source: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/wiki/guide

How to Start Learning a Language

Preamble

This guide is written and maintained by me, /u/Virusnzz, on behalf of the community. If you think something is missing or you have any queries, PM me. Otherwise, feel free to make a thread about anything in this guide.

Once you have read the guide, please take a moment to send me some feedback. I am always trying to improve and your input is greatly appreciated.

Please also read our FAQ to read some common beginner questions more explicitly addressed.

If you’re here for resources, they can be found in our resources section.

Structure

  1. Introductory sections
    1.1. Introduction - Shows you how to use this guide and explains principles
    1.2. Preparation - Introduces you to goals and covers your basic mindset
  2. Beginner stages
    2.1. Starting principles - Covers some key principles you will use often
    2.2. The structure of languages - A brief explanation of the structure of languages
    2.3. Finding resources - A guide to finding the resources you need
    2.4. The three core resources - Discusses the three core resources you should be using as a beginner
    2.5. Teaching yourself - Explains how to learn using the resources discussed
  3. Intermediate stages
    3.1. Learning good pronunciation - An intermission-type section on how to teach yourself good pronunciation.
    3.2. Study after the basic course - Discusses how you should go about learning once the basic course is done.
    3.3. Two key activities - Highlights the two most common and effective learning activities.
    3.4. Advice on studying - Covers how to approach to your intermediate learning
  4. Further advice
    4.1. Further advice on flashcards
    4.2. Further advice on learning grammar
    4.3. Further advice on learning vocabulary
    4.4. Further advice on using content
    4.5. The remaining principles + some useful tips

Appendix 1: Full list of principles

Appendix 2: Elaboration - Elaborates on some earlier statements and principles

Appendix 3: About languages - Some ideas about how languages function

Introduction

Welcome to the /r/languagelearning guide to learning a language. The goal of this guide is to get you started as fast as possible and as effectively as possible by teaching you the fundamentals of learning a language.

While this guide may seem long, think of it as an investment. If you start with a bit of theory, you will save time in the long term by doing it right first time. In addition, relative to the enormous amount of time you will be spending with your language, time spent in preparation is both minuscule and disproportionately effective.

However, if you are not willing to read all of the guide before you start, you can read the sections The three core resources and Finding resources.

Principles

Principles are the basic underlying rules and ideas that enable you to be a more effective language learner. They are how you should approach language learning, and are the biggest difference between ordinary beginners and experienced language learners.

This guide amalgamates principles from around the web (including here on Reddit) to save you the trial-and-error learning that a lot of us had to go through.

We’ve scattered most of the principles throughout the guide to prevent you getting overloaded. While a principle may be placed under a certain section where it is most relevant, they will also apply to other aspects of your learning.

Preparation

The are three basic steps you will take before you can study. 1. pick a language, 2. set a goal, and 3. make a plan.

1: Pick a language

If you haven’t chosen a language, you will need to do that first. Usually it will relate to your goals. If you haven’t decided yet, use the FAQ entry to help you think about it. If you have more than one you want to learn, it is best to pick the one you are most motivated by now and save the other(s) for later.

2: Set a goal

In order to learn a language, you should first set yourself a goal or set of goals. This will be based off your motivations - the reasons you are learning the language. Again, use the FAQ entry to help clarify your thinking.

The best kind of goals are SMART goals. That is, they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Specific - Don’t make your goal too vague (i.e. “fluency”). These are impossible to measure or hold yourself accountable for. You should also avoid making your goal too specific (“learn 1000 words”). Goals that are too specific can distract you from what you really want. Think about what you want to use the words for.

Measurable - Language progress can be hard to measure, but there should be some degree of progress visible towards your goal.

Achievable - Don’t aim too high. You can’t be fluent in a year without working at it like a full time job.

Relevant - Make it depend on what you want out of your language. If you are learning to communicate with a friend, your goal needs to be centred around that friend or other speakers of the language.

Time-bound - Picking a point in time discourages you from slacking off and letting progress lapse. You might like to start of by thinking about a length of time you want to dedicate and then selecting a goal based on that time limit.

If you’re not sure what goal you should have, think of the situations you want use the language in. Here are some example goals:

  • Converse with my friend for 5 minutes without losing track of what she’s talking about. Timeframe: 8 months.
  • Read and understand Tolstoy without a dictionary. Timeframe: 5 years.
  • Know enough basic words and grammar to feel comfortable communicating when I’m on holiday. Timeframe: 6 months.

You can have multiple goals. You can also have smaller, short-term, intermediate goals like “have a basic conversation with a native” to help you measure progress. You could also have constituent goals that you think are necessary to achieve your main goal, for example “know 2000 words”.

You might be tempted not to worry about choosing a goal since you already know you want to speak the language and get better at it with no end in mind. Trust us - goals will help you get there faster.

Don’t be afraid to revise any of your goals. If you’re going at it for the first time, it can be hard to know how long it will take or if the goal you choose is really what will motivate future you. Pick an intermediate time period to stop and review your goals and progress.

Finally, it will help you to write down your goal somewhere, especially if you have multiple goals.

3: Make a plan

Languages actually take quite a lot of effort and work to learn, so it will help you have a good idea of how you will go about achieving your goal. There are 2 factors to consider:

  1. Approximately how many hours are required to reach your desired level: Beginners often underestimate the amount of time it takes to learn a language (see How long before I can become fluent). A good idea of how long it will take comes from the FSI Language Difficulty Ranking.
  2. How much time you can spend during the day: This is going to be the primary indicator of how achievable your goal is. If you think you can’t reach your desired goal given the time available, you need to either make time or adjust your expectations.

Commit to a minimum amount of time to dedicate every day. Make sure you also have a large enough block of time sometime in the week to get some focused study done. That might be an hour on the weekend, for example. Your daily study block should not be less than 20 minutes. The more you can commit and fulfil, the faster your progress will be. Don’t be afraid to re-assess your goal in light of time constraints.

Starting principles

This section covers an initial set of principles that are helpful to know from step one.

Principle: Do things that get you closer to your goals

A large source of slow process for many learners is that they do not focus on doing things that are associated with their goals. This key concept is called direct practice, and was perhaps best summarised by Scott Young in his book Ultralearning: “The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.” For example, if you want to communicate, you need to spend a large amount of time practising communicating, not drilling grammar.

The individual skills improved by studying do not directly translate into your target situation without practice. Studying individual components of language obviously has its place, but it needs to be weighed up against the benefits of trying to directly practise what it is you want to be good at. As much as possible, try to do the things that directly relate to your goal.

Principle: Think of language learning like a skill, not a subject

A core concept of language learning is the difference between learning and acquisition, (described by Stephen Krashen here). Learning is the knowledge of a subject that allows you to talk about it. Language acquisition is the largely subconscious process of picking up and being able to use a language.

They key to using a language is acquisition. For example, you acquired your native language largely without the help of any conscious learning. Learning is useful because it can help the process of acquisition by giving you a head-start to help develop your intuition, but acquisition should be the goal.

You do not need to be able to complete grammar exercises or describe the grammar like a teacher to use it correctly. Compare learning a language to learning an instrument. You achieve mastery through practising the language as it aligns to your goals. That can mean reading texts, listening to podcasts, watching videos, writing stories, and finding natives to speak with.

Principle: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

Mistakes are a natural part of the process of learning. Don’t shy away from trying things because you are afraid of making mistakes. They are a powerful learning tool to help you find errors. Making mistakes will not necessarily hinder your progress. They are a natural part of the progression towards becoming good at something.

In addition, trying to use the language absolutely correctly every time can slow your progress by reducing the amount of practice you get.

Most mistakes simply fix themselves over time without correction. As long as you are getting lots of input and basing your language production off of that, you will probably be fine. Listen closely next time you are near a young child. They make mistakes all the time, yet all will learn to a native level given enough time.

Principle: Time with the language is the key to how fast you will learn the language

A lot of people come to /r/languagelearning wanting to know how some people become so accomplished at languages, believing there must be some special technique they are utilising that makes languages come to them faster. The trick is there is no trick. You just need to practise, practise, practise. You can predict someone’s success with language learning relatively easily by asking one core question: How much time do you spend with the language each day?

People recommend approximately an hour per day, with an absolute minimum of 20 minutes. Beyond the need to sleep or complete any other essential responsibilities, there is no maximum to the amount of time you could spend. Every additional minute helps, and these add up over a long period of time. If you increase your study time from 20 minutes to 40, you will achieve your goal in approximately half the time.

There are other factors in addition to time:

  • How well do you know what techniques are effective and what techniques work for you? - Just reading this guide and following the few core principles covered here will get you 95% of the way. The rest is tinkering around the edges and comes with experience.
  • How much of your study involves using the language? - Almost all learning is best done with the language, that means, even when you are studying to improve a specific aspect, using real texts and audio and integrating speaking and writing into your study routine.
  • How much of your time with the language is spent actively paying attention? - This means not just passively watching or listening, but actively focusing and trying to improve your ability or understanding. The more, the better.
  • How much do you enjoy your language? How motivated are you to improve? - Enjoyment creates the motivation to spend the hours and to learn to do it effectively. Becoming unmotivated can lead to stagnation.
  • How much are you working towards your goal? - People often appear very accomplished because they are engaging with a specific task, such as conversing on the street. If you want to get to a certain level in a certain skill, you should expect to get there faster by practicing that specific aspect of the language much more than the average learner.

Principle: Keep up your motivation

Your motivation can easily wane over time, so it is important to pay attention to your own motivation and find ways to keep it strong.

Choose what works for you

Choose a method that you enjoy and that helps you progress. Not everyone is the same - some methods people tout as effective might not work for you at all. There is nothing wrong with you, it is just that there seems to be a lot of individual difference when it comes to learning method effectiveness, and the overwhelming factor seems to be the interest and enjoyment of the learner themselves. If you find the method you are using is too boring, change it up.

Work towards a goal

Spend some time properly considering what motivates you. Is it the idea of conversing with real people? Is it reading some literature in its original language? What ever it is, if you have it in mind, striving towards it, making progress, and successfully engaging with those parts of the language that motivate you will help you stay motivated, increase the time you can keep studying without getting bored or tired, and reduce the chances you will give up. Be sure to keep those reasons around you. For example, if you are learning to communicate with certain people, try to be around those people more often.

Find input you enjoy

Finally, wherever possible, find target language media you enjoy for its own sake. Often this is the same kind of media you enjoy in your native language. You can use this media for a focused study session or you can just enjoy it.

Principle: Be willing to try other things

Keep an open mind and try different things every now and then. If you feel your progress slowing with a resource or method, try something else. This applies equally to the kinds of resource you are using. If podcasts aren’t working, try texts. Texts not your helping? Try some video lessons.

