#foreign language tips

Overcoming anxiety while learning a new language, especially English, is crucial for building confidence. Key strategies include identifying your fear, accepting mistakes as part of the process, and practicing active listening. Deep learning methods help retain vocabulary, and fluency courses offer structured guidance. To boost your speaking skills, try preparing conversation starters and remember that practice is essential to fluency.

this is all from Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb. 

Let me include a short list of words you will need if you want to make contact with someone who doesn’t speak your mother tongue:

Contact-making words -- Hello. Excuse me? Thank you. Please. I’m sorry. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good-bye.

Ready-made formulas --  I’m from the U.S. I don’t speak… Do you speak…? Please say it again. Slower please. Where is…?

Pronouns -- I. You. Whose? Mine, yours… Who? What? This, that.

Adverbs of place, time, etc. -- Here. There. Where? To the right. To the left. Straight on. Already. Yet. Still. Now. When? How many? How much? Many, much, few, little, more.

Auxiliary words -- Have to, must. May. Can. I’d like… Why? Because…

Inflected forms of “to be” and “to have” -- [Language dependent]

Numbers (and dates)*--  From one till ten, till a hundred. Days of the week, names of the months. Today, tomorrow, etc.

Important verbs -- Leave. Arrive. Come, go. Start, finish. Eat, drink, look for, find, buy, get on, get off, have, know.

Nouns -- It is a difficult question as their priority depends on the situation. For a tourist: room, bed, bathroom. In a restaurant: soup, bread, meat, water, beer, pasta. If you have some money for shopping, you don’t have to do anything but point. You will be understood.

Adjectives in the positive and comparative degree --  Big, small. Cheap, expensive. Hot, cold. Good, bad.

This list, of course, can be extended and reduced at will. You can also play with it by checking how many forms you can instantly express in their foreign equivalents.

Unfortunately, there are a host of expressions that play a greater role in making you fluent than verbs, nouns, adjectives, and all other “responsible” word-classes. I call them filler words because their common property is that they don’t change the essence of a sentence, they only supplement it. Such filler words are quite, obviously, rather, of course, well, in fact, though, mostly, certainly, instead, a lot, still, anyway, etc. It is not easy to memorize them because there are no objective concepts attached to them, yet I recommend learning them with all my heart.

Since we are discussing filler words, let’s not forget filling clauses, either. These are usually sentence-launching expressions, not even bricks of the building of language but in fact ready-made slabs of it. They can be carried to the spot in prefabricated forms and plastered in immediately. Their great advantage is that they provide transitions between banal discourse and important discourse. In addition, they allow time to recall expressions that have sunk deep into your memory and to strike the tuning fork, which I have mentioned several times.

1. Commit and take the time!

Learning a foreign language does not happen instantly; you have to devote time to your studies, go to class, read and practice at home and anywhere you can. To learn a foreign language, you cannot expect to merely show up to a weekly class and become fluent; you must work at it, and you will be rewarded by accomplishing your goals. Make sure that you are really committed to learning a foreign language. Do you have a deep desire or a specific purpose? If not, you need to convince yourself that you have a desire to become fluent in a foreign language or else you are not ready to take language classes.

2. Practice daily.

Try to incorporate your new foreign language into your daily life. In addition to speaking to as many natives as possible (don't be afraid to practice your new language when you encounter native speakers). Speak only the new language with peers from your foreign language classes, listen to music in the new language, watch movies or television programs in a foreign language, read books, etc.

3. It's more than vocabulary.

While a sheer number of vocabulary words to memorize is an important step, you really need to focus on how those words come together to build sentences. Listening to fluent speakers of your new foreign language, reading books and stories can help you increase your ability to speak a new language with proper syntax and flow.

5. Relax and enjoy yourself!