Learning a new language isn’t as difficult as it may feel:
- To achieve bare-minimum, you only need enough phrases to hold a basic conversation with a native speaker about mundane objects.
- You only need about 125 basic words in any language to start linking and adapting to begin speaking.
- At about 625 words, you can speak on the level of most children.
- You can be fluent in most languages and understand most of what you read with only about 1,000 words.
- Even an experienced native language professor won’t know most of that language’s words!
- You’re rewriting your brain with a new set of information (mostly for the same things), so you simply need lots of exposure to get it into your memory.
- Children are exposed to thousands of hours of their native language, but adults only need a few hundred for the same results.
Bear in mind, though, that cultural awareness is far more important for connecting than knowing a culture’s language:
- Before you even visit a country, research beforehand about all their cultural standards.
The best path when learning any language is to move intuitively into it:
- Listen carefully to thoroughly hear the idiosyncrasies of the language.
- Gradually imitate the pronunciation with your tongue, but not looking at anything.
- Once you have it down, start trying to read or imitate speakers.
- Learn the grammar and a basic set of vocabulary.
- Expand on vocabulary as far as you need.
Every language is divided into pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary:
- Pronunciation is the way you make sounds.
- Grammar is the correct way to arrange words.
- Vocabulary is the list of words you know.
Read and watch things you want to watch, and make your own curriculum:
- By making your own curriculum, you increase how much fun you’ll likely have with it (and increase your learning as a consequence).
- Focus on constantly finding new things more than repetition.
- Draw personal connections to the words.
- Learn aspects of the new culture or subjects in that language that you like.
- You should enjoy what you’re consuming and trying to parse.
- As much as possible, do not cross the languages.
- When you see something, you’re building a “second brain”, so avoid mixing in your native language into that thinking.
- While learning the language, you will have to wrestle with 2 points of view at once.
- It takes tremendous focus to learn what you want to know without the distraction of what you already know.
- Instead of consuming a wide variety of content, focus on getting used to a small amount of content.
- 3/4 of your language learning will be consuming, not speaking.
- Try to listen more than read.
- Listen to lyrical music in that language.
- Watch foreign-language films and TV.
- Choose any genre you want, as long as it’s not comedy (since it breaks many language rules).
- Because of the spread-out medium, TV is generally easier to consume than films.
- Research the plot summary ahead of time to know what’s going on.
- Do not put subtitles on in your language, or you won’t learn how to listen.
- Guidebooks with CDs are worth the purchase.
- Find target-language audiobooks for books you’ve already read in your language.
Get used to the sounds and rhythm at first, and don’t worry too much about understanding all of it:
- Choose short items of a few lines, then later 2-5 minute segments.
- Listen a few times without reading the text.
- Lip-sync words and phrases as you come across them, and look up words you don’t know.
Focus obsessively on correct pronunciation:
- How you pronounce determines how well you can fluently assemble words together in that language.
- It’ll take you 3–8 days to get it right if you practice 30 minutes each day.
- Focus on sounds, not letters.
- Some languages have a few sounds (Hawaiian has 15) or many (certain Caucasus languages have up to 60).
- Depending on what you learned as a small child, you may not be able to pronounce some sounds at all.
- Create a temporary “phonetic alphabet” to catch all the sounds of the language.
- Become accustomed to the sounds of that language.
- Trust your ear to develop a good accent.
- Closely observe how people in that language have accents in your language, since they’re borrowing patterns from their native tongue.
- Imitate the sound you hear, and record yourself to see how you sound.
- Pay close attention to really similar sounds and syllables.
- Aim for absolute precision, and try to avoid overlaying how your native language uses a sound.
- You only use 3 parts of your body to make words:
- Your tongue does most of the work, and you might have limits in training it.
- Your lips are either open to make an “ooo” sound, very open to make an “aaa” sound, or closed.
- Your vocal cords are either activated (e.g., “zzz”) or not (e.g., “sss”).
- Every consonant requires 3 major bits of information:
- Where’s your tongue?
- What’s your tongue doing there?
- Are your vocal cords doing anything?
- Vowels have 2 bits of information:
- Where’s your tongue?
- Are your lips in a circle?
- Most languages have tiny nuances:
- Saying “bee fee thee see she ye key he” gives 8 of the 11 possible combinations of your tongue and lips.
- Saying “toe no so low row” has the tongue in the same place, but changes how and where air passes around the tongue.
- Vowels are very particular, and “ee eh ah” is simply a vertical movement of the tongue.
- Note connections between sounds, and how they cluster together.
- Most words have been smoothed over centuries into a natural flow of the tongue.
- Focus on gliding between the sounds.
To increase your mental association, adopt the body language and culture of the language you’re trying to learn.
Pay close attention to mouth movements:
- T type sounds are a sudden pop of air (“t”, “d”, “p”, “b”, “k”, “g”).
- You’re locking the air in until you push it through after enough buildup.
- Tap type makes a very short version of this (“r” in Spanish).
- N type sounds are through the nose (“n”, “m”).
- S type sounds make sounds of air passing through the mouth.
- It can be a rushing sound (“f”, “s”, “sh”, “h”, “th” from “thing”).
- It might be buzzing (“v”, “z”, “th” from “the”).
- L type sounds are making sound by blocking air from escaping through the front (“l”).
- R type sounds aren’t obstructing the air at all, but adapt the tongue to change the sound.
- Some are more like vowels than consonants (“r”, “w”, “y”).
- Avoid looking directly at the letter “r”, since it’s spoken in English very differently than other languages and seeing it provokes our conditioning.