The structure of languages

It is helpful to think about languages in a structured way so you can know what’s going on when you’re learning something and won’t feel lost. We’ll keep coming back to these bolded concepts, so don’t skim over them.

Languages consist of two core components: vocabulary and grammar. These go together to form the language.

The language (vocabulary + grammar) is expressed through any of the four skills: reading, listening, writing, or speaking.

The skills of reading and listening create what we will call input (also referred to as content). The skills of writing and speaking are how you produce the language. We’ll call them output.

The basic building blocks

When you start, you will mostly learn the most basic grammar and vocabulary (our core components) essentially in isolation or with very simple, learner-centred input. Keep in mind languages function differently, and so the actual combination you need to achieve basic competency can differ. Below is only a rough guide.

Grammar: Core grammar, including the general structure and logic of the language.

Vocabulary: Usually the 500-1000 most common words.

You will also need to learn the basics for each of the four skills:

Reading & writing: The script, orthography (how the letters correspond to sounds).

Listening & speaking: The sounds of the language, including pronunciation and tones.

The three core resources

We need three core resources to get you started learning the basics:

  1. Beginner course
  2. Vocabulary
  3. Input (content)

First we will show you how to find them, then we will talk about how to best use them and how to study.

Finding resources

Spend some time looking around, reading guides, and getting recommendations. Every time you encounter something you think you might like, bookmark it then keep looking. Once you’ve spent some time hunting, then go back and choose what you think will work for you, keeping in mind the insights from this guide.

The best place to start looking for any resource is always with what other learners of your target language recommend. Try the most recommended resources. These are often the highest quality, too. Make sure you look for communities that have lists of recommended resources. This guide provides some good resources that serve multiple languages to help you start looking, but does not make any specific recommendations about what is best.

Keep in mind there is a lot of room individual preference when it comes to the best resources. Don’t use something just because others tell you to. Go with what you enjoy most.

There are several places to find out what you should be using:

  • Google search communities dedicated to your target language - see if they have a list of recommended resources.
  • Google search for guides or articles about learning your target language.
  • Google search for resources.
  • Check the resources section of the wiki for your language.
  • Check the resources section of the wiki to see if there is a subreddit dedicated to your target language, which often have a list of resources in the wiki or sidebar. You can also do a search there.
  • A bookstore.
  • Look at popular language learning programs or online courses.

1. Beginner course

Here are the basic types of beginner courses you can get:

Text, audio, or video explanations

Using Google or community recommendations, it is possible to find websites, podcasts, or video series that explain the basics of your language. These are usually free and and can be a good way to get a structured overview of the language. The video variant can be good way to get a lesson-type environment for free for those that prefer it. Some common examples include:

Please note that videos and podcasts can be slower.

Teach-yourself books

These books typically provide explanations, give you exercises, and provide you some beginner input too. These are a popular method.

You can find good teach yourself books in many bookstores. You can also buy them off Amazon which is usually cheaper. Usually people have written blog posts recommending the best textbooks.

A common example is the Colloquial series.

Online courses

There are a few well known online courses that will likely have courses available in your specific language. Often they have accompanying apps. The method these use to teach you varies, and often combine elements of the other types listed here.

The best and most comprehensive courses cost money. As always, while we list some here, there might be better ones specific to your language. Some well-known services include:

Listen-and-repeat courses

There are also a variety of listen-and-repeat courses that can teach you the language. These function by having you listen to phrases and then repeatedly prompting you to recall and say the phrase out loud.

Some free varieties include:

Some paid varieties include:

Advantages and disadvantages

Listen-and-repeat courses are very good at helping you get a feel for the language. They get you to remember and use lots of useful words and constructions that you can apply in many contexts. The are also very good at getting you starting to speak, building confidence early-on in a low-pressure environment. Both these important aspects are often missing in traditional courses. These courses are perfect for people who are travelling somewhere soon and need tourist phrases and people don’t have a lot of time to study at their desk. On the other hand, listen-and-repeat courses are not well-rounded. For that reason you should avoid using them in isolation. If your focus is on communicating, using listen-and-repeat courses in conjunction with traditional study is beneficial and recommended. If you are less interested in communicating, consider these optional.

Classes and tutors

As we noted, you can have a teacher, but learning is fundamentally an internal process.

One way is to take classes, which may or may not require you use their textbook. These can be a somewhat slow way of learning the language if you are attending one lesson a week, but they are a relatively inexpensive way to learn in a classroom environment if that’s what you prefer.

The other way to learn is with a private tutor, one-on-one. You can find one in real life, but relatively inexpensive tutors are also available online on sites like iTalki.

2. Vocabulary

There are two main tools you will use to learn vocabulary:

  1. Flashcards
  2. Dictionaries

Spaced-repetition software

A huge portion successful language learning is really just knowing words, and the best way to learn lots of words fast is with flashcards.

The most popular flashcard software is Anki. It has a downloadable program and an app for iPhone and Android (the iPhone version costs money). Anki is popular due to its large community, high functionality, high customisability, sync between devices, and clean interface. The flipside to this functionality and customisability is that there is a fairly steep learning curve.

Anki allows its users to export and share flashcard decks they make. There is already a large array of pre-made decks of cards for you to use to get started. If you’re a complete beginner, find a deck with words ordered by frequency. The best decks also have example sentences. Go to your language’s section and sort by rating. Browse and see if you can find any you like. Feel free to download multiple and try them out. Check out the shared decks here.

We recommend you eventually learn to make your own cards. This allows you to add words that you find personally relevant and useful.

You will find yourself confused by some function at some point, so it is recommended to read the manual soon after you download it. Check it out here. You can also find some clear video explanations here and here.

Anki is not the only SRS software on the market. Here are some alternatives you might like to consider:

  • Memrise - an online SRS program that focuses on using mnemonics
  • Clozemaster - a SRS program that teaches using fill-the-blank sentences that features a rather gamified interface
  • Quizlet - an online flashcard system
  • LearnWithOliver - another online flashcard system

You are also invited to do your own research. This is not a comprehensive list.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries can be online or physical, but most people find online dictionaries to be much more convenient.

The best dictionary to use depends on your language, so you will need to do your own research in communities dedicated to the language you are learning. There are some excellent dictionaries dedicated entirely to a single language.

The ideal dictionary will give you example sentences, an English equivalent, and the correct pronunciation.

There are a few dictionaries that offer translations for multiple languages. If you would like to browse some more well known generic ones, we recommend you check out these:

There is also translation software such as Google Translate or DeepL, which can be helpful when getting the sense of the meaning of an entire sentence. Avoid becoming overreliant on translating whole sentences. Make sure you attempt to understand a sentence yourself first. Avoid using translators for single words, since you may be given an inaccurate translation.

Popular tools

Phrasebooks

You may also like to learn some phrases, either to help you get a feel for the language or if you are travelling soon.

Here are some websites that have phrases and words in lots of languages that teach you in an interactive fashion:

3. Input

Finding content as a beginner can be difficult, particularly for languages that are not as popular. We recommend you simply use the best, most interesting content you can find that allows you to practice reading and listening without being overwhelmed by the difficulty.

Here are some examples of input you might use:

  • Reading
    • Books
    • Articles
    • Reddit-like websites
    • News websites
    • Conversation transcripts
  • Watching
    • Interviews
    • YouTube channels
    • Movies
    • TV series
  • Listening
    • Music
    • Podcasts
    • Dialogues for learners

The best resources for a learner are:

  • Short stories for learners, in books or online
  • Websites with articles or news intended for learners
  • Graded readers
  • YouTube channels intended for learners
  • Podcasts
  • Dialogues for learners

Resources with naturalistic dialogues are highly recommended, as is anything that uses both audio and a text transcript to help you practice multiple skills. Pick whatever you prefer, because that’s what will engage you.

As we have mentioned, the best resources are probably found with Google or in a community or subreddit dedicated to the language you are learning. You can find a list of subreddits plus some helpful resources in the media section of the /r/languagelearning wiki.

Popular sources

Here is one place you can find quality beginner content in lots of languages:

Some websites offer a lot of beginner content. You might like to try:

Popular tools

There is a variety of useful tools to help you improve your reading:

  • Readlang - Import texts and get instant translations, built in flashcard program
  • Lingq - A popular paid service similar to Readlang that provides lots of content and records and highlights known words
  • Language Learning with Netflix - gives you more control over Netflix subtitles and helps you find popular titles in foreign languages.

Key tip: Mix it up

A large mix of resources is even better than a single type. It’s surprisingly difficult to translate your language ability from one skill into another without a lot of practice, so take the time to learn those skills. For example, reading lots will help you learn a lot of words, but you will struggle to recognise these words when you hear them until after you’ve done a lot of listening practice.

How to use the three core resources

1. Beginner course

Grammar instruction is the essential component of the beginner course, as everything else we can potentially get elsewhere. There is lots more a good beginner course can give you, such as lists of key vocabulary or some content to practise with. There are clear benefits to using a course that merges grammar instruction with other aspects of the language. For that reason the most popular beginner courses are usually the most comprehensive.

Key tip: Don’t try to learn components of the language in isolation

Learning grammar in isolation is boring for most learners, inefficient, and can cause you to forget concepts quickly. The actual way you with learn grammar or any other part of the language is by using it in context - that is - through listening and reading. By encountering forms in context, you eventually come to understand them and how they are used. The best lessons teach you using input to provide some context and practice.

Lessons will give you an explicit understanding of something that make you feel like you know it. This is not necessarily the case, as understanding the the grammar is very different using it correctly. To build on your language ability, you need to practise lots with input.

Principle: Learning needs to be difficult

The brain learns optimally by encountering something difficult, working hard, and eventually succeeding at using or understanding something. There needs to be some kind of mental struggle involved in your learning. This struggle should turn to insight, for example the learning of a new grammatical rule or word usage. This means there should aim for just the right amount of difficulty. Not too difficult that something presents an insurmountable barrier, but not so easy that you don’t learn anything new.

Finally, this knowledge of the grammar or vocabulary is solidified and refined by repeatedly encountering it until there is no longer any mental effort required, and that effort can instead by allocated to another part of the content you are using.

Principle: Don’t try to learn things perfectly first time

Learning happens slowly over time, usually well after you are first introduced to a word or concept. You don’t need a perfect understanding to learn the next unit, so don’t spend too much time trying to completely learn a concept or word perfectly before you move on. The very act of moving forward with a loose understanding will help teach you things already covered as you encounter them again. On the other hand, if you don’t move on, learning could become very slow and boring. This principle applies to all your learning everywhere, not just how you approach your beginner course.

