How to Learn a New Language

Want to find out how you can learn a new language quickly, without the need for expensive classes or language learning software? There are really no secrets or shortcuts -- you just need to commit to your new language, be willing to work hard and not be afraid to make mistakes. Start with Step 1 below to find out more.


Connect with a native speaker. Hands down, the best way to learn a new language is to speak it. Too often, people spend all of their time studying grammar and memorizing lists of words instead of actually going out there and putting what they've learned into practice. Speaking with a real, live person will help you to feel much more motivated about learning the language than staring at a book or computer screen.

Study the language everyday. People often claim to have studied a language "for five years" and still not be fluent. But when they say five years, they probably mean that they studied the language for only a couple of hours a week over that entire time period.
Let's get one thing clear -- if you want to learn a new language quickly -- that is, in the space of a few weeks or months -- you're going to have to commit to studying the language for a couple of hours per day.

Always carry a dictionary. Carrying a dictionary with you will save you a lot of time and frustration, so invest in one as soon as possible!

Watch, listen, read and write in your chosen language. Immersing yourself in a language means doing all of the activities you would normally do in your native tongue, through your new language -- whether that's reading, writing or listening.

Visit a country where your chosen language is spoken. Obviously, it would be a great boost to your language learning skills if you could visit and spend some time in a country where your new language is spoken.


Learn vocabulary. Mastering basic vocabulary is probably one of the most important things you can do when learning a new language. Even if you can't understand whole sentences, the ability to pick out key words can help you to understand the general meaning of a speech or text.

Don't worry too much about grammar. The reason why most people can't remember most of the language they spent years learning in school is that school curricula tend to focus a huge amount of time on learning grammar and very little time on speech. This is pretty much backwards -- if you want to learn a language quickly, you should learn how to converse first. The specifics of grammar will come later.

Work on pronunciation. Pronunciation is another place where you should focus your energies. There's no point in memorizing hundreds of words and phrases if you pronounce them so oddly that they can't be understood. Therefore, it's important that when you learn a word, you learn the pronunciation simultaneously.

If you live in a major city that has a good international crowd, Meetup.com has many regular language specific gatherings, and I've actually found that Couchsurfing, a site usually associated with budget travel, has one of the most excellent per-language and per-city social searches to get in touch with natives.

Apart from one-on-one time with people, the resources that I use between spoken sessions to prepare and learn better include:

• Anki: a flashcard app for the iPhone (paid in iTunes or free on jailbroken iPhones in Cydia) and Android (free). An open database of pre-made decks cover many excellent word lists you can download in advance.
• Memrise: the vocabulary lists on this site include memory cues with their words, to give you tricks and mnemonics to make it much less likely you'll forget the words.
• Native content: Try an active language learning forum to ask for the best news sites or blogs for the language or dialect you are most interested in. One trick I like to do is flick through the top 100 sites by traffic in Alexa's per country list, to see what sites those in that country genuinely check out regularly. For instance, there is a Spanish equivalent of Reddit called Menéame popular in Spain with tons of great articles to read every day. Stumbleupon also has a language setting to find random nice content in a bunch of languages, tailored to your interests, and you can change your computer and software interface languages too.

Your learning approach naturally adapts to your priorities, which is the opposite of what most one-size-fits-all courses seem to aim for. You have great power to succeed in your language learning project this year. Work hard, adapt your learning approach to your priorities, make it about using your language rather than studying it, and you will get results!