During this time in our world, we have so much free time on our hands. Many people are looking into new skills and hobbies, learning things, and filling there days at home with interesting activities.
As for myself, my biggest passion after traveling and interior design, is learning new languages. In the past few years, I’ve been studying on and off French by myself.
For the first year, I did take French classes, but since then I didn’t have the time for these classes and I decided to learn French myself.
Today, after a few years of learning on and off a foreign language, I wanted to share with you my own tips on how to teach yourself a new language!
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Decide which language you want to learn and set your goals!
First of all, decide on what language you want to learn. Ask yourself what language interests you? Why do you want to learn it? Do you want to learn how to speak, read, and write in it? or only speak and read it? Set your blogging goals, decide what do you want to get out of learning the language.
As for myself, I decided I want to learn French because it’s a childhood dream of mine (I also don’t know why I decided French back then, I just fell in love with France before I’ve been there and fell in love with the French culture).
And as for my goal with the language, I decided that I want to learn how to speak, write and read French. But for example, before French, I learned a little bit of Italian, where I only know how to speak (a little bit) and read (a little bit).
Grab a pretty notebook and study with it!
I don’t believe in learning a language without writing it in a notebook like the “good old days”. An organized notebook will help you keep track of your process, and keep all of your studies organized.
Listen to the language
By that I mean create a music playlist with your favorite songs in the language you want to learn, watch Youtube videos about subjects that interest you in the language you are learning, find interesting TV shows in that language, etc.
Download Duolingo
Duolingo is a fun language teaching app that is completely free to use. They teach multiple languages such as French, English, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and so much more!
I don’t believe you can study a full language only with Duolingo, but it is definitely helpful, especially with the vocabulary and the basics.
Except of Duolingo, here are a few more apps I found helpful:
- Drops
- LingoDeer
- Tinycards
Start a language studying challenge!
Especially during quarantine, starting any type of challenge can be very fun. As for myself, I am on a workout challenge and on a language studying challenge for a whole month and I am really enjoying it! There are multiple language challenges you can find online, you only need to pick one!
Be consistent
This is the most important tip in this blog post. You can’t learn a language without being consistent. Like in anything in life.
You need to be consistent, and you need to work for your goals. Even if you’ll spend 15 minutes a day learning, that’s amazing and will be better than studying once a week or once in two weeks!
Invest in workbooks
Workbooks are one of the best ways to learn a new language. It’s the easiest way to make sure you are learning everything you need to know and give you all of the information needed to learn the language you are studying.
Read a children’s book
As a beginner, you can go straight away and read a 150 pages book in a language you are not fluent in. So an easy simple children’s book will definitely do the job for you.
Also, if you purchase the book, you can translate the book word by word to your own language, which can make the reading process easy.
BONUS: You can read a book you already read, in the language you are studying (so you will already know what’s going on there and just translate the book).
The Post-It notes method
This is a very helpful studying method I found to be even more helpful then I expected.
Take a few Post-It notes, write on the names of objects that are your in your house, and stick them to these objects.
For example, I wrote in French “bed” on the Post-It note and stick it to my bed’s headboard. Same as for “door”, and stick the note to the door.
This way, you visually see the name of the object on the object itself.
Use the language you are studying in your everyday life
You want to “live” the language you are learning. Making yourself think in that language is hard, but you can “live it” by switching your phone’s language to the one you are learning, writing your to-do lists in that language, etc.
I hope you found these basic language tips helpful! If you have more tips, feel free to leave them below!
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