Teachers versus tutors

A key distinction to be made is between teachers, who instruct you in a classroom with other learners, and tutors, who instruct you one-on-one.

Teachers can be a useful way of learning a language. Many learners prefer the act of someone explaining things to them in a classroom setting. Tutors can be even better, facilitating your learning by structuring content and activities to your preference.

However, using a teacher or tutor simply to explain the basics to you is not necessarily the best use of your money. Any information they give you will also be freely available on YouTube or another website.

Where tutors have a natural advantage is that there is a native or proficient speaker with you who can be a source of input, identify errors, and provide correction. This is generally much more powerful. We recommend you use tutors for this purpose.

2. Vocabulary

For many languages, you could understand nothing of the grammar and still be able to understand basically anything you read at the beginner level with enough words. The general rule for a beginner is to try get to 1000 words as fast as possible, and stretch for 2000 if you can. That covers the basics and gets you talking.

For a language like English, the number of words you’d need to be fluent is over 10,000. Don’t be intimidated by the large number - you can get there by chipping away at it slowly, and if you approach your content right you’ll absorb a lot of them naturally, just like you did with your native language.

Don’t be discouraged when you encounter unknown words - it’s a natural part of language learning. The main way you learn vocabulary is by being prompted to remember or otherwise extract meaning from a word as you encounter it.

Remember the principle Think of language learning like a skill, not a subject? There we noted that learning occurs incidentally when you use the language. This applies equally to learning vocabulary. You will apprehend words once they come up naturally enough times.

There are two main tools you will use to learn vocabulary:

  1. Flashcards
  2. Dictionaries

In addition, there is a third resource you might like to utilise:

  • Word lists

Principle: Words, words, words

If you don’t know what to actively study, try to increase your vocabulary. It is generally a better way of boosting your comprehension than actively studying grammar, since grammar can more easily be understood through context. For most people, the best way to do this is through flashcards. This will be discussed later.

Key insight: You learn words by repeatedly encountering them

It takes experience seeing a word often in context to learn it. This is why input is so heavily emphasised and has its own section below. Keep in mind that reading a lot is a great way to properly learn words you have recently first encountered.

Key tip: Learn words using content

The best way to encounter words often and learn them through context is by using content a lot. This will be covered in the “Input” section below. You can also turn texts you find into carefully structured vocabulary lessons. This is a type of lesson we cover later in the guide.

Flashcards

This section is about how we “cheat” our way into being prompted with new words more often than normally occurs our study.

Getting the large quantity of words you need to know into your long-term memory can be very difficult. For this, spaced-repetition software (SRS) is a godsend. SRS is probably your best bet for learning lots of vocabulary quickly.

SRS works by automatically spacing out your revision of words using something called the forgetting curve. You are first shown a word multiple times and asked to recall its translation. Once it deems you to have learned the word, the algorithm will then increase the interval between revisions of the word. The algorithm attempts to get you to recall a word just before you forget it. Eventually, after a lot of revisions, you will have been prompted by a word enough times it will be safely in your long-term memory.

The most common SRS software used by language learners is called Anki. We will discuss this program later on in the section on finding resources.

Key tip: Make your own flashcards

The best way to use flashcards is by creating your own. If you find vocabulary that you want to know and use sentences that you have chosen, learning them becomes far easier as you are more motivated and pay closer attention to what you are learning. Actually doing this can be time consuming, but many find the time spent building the flashcard deck useful, too. If you use Anki, the resources section discusses using it to make your own flashcards. There is a learning curve, but once you understand it you can customise your learning and create new custom cards relatively quickly and easily.

Key tip: Learn the most common words first

Words in natural language follow something called Zipf’s Law, which basically states that the most common word will occur twice as often as the next most common word, which will occur twice as often as the next most common, and so on. This means languages are heavily dominated by the most common words. Once you have learned 2000-3000 words, you have covered almost all of the words you will hear in daily conversation.

Taking advantage of this means learning the most common words first. With only a few hundred words, you will have access to all of the filler words, which make up most of spoken language. This isn’t a free shortcut however, because much of the meaning is contained in the less common words. What it will do is put you in a good position to learn these words naturally and better derive meaning from context.

When reading texts, you should also pay attention to what words you are learning. Take note of and focus on unknown words that are both simpler and seem to be more common. A large portion of the new words you encounter will only appear once, meaning there will not be repeated opportunities to help learn them. Learning these words is harder for a beginner because you are reading slowly and still have many other more common unknown words that you are encountering, so you should avoid focusing on these when there are many more common words left for you to learn first.

Key tip: Use sentences

The human brain is not good at learning without proper context. In order to build it into the language and help it be relevant to your mind, it is highly recommended to use sentences with your flashcards. Many learners use sentences to help them understand a word’s usage in context, while others simply use sentences without picking out any specific word to define and learn. Ensure you do not use sentences that are too unfamiliar in their grammatical construction or vocabulary, as this can overload your brain and cause too much struggle. The context needs to actually help with the word. More advice on using sentences is given further down.

Dictionaries

It is important to find and use a good dictionary to supplement your reading.

Use dictionaries when you encounter key unknown words that you want to know, emphasising ones that are simpler and more common. Never simply look up new words as you encounter them. Try to understand or at least cover the whole section or text first, then go back for the words crucial to your understanding.

Dictionaries are also useful for finding example sentences, which are great way of getting extra language input while providing useful context for the words you are using. You can find some great dictionaries that provide sentences perfect for learners in the section “Finding resources”.

Key tip: Do not blindly trust single-word translations

Most learning involves getting translations that translate a word from your target language to English. It is important to remember that translations are imperfect. Languages use words differently, and the kind of contexts certain words might be used in often do not overlap. There are often entire phrases that, if translated directly from English, would result in a very strange and unnatural sounding sentence.

Key tip: Don’t use dictionaries to learn words on their own

Dictionaries are a supplement, a reference to be used when you discover a particularly interesting word or something you are struggling with. Using them to select what words you learn can cause you to learn less useful words without being aware of their proper usage.

Word Lists

It can be helpful to keep list of those words you have looked up and find interesting enough to want to remember. This can serve as a useful reference, and the act of writing a list by hand can aid memorisation.

Avoid memorising by reading lists of words on a page. Word lists are useful if you really dislike flashcards or would like to review those words you looked up. Word lists should not simply be read over, but revised with one side covered to get your memory working. Remember the principle Learning needs to be difficult. If you let your brain cheat, it will.

3. Input (content)

Using more input is the single biggest positive difference you can make to improve your language learning.

It takes a LOT of time with the language to become fluent, and most of that time should be spent with natural input that is both comprehensible and interesting to you.

As a beginner, the best content for you will probably be intended for beginner-level language learners. TV series, music, movies, and real news websites are generally intended for adult native speakers, and hence probably too difficult to use effectively. We do not recommend you use them regularly, but if you’re truly starved for interesting content and want to try them, feel free to give them a go. At the end of the day, your learning is self-directed, and you should engage with what you enjoy. YouTube channels and podcasts vary widely in terms of difficulty. Try to find some level-appropriate ones.

A common method is to use resources intended for children, however the vocabulary is often not useful for an adult nor the topics very interesting.

Input supplements your acquisition of both grammar and words by helping you understand how the language is used in context. It:

  1. Introduces you to new forms and words in context in a way that is interesting. Becoming curious, searching for a word and learning its meaning is a very powerful way to learn and makes words easy to remember.
  2. Solidifies words and forms in your memory as you encounter them repeatedly.
  3. Builds an intuition for the language.

Intuition is an important part of learning. It is the subconscious knowledge that makes you so good at your native language. This is why certain things can just sound correct or incorrect without you having any explicit understanding of why.

Sometimes content will already be integrated in the course you are doing. Even if your lessons do include texts or audio, it will still be useful to find your own that interest you. More content is always good.

Principle: Use content you find interesting

As a learner, at all levels, your goal should be to find and absorb as much content as possible that is both interesting and understandable. Interesting means the content should be interesting to you. Since you are mostly or entirely self-studying, you have the luxury of tailoring your learning using content that interests you. If the content is boring, find something else. Think about things you like in your native language.

As a beginner, content that is both interesting and understandable can be hard to find, especially for people learning rare languages. You may have to compromise.

How much time should I dedicate to each of the three core resources?

There is no well-evidenced universal answer for this. Around a third of each to start with would suit anybody well, but you should do what feels right. The key is don’t spend all your time on the grammar portion. The progress feels good but you will learn faster overall with the help of input and context. Later on, you should start to get a feel of what is working for you.

The more of a thing you do, the better you will be at it, so if you choose to focus more on grammar, you’ll come out with a strong explicit understanding of the grammar but be relatively worse at using it in context. If you learn lots of words, you’ll be really great at understanding more advanced texts, but you might struggle to speak or use the grammar yourself. For those that hate grammar, you can safely reduce your time learning grammar to about 1/8th if you wanted. We don’t recommend going completely without grammar, however there are learners who do this.

Teaching Yourself

Now that you have been introduced to the three key resources plus pronunciation, we more onto more general advice about how to study.

The general pattern of your learning is this: You simply need to progress through the course given to you while ensuring you spend most of your time supplementing that material with content and vocabulary practice.

Lessons give you the grammar and other basic building blocks. Input supplements lessons by giving you even more input to help you build an intuition for the language. Flashcards or other vocabulary methods supplement the lessons and content by getting you exposed to much more words than you would have otherwise.

The three fundamental ways of apprehending something new

There are three fundamental ways you learn some aspect of your language. They are:

  1. It is explained to you directly (think being told how to conjugate a verb)
  2. You encounter it in context through reading or listening
  3. You use it in your writing or speaking.

1. Direct explanation

It is very difficult to encounter and use the aspects of language you need before they have been explained to you. For that reason, our grammar and vocabulary resources get us off the starting line by directly telling us how the language works. Simple flashcards also work this way by directly supplying the meaning of a word to you.

You generally want to only do this once before trying to learn using context. That is, as much as possible, read the explanation of a grammatical form or spend effort learning a word only once before you then rely on input to prompt you multiple times. It is completely acceptable to go back to the explanation to help you if you can’t remember something. They key idea is that you will not learn something without moving onto the second stage, so you should not go back to any exercise or explanation without first trying to learn by seeing the word or grammatical form in context.

2. Encountering in context

Information later becomes solidified in your mind as you encounter it more often using content. For that reason we need content early on, even if it is just some basic, learner-centred dialogues.

Content can also teach you absent any initial explanation. This is how you learned your native language. As adult learners, however, we find that successful learning is achieved faster if we at have at least some kind of explanation.

