6 Great Ways To Help You Learn A Foreign Language

Learning a second language is always a great way to broaden your horizons and keep your brain active at the same time. It can be especially useful if you're planning to live in or visit that country. But there are things you can do to speed up the learning process, just as there are things that won't really help that much at all. My first language is English, but I also know French and the language I'm learning currently is Italian.

Read Labels

The trick to learning a new language is to expose yourself to it at every opportunity. This may mean just looking at the label on products we buy all the time. Grocery products especially have the ingredients and so on usually in many different languages. Just by looking over the label then, you can learn two or three different words. If you do this often for different types of products, you'll be amazed at how quickly your vocabulary expands.

Listen to the spoken word.

This can offer itself several different forms, but what I'm suggesting is just a couple of these. Typically, you can purchase programs that incorporate spoken lessons rather than written. You can listen to recorded interviews in your language delivered by native language speakers. This is particularly useful as it allows you to get used to hearing the language spoken at the correct, meaning usual on-the-street, speed. You see, learning to speak the language is quite tricky, but to understand the spoken word over which you have no control is very much more tricky.

Avoid Holiday Phrase Books

In my opinion these are largely a waste of time, although they are for some reason incredibly popular. OK, so you open the page and you can see how to say "Good Morning" in your language. But how on earth can you possibly be prepared for the myriad possibilities that might come forth by way of a reply? You can't! That's why they are a waste of money.

Hire A teacher

You can do this quite economically. Look in the local paper or enquire at your school. What I did was to ask the local high school Italian teacher if she would put the feelers out to her Italian colleagues and friends to see if anyone was interested in one on one conversation lessons. This got floods of responses and I chose someone who lived nearby. This helped me enormously.

Hook Into Conversations

When I'm out walking or at the shops, and I hear someone talking Italian, I talk to them in Italian. It's surprising how willing people are to join in and help. To be honest, I often get lost, especially if they start talking too quickly. But I just stop and ask them - in Italian - to slow down a little. They are happy to do this. The trick is not to panic, and if you can't understand, I've asked people to use just simple words before now.

Practice Talking

This is so important. Your mouth and voice box get used to making only the sounds and syllables of your native tongue. The way your mouth and lips form these sounds is second nature, but when all of a sudden you have to start putting unfamiliar sounds and syllables adjacent to each other in a sentence, it is very difficult to do until your mouth adapts. And you can only do this with constant practice. Therefore, I recommend staging conversations with yourself when you're out walking or in doing the housework or whatever. Talk to yourself OUT LOUD in your language, and your mouth and ability will soon adapt to the changes required.

If you do these things, I promise you, you'll progress faster than you ever thought possible. And not surprisingly, once you have one extra language conquered, a third will be easier still. I say easier because many concepts are similar across languages in the same group - like the Romance languages for example. To give my own example of French and Italian, much of the structure follows identical rules, and many of the words are very similar. And when I start on Spanish, it will be easier again. Good Luck, Bon Chance, Buona Fortuna!

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