How to learn a new language

This blog aims to give you 4 tips on how you can learn a new language in an efficient way.

Let’s get started!

TIP #1

Learn languages that are in the same language family as your native language.

It basically means that you should learn languages that belong to the same language family. For instance, I speak Spanish and it belongs to the group of Romance languages that derived from Latin. Therefore, learning Romance languages such as Italian and French would be a lot easier for me than learning languages that belong to other language families.

If you don’t know which other languages belong to the same language family, you can google it by searching the language you speak + “language family”. For example, “Spanish language family”.

The following pictures gives you an idea of what I am talking about.

TIP #2

Don’t be shy to speak it.

A lot of people start learning a language grammatically and don’t speak it enough. I would definitely recommend if you have the opportunity to speak it and really practice it in real life, DO IT.

When I first came to Canada, I was also shy and afraid that people would judge my accent. But in reality, native speakers would not judge you by your accent. Only people that are not native speakers would judge your accent. Therefore, don’t worry about whether you sound native or not. If you learn a language after puberty, it is almost impossible to acquire a native accent of the language you are learning. This leads to my next tip.

TIP #3

Start learning languages as soon as possible.

This is very important. If you want to learn a language, you better start NOW because it becomes more difficult as you age. This is proven by many studies. Everything you learn from a language is stored in your short-term memory. For example, vocabulary. The goal is to move all the information that is in your short-term memory to your long-term memory because you don’t want to forget what you have learned the next day or the next week. Kids are much better than adults in transforming their short-term memory into long-term memory. That’s why kids always learn things pretty fast, and this happens with languages as well.

Don’t wait and start learning languages!

TIP #4

Listen and get to see the language more often.

Our brain needs visual and auditory stimulation in order to learn a new language. By getting enough visual and auditory input to our brains would allow us to process all the information that we have learned in a more efficient way.

I learned Mandarin through Taiwanese dramas when I was a kid. The more you listen to it, the more confident you become speaking it because your brain would automatically find the correct pronunciation of the words. It is also important to see the words. For me, I learned many Chinese characters by seeing the subtitles of the dramas I watched. Hence, try to give as much visual and audotory input as possible to your brain to accelerate your language learning process.

The most important thing is MOTIVATION and being CONSISTENT.

Good luck on your language learning journey!

Georgina Tan