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The Method

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How to Learn a Language: An Overview

Language learning is complex; it’s one of the reasons I love it so much.   You’re dealing with four separate, yet linked skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking – which are in turn linked to thousands of separate, yet linked facts – grammar rules, vocabulary words, pronunciation rules, etc.  Figuring out how to work on each of these aspects individually and as a whole has been a hobby and passion of mine for the last nine years.  While a detailed discussion of each aspect of this method is quite a bit of material (hence the forthcoming book!), this should get you well on your way.

Start with Pronunciation

The greatest challenge in learning a foreign language is the challenge of memory. With thousands of words and grammar rules to remember, you need all the help you can get to retain what you learn. This is where an early focus on pronunciation comes in: if you look into the science of memory, you’ll discover that it’s much harder to remember words you can’t pronounce well. And one of the reasons that foreign languages can be tricky is that they’re full of hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-memorize words. You can eliminate that challenge by training your ears from the very beginning. You’ll also get a number of side-benefits: better listening comprehension, better speech, faster vocabulary acquisition, and native speakers who will continue to speak to you in their language instead of switching to English.

So how do you do this? Learning accurate pronunciation takes two main steps: first, you’ll need to train your ears to hear the new sounds of your target language, and second, you’ll need to train your mouth to pronounce them. For the first step, I’m in the process of Kickstarting a set of apps that will do the work for you (and designing a free guide to developing those apps yourself for any languages I’m not covering). For the second step – training your mouth – I’ve released a series of videos and flashcard decks to help teach you the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). With its help, you can learn how pronunciation works in your mouth (in English), and apply those ideas to your target language.

No Translations

The moment you cut English completely out of your language studies is the moment you begin to think in your target language.  You can do this from the very first day.  Starting with pictures and graduating to simple definitions and fill-in-the-blank flash cards (see below), you can teach yourself the vocabulary and grammar of a language without the added mental step of translating back and forth from English, and actually build fluency instead of translation ability.

Use Anki for Vocabulary and Grammar

Anki is a free software program that relies on more than a century of research proving that studying a concept in intervals (For example, only on days 1, 4, 10, 20, 35, 60, etc.) is much more effective than studying all at once.  Anki automates these intervals, showing you facts at the optimal times to push them deeper and deeper into your long-term memory in the least amount of time possible.  It’s a shortcut to memorization that gives you total control of what ends up in your long-term memory, and it is so efficient that the you will be able to memorize hundreds of flashcards a week in 30-40 minutes a day.

Choose your Vocabulary Efficiently

Computational linguistics has given us new tools to study languages, and what we’ve found is that learning the first thousand most frequent words in a language will enable you to read 70% of every text you’ll ever encounter, but learning the next thousand will only give you 10% more (and the next thousand, 4%).  Use this to your advantage!  Learn the first one or two thousand most common words, and then customize to your own needs.  Why learn academic language if you just want to travel?  Why learn business language if you just want to read academic papers?  Choosing your vocabulary to suit your needs makes your study time much more efficient. So what does this look like in a new language?

Stage 1: Learn the correct pronunciation of the language.

This starts with training your ears to hear the sounds of your target language, understanding English pronunciation (assuming you’re an English native speaker), and then fine tuning your pronunciation with the help of the IPA (or a good pronunciation book).  You should know the sounds of your target language, how they’re different from English, and all that language’s pronunciation rules.

Stage 2: Vocab and grammar acquisition, no English allowed

Start with my basic word list – a list of extremely frequent words that are easy to visualize. Put those in an Anki deck and learn them.  Once you have some words to play with, start putting them together.  You can use Google translate and a grammar book to start making sentences (but make sure that what you put into your Anki deck has no English!), then get everything you write yourself double-checked at lang-8.com.  Turning them into fill-in-the-blank flashcards builds the initial grammar and connecting words.  As your vocabulary and grammar grow, move to monolingual dictionaries and writing your own definitions for more abstract words (again everything you write should be double-checked at lang-8.com).  This builds on itself; the more vocabulary and grammar you get, the more vocabulary and grammar concepts you can describe in the target language. Once you’ve absorbed most of the material in a basic grammar book, move on to a frequency list and learn the top 1000-2000 words in your language, along with any specific vocabulary you need for your particular interests.

Stage 3: Listening, writing and reading work

Once you have a decent vocabulary and familiarity with grammar, start writing essays and journal entries, watching TV shows and reading books. Put every writing correction (from a tutor or lang-8.com) into your Anki deck, which will continue to build your vocabulary and grammar.