3. Using the language

The final way knowledge is solidified in your mind is by using it. This is an aspect we have not yet emphasised in this guide, but is important at the intermediate and advanced stages of learning.

While you may understand a word very well and somewhere in your mind understand all its uses, crossing the gap into active usage can be another hurdle to successful language learning. Eventually, you will need to practise speaking and writing your language.

Principle: Noticing

One powerful learning tool is simply noticing. That means noticing words and constructions you have had explained to you before and recalling their function and meaning while using content. Sometimes you will notice something completely new and might search it up. What will eventually teach you is the act of continuing with or re-using your content and then noticing and successfully recollecting the new aspect you just learned. To cultivate this, keep an eye out for new things as you read, don’t try to just get the idea. Cultivate a mindset of curiosity towards these new aspects of language.

Learn using your content

Your courses will provide a solid base of understanding through direct explanations, but you will learn your language when you practise using it. That means encountering forms and words in context.

In practice, this means that as you learn things in your beginner course, you will notice them appear in your content. At the same time, you will notice patterns in your content that will eventually be explained by your course. As you notice and use those things you learned by engaging with your content, gradually they will become reinforced until you have learned them completely.

Principle: The key is successful recall

The most important aspect of learning is successfully recalling and applying a word or concept in your learning. This means, when you learn a piece of grammar, you need to go to your content, use it, and engage with it, noting those concepts that you learned and extracting meaning from the content using your new knowledge. This is the foundation of spaced-repetition systems. Even stronger is productive recall, which means the requirement to generate language using words or grammatical concepts you recently learned.

When to move on from grammar lessons

Your beginner course should eventually start running out of “easy wins” with the grammar. These are very common aspects like verb conjugations and noun declensions, articles and prepositions. The more similar the language is to your native, the less time you will need to spend learning grammar. With Dutch, for example, that period of time is quite small, but you can expect to be dealing with “basic” grammar for much, much longer with Arabic or Russian. Once this core grammar is covered, you can cease to study grammar in a systematic manner.

After that point it is still recommended to continue to use your course or some other book or website as a reference of forms to take note of when you are using content. The advantage of continuing with grammar in a structured manner is that you will have a wider knowledge base that will let you recognise forms you might miss otherwise. If you have a strong dislike of grammar, you can get away with using it minimally. Some advanced language learners quickly drop any structured learning and scan resources for what interests them because they know what they need to know and how to recognise gaps in their own learning. We don’t recommend this for beginners.

If you’re eager to start, you can stop here and start studying if you like. Ultimately, perfect technique is second to just spending time with the language. If you do stop here, good luck! At some point you should find that the standard formula is no longer as effective as it used to be. At that point, it will be helpful to come back and learn the rest of the core language learning theory presented here.

If you have an interest in doing so, you are free to read on and see how your language learning might change as you start to get more comfortable in your language, as well as get some more tips for your studying.

Learning good pronunciation

Please note: This section is not yet complete

It is useful to learn good pronunciation before you begin to speak. Poor pronunciation can become ingrained and hard to fix. At the same time, we recognise that a course on how to teach yourself pronunciation is not for everybody. If this is not for you, skip this section and continue on to Study after the basic course.

The advantage of learning good pronunciation is that it is probably the easiest way to sound fluent at a upper beginner or intermediate stage, and early effort will continue to help you throughout your language endeavours. If you’re the outgoing type or are learning primarily to communicate verbally, nice, natural-sounding pronunciation is a good way to keep people happy conversing with you and get complements on your apparent skill with the language. Pronunciation is especially important for languages with very different phonology, such as Chinese.

It may take some time to train your ear. For a while, different sounds will seem the same to you. If you persevere, however, they will begin to sound different. Eventually, you will wonder how they ever sounded alike.

How to learn pronunciation

Plan out some sessions where you focus on pronunciation early on. Ideally, as soon as you first start trying to say words you should already have an idea of how to pronounce them correctly. Most courses tend to cruise past pronunciation without giving it much attention. This means your first experience building your own syllabus will probably be here. Don’t worry though, we’ll walk you through what you need.

You don’t need to learn everything about pronunciation at the start. A good understanding of each of the main sounds is sufficient to start. A lot of pronunciation skill comes later as you begin to talk more are try to bring your speech to more closely resemble that of native speakers you hear.

Use Google or search your preferred community to find a guide to pronouncing your target language. This guide will ideally go through every relevant sound.

The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of writing all the sounds of human language. Knowing the core sounds associated with your language and being familiar with their IPA symbol is very useful. You don’t have to memorise it every symbol. The key here is that you notice that the different sounds exist and are pronounced differently. The IPA just helps you conceptualise the sounds and reference them.

The additional benefit is that articles explaining phonology are made much more precise by referencing the IPA symbol for a sound. You can look up pronunciation and google the symbols to make sure you are making the right sounds. Take for example Schwa, a sound very common in English but likely absent in the language you are learning. You can play the audio to hear the sound and see where in the mouth it is articulated. Wikipedia has a vowel chart that is immensely useful for understanding how vowels are produced.

If you try to work on pronunciation, it is worth using resources like Wiktionary and the IPA reference on Wikipedia. While there is a reasonable learning hurdle to overcome, becoming familiar with the small selection of IPA symbols that are used in a language is immensely useful. For example, when that language has a spelling system that does not directly correspond to the pronunciation (the classic example being the orthography of French) the IPA can save you hours of pronunciation practice and innumerous mistakes without constantly needing audio which may or may not be supplied. All that is required is a dictionary with IPA included.

Here are some useful links for understanding the IPA:

Study after the basic course

Language learning changes once you’re done following a structured syllabus. For most people this happens around the early-intermediate level. Learning becomes more self-directed and based on your own goals.

How your study changes

We will start by comparing your new syllabus to the beginner one:

Beginner course - the grammar aspect of your learning will feature much less prominently in your study. Drilling grammar will become a useful but more niche activity employed only in specific circumstances.

Vocabulary - You may choose to emphasise vocabulary much less than you have, however it is still a great drill to do.

Input - Input now becomes the primary method of studying.

In the intermediate stages you will study primarily by seeking out content and utilising it to help you apprehend new vocabulary or grammar or work on your skills. You continue to learn by absorbing language naturally, seeking explanations/definitions when you need to and noticing forms. There is a huge amount of nuance to grammar and vocabulary usage, so the only way to properly absorb it all is with content. What content you choose to use and what you focus on improving depends on your interests and goals.

Writing and speaking will start to feature much more prominently in your study.

For this we need to expand on your toolset.

Your toolset

The intermediate language learner’s toolset is not dissimilar to that of the beginner:

  • A grammar reference - something sufficient to help explain concepts. For many people this is just Google.
  • A preferred dictionary
  • Flashcards - to help drill vocabulary and memorise forms
  • Content you find interesting
  • A conversation partner or partners

The three fundamental types of language learning activities

All activities fall into one (or more) of three categories:

  1. Meaning-focused - As large amounts of natural language are required to learn a language, the learner should be seeking out and engaging with large amounts of input. The goal is simply to expose yourself to as much of the language as possible and generally understand what is being read or heard. It will be helpful to become comfortable with some ambiguity regarding what you just read or heard.
  2. Language-focused - This is when you utilise some smaller piece of content to attempt focused improvement at some component or skill. This is concentrated study can be done in conjunction with learning a grammar concept, vocabulary, phonetics, natural phrases, advanced comprehension, or anything. A text used for language-focused learning is often more difficult than one you would use for meaning-focused learning.
  3. Fluency-focused activities - Exercises aimed at helping you improve the speed at which you can use language you already know. If you use content, you would generally use it for some specific component and focus only on that. The most typical activities of this type involve pronunciation.

How much you do of each is up to you, though the nature of meaning-focused language learning means they will likely take most of your time.

There are many new activities for you to do that fall under these categories. We will highlight two very important ones soon: conversation practice and extensive reading. You’re 90% of the way just with those two.

Practice versus drilling your language

Everything you do with your language can be either classified as drill or practice.

Drilling is the act of isolating a specific component of language and trying to improve it in isolation. Usually this is something that is too difficult to focus on when you are trying to do the whole task. Drilling can be a very effective way to fix weaknesses and improve at a faster rate. Drilling is best done with and around the use of content to help your brain connect it to the broader context. Sometimes drilling can be done in the middle of using a piece of content, after you have read it over but before you have fully understood everything.

You don’t always need to drill unfamiliar forms. Sometimes a single dictionary lookup or grammar explanation is sufficient to understand something. By noticing and recalling meaning in context you will come to learn many aspects of your target language.

Drilling grammar is best done when you encounter unfamiliar forms in content you are using. Here are some common methods:

  • Fill-the blank exercises
  • Memorise phrases in flashcards that show it in use

Drilling vocabulary is done one of two ways:

  • Word lists, covering one side at a time
  • Flashcards

Drilling vocabulary is very effective due to the enormous amount of words a learner needs to learn to become fluent. Ideally you need to drill words that are relevant to you that you have encountered in your content. Here we also need to reiterate the effectiveness of using example sentences. These provide crucial context that will help you transfer that knowledge into your repertoire.

Practice is everything else - it is using the language in an integrated fashion.

What should I study?

Two fundamental factors weigh on your choice of what to study:

  1. Your goals
  2. Your weaknesses

Your goals

Remember the principle Do things that get you closer to your goals? This means you should be regularly attempting your goal to improve at it. The best activities for study either closely simulate or completely match your goals. For example, if you are learning a language for its literature, reading a book is a perfect exercise. If your goal is to have conversations, reading can be considered a good simulation for the purposes of learning new forms or vocabulary, but you want to be focusing on listening and speaking activities.

Your weaknesses

Based on your goals, try to decide what is most holding you back. A good definition of a weakness is “anything that prevents you successfully completing your goal.” For example, if your goal is to communicate but you keep struggling to find words, vocabulary may be a key weakness.

Here is a list of things you can aim to improve. This list is not comprehensive and what is most important will depend on your target language. Use this to help you think about your weaknesses.

  • Grammar
    • Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions
    • Tense
    • Mood
    • Number
    • Gender
    • Word order
    • Suffixes
    • Other grammar (language-dependent)
  • Vocabulary
    • Words known
    • Prepositions and other particles
    • Collocations
  • Reading
    • Spelling
    • Characters known (for languages like Chinese or Japanese)
  • Listening
    • Sound perception
    • Distinguishing words
    • Speed of comprehension
  • Speaking
    • Phonetics
    • Tone
    • Intonation
    • Fluidity and pace
  • Writing
    • Spelling
    • Writing speed

If you’re stuck, it’s a good bet your vocabulary is holding you back at least somewhat. A fluent speaker of English knows over 10,000 words, and you’re probably not there yet.

