#learnalanguage

1. Listen before you speak

Being slow to speak and quick to listen is good life advice whether or not you’re learning a foreign language. Effective listening is essential to communication. As a beginner there is a tendency to concentrate so much on what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, that you can completely miss the meaning or heart of what the other person is trying to communicate.

Not only will this impair your ability to listen in your target language, but it will also stall what little conversation you had going. Remember that conversations are a two-way street. If you’re speaking more than listening then you actually have more of a monologue on your hands rather than a dialogue.

The inputs of language learning, listening, and reading, are just as important as the outputs, speaking and writing. For beginners, inputs are even more crucial, as they are the main way you acquire new vocabulary. I’ll even go so far to say that for new students the best method for learning involves more listening than it does speaking. Though that may change with higher proficiency levels.

2. Don’t be embarrassed when you do speak

Peoples' next mistake usually comes from the other side of the spectrum, where new learners are too scared or embarrassed to contribute to a conversation. The fear of making mistakes and embarrassing yourself can paralyze your language learning.

It’s vital to remember that everyone makes mistakes. Even native speakers had to find their way through the language when they were children.

Making mistakes while learning a new language is inevitable, but it’s also a good thing. The faster you make mistakes, the quicker you can correct them and move on with your learning. So instead of being afraid to make mistakes, try looking at them as steps toward progress. In reality that’s what they really are.

3. Don’t major on minors

If taken in all at once a new language can feel overwhelming to learn. It’s so easy to get discouraged by all your little mistakes and conversational mishaps that you lose sight of the progress you’re making. In addition to mistakes you’ll also come across plateaus, where you study and practice consistently but don’t see any results for a significant amount of time. But whether you face errors or plateaus remember that these things are minor obstacles on the road to fluency. 

Your biggest obstacle always is not to give up and stick with it.

If you stay persistent your mistakes will be corrected and your abilities will improve, but if you slow down or throw in the towel completely; then you will either subvert your progress or nix it altogether. So remember that as long as you’re still studying and learning the language you can’t lose.

It might feel like you’re losing the battle for language learning for a little while but hang in there.

A practical way to help you stay motivated is to make small weekly goals. Research shows that goal-setting has a significant impact on learning. Try picking one aspect of grammar or a collection of new words or phrases to study for the next 7 days. At the end of the week check your progress and measure your success. Setting little benchmarks like this will give you a rightful sense of accomplishment.

4. Remember that immersion isn’t magical

A lot of people think that by moving to a foreign country they will learn the language by osmosis.

But whether you learn abroad or at home you still need to study and practice the language. Living in a new country gives you way more opportunities to do this than staying at home, but if you don’t consciously take advantage of these opportunities while living abroad it won’t benefit your language learning.

If you’re an expat living in a foreign country there is a natural inclination to hang around other expats. Learning a language and living in a foreign culture is hard and uncomfortable.

For better or worse we’re often drawn to the easier road. If you made the decision to study abroad then you want to hang out with native speaking people as much as possible. You have the rest of your life to be with people who speak your language. This doesn’t mean ignoring your expat friends. Just be sure that you’re giving proper attention to your language learning.

5. Be open-minded

Languages are better lived than they are learned.

When learning Turkish your English speaking brain will want to confirm the new grammar and vocabulary to your native language norms and grammar rules. Ignore your brain on this one. At first you might feel completely wrong saying a sentence that is in fact correct. After a certain point in language learning there is a switch that goes off, when your brain finally realizes that you’re not speaking your native language but a new one altogether. This could take a while though, especially if this is your first time learning a new language. Until then do what you know is correct even if it feels a bit weird when you say it.

The same goes for culture. Just as you want to open to the differences in the language, don’t forget to be open to the differences in the culture too.

I hope this post helped you shift your thinking and approach learning language in a way that will help you become fluent faster. And that you’ll learn to enjoy the journey toward fluency and savor the language for its own sake, that’s probably the biggest language learning secret there is!