Learning or knowing a language is a skill and not just knowledge. It should be practiced regularly to increase your familiarity and exposure to the new words/phrases you learn. Sometimes you may want to learn the new language in an environment where there are few or no native speakers near you. This makes the challenges even more difficult; but with these guidelines you can ease your way. Language study requires self-discipline and determination, especially if it is a committed training. The basic or common challenge you will face is to forget. This is absolutely normal as you are trying to familiarize yourself with words that you have never met before or maybe never heard in your life. Therefore, holding on to the learned words/phrases is just as important as understanding them. So you have to find ways to be a good retainer, not just a good receiver.
The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the first to scientifically study forgetting, using himself as a subject. His results were plotted on what is known as the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, and from this curve the following theories were deduced.
• You forget information more quickly, within the first hour of comprehension, and you can forget an estimate of more than 50% of the information you obtain within this short time limit.
• Another very interesting deduction from your curve is that the more repetitions, the more a long-term memory is established.
Based on the previous analysis, we will begin our tips with strategies to make new words or phrases stay in our long-term memory, and then we will continue with other tips that can help us.
1. Don’t learn so many words at once. I could choose between 10 and 20 a day to learn.
2. Don’t spend a lot of time practicing your new words or phrases; instead spend very little time, maybe 15 words in 30 minutes. This has proven to be more effective as the fewer words allow you to go over them over and over again.
3. Go over these words 6-10 times before you can remember them long term. For example, you take 20 words a day, go over them 5 more times, after your first practice, then twice more, the next day, once more that week, and at least two more times that month.
4. “I decided to use my three months of summer vacation to learn German, considering the free time I would have, but I didn’t have time for that after I started. I just couldn’t avoid the distractions.”- Mary john, a math major.
Actually! The language study does not recommend a fixed period of time every day. We are in a busy world full of activities, and the best way to do an activity is to create time for it and not wait for free time to do it. Sometimes setting a particular time can be ineffective, because other activities considered a higher priority for you than learning the new language could take its place.
Divide your time into smaller chunks throughout the day. This also helps you to go over the words over and over again as explained above in the last tip. You can practice during your lunch hour at work or during breakfast at school. Also, while you are in the elevator, on the bus, or waiting for the train; ten minutes before sixster, or 10 minutes before your night’s sleep. Overcoming distractions is an important step in learning a new language, and if you can pull it off, you have a great chance to learn.
5. Never procrastinate. As said above, language studies require great discipline and you must be prepared for it. Once you’ve started, do yourself a favor to continue at all costs. Procrastination creates a pause in your training and this could increase your tenderness to get discouraged. For example, due to a great enthusiasm, you started and for a week you kept up. Due to procrastination, he did not practice for the next three days, and then the procrastination again prevented him from practicing for the next four days. As this happens, your tendency to forget some words increases, then you start to fluctuate on the old words and treat them as new again. This can get to a stage where you get frustrated and eventually give up. Be constant, only then can you improve what you are learning.
6. “In my French class, I was the best student. I learned a lot of words and my teachers were very impressed. But now, after seven months, my classmates are fluent while, on the contrary, I can’t even make a complete sentence” – Victor James is a high school teacher.
The fact is that knowing all the words in the Dictionary will not make you speak a language fluently, even with perfect grammar. Even if you want to impress, this route is not the way to go. Your ability to sound like the native speaker should be your priority and goal. Also, strong accents and poor pronunciation could become unnecessary challenges for you, making the whole process complicated for you. In short, you may want to talk about a topic of interest, but easily end up stranded at any time.
7. Don’t be shy or afraid to talk to the natives. You can never speak well until you speak and know your mistakes. Sometimes, you read information and forget it or part of it. But when you fail a question (perhaps on a test) related to that information, it sticks in the brain permanently (especially after it’s been corrected). Feel very free and confident when speaking, even with mistakes, but do well to know your mistakes, learn your corrections, and try to improve in subsequent interactions.
8. Each language has its own technicalities. Try to know them because some of these rules are the ones that constitute the base or concept of some specific languages. For example, like Latin, the Russian language has many declensions. These are modified in the verbs or even in the nature of the sentence (either past or present). This is very important because sometimes you get tricked trying to learn some new words while interacting with the natives. For example, ‘will’ – used for the future tense in Russian is “budete”. Knowing this word alone is not enough. As a beginner, I was talking with a Russian friend and he said “on budget dumat”, which means that he will think. The word has changed with respect to the subject “he”, it will also change if the subject is a first person pronoun (I), or we, or they, or you, as well as when it is present or when it is past. Unlike English (he will, I will, etc). It remains the same, only in cases of present and past tense. Knowing the grammar is very important. In essence, when learning the Russian language, the words in the dictionary are not enough to know the language to a certain level. For every verb and adjective you learn, you’ll still need to know their declensions, since in most cases, it’s the declensions that are spoken when you communicate. Using this example, we can apply it to other languages. When you know the main rules that affect the whole concept of the language, practice it along with learning new words and phrases, even if it means it’s a little extra exercise on top of the normal one (in case you have a tutor).
9. Contrary to point 8, when you speak now, you should not force yourself to follow the rules of grammatical knowledge. Remember, you only did this to learn how words are expressed, but you are not required to follow any rules when speaking. Have a random approach to learning the language and just talk. With your consistency, the corrections you receive, and your knowledge of the rules, perfection would be easy to achieve. So know the rules for the sake of perfection and start applying them comfortably, after a lot of conscious training. If you are also learning through reading, don’t read word for word. Sentences in most foreign languages are not constructed in the same way as your language, and therefore reading word for word causes your memory to assimilate very slowly, so you interpret the sentence in a much more difficult way, even if you know the meaning of every word in the sentence. Read a complete sentence as a whole packet at normal speed. Your brain combines the meaning of each word and then you can easily get an idea of what the sentence says in a possible short period.
10. Different languages have their different ascents spoken with different part of the mouth. The German language most often uses the front of the mouth, while Arabic primarily uses the middle of the mouth, near the edge of the hard and soft palate. In this case, the tongue joins this part to make the frequently high-pitched “K” sound heard in almost all parts of your speech. On the other hand, the Hindi sound comes from the back of the mouth.
If you want to know how to get promoted from native speakers, then imitate them when they speak yours. While studying in Ukraine, we international students mockingly imitate Ukrainian teachers when they speak English. Sometimes they speak English as a direct contextual translation of the Ukrainian version of exactly what they are saying. This also gives us clues as to how we can say such sentences in the Ukrainian language. After about one session, the next set of lectures was impressed by the way we spoke the Ukrainian language even though we had an average standard.
You may be learning a foreign language in an environment where there are no native speakers, and therefore you may not be able to apply most of the advice explained above. You can do the following;
• Sign up to any Internet social network that has a lot of native speakers.
• Find friends to chat in the language. Oh! Your computer may not have language keys. Well, there are many translators on the internet and the most popular one is Google translation tools. While typing and translating, read and take notes or even write new words/expressions. Since it is a chat, there is a tendency of repetition of such words. This allows you to master them well.
• Supplement your efforts by using eBooks in the language of your choice. Keep in mind that a good ebook should be able to provide live web links that will take you across the internet for more detailed information. And you should also be able to have tools for fun, puzzles and games and templates to help you create your own language learning aids.
• Finally, extend your chats to video chats with the natives so you can listen to how they speak and also learn. With a webcam; You can chat via msn, yahoo, skype, etc.
Follow these tips diligently and you will have a good chance of learning a foreign language with ease.