Once you’ve identified a weakness, choose resources and do activities that let you improve that aspect or skill you are lacking in. You may choose podcasts because you struggle to understand spoken language, or you may pick some written content that interests you to help you learn words.

Activities

Meaning-focused activities

Extensive reading: Reading as much as possible and on a wide range of subjects. The goal is to be exposed to as much vocabulary as possible while still understanding what you read, even if not fully. This has been mentioned above as an important addition to your repertoire.

Narrow reading: Staying within a specific topic area when reading can help you encounter many of the same words over and over to improve your vocabulary retention. It can also help you target the kind of vocabulary you learn. You can achieve this by following the same topic in the news or reading about a specialist area of knowledge you already know about.

Conversation practice: Talking and listening to natives in real conversation is highly beneficial. This has also been mentioned above.

Reading while listening: Helps you get used to sounds while reading, as well as improving comprehension over simply listening.

Listening to audio: This works like extensive and narrow reading, but by listening. This can be notably harder since listening is a more difficult skill to become competent at.

Read and write: Try reading and then writing a short article about a topic. If you want to mix it up, you don’t have to read, but can instead watch or listen and write.

Language-focused activities

Intensive reading: This means carefully reading a specific text with the objective of learning a new piece of language. Your goal is to gradually understand the text by working out the meaning of the parts you do not understand at first.

Memorising sentences, dialogues, or words using flashcards or other tools: This technique is well covered under the sections on flashcards.

Writing new forms and words down: Self-explanatory. Many people find the act of writing to be helpful when memorising.

Translating between languages: If your text is dual-language, you might try translate your native into your target language, then compare your translation to the actual text.

Delayed copying: Using a rather small text (~200 words), read it first to understand it, then follow up by going through, trying to remember the first four or five words and writing them on a piece of paper without referring back to the text. You can gradually increase the number of words. This helps you hold longer and longer phrases in your head.

Spelling/writing practice: Use for languages with very different spelling or writing systems than your own. Can be easily integrated into any other writing exercise like delayed copying.

Fluency-focused activities

Listening for sounds: Focusing on sounds rather than meaning to hear how words sound in connected speech.

Shadowing: Listening to dialogues with text and trying to mimic the speakers as closely as possible. After a few repetitions you can try to speak over top of them. Helps work on intonation and pronunciation.

Repeated writing: This involves doing a piece of writing, getting it checked and corrected, looking at it carefully, putting it away, and then writing it again from memory.

Repeated speaking: Record yourself speaking a text and play it back, listen and compare to a native.

Principle: Divide study into blocks

The best way to continue to progress is to divide your time into study blocks. Study blocks generally last between 20 minutes and 1 hour and will usually deal with a single resource, such as a single text (such as an article or chapter in a book), a podcast, or a video. A single study block will have a goal or goals involving the improvement of certain skills or core components. These can be any of the 4 skills (listening, writing, reading, speaking) or most likely your vocabulary or grammar. What you do depends on the resource you have selected and your broader goals.

Key tip: Study consistently and as much as possible

There’s no bad amount of study. The more you do, the faster you will reach your goal.

Principle: Practice your language then drill your weaknesses

The most effective way to improve at your language past the beginner stage is to take a deliberate approach of seeking out your weaknesses and finding ways to improve them. That means practice the language according to your goals, learn your weak points, then drill them.

A good technique is to alternate between the two, balancing your drill time and with your practice time. How you divide your time will be up to you. Practice helps you improve your overall skill and identify weaknesses. Study allows you to isolate and fix those weaknesses. For more information, go to the section Principle elaboration: Practice your language then drill your weaknesses.

Key tip: Narrow your learning

If you have a specific context you want to be highly competent in, such as work or family, your choice of input and vocabulary should begin to differ from a more evenly-balanced approach. Narrowing your learning allows you to effectively reach a higher level much faster. Tailoring your learning to your goals is also very motivating. Start by tailoring the resources you use by using content that aligns with the kinds of contexts you need the language for. For example, if you want to learn for business purposes, interviews (podcasts or videos) of experts are where you should aim, as are articles in business publications. Your goal may emphasise certain skills, and this same principle applies. For example, if you want to be able to communicate with ordinary people in public, you will utilise audio resources and speaking practice more.

Principle: Your level +1

Remember the principle Learning needs to be difficult? Learning occurs when the brain struggles a bit before making a successful connection. When it comes to using content, the best way to ensure this happens is to choose content that is just a bit above your level.

When something is too difficult, a lack of context and meaningful connections create a barrier that results in a lot of tiring mental effort with relatively little payoff. Equally important is that the content not be too easy. When something is too easy, there is no mental challenge and you don’t learn anything.

+1 means that the content you are using is just a bit harder than you are comfortable with. It is difficult, but still comprehensible. This provides you with a challenge that vastly reduces the mental barrier to understanding. You find you learn something faster than if you sat with a single difficult aspect many times within the same piece of content. In addition, all the known content surrounding something new provides useful context that reduces the barrier to understanding.

What precisely “just above your level” means may depend on what you are aiming to study. As a general rule, between 90-98% of words should be already known to you. For listening, a clip with 100% known vocab might be +1 if you struggle with aural comprehension. For more info, check out [Principle elaboration: Your level +1](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/wiki/guide#wiki_principle_elaboration.3A_your_level.2B1)_.

The two key activities

Two activities are so important to successful language learning they need to be highlighted. If you do nothing else, you can still be very successful simply by integrating these two into your study routine.

Activity 1: Conversation practice with natives

The purpose of language is communication, so to learn the language, you need to speak it, and there is no better speaking exercise than doing so with a native in conversation. While you might find you ‘know’ some parts of a language really well, you may be surprised to find your knowledge is not as complete as you thought when it comes to producing the language.

Conversation is a great exercise because it gets your brain actively utilising the knowledge you already have, greatly improving your understanding and fluency with the language. It also exercises the skills of speaking and listening in tandem, it exposes you to native speaker content, exposes you to new forms and vocabulary, and lets you get help and receive feedback in real time. Many learners report a burst of insight that can come from beginning to speak as their target language turns from memorised rules and phrases into a living language that they can interact with. Learners also often report finding this very motivating.

If your goal is to be able to converse with people, this aspect is essential. Conversation is a resource that perfectly aligns with the skills you need to improve and the kind of grammar and vocabulary you need to be using.

Many learners emphasise beginning to speak as soon as possible, and might begin conversation practice shortly after they start learning. At this point, your vocabulary is limited to a few phrases and basic sentences, so it is hard to have conversations at such a low level. Because of this, many other learners do not bother at the start, or may do so in relatively small amounts as they find it fun or motivating. The choice is yours.

How to get conversation practice

The best way practise speaking is to find a native speaker and start a language exchange, an activity in which you each spend time practising in each other’s language. You can do this by organising with people in your real life if you have any. If you are like the majority of us and do not have natives nearby, the best option is to do an online exchange using Skype or any other internet calling service. You can find people very easily by using a community dedicated to language exchanges. The largest and most popular communities are iTalki and HelloTalk, however many are listed in the language exchange section.

There are other methods of getting practice. If you live in a big enough city, there are often meetups for language enthusiasts or more generic meetups that are often attended by expatriates and travellers. You might get lucky and find a native speaker there who is willing to let you practise if you ask them. The country associated with your language may have a community of speakers in your city. You can also pay to have a tutor in order to get conversation practice, either online or in real life if available.

Beating nerves

Starting to speak can be daunting, particularly at first, but it’s incredibly important. If you are feeling nervous or anxious about starting a language exchange, understand that most people will be very kind and accommodating. A good partner will understand your level and speak at an appropriate level for you. In return, any help they give using your language will be good practice for them. Make sure you are clear about your level and your initial difficulty will not be a problem. If you have the money, hiring a tutor can be a good way to ease yourself into it without the pressure to perform for someone else. The initial hurdle of starting to speak is the largest, especially on your first foreign language, but there is no way around it. After that, speaking becomes increasingly easier, even when first speaking any future languages you may learn.

Finding things to talk about

If you are struggling to find things to talk about, you have a few options. First is to search for conversation starters online. Otherwise, you might like to find some games that require discussion or teamwork to get you both talking. You can do this by sharing screens on Skype and playing an internet quiz game or even something like Geoguessr.

Activity 2: Extensive reading

Reading is probably the best way to continue to improve your understanding of vocabulary and grammar. There is nothing objectively wrong with listening instead, however written content has everything easily accessible to be referenced, returned to, and looked up. It is also better in terms of sheer quantity of content available to learners, meaning there are more things that interest you available in the written form. Reading and listening are simply different ways of accessing the core components (vocabulary and grammar), which remain largely unchanged between the two content types. You won’t improve your ability to distinguish sounds in speech, but you can work on that separately.

The key to extensive reading is that you read widely and a lot. Use the suggestions from the resources section to find some good tools and content to read.

Find a book

The most common way learners tend to get lots of language exposure is by finding a book they enjoy reading. Graded readers, which are tailored to your level, are ideal. However, learners often find books for teens or even pre-teens that they enjoy enough to read. If the book is a translation of one you have already read in your native language, that will help you read a more difficult book without losing track of what is happening. Harry Potter is one of the most re-read books by learners.

Advice on studying

Approaching a resource systematically

Trying to access an entire text at once is usually too difficult. The best approach is usually chunk it up into manageable activities so that nothing is too difficult. It’s impossible to remember the meaning of all new words and forms as well as comprehend the meaning of entire sentences and how they flow together to make a broader point on your first read through. While using some content to learn off of, you will likely read or listen to the whole thing multiple times. This number can be has high as ten times. Reading a text multiple times is a powerful way of learning that gives you that essential repetition to ensure you remember what you learn. In each reading you will read more carefully and try to gain new insight. Here is a good order:

  1. Skim reading for broader context - lets you derive meaning from context more easily
  2. Brief reading - read without looking anything up, try to guess more meaning
  3. Deeper reading - read again, getting definitions for key words to let you understand the text
    Now you’ll have a good idea of what words/forms you are struggling with. From that point, you can decide what kind of exercise you want to use it for. If you decide to use it for intensive reading:
  4. Another deeper reading - this time, focusing on those bits that are new to you.
  5. As many repeat readings as necessary, each time focusing on a different aspect.

At the end you can make a final pass, using all the new knowledge you have just gained to understand the text much better. If by the end you can comfortably understand the content, congratulations! You are now measurably better at your target language

There are lots of other ways you might like to access it. Here are some more examples for step 4 onwards for an audio dialogue designed for learners with accompanying transcript. Many other resources like videos and podcasts can be used in a similar way. You could do all of these, or just a few. Note that the activities require better understanding as you go down.

