Learn a New Lingo While Doing Something Else. Baffling grammar, strange vowels, quirky idioms and so many new words—all of this makes learning a new language hard work.
Luckily, researchers have discovered a number of helpful tricks, ranging from exposing your ears to a variety of native speakers to going to sleep soon after a practice session. A pair of recent papers suggests that even when you are not actively studying, what you hear can affect your learning and that sometimes listening without speaking works best. In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, linguists found that people who took breaks from learning new sounds performed just as well as those who took no breaks, as long as the sounds continued to play in the background.
The researchers trained two groups of people to distinguish among trios of similar sounds—for instance, Hindi has “p,” “b” and a third sound English speakers mistake for “b.” One group practiced telling these apart one hour a day for two days. 6 Powerful Learning Strategies You MUST Share with StudentsCult of Pedagogy. Learn a New Lingo While Doing Something Else. Pro Tips: How to Study. 8 Practical Ways to Learn All the Foreign Language Vocabulary Needed for Conversational Fluency. Did you know that 1,000 words can get you a long, long way in a foreign language?
It might not seem that easy when you’re looking at the raw numbers. The Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 170,000 English word entries. The “Hanyu Da Cidian” dictionary includes 370,000 Mandarin Chinese words, and the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” includes 200,000 Russian words. Most languages have similar numbers of words circling around. As a language learner, these numbers can seem downright crazy! Luckily, you don’t need to learn anywhere near that many words to communicate proficiently. So simply learning 1,000 words can get you far in your ability to understand texts and communicate with people. With a little strategy and the right tools, you can learn much faster and easier than you might have imagined. 1. The first step to learning effectively is to identify what you want to focus on and set goals. 2. 3. Do you know what it means to “learn” a word? 4. 5. Football. How Does Learning A New Language Affect Your Brain? How I Finally Learned a Different Language. And You Can Too.
In early 2014 I took a course that guaranteed I’d be conversational in a new language (Spanish) in just 30 days.
Not fluent, mind you, but able to hold short conversations with native speakers. Great. I’m moving to Mexico in May, so I can get ahead of the language learning process, I thought. The claim wasn’t false. I was indeed conversational in Spanish after just 30 days. The truth is, I learned a few canned phrases but somehow completely overlooked the fact the course didn’t teach me anything outside of simple scripted responses. In short, I was screwed. For the next year I tried just about everything to learn the language.
After dismal results my first year living in Mexico, I decided to forego conventional wisdom and come up with my own approach. The results were far superior to that of Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, and even the occasional session with a tutor. In just three months, I went from a blubbering idiot to a blubbering idiot that could speak Spanish. The Secret to Language Skills.