of charge with Lang 8 ... In other words, for free practice, the possibilities know no boundaries.

6. Adults are actually much better at learning languages ​​than children.

Now that you have a ton of resources and resources at your disposal, you can begin to tackle one of the most important problems. This does not apply to grammar, or lack of literature, or the volume of vocabulary.

It's about your negative attitude towards your own potential.

In our society, a very common misconception, which often makes us give up: " I am too many years old to learn a new language and speak it fluently. "

However, recent research has confirmed that compared to children, adults can be much more effective and more productive in matters of language learning.

The study was carried out by scientists from the University of Haifa. Experts were able to demonstrate that under certain circumstances an adult intuitively understood the grammar of a foreign language much better than a child.

In addition, there has never been any research previously conducted that analyzed the relationship between increasing age and decreasing language learning ability.

There is only a general tendency regarding the study of foreign languages ​​by adults, which depends to a large extent on external factors(for example, time constraints due to work activities).

And creating an immersive environment is very easy, without spending money on travel and without the need to return to childhood.

Free online language learning

7. Don't forget to build your mnemonic vocabulary

It is important to remember that cramming alone is not enough. Of course, with endless repetitions, the word sometimes simply eats into memory, and remains there forever.

But sometimes it also happens that a word or phrase repeated more than a dozen times simply flies out of memory.

Try to memorize words using a technique such as mnemonics. It will help the vocabulary stick to your memory much faster and be remembered for a long time.

You should tell yourself out loud some short, funny, and most importantly, memorable story that you associate with a certain word.

Someone might think that this will only greatly increase the time for learning a language, however, having tried it once, you will understandhow effective it is.Moreover, you will only need to remember the association a few times, and then the word will become an integral part of your vocabulary.

Language learning: where to start?

8. Accept your mistakes

More than half of all inhabitants of our planet speak several languages. This suggests that monolingualism is precisely a cultural consequence, not a biological one.

Therefore, when an adult cannot learn a language, the point is not at all that he lacks the necessary genes. All due to the fact that his system of language acquisition is broken.

Standard language learning methods are based on an approach that has not changed since Charles Dickenson's study of Latin.

The differences between your native language and the target language are presented vocabulary and grammar for memorization. Traditional approach: learn everything and you will know the language. The logic can be traced, isn't it?

However, the whole problem is that you can never actually "learn" a language, because it is not something that you may or may not know. It is a means of communication between people.

The language cannot be learned by cramming; it must be used.

At the very beginning of the language learning journey, the emphasis should be on communication rather than sharpening the details. This is what key difference.

Of course, you have the right to learn the language until you can give out in one breath: "I apologize, dear sir, would you be so kind to point me to the location of the nearest restroom?", But the usual "Where is the toilet?" carries the same semantic load, but without further ado.

You will probably be forgiven for being so spontaneous, because they will see that you are learning. Don't worry about offending native speakers because your “insolence” allowed you to speak to them in their native language.

The best thing you can do when you first start learning a language is to admit that mistakes need to be made, but trying to make everything perfect is not.

Set yourself some kind of norm, for example, no more than 200 mistakes a day, but most importantly remember that you are practicing and using the language!

Independent language learning

9. Goals in front of you must be smart

Another important drawback that is present in most approaches to language learning is poor or incorrect setting of ultimate goals.

As a rule, we tell ourselves: "You need to learn Spanish by the new year." However, do you understand whether you have learned it or not? And if you have set such a goal, then by what criteria will you understand whether you have achieved it or not?

Vague goals like these can be infinitely unattainable, and a smart goal is specific, achievable, measurable, relevant, and necessarily time-bound.

To learn how to set smart language goals, you should definitely familiarize yourself with how the system works. European Common Framework, which will provide invaluable help in determining the level of the language.

With this system, you will set a specific goal and be able to measure your progress.

In short, A is a beginner, B is a conversational level, C is an advanced. Each level is divided into two categories: 1 - lower, 2 - upper.

Thus, the beginner who has learned the basics is A2, and the advanced beginner is C1. Each level can be measured, so official institutions can test you and even issue a diploma (of course, without enrolling in a course) for knowledge of any European language.

You can also take a test for knowledge of the Chinese and Japanese languages.

So, now what is your goal? What level in practice corresponds to your stated "skill" or "fluency"?

Long-term practice shows that fluency comprehension corresponds to the B2 level. In fact, this is social equivalence in a person's native language.

In other words, you can easily understand ordinary situations occurring in a foreign language. For example, talking with friends at a bar, asking people about their weekend plans, discussing the news, etc.