  • Practise listening, try to understand how sounds create words and how words flow together in practice.
  • Drill some key vocabulary with flashcards
  • Listen to the text once you are more familiar with if it was too difficult to comprehend via audio earlier on
  • Produce a verbal or written summary of the resource
  • Read the text aloud focusing on speed and fluidity
  • Record own version of the dialogue and compare it to the pronunciation of the characters, send it to a native to be corrected.
  • Send the written summary to a native to be corrected
  • Discuss the dialogue with a tutor.

Key tip: Make sure you get some variety

Try to do study involving at least a little bit of each of the four skills. A bit of everything will allow each skill to build on the other. For example, reading a lot will help your speaking, but even speaking every now and then will aid your reading by making words and concepts more salient in your mind.

Principles of studying

Here are some more helpful principles to guide your learning.

Principle: Get feedback on your language ability

A good way to catch errors is to find ways to get feedback on any mistakes you are making. While your language should get better with time on its own, it can be helpful to catch some mistakes you are repeatedly producing so that they don’t become a permanent feature of your speech or writing. To do this, asking for feedback from your tutor or language partner can help. You can also try your hand at writing and sending it to natives to be corrected. The communities section lists several sites that have this functionality.

Principle: 80% of your results come from 20% of your study

Otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, this principle is applied to basically every field out there and has its origins in management theory.

This principle is not a fundamental law, but the observation that in some domains, the fastest progress can be made by focusing on a certain subset of issues that are having the largest impact.

Applying it to language learning, the principle states that for any domain of your target language, fixing the biggest 20% of your issues will achieve 80% of the impact you can get in that domain. Similarly, 20% of your study time is achieving 80% of your results. Some activities you are doing are probably having a minimal impact, while some smaller gaps in your knowledge are probably having an outsized impact on your ability to communicate. Think about what activities seem to giving you the biggest improvements and re-assess your study routine.

Principle: Learn things that are personally relevant to you

Acquisition seems to happen more easily once your mind is primed to see something as “important”. The best way to learn something is when there is as little resistance as possible, meaning your subconscious is prepped to acquire it based on relevance and usefulness to you. The mere act of “wanting” to know something seems to help. You will also be more motivated to learn them, and have less trouble spending the mental effort required.

If you want cultivate this effect, approach unfamiliar words and forms with a sense of curiosity. Prime your mind genuinely trying to figure out how a word or form affects the meaning of the sentence before you look it up. It also helps if you encounter words multiple times, giving the word a sense of familiarity and importance. You will find it much easier to remember things your subconscious has learned are important. This is why reading widely for enjoyment can be useful.

Principle: Context helps you learn

When using content, the context you encounter a new word or concept in can provide a useful hint as to its meaning. The situation, surrounding words, topic, and type of resource your using all provide hints you can use that let you guess at the meaning of something. Even if you’re not sure, encountering something in context enough will gradually help you understand. At all times avoid trying to learn new words or forms in isolation. Learn words and grammar from larger texts and use sentences in your flashcards.

Principle: Repetition

One important aspect of apprehending something is repetition, which means encountering it often enough until the mental effort required to understand it is minimal. Just learning a new word or concept once and moving on isn’t necessarily enough - you need to encounter it multiple times to let it gradually solidify in your mind. Once you know something easily you can focus on other aspects that are more unfamiliar, and hence gradually improve your understanding of the language. Keep this in mind next time you see a word you thought you knew and get frustrated. You will require a lot of repetition before it truly sticks. Forgetting “known” words is extremely common.

Languages naturally repeat words and forms all the time, so you will still continue to get repetition by using your language. However, sometimes you won’t see certain words and forms for a while and will forget them.

There are many ways to get repetition. Flashcards do so automatically. You can also get repetition by reading the same piece of content multiple times. Second, third, and even fourth and fifth passes depending on how challenging a text is solidify aspects of the text that once required careful concentration. It is useful to review activities, lessons, or content you covered a few days or weeks ago. This guarantees you are encountering the same forms and words again.

Principle: Top-down and bottom-up processing

When trying to understand something, the human brain uses two broad processes: top-down and bottom-up.

Top-down processing involves using context to make deductions about what some content is about.

Bottom-up processing involves understanding the pieces to build up to a coherent whole.

Using both simultaneously is what lets you learn new words and constructions from context. For example: while watching a video you encounter a new word. You might note that the speaker appears to be indicating an apple in their hand, or perhaps the scene is shot in an apple orchard and you hear the word often. In this case, top-down processing involves picking up that the word means “apple” naturally. The lack of mental effort required comes from your already-gained knowledge about the broader context. In practice, many clues contribute to helping you understand numerous aspects of language. Simply expecting a type of response from a character or person activates that schema in your mind, so you are prepared to understand what they say along those lines anyway, even if the grammatical form or sentence structure is unfamiliar to you.

Bottom-up processing is any word or form you already know that helps you understand the sentence. Pausing a video to try recall the function of a form you just heard is a good example of bottom-up processing being practised and applied to learn effectively.

When engaging with content, both processes work in tandem to help you apprehend meaning in real time. Knowing this lets you take advantage of it. Before you start something, make sure you understand the context and have formed expectations surrounding what the characters are going to do or say. One common method of doing this is beginning a text by skim reading, or starting a TV episode with a plot summary.

Key tip: Beware of fossilisation

This is the process in which the learner acquires a specific form or way of speaking that is not native-like, and this mistake becomes stuck in the learners speech. This is different from ordinary mistakes that a learner makes, which can be corrected and will often fix themselves. Fossilised mistakes are often resistant to correction and the learners efforts to change. Fossilised mistakes arise when a learner repeatedly (and successfully, in terms of being understood) uses a certain form without being made aware that it is not native-like, to the point of hearing and using it so often it sounds natural to them. The best way to counter this is to avoid it in the first place by being constantly aware of how things are formed around you, and trying to shift your speech more closely resemble how natives speak.

Principle: Passive and active learning

Passive learning is allowing content to come to you in a passive way, without actively trying to decode meaning. For example, relaxing and listening to the radio, or watching a TV show.

Active learning is paying focused attention to forms you don’t know and attempting to improve. If you are listening, you may be pausing and repeating until you can hear what was said and/or looking up and practicing unknown vocabulary beforehand.

While passive learning is generally much more enjoyable, active learning is more efficient in terms of progress per hour spent. Do not make the mistake of thinking just being near the language will make you absorb it naturally. 20 minutes of active learning will get you further than 1 hour of passive learning.

Principle: Incorporate your learning into your life

It’s helpful to think of learning language as a process, as something you need to incorporate as a part of your life rather than something to set time for like a school subject. Understand that, and you can let it become a small part of you and how you think and structure your life.

To do this, it is helpful to find media you enjoy in your target language. This can mean podcasts, youtubers, books, etc. The more content you can find that you like, the better. Another minor intervention you can make are switching the languages of various devices you use.

Find ways to learn on the go

If you’re a person who generally has little time to sit at a desk and study (or even if you’re not), it can be very helpful to use the small bits of downtime throughout your day for study. Here are a few ideas:

  • Get a penpal on a chat app such as HelloTalk. Use any downtime to read and reply to messages.
  • Use digital flashcards on your phone. Use any spare moment you have to practise them - on the bus, in a queue, walking between class, etc.
  • Listen to podcasts while walking or driving, or during any other time you’d otherwise not have to carefully focus. The largest benefit of podcasts is that you can use them even when doing other tasks, such as cooking or cleaning.
  • Carry a book with you.

Further advice on flashcards

Flashcards get their own section because they can be such a powerful tool, useful for more than just learning words.

Using pictures instead of words

Many people advocate using pictures instead of words to learn. The theory goes that using words interferes with the learning process by anchoring the learner to her native language. Recall that earlier we mentioned that translations should be considered approximations of the true word only. If understood in this context, there is unlikely to be any significant issue caused by using words instead of pictures. In addition, the kinds of words that lend themselves to using pictures such as concrete nouns rarely overlap with different words in a way that is different between languages. Overall, if you like pictures, use them, but there is nothing wrong with using words.

Flashcards and phrases for input

Flashcards are a tool can serve as an effective method of gaining useful input and engaging in productive recall. When using flashcards for input, generally you will choose a phrase you want to have easy mental access to. This is usually because it can serve as a kind of mental “island” to reduce cognitive load when speaking or because it sheds light upon the usage of a grammatical construct. It is common and highly recommended to use example phrases for all your flashcards, but you can also use pure phrases without highlighting any particular word to learn too. Trying to construct and understand the full sentence in your mind helps give your brain a more intuitive feel for how the language works. These phrases can function as a kind of template in which you swap out words or grammatical markers as necessary. We recommend making the phrases personally relevant and interesting to you, since you’re going to be finding them anyway. These can also serve a dual purpose by helping you learn and drill vocabulary in context.

It is not recommended to build your own phrases unless you are sure it is native-like (i.e. you have made it with a native teacher). Because of that, you will have to use services that provide sentences. If you are lucky, the language you are learning has a good dictionary that also provides phrases (such as Spanishdict for Spanish learners), otherwise you will need to use another service. Sometimes Wiktionary has them, and is a good service that has audio, too.

Anki also provides pre-made decks which often have sentences. These can work too if you like them and the sentences are relevant and at your level. They can also save you time if you find yourself studying on the move a lot but don’t have the time to sit at a desk and build your own deck.

Use flashcards both productively and receptively

This means you should set your flashcards to show both sides first, meaning sometimes it will show your target language first and ask you to try to understand it (you don’t need to translate it in your mind), and sometimes it will show you the English and ask you to recall the correct target language construction.

Recalling the sentences for productive purposes (i.e. reading it in English and trying to recall the sentence correctly in your target language) is a powerful tool. It is also much harder, so difficulty-wise your sentences should be geared towards that level. This will not make you less efficient, you will just be much quicker when you get the target-language-first side of the card. Recalling and understanding quickly is also a skill you’ll need.

If you want you can use flashcards that are target-language-first only. You will still learn. Using cards productively (English first) just helps you better remember by engaging your brain and gives you practice in productive recall, lowering the barrier to beginning speaking.

Do not learn sentences or words that are too far above your level

Recall the concept of “chunks” mentioned in the first section on language learning principles? As a new learner, you don’t have most of these chunks, but sentences (and reading) help to create them. Because building new chunks takes so much focused effort, it is best to minimise the number of new chunks in each flashcard sentence. Words should also be as relevant as possible to you personally to maximise the assistance already-known connections can give you. At most one unfamiliar grammatical concept and at most two new words is plenty. It is perfectly fine only to have one new thing in the sentence.

