How to Learn Any Foreign Language Quickly

Learning a foreign language is one of the most enriching and life-enhancing skills you can acquire. It can open up lots of job opportunities and make traveling more exciting and rewarding. You probably don't want to spend years with your head buried in books, so we've put together a few tips on how you can learn any language fast.

Immerse Yourself

One of the keys to mastering a foreign language is total immersion. The more you immerse yourself, the more rapid your progress will be.

Watch television shows or movies in the language you are trying to learn. To make it less of a chore, select shows or movies you are already familiar with. Avoid using subtitles because you will start to rely on them. And in the real world, people don't use subtitles.

Listen to radio programs and download podcasts in your target language. These are easy to find online. Learn songs in that language and read at least one newspaper or magazine article a day.

Like learning any new skill, you need to find as many opportunities as possible to practice. Try arranging a language exchange a couple of times a week with a speaker in your target language who wants to learn yours. If you can't meet up in person, arrange online sessions. In so doing, you'll be able to achieve conversational proficiency in much less time than you would by just reading books. There may even be language immersion meetup groups in your town or city.

Study Every Single Day

To learn a foreign language, you have to commit to putting in the hours, something that may require cast iron willpower. Language learning is based on repetition, going over things again and again until they stick. If there is a long time between your study sessions, you are prone to forget what you learned the last time you studied.

People complain they can't learn a language because they're no good at it or that it's too complicated. However, the top reason for failure is not practicing the language consistently. Now you may be saying to yourself that's all well and good, but I don't have enough time to practice every day. The truth is you don't need to set aside hours every day; just 30 minutes to one hour daily will do. And this can easily slot into your routine without causing too much disruption. For example, you can memorize words and practice pronunciation while doing chores around the hours. There’s also a lot of deadtime that can be put to good use during the commute to and from work.

Focus on the Right Words

You do not need to know all the words of a language to be able to speak it. For example,

only a few hundred words make up more than half of written texts in English. The same is true of many other languages. So, the trick is to learn the most common words of the language you are trying to master. You can easily find these by looking them up online. Start with the 100 most common words, then work your way up to the most common 1,000 words.

Concentrate on the words that are going to be most relevant to you. These could be related to your work or hobbies and interests.

Learn Cognates

Cognates are words between languages that share similar spellings and meanings. They are easy to remember because you already know them. For example:

English Words

• Dentist

• Elephant

• Chocolate

• Family

• Dictionary

Spanish Words

• Dentista

• Elefante

• Chocolate

• Familia

• Diccionario

Start Speaking Immediately

Don't wait for your language skills to be super proficient. Dive straight in and engage in conversation with anyone you can. Don't be embarrassed by making mistakes. They're unavoidable. In any case, blunders are great teachers. When you're interacting with native speakers, ask them to correct your errors.

Also, don't worry too much about accuracy. Concentrate on fluency, which is speaking the language smoothly in real-time. This doesn't mean forgetting about the importance of accuracy, but you're not after native-level fluency, not initially. Focus on conversational

fluency because that is all that most people need.

Work on Pronunciation

It's no use memorizing hundreds of words if you can't pronounce them correctly. This is where having conversations with a native speaker comes in handy.

Use these handy tips, and you'll be well on your way to learning a new language fast.