My Language Learning Background
I have a long history of learning different languages, as it’s one of my biggest interests in life. The first language I learned was my native language, Swedish (duh). While growing up I learned English thanks to music, movies, and video games. In school, I learned some Spanish and since I was fascinated by Japanese culture I took extra Japanese classes and studied it in my free time. When I moved to China during my master’s degree I studied Mandarin. However, I never reached a conversational level in either Spanish, Japanese, or Mandarin. It wasn’t until I moved to Germany and learned German that I properly learned a third language. Now I’m in Colombia learning Spanish to make it my fourth language.
Throughout my life of learning languages I have tried and developed different techniques, and I thought I’d share my favorite ones. They are nothing new or revolutionary. In the end, you will have to put in a lot of effort to learn a language, no matter what techniques you use. Nevertheless, here are my top five techniques for learning a language:
1. Language soaking
Language soaking is a technique that I learned from Chris Lonsdale’s TEDx talk. It means listening to your target language as much as possible, even if you don’t understand what’s being said. The point is to get the rhythm and structure of the language and to see patterns and words that occur often. I do this primarily by listening to music and podcasts.
2. Talk to people
To many people, the most difficult thing to do in a new language is to speak. That’s why it’s important to practice it as much as possible, and the best way to do that is… to speak! It’s important to do this right from the beginning even if your level is really low. The goal is to reach what I consider to be the most important level when learning a language: the 1on1 Conversations level.
This is the level of being able to have conversations with most people for an extended time. On this level, you will still make many mistakes, and you will still ask “Could you please repeat that?”, “What does that mean?”, and “How do you say X?”, but it will be infrequently enough such that the conversation has a flow and the person does not get annoyed enough to want to end it. What’s great about the 1on1 Conversations level is that after you’ve reached it you can easily strike up conversations with most people to continue practicing.
The reason why the 1on1 Conversations level is about most and not all people is because some people have a very low tolerance for getting annoyed and will want to switch to a different language or end the conversation if you make any mistakes or have an accent. Luckily they are the exception. Most people are extremely patient and kind when you try to talk to them in their native language. It’s a very good idea to find people who you can talk to and make mistakes. Chris Lonsdale calls these people “language parents” in his TEDx talk. Finding language parents is much easier if you’re living in a country where they speak your target language.
The reason why the level is specifically about one-on-one conversations is that being part of group conversations is more difficult, for a few reasons:
- People will usually talk faster and use more colloquial words.
- The more people listening the more nervous you are to make mistakes.
- During the time it takes for you to process what someone’s said someone else in the group has already replied and the conversation has moved on.
- There’s usually no chance to ask questions like “Sorry, could you please repeat that?”, as in one-on-one conversations.
When learning German I’d say it took me about six months to reach the 1on1 Conversations level, and then an additional six months or so to be able to participate decently in group discussions.
3. Anki
Anki is a flashcard program that you can use to memorize anything. It uses spaced repetition, which means you only practice the material that you’re about to forget. The first time I used Anki was when learning Japanese. When learning German I used a deck of cards based on the B1 word list from the Goethe Insitute. Now that I’m learning Spanish I manually add words that I encounter and would like to learn. I think this is the best way to do it since I control each word that I add and learn. The B1 word list I used when learning German was very helpful, but several words weren’t.
4. Watch videos
Watching videos is a great way to learn a language. The important thing is to watch things with subtitles in your target language. You can watch movies, series, YouTube videos, or anything else that you like. Even if you don’t understand everything you’ll understand the context, and if you need to you can pause the video and use a translation tool.
Watching videos is a great way to improve your vocabulary, grammar, and understanding of the structure of the language. It’s also a good way to learn slang and how people speak. It’s very related to language soaking because, in the beginning, you’ll be listening to a lot of things that you don’t understand.
5. Read
I enjoy reading and find it to be a fantastic way of improving my vocabulary, grammar, and understanding of a language. What works best is to read what you’re interested in. I am interested in politics and read a lot of news related to that. It’s also a great idea to read books, especially ones that you’ve read before. With the help of a translation tool, it’s remarkable how little time you need to read quite complicated books.
As I am reading a book in my target language I translate words that I don’t understand and add the ones I want to learn to Anki. I think this is a fantastic way of improving my vocabulary.
Conclusion
Learning a language takes a lot of hard work and time. It’s a never-ending process because there’s always more to learn. Luckily, it is an extremely rewarding process, especially in the beginning when you improve very fast. In my opinion, the rewards and satisfaction of learning a language far outweigh the effort.