- It curls up more than a Spanish or Italian “r” and moves the opposite direction from a French or German “r”.
- Trilled type sounds come from S type, but by letting the tongue flap against the roof of the mouth (“rr” in Spanish).
- This can also express by letting the back of the tongue flap against the uvula (“r” in French).
Only move onto correct grammar after you feel comfortable with pronunciation:
- All grammar comes from 3 basic methods:
- Add words (“You like it.” versus “Do you like it?”)
- Change the forms of words (“I eat.” versus “I ate.”)
- Change the words’ order (“This is nice.” versus “Is this nice?”)
- About 50% of elementary language books obsess about pronouns and verbs.
- Most grammar rules are easy to understand simply by closely observing a few details in textbook examples:
- Did any words get added to the sentence?
- Did any words change their form in that sentence?
- Is the word order at all surprising?
- Memorize the gender of nouns and verbs as a visual mnemonic (e.g., masculine explodes, feminine catches fire, neuter shatters like glass).
- Grammar is best learned by using, not by talking about or analyzing it.
- Grammar can be challenging because the example sentences are often teaching multiple grammar rules at once (e.g., tense, pronouns, and gender).
If at all possible, make frequent conversations with a native speaker:
- If you use language learning books alone, you’ll likely have an awkward pace compared to learning through conversations.
- Find people online to chat with over a video conference.
- After introducing, have 5-6 small talk topics ready to discuss.
- Get a language tutor.
- They should not spend more than 5 minutes speaking your native language during each session.
- Invite your friend or tutor to make fun of you by saying the word how you say it, then saying it correctly.
- Keep listening carefully to how they speak, and closely analyze the differences.
- Pay close attention to how people respond to your choice of words.
- Since there are regional dialects (which you will need to understand) find a vast range of people who speak various dialects of that language.
- Even with nobody around, you can still learn through dialogue:
- Repeat the phrases until you clearly hear yourself.
- Record yourself speaking and compare it to native speakers.
Focus on the bare essential vocabulary and phrases you must understand:
- Add new words and phrases every week.
- Every language has its own way to adapt verbs to context, and uses a few key verbs a lot:
- to be, to have, to be able, to come, to go, to know, to take, to want, to say or tell, to do or make, to see, to give
- Read a small dictionary (such as at the back of a travel guide) to understand the most basic and critical words.
- Pick words you’ll likely use (e.g., “mother”, “medicine”) over words you may not use nearly as much (e.g., “niece”, “peach”).
- Focus on hard words by saying the syllables in reverse.
- Don’t fill your mind with less useful words:
- Since verbs require nouns and most verbs are styled like other verbs, conjugate verbs as you go and don’t bother trying to memorize how to do it.
- Adverbs and adjectives simply describe and expand on the nouns and verbs, so you don’t really “need” them right away.
- Synonyms (e.g., “policeman” versus “cop”) are only useful once you understand the language enough to detect context, so just use your favorite word for now and change later once it’s intuitive.
Build words out into phrases:
- Phrases are groups of 2 or more words that will help you express yourself.
- Systematically learning phrases is the easiest way to learn a language and tends to also teach verb tenses, prepositions, and vocabulary.
- Glide the words together into natural phrases instead of each word as a standalone object.
- Make the phrases a part of your daily language.
To expand your vocabulary, read language literature:
- Most of the advanced words of a language are written, and people generally don’t speak them.
- We tend to learn unknown words about 10% of the time we encounter it.
- Learn how to filter out words that are generally unimportant relative to the central ideas of what you’re reading.
- Break down every sentence into smaller pieces.
- Get a good grammar book.
- Don’t bother with books designed for classrooms, since they usually don’t explain anything.
- A frequency dictionary typically has the 5,000 most important words.
- Get a single-language dictionary for that language (which has actual definitions and teaches more words), and a bilingual dictionary.
- Read the Wikipedia article in your target language.
- Use an image search to see results for an obscure word.
Use flash cards to build up your memory:
- You’re trying to deepen memories with flash cards, not make them.
- Write phrases on the card, not just words.
- Make the phrases memorable by using fun ideas.
- You should be able to say the phrase out loud, as well as make a mental picture from it.
- Do not use your native language on the back side, just a picture.
- Our visual memory has an easier time learning than simply text memory.
- Word-picture combinations work better than words alone.
- Make many simple cards instead of a few complex cards.
- Only study while you enjoy it, and never for more than an hour at a time.
- Study until you can repeat it once without looking, then stop.
Write out the language, but stay focused on speaking:
- In some ways, writing was our first foreign language because it requires seeing versus hearing.
- By writing, you can understand the structure of the language and clearly capture ideas, but it won’t let you feel it out (which is critical for speaking).
- Use translation software (like Google Translate) to get a gist of what you’re trying to write.
Keep yourself productive by setting and pursuing goals:
- At the end of each lesson, ask what you learned that would help you if you left immediately for that language’s country.
- Measure how many words you read, how many words and phrases you’ve committed to memory.
- Keep track of how many words and phrases you know in total.
- When you’re comfortable with the sound of the language, phase out your phonetic alphabet.
As long as you persevere every day, with lots of input, you will quickly learn it within 6 weeks to a year:
- It’s not easy, but nothing worthwhile really is.
- You’ll notice your experience with language speakers will get harder at some point because they presume you’re a native speaker and start speaking at their normal pace with informal style and slang, and with big words.
- If you want to expand yourself further, learning a third language becomes significantly easier.