Learning a sentence chock full of new grammatical constructions and words might seem like a really efficient way of learning, but there will be no familiar connections or context to aid understanding. Recollection will be particularly hard, akin to recalling random letters in order.

The only exceptions are for the very beginning and when learning survival phrases. Even simple constructions may be completely novel to you, but learning short, useful phrases early is a great way to absorb the language. At the start your sentences will need to be very simple, such as “where is the toilet?”, or “how are you?”.

Further advice on learning grammar

How important are grammar lessons?

The opinions of the community vary greatly on the efficacy of using grammar instruction. Some consider it a needless distraction, useful only at the very beginning, while others consider it essential, and continue to study it well into the intermediate stages. Most people sit somewhere in-between. As a rule of thumb, you can get away with studying grammar less and less as you progress, but it will be helpful to occasionally or even continually refer to grammar explanations when you notice something and you are not sure why it is formed that way.

Many learners approach grammar by simply reading about the grammar before going on to texts and/or flashcard sentences and relying on them to remind and solidify their usage. This doesn’t imply an easy way out, since focused attention needs to be given to new forms so your brain notices them. Ideally, your resource will provide content related to the lesson.

If you want to minimise the usage of grammar instruction, good technique is required. You will need to make sure you are noticing grammatical form and incorporating native-like elements into your speech and writing. This is why most people fall somewhere in the middle.

Further advice on learning vocabulary

Other than by flashcards and dictionary lookups, the way you learn words is by encountering them naturally and deriving meaning through context and repetition, as you have done with your native language. This takes a lot of input and can sometimes be imperceptible, but is highly effective. Any advanced learner will tell you a large portion of the words they know came to them this way.

Mnemonics

Mnemonics are a general tool that turn vocabulary into easy-to-recall mental images that serve to help you remember a word. Mnemonics can be very useful as a way to learn vocabulary quickly, however the word won’t be truly learned until you don’t actually need the mnemonic and can use and understand the word automatically. Mnemonics are a useful tool to improve your recall, not an easy way out of having to absorb the language.

The most common method is the keyword method. This links the word you want to learn to a similar-sounding word in your native language. For example: Imagine you want to learn the French word for “car”, which is “voiture”. You might note that the word “voiture” sounds like “vulture” in English. You can mentally link the two by imagining a car with a vulture on top of it, or if you are very imaginative, imagine someone built a car shaped like a vulture. The stronger the mental image, the better. Now when you encounter either word and want to translate it, the imagine of the vulture-car will appear and remind you of the meaning or translation.

Further details are too much for a guide such as this, so we will provide you with some links to learn more on your own if you are interested.

Guessing words

There are a few techniques that can help you understand words and remember them more easily.

One way is through associations to similar words you already know. Many words are derived from others, and form a grouping of related words. For example, understanding the English root mech- can help you remember or derive the meaning of many words, such as ‘mechanic’, ‘mechanical’, and ‘mechanised’. There are also more distant relations that can help give some indication, such as ‘mechanism’ Some associations can be more abstract, for example the word ‘jump’ and ‘jump-start’. You can also combine this technique with mnemonics, for example imagining a jumping car for the word ‘jump-start’.

Another you can use for languages related to ones you already speak is spotting similarities between words. For example, the English word ‘citizen’ and French word ‘citoyen’ are related, and the similarities are clearly visible.

Multi-word phrases

Many words have meanings that are closely tied to the meaning of words next to them, and the meaning of the whole may have little relation to their meaning when taken in isolation. Some examples in English are phrases such as “of course”, “at all”, “for instance”. Think of these as discrete bits of vocabulary to be learned together, in which constituent words are simply aides to help you form associations. It is important to also learn these kinds of phrases in your study. Often this is done with flashcards. You can help your learning by thinking about how the words are associated.

Focus on words that don’t directly translate

Most words in the language will have a relatively straightforward equivalent, particularly if you are learning a language that is closely related to English. For the most part, the words “dog”, “shoot”, and “tree” all have a simple translation you can memorise. Regardless of the language, however, there will always be words that’s don’t quite fit with how you think of them in English. Among these words will be words that have a significantly expanded range of uses compared to the direct English translation. Particularly important is to carefully learn the most common of these. Take, for example, the Spanish words “poner” and “seguir”, “put” and “follow”, respectively. Both of these words are used in a variety of phrases where a native English speaker might not expect them to be, such as “ponerse de pie”, which simply means “stand up”. Phrases using these words will sound awkward or nonsensical when translated word-for-word. Adding the range of uses of these most common special words to your repertoire is a good way of avoiding common learner mistakes and making your speech sound more natural. In this case, just learning that “poner” means “put” would be like teaching an English learner that the word “take” means to get an object from somewhere, leading to confusion when you later ask them if they want to “take the bus”, “take 5”, or “take a shower”.

On the other hand, there are also common English words whose translations the language you are learning will shy away from. These are much harder to spot. The best you can do is watch for phrases where you think “I’d have translated that differently”.

Use logical connections to help you learn

Words are often comprised of smaller root words and grammatical particles that can help you understand their meaning. Take the English word “destruction”. It has the prefix “de-“, the noun “structure”, and the suffix “-tion”. The meaning of this word might be easy to guess as a native, but it wouldn’t be so easy if you weren’t familiar with its parts. Being familiar with the constituent parts of a word make learning its meaning easier.

Some root words have derivations that may not be immediately obvious. For example, the English root “spir” is the link between the words “inspire” “respire”, and “spirit.”

Take advantage of these connections by trying to spot them where possible. They will aid your learning by drawing on logical connections between linked concepts. You should also try to avoid learning large words if you don’t know anything about their constituents.

Further advice on using content

Working with content that is very difficult

If a resource is notably above your level, you will need to approach it systematically. This technique is highly effective, but is also time-consuming and cannot be used with overly long texts. The key advantage is that it is much more efficient than taking it sentence by sentence.

Do try to study the text sentence-by-sentence. It is simply too hard to hold the meaning of the text together with the new words and forms in your head and have any of it reliably stick.

Instead, you need to make multiple passes, each time focusing on the parts that are easiest to comprehend. Each pass is aimed at achieving a deeper level of understanding.

To do this, read text several times in an ordered process.

  1. Skim read: First, skim-read the text, seeking out the key words in order to understand the broader context and meaning of the text. The first pass will never involve looking up words, as it will be too hard to hold their meaning in your head while also trying to understand the text as a whole.
  2. Fast read: Try to read the whole text again quickly. Try to understand more of the meaning, again only focusing on understanding. Make sure you read every sentence even if you don’t know what it means. Think about what you expect to happen or be covered based on this.
    Now decide on a goal for the text. Are you learning it for new words, word usage, useful phrases, grammar, collocations, or something else? You don’t have to learn everything in the text perfectly. You can only choose to learn one thing if you like.
    The next steps assume you are learning vocabulary, but the technique applies to other aspects.
  3. Careful read: During the third reading you will try to guess the meaning of then look up only the most important key words for understanding the text. The key is still to focus on meaning first and foremost.
    If you are encountering too many unknown words, you might make a word list to help reduce the mental burden. Doing so means you probably won’t learn most of those words this time round, but you’ll probably learn them faster than if you tried to drill them all without more context now.
  4. Deeper reading: For as many more passes as you need (1-6), you will go over sentences again and look up words or research grammar as necessary to help you understand the text. You might choose to go through more slowly, collecting a word list for new words and trying to build a fairly good understanding of the meaning of the sentences. You might also look into key words in more depth with your dictionary, or spend some time making a mnemonic or flashcards.
  5. Final reading: It is helpful at the end to quickly read your text once more, using everything you just learned.

Remember: you do not have to learn every word or piece of grammar. As long as you have understood the meaning of the text, you can use that knowledge to help you learn as much or as little as you want.

If your content is too long or hard to do this effectively, it is simply too far above your level. Save a bookmark and re-visit it in 6 months.

Several principles are engaged:

Top-down vs bottom-up processing: Let your mind use broader context to fill in gaps and help you learn. Trying to understand the context and build expectations about the text primes you to understand words along these lines even when you don’t fully know them.

Repetition: Multiple passes = multiple chances for your brain to realise something is important and the content to stick in your head.

Your level +1: By focusing on the easiest parts of a text with multiple passes, you are essentially distilling the text down to a level that is just above your own.

The remaining principles + some useful tips

What follows is advice on several aspects of language learning you should know. These are things that successful language learners all generally do.

Principle: Language learning has natural plateaus

People inevitably encounter certain plateaus during their learning. It happens to everyone. This is a natural part of learning a language, and has more to do with how language learning works than anything to do with you. Read our FAQ entry here for more info.

Principle: Languages are learned with small steps that add up over time

It helps a lot of your interaction with the language is consistent. Try not to take long breaks from learning. Do at least a little bit every day. Too tired? Just do five minutes. Those five minutes now keep you in the habit of doing something every day, and keep the language active in your mind. Once you’ve started, it should be easier to go longer than five minutes. Try to do that, but if you can’t, you don’t have to feel guilty - you kept to your minimum.

You should also avoid “cramming”, that is large blocks of study followed (or preceded) by large periods without any study. Lots of small study periods interspersed throughout the day are more effective than one large block of study. One hour every day is far better than seven hours on Saturday and none during the rest of the week.

A big advantage of being self-taught is that nobody is monitoring or timing your language study. The disadvantage is that nobody is monitoring or timing your language study. Don’t cheat yourself by skipping a day when you know you should be practising.

Principle: Don’t try to learn too much at the same time

Which ordering of letters do you think is easier to memorise: “ohezro esn rinyg bivt”, or “snoozing by the river”? You would probably find the latter much easier to remember, though both contain the exact same letters. This is because the phrase already has meaning to you, and you are already familiar with the constituent words. You don’t need to memorise the letters because you’ve already memorised the order for each word.

This idea of already-learned aspects of language is a concept we will refer to as “chunks” (brought into the public consciousness by Barbara Oakley, who posted a good overview of the idea here) that helps explain a lot of why we find learning certain things difficult.

The known aspects of language constitute chunks which don’t require effort for you to comprehend or use. These known chunks are an aide that will help teach you how the new word or piece of grammar is used and understand the context surrounding it.

It is far easier to learn something new when other aspects you are presented with at the same time are already easily understandable. For example, learning the meaning and usage of a new word in an example sentence will be much easier if you already know all the other words, just like how it is much easier to remember all those letters once they are structured into words. Grammar will be more easy to memorise if one concept is presented to you at a time using words you already know.

