Learn A Foreign Language
If you’ve chosen to learn a foreign language, good for you! Learning a new language can be a wonderful experience that leads to many opportunities including better travel, better job prospects and new friendships.
If you’ve just begun to learn a foreign language, you may feel a bit lost with all of the materials out there that are available to teach you a second language. Through my language experiences, I would like to share a little information with you so that you can avoid the same mistakes I made and improve in your new language as quickly as possible.
In order to learn a foreign language as fast as possible, you should avoid the following three problems that can slow you down. Afterwards, I will teach you one tip to make sure you are on the right track to learning your new foreign language as quickly as possible.
Problem 1: Dry vocabulary lists. Unfortunately, many textbooks teach you a foreign language by providing you with a boring list of vocabulary with one side showing the words in your new language and the other side showing the words in English. Rote memorization of such lists is not only boring for a language learner, but it is a waste of your time, too! These lists do not convey any of the context surrounding the words and humans are not computers that are meant to translate word-to-word as these lists teach.
Problem 2: Grammar rules. Many programs tend to rely heavily on grammatical explanations. While these may be helpful in one sense, it is not a particularly quick way to learn the language. It is much more important to be learning key phrases that you can use at your disposal. If you simply learn grammar rules, you may know a lot of structural information about the language but you will be unable to speak the language at a fluid rate.
Problem 3: Useful phrases. Too often do I see books and programs that refuse to teach useful language from the beginning. Instead, they would rather focus on forced examples that better fit the grammar rules and vocabulary lists they are trying to push. You will often be forced to do exercises that make you learn phrases like “The vase is on the table” but you will find that you don’t know real conversational phrases like “Are you hungry? Let’s go get some lunch”.
Now, what I consider to be the most important factor in learning a new foreign language: full, complete, natural phrases. Many programs, audio courses or textbooks will start off teaching unnatural language that can only be found in a textbook. If you use these resources, you will find that you will be unable to understand the language in real situations and you will only be able to say phrases like “The cat is large” or “How do you do? My name is Joseph Smith. I am pleased to meet you” which will have native speakers laughing at your stiltedness.
If your goal is to speak the REAL language, then you should focus your energies and efforts on the REAL language. Don’t waste any time on language that only exists in textbooks. Furthermore, do not waste any money on these textbooks or programs. Real, natural phrases will get you used to the natural rhythm of the language and immediately begin to condition you to sound like a native speaker.
I hope this article has helped you. There is much, much more to language learning and I share all of my tips, tricks, techniques and methods in the book I have written. If you want the fastest method to learn a language so that you will become fluent in a foreign language in a matter of months, learn thousands of words without worrying about forgetting them, master grammar and do all of this in an enjoyable, painless manner then you need to read Learn That Language Now!
August 29th, 2008 at 7:43 am
That would suggest that a phrase book is more useful for learning a language properly than a textbook or self-study course is. I find that only partly true if you are living in the country, and totally the opposite if you are studying back home, where the sentences just seem random and don’t really stick in your head until the patterns are pointed out.