At this moment millions of people are learning a new language. In schools, learning a second language has become common. Companies send their employees to language courses all over the world.
You can find online thousands of articles, tutorials, apps, websites and online courses that help you learn a foreign language. All of this can be a bit overwhelming.
If you want to start learning a new language and don’t know where to start this article is for you.
The first thing you should do is to ask yourself a few basic but important questions like:
What do I want to achieve?
How would I like to learn?
How much time do I have?
The next steps to get you started with learning a foreign language are pretty simple but yet very important.
1.Choose the right language course/provider
When you decide to learn a new language the first thing you need to understand is that you can’t do it on your own. You need someone to guide you through all that you will have to learn.
It’s important to do extensive research before starting to learn a new language.
What you should do before selecting the right course for you is:
- contact different language institutions /schools/course providers and tell them what you need and ask what they provide;
- make sure they are accredited and at the end of the course you will have an exam and a valid diploma;
- discuss with the language teacher/trainer what your expectations are and make sure you have clear goals;
- select quality over cheaper prices, a good teacher and the right course materials, these are essential tools to help you succeed.
2. Have realistic expectations
Some languages take more time to learn than others. This is also connected to how much the target language and your native language have in common. If your native language belongs to the romance branch (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian) it will be easier to learn another romance language. If you want to learn German it will be way harder. This is a major factor.
The next point is that we’re all different. Some people learn faster while others slower. We all have our own pace. Make sure you don’t set unrealistic expectations of yourself or your language trainer/teacher.
What I mean by this is that you definitely will not learn a language in three weeks. That’s a complete lie promoted these days all over the internet.
In three weeks, you can learn to say something like: “Hello, my name is John. I’m coming from Norway and I’m 30 years old. And you?” If this is the limit of your skills you are not speaking the language, you are just getting started.
When you speak the language, you can carry on conversations, read, understand and listen to other people talking about a variety of subjects. Trying to survive and living are two different things and that is the difference between a beginner and an independent user in a language.
A language is divided into several levels, from beginner to proficient. To learn one level, you will need time, you can’t rush it and you can’t expect instant gratification. It takes a couple of months to reach a certain language level.
3. Be committed and constant
The key to learning a new language is to invest your time and efforts every day. Of course, this is not easy and there will be moments in which it feels like it’s too much. To be able to overcome this you need to set your goals for the day.
- 15 minutes of learning are better than 0.
- You can make small changes to your daily habits.
- You can learn while drinking your coffee.
- Instead of scrolling on social media install a language learning app.
- You can learn a language 10 minutes a day or several hours. This is all up to you. Just remember to make it fun.
- Make it a part of your daily life. This way you will make it easier for you to keep going at it every day.