Building new chunks is difficult and takes focused effort. The core idea of this principle is that it is almost impossible to learn a lot of new chunks of language at once. Learning using a text or example sentences chock full of new grammatical constructions and words might seem like a really efficient way of learning, but there will be no familiar connections or context to aid understanding, and your learning will actually be slower. Recollection will be particularly hard, akin to recalling random letters in order. Focusing on learning a single aspect at a time allows you to build new chunks easily while minimising the chance of forgetting. The additional context provided by known chunks will assist you in understanding the new part. If you already have an idea of what is happening in a new text, it will be much easier to understand and learn a new word when it comes up.

This principle does not mean “don’t try to learn quickly”, it means that when you learn a new word or grammatical construction, you will learn it much faster if it is presented to you in the context of other chunks of language that are already familiar to you. If you are learning something difficult, learn that difficult thing in context of already known things and rely on that context and knowledge to help you learn. The texts you use to learn should already be mostly comprehensible. Learning words or grammar is best done with understandable context, either in text or with example sentences for your flashcards.

Principle: Learning with your subconscious

Even though we might tell ourselves something is important to remember, it is primarily subconscious processes that mark something as important and enable us to remember something. Learning something that has no obvious relevance to your life, you haven’t needed to use, and has no relation to anything else you know can be hard. First learning something completely new constitutes a mental “hurdle”. That is, learning basically requires pure memorisation. This type of memorisation is very, very difficult to do relative to other methods. There is a high degree of mental “resistance” - meaning it seems hard to get it to stick in your memory.

As much as possible, follow the principles regarding memorisation. Here are some examples:

Learn things that are personally relevant to you - take an approach of being curious towards new forms or words you encounter.

Context helps you learn - learn things in context with the language, rather than in isolated segments.

Logical connections help you learn - take advantage of logical connections to already known words.

This is the end of the guide. If you have gotten here by reading the whole thing, please take a moment to send me some feedback. I am always trying to improve and your input is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading!

Appendix 1: Full list of principles

Appendix 2: Elaboration

What’s wrong with learning two languages at once

Generally it is advised to actively learn one language at a time, as learning another takes time away from the first. If you want to actively learn more than one language, be sure you have the time to dedicate to both.

You can’t learn like a child

A common misconception is that because children learn a language without much formal study of grammar, that an adult needn’t do so either. There is evidence to suggest children have some inherent advantages learning phonology at very young ages, and that can make it hard for adults to achieve completely native-like speech. Beyond that, however, the true advantage to being a child is that they have 18 years of life in complete immersion with no adult responsibilities. It is also important to remember that while children don’t usually explicitly study grammar, they do spend a an enormous amount of time in school practicing improving their language skills through reading and writing and having their output critiqued. The way you can best emulate the situation of children is by finding ways to immerse yourself as much as you practically can. Beyond that, however, the fact that children do comparatively little active study of grammar and vocabulary compared to a language learner does not mean that you are better off doing the same. Active study will enable you to reach a higher ability faster. This video by Tom Scott provides a great overview.

Why you shouldn’t learn languages like you did in school

Language learning in school suffers from four main problems that make it very inefficient:

  1. They focus far too much on grammar and rote learning. The majority of successful language learners will tell you to focus on speaking and reading more, as this time will actually help you learn the grammar better and faster than doing exercises. If you like grammar, you are free to focus heavily on it, though a lot of people do not. While early instruction helps, it is completely possible to absorb grammar naturally.
  2. They are not timed well. Learning languages takes a lot of time and practice, and require active usage and integration into your life in order to improve at a decent speed. The school format of spending a limited and segmented time with a subject while being completely isolated from it at other times is inefficient for languages.
  3. They teach to a test. Your learning is determined by your own goals. Build your skills towards fulfilling that goal. Assess your own progress by thinking about how much closer you are to achieving it. Skills with rote grammar exercises help you succeed in tests - they don’t help in the real world.
  4. They can be overly structured. If you only study a topic for a few lessons then move on without a chance to continue to use and practise your new knowledge, you will find yourself gradually forgetting it all. Languages are best learned by actively using them, not segmenting them into a series of topics that need to be rote learned.

Principle elaboration: Practice your language then drill your weaknesses

Recall earlier we discussed the need to focus on activities closely associated with your goal, such as practising speaking when your goal involves spoken communication. We already covered drill, the act of deliberately practicing your weaknesses, and direct practice, the act of practicing the thing you want to be good at as directly as possible.

Drilling reduces your cognitive load and lets you focus improving on a single thing or subset of the full task. Any activity can be a drill if you are trying to improve without doing the thing that is your real goal. You’ve probably noticed you’ve already drilled a lot by learning grammar in your beginner course. We’re not teaching you a new skill, just labelling something you already do.

With this in mind we have one more concept for you:

Transfer

Transfer is simply the concept describing how knowledge and skill at one task applies to novel situations and related tasks. For us language learners, that means how our study of the components of a language translate into the ability to speak or do whatever our goal is. Research demonstrates that transfer is surprisingly difficult, and does not happen automatically. Tests of economic reasoning done on a group of college economics majors and other students showed a surprising lack of a difference between the scores of the two groups (source). The students probably learned skills such as taking derivatives and defining GDP, and this came at the expense of ignoring the kind of economics knowledge people need in the real world. The same can happen to you if you spend your time learning tables of conjugations and memorising particles. This knowledge will not easily turn into skills you can apply to achieve your goals.

This means we cannot rely on practicing some component of a language and hoping we’ll be able do some related task when the time comes. Getting good at reading won’t translate into fluid conversation without practice. That is why we need to be direct in our practice.

How do we apply this?

The reason these distinctions are useful is because learners often substitute direct practice with a related task when they shouldn’t. Those who want to communicate will pass time drilling grammar, vocabulary, or reading news. All of these tasks have their place and are important, but real-world skill at language (or any task) is a complex melding of its constituent skills that involves novel scenarios and unpredictability that drills can struggle to simulate.

Achieving your goals with the language is going to require both practicing doing things that get you closer to your goals and studying specific aspects of the language that will help you get better at your goal faster.

How much of each?

Both will help you improve, but each has strengths and weaknesses that play off each other. It is useful to have a balance between the two. Excessive study without practice will not translate into skills that help you achieve your goals, and learning may become stale or you could lose track of what direction your learning is headed. Excessive practice without study could cause you to develop fossilised (hard to fix) errors (most often occurs if you are speaking a lot) or your rate of improvement could stagnate.

So when should you drill and when should you engage with your goal directly? The most effective strategy is to alternate between the two. Engaging with your goal directly will reveal your weaknesses. You can follow up by finding ways to drill them. Once you have drilled some aspect, you go back to your goal and find ways to integrate what you’ve learned. The spacing can be as close or as separate as you desire.

Direct practice helps you learn and refine the necessary skills while helping you identify specific weaknesses that are holding back your performance. Take these weaknesses and find way to drill them. Drill doesn’t have to be the simple activity you are likely thinking of. In fact, some drills are far superior than others. Ones that more closely simulate the skills you are looking to improve are best. This is why completing grammar drills that test you on choosing the correct form can be so poor. You’ll get very good at doing tests, but what portion of that will easily transfer to your speaking? Not so much. Instead, your grammar practice needs to more closely simulate what you will encounter in your real life. That is another reason why grammar should be learned in context. Engaging with grammar in texts far more closely simulates the goals of 99.9% of learners.

Why should I read if my goal is conversation?

In this guide we discuss the importance of engaging with lots of content, often written. Why then should you engage with written content if your goal is to speak? Reading is a good way to encounter new vocabulary or grammar and focus on learning it. In addition, the written form is a good simulation of the spoken language, containing most of the same grammar and vocabulary. We can’t always engage directly with our goal - perhaps there are no speakers around. To continue to improve it is helpful to try to simulate our goals as closely as possible.

Principle elaboration: Your level +1

As we noted, the definition of +1 depends on what you are doing with the content. Here are some examples to help you think about it.

For example: If your listening level is comparatively low, an audio dialogue with all known words might still present a challenge. Utilising this principle, you would use this resource focusing only on your ability to hear different words. You may also want to do first to a pass over a text version of the audio so you know what to expect. Be careful though, you don’t want to listen simply relying on having near-memorised the text. If you are trying to practice listening, there needs to be a mental struggle followed by successful apprehension mentioned earlier to hear the sounds and successfully make out the words. Otherwise, while you might have completed an alright study session, you didn’t move towards your goal of listening better.

If you want to finish a long text, you are reading without a dictionary, or you just want expose yourself to as much of the language as possible without stopping to look up words, ~98% known words is closer the ideal amount. If you are prepared for a careful study session and want to make multiple passes over the same text, 90% is acceptable.

In addition, real word factors such as resource availability often result in the learner having to use resources that are slightly too difficult. This is okay, but if you understand less than 80% of the vocabulary, you should strongly consider abandoning that resource regardless.

Appendix 3: About Languages

This section provides links and information on understanding how languages work. Understanding languages is a useful skill because it will allow you to recognise patterns and break down the various elements of the language you are learning to understand how meaning is constructed. As you are learning, noticing these aspects will help you build your skills faster. For example, understanding the various elements of how our mouth makes sound will help you more closely imitate the sounds of the language you are learning.

This is basically the study of linguistics. It is not essential for language learners, but highly useful for serious ones.

This playlist is one of the best out there, and much of the below points will link to videos in this playlist. It is made for people who make conlangs (constructed languages), however the information is the same.

Grammar

There is an enormous amount of information on different grammatical concepts, so covering them all is impossible.

Languages can differ in surprising ways

There are a few linguistic insights that all new language learners eventually obtain that are useful to know. If you are a new language learner, or your only experience is a few years in highschool, you may not be aware that your mind is loaded with assumptions about how language should be used that simply don’t hold true in other languages. These differences catch learners out, so if you know to look out for them now, you can focus on them as you encounter them.

  • Word order. English is structured in the order subject, object, verb. There are many different ways to order your thoughts, ranging from simple changes to the completely unintuitive (for you). Even languages with a similar word order to English will occasionally throw you for a loop by placing certain structures in the inverse positions. Remember that in addition to the three basics, we have adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and indirect objects, all of which might go somewhere different. In languages with case systems, the word order might not matter, or it may matter only in certain contexts with certain constructions. Pay attention to how words are ordered and be ready to throw out your intuitions about how you should structure your thoughts when spoken aloud.
  • Words and their translations do not always align exactly with how we use them in English. This means that what may be one word in English might be two in another language, or vise versa. This is particularly common with words like “by”, “of”, and “for”. Just look at the 11 definitions of “of” according to English Wiktionary. There is no law that says all of these definitions should apply to the closest analogue in another language, and they rarely do.