6 tips for learning a foreign language
Learning a foreign language always depends on a goal. It can be a personal reason: The pleasure of discovering the culture of others at the same time and strengthening one’s capacity for integration into the community.
Learning a language can be for a professional reason: To communicate with customers, or foreign suppliers.
In this article, we explain how to learn a new language.
1 Immerse yourself in the language
It is highly recommended that you bond with people whose native language is the one you want to learn. They can be your friends, coworkers or acquaintances on the Internet.
It should be understood that memorizing only words or sentences is not enough, it is absolutely necessary to speak. So if you have the means, don’t hesitate to visit a country where the language you want to learn is spoken.
If you don’t have the means, the internet today allows you to communicate with people from all over the world who share the same passions as we do without leaving your room.
2 Practice the language daily
Learning a foreign language does not happen in a short time. Depending on your motivation, make a daily plan to exercise a little each day. Going forward at a steady pace will benefit you.
3 Repeat regularly
Repetition is very useful while learning a language, so it is necessary to repeat things until you can remember them more easily. Professor Yury Shtyrov has demonstrated that it takes listening to a new word 160 times for a quarter of an hour to memorize it forever.
Repetition will help you improve pronunciation. This will allow you to formulate sentences and work on your accent without too much difficulty.
4 Consolidate your motivation
Learning a foreign language does not happen in a short time. Depending on your motivation, make a daily plan to exercise a little each day
Larousse defines motivation as “Reasons, interests, elements that push someone to take action; made for someone to be motivated to act ”.
To stay motivated, you need to find motivators, including remembering your goal and why you are learning. The pleasure of achieving one’s goal (to earn more money, to develop professionally, etc.) counterbalances the effort required.
To train online, motivation is the main factor in progress. The results of the « Motivating factors in online courses » study (Selvi, 2010) show that certain factors increase motivation for online training.
5 Learn basic vocabulary
It should be remembered that vocabulary is the basis of a language. Depending on your goal you can make a word list to facilitate your learning.
According to the BBC News online relayed by the international mail newspaper, “You can understand 75% of English-speaking conversations by mastering only 800 of the most used lemmas. On the other hand, it takes 3,000 to follow the dialogue in a film and 8,000 to read a novel or a newspaper article ”.
6 Use multiple media
It is advisable to diversify the learning materials. For example, practicing writing, listening to podcasts, audiobooks, documentaries or reading documents written in this language. The diversification of the supports will allow you to discover with which channel you can feel better to better achieve your goal.
7 Learn a new language in one term
By devoting a little more than 2 hours a day to learning a language, you will be able, in one term, to communicate with a new language. You only need to learn 800 words to start communicating with a foreign language, and a quarter of an hour to learn a word. So 200 hours of learning are enough to learn a new language.
This is why wedigitalpro offers online language training, with a one-term formula.
To learn more, see our online language training catalog.