Learning a brand new language can be a key to finding success in your career.
It can help you stand out from the crowd. It can also help open up amazing job opportunities, including those unorthodox ones where it is mandatory for the candidates to know a different language just for the sake of the post itself.
Yes, learning a new language is never easy. Time constraints become a factor, especially when you start on this journey in high school or college. However, there are a few tried and tested tips and tricks that can come in handy for this. Let’s take a quick glimpse at them without further ado.
1. Commit To It
You are on a mission or at least make it look like it.
You cannot succeed unless you commit fully to it. Believe that you will cross all the hurdles that will be thrown at you during your journey down this road of yours. Prepare accordingly and take the challenge head-on, and you’ll see that you have learned the language in no time.
2. Learn To Accept Mistakes
You need to go back to the way you used to study in your childhood. That’s because learning a new language involves a whole lot of fundamental learning, consisting of things like learning the alphabets, the vowels, the consonants, words, sentence constructions, etc.
You are basically starting everything from scratch, just like the way you learned English when you were a child. So mistakes are bound to happen and this might frustrate you.
Learn to accept mistakes. Remember, they are an integral part of education. There’s a saying that if you don’t fail, you don’t learn. Learning from mistakes is something that counts the most.
3. Practice And More Practice
The more you practice, the more efficiency you gain.
It won’t be effective if you attend your language class every week and then, don’t practice anything on your own. If you go down that road, everything will just go downhill for you.
So find out a little bit of free time from your busy schedule and reserve the same for your practice, no matter what the circumstances. Practice religiously every week, and you’ll start getting results before you even realise it.
4. Take The Aid Of Technology
You are not in the stone age anymore. You are in the 21st century. Advanced mobile technology has actually become a part of our daily life. Why don’t you use that to great effects for this purpose? They are competent enough.
You will find many apps such as:
- FluentU – for learning French, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Chinese, etc.; available on the iTunes for iOS devices.
- Rosetta Stone – for learning Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Filipino, Arabic, Chinese, etc.; available on iTunes for iOS devices and Google Play for Android devices.
You can also find many others on the apps stores that can aid you a lot in learning a new language from the very comfort of your drawing room.
So don’t ever hesitate to use these apps. They can definitely come in handy for this.
5. Use A Dictionary
While learning a new language, you would definitely come across words or phrases that you would not recognise at first glance. As a result, you might feel a little lost because you are not understanding anything.
A dictionary can aid you a lot in such circumstances. So try to carry a pocket dictionary on your phone – one that’s capable of bringing out the meaning of those unknown words and phrases in the language that you know the best, such as English – so that you can refer to it whenever you want to.
Who knows? You might actually learn something new every day.
Last but not the least, do remember that learning a new language is all about enjoying and having fun during your lessons. If you are not enjoying your language classes, you will get bored quickly and may just quit after a period.
So enjoy what you are doing, and you will see that you have picked up the new language before you even realise it. We wish you the best in this endeavour of yours.