5 Tips to Learn a New Language Quick
Accessing financial freedom is not simple. In order to achieve it from scratch, you will first have to educate yourself by searching for information from different sources: books, online training, dedicated articles, videos, and others. There are more and more sources of information in many languages. However, reading sources in one language means limiting yourself to a small percentage of the information sources available in the world. To increase your chances of success by increasing the total number of good and reliable sources of information you can access.
Plus, the job search gets a lot easier if you are bilingual or multilingual. Your language skills are a valuable asset that will always be with you even if you decide to change your career path or relocate and choose a different international career.
In one word, your language knowledge is your freedom, the gift that keeps on giving.
Learning a foreign language is an exciting endeavor, but it requires a lot of investment. Here are some tips that will make learning any language a bit easier for you.
1. Read books in the language you want to learn
There is nothing extraordinary about this first tip, it is something you already know, something you may have read on many other blogs or that people have already advised you to do. But if this advice is so popular, it's because it works like a charm.
However, if you start your learning from scratch, you will not be able to read a book in a foreign language right away. If it is your case, go straight to Tip 2. You will be able to start reading books after a few weeks or months. It will only depend on your motivation.
2. Listen to audiobooks at home, on public transport or in your car
Until a few years ago, audiobooks were not a thing, but they are becoming more and more popular due to the increase in the number of titles available, their ease of access, and lower prices.
Listening to an audiobook should not consume your time. You can listen to it in an infinite number of situations: at breakfast instead of the radio or news, in your car, on a bus, train, subway, plane, taxi instead of music or radio or other films and series, during your sports session, during a bath, but also during household chores that do not require your concentration such as washing dishes, ironing, etc...
Look out! Listening to the audiobook requires concentration on the voice and the words of the reader. If you are doing an activity that requires concentration, go to Tip 3.
3. Listen to radio or podcasts
Unlike listening to audiobooks, listening to the radio or podcasts does not require special attention. You can listen to them at work as an alternative to ‘traditional’ music or FM radio, at home when you're with family or friends, when you're playing with your children, etc.
Leave it to play in the background without paying attention to it, but try to focus from time to time to test your listening comprehension as you learn. You will see that you will make progress very quickly and you will start to distinguish more and more words.
You should also know that listening through your headphones is always more difficult than listening directly in a physical face-to-face meeting with another person. The transport of the information of a sound coming from a person speaking, via the microphone, the transformation of this sound into data transferable on the Internet and the re-transformation of this data into sound via your headphones, decreases in a more or less important way the intelligibility of the words.
One could make the analogy with a boxer who trains with weights on his wrists and ankles. This makes his training more difficult but will make him faster and more agile in a real fight without this handicap.
4. Watch the original version of series and movies or read subtitles WITH the original version on
As you can see, this technique clearly doesn't require extra time in your day, except if you never watch movies or TV shows. If this is the case, don't panic and use other techniques presented in this article rather than start watching series, because watching them is very time-consuming and addictive.
But hey, if you have caught the TV bug (or the movie one) take advantage of it to use all the time spent in front of your TV to practice your foreign languages by watching them in their original version with the help of subtitles in the SAME LANGUAGE as the audio. Yes, it is important to have subtitles in the same language as the audio, because it is a support that will help you to distinguish the words pronounced by actors or characters.
5. Play to learn a new language
Of all the tools presented in this article, educational applications are the most recent ones. This software (applications) is based on language learning through play. They improve the learning of vocabulary, spelling, grammar, comprehension, and oral expression. Gamification is based on the principles of reward and competition. A player, or a student, receives points when they succeed in the exercise presented to them, lose life if they answer a question incorrectly, and must repeat the exercise when they have no more lives. They receive badges when they reach a certain number of points and can compare their progress to their friends’ or classmates’ through a ranking system, thus motivating students through the effect of healthy competition.
The options presented above are not magic recipes that will allow you to become bilingual effortlessly even while living abroad. If you don't speak the language of the country you live in or if you spend most of your time among people who speak your native language, you will not progress. Get out, mix with the locals, and meet new speakers. Your learning will only be better and your experience will be richer. And don’t stop to practice – all day every day – because the more you use the new language the better you become at it.