Stage 4: Speech

At the point where you can write ‘fluently’, find a place to immerse in the language and speak all the time (literally!  No English allowed or else you won’t learn the skill you’re trying to learn, which is adapting to holes in your grammar or vocabulary by going around them rapidly and automatically without having to think about it).  I prefer Middlebury College, but a few weeks in the target country will work as well if you’re very vigorous with sticking to the target language and not switching to English.  If you’re extremely strict with yourself, your brain adapts pretty quickly and learns how to combine everything you learned in stages 1-3 together into fluent speech. You’ll find more detailed discussions of the four key aspects at the links to the left and language specific resources in the Languages section.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Yes, anm54475 is right. Log in to italki.com, and under Community, go to the Notebooks section. There, click “Write a notebook entry” and put down your thoughts. Between one sentence and a couple paragraphs at a time is best, since if your entry is too long, fewer people will be willing to correct it. Give it a meaningful title (not just “my thoughts” or “today”), or just use the first line of your entry as your title. Before you submit it, make sure to select the language in which your entry is written, to make sure you post it to the correct forum. You will get a notification once someone has added corrections.

    I believe you will have the option to contact a tutor via the Fluent Forever app when it comes out in 2018.

    Reply

  5. Main Essentials of Learning a New Language – They distinguish three main essentials associated with learning a new language; namely the vocabulary, basic sentence elements / patterns, and grammar rules. Vocabulary – the most basic step towards learning a new language is to learn its words. Familiarity with the words will lead you to form sentences. Sentence Patterns and Elements – this has to do with how you ask and answer questions. Making coherent sentences is the way to make someone understand what you are saying. The ability will also help you understand what others are saying and how you might respond. Grammar Rules – Each language has certain rules that need to be followed.
    There is a special type of media developed for the first and second component – a bilingual graded book. Bilingual graded books are also called bilingual graded readers. They offer a parallel translation that allows the user to learn a new language in less time. With the translation on the same page, learners can effortlessly learn what any unfamiliar words mean. They can quickly pick up new vocabulary and phrases that are used over and over in texts of bilingual graded books. When they read a graded bilingual reader, they can pick up chunks of language and vocabulary that they can use in conversation and other real-world applications. It also significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to become conversational in a new language. As you read a bilingual reader, your brain begins to remember words and phrases simply because you are exposed to them several times. You don’t even realize, until you have to recall what you’ve learned, that you have already learned the new words and phrases. Listen to the audio tracks that should always accompany a bilingual graded book to learn how words are said and to improve your overall ability to speak the new language. A good idea is to use the free VLC media player to control the playing speed. You can control the playing speed by decreasing or increasing the speed value on the button of the VLC media player’s interface.
    Decide what is better for you a paper book or an e-book. Many of the e-readers by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo have dictionaries pre-loaded on their devices, with options to download additional ones, for free. If you do not have an e-reader, you do not have to buy one, because you can download it as a free app to your phone and use it right away. Writing your own notes, searching or making highlights is ridiculously simple with an e-reader or e-reading app. Anything you do with an e-book is also synced to the cloud, ensuring any change will follow you, no matter what device you are on.
    At first search on Google for “bilingual graded books” or “bilingual graded books for beginners”. Choose and buy a book on a suitable topic, for example general, business, medical, culinary, dialogues, students, cooking, family, tourists, detective, short story or whatever you like. Read it for about twenty minutes a day. If you do it every day, you will be surprised how much you can learn in a month’s time. Try to use the target language after you have learned for a month. If you don’t have an opportunity to talk to native speakers at home or at work/study, use your target language in small talk on Skype or another online chat. Search on Google for “free online clean chat rooms” and pick up the one that suits your interests. Two or three minutes of small talk two or three times a week or more often will give you some motivation and encourage you to learn new questions and answers for new dialogues. Compile a list of questions and answers for your dialogues in a target language or find them on Google with keywords “Bilingual graded books dialogues” and try using them.
    Don’t be afraid of making errors. They are your steps to success. You will spot and correct them sooner or later anyway. They will not be for the rest of your life. Better not to talk at all than to talk incorrectly? Wrong! Start talking as much as you can! Your language will improve every time you talk. A learner who knows only a hundred words and isn’t shy of talking will progress more quickly than the one who knows a thousand words but remains silent because he or she is afraid of saying something wrong.
    It can usually take you from one to three months to finish a bilingual graded reader at beginner level (A1) and elementary level (A2). The amount of time depends on your previous experience with learning foreign languages and on your personal abilities. At this point you should be able to ask and answer simple questions with the following questioning words: What? Who? Where? When? Which? How many/much? As you improve and become more confident in your ability to use the new language, you can move on to the next reader level and continue your language-learning journey. After using a bilingual graded book for a week or two you are ready to study grammar rules, so buy a good grammar book. A grammar book will satisfy your curiosity about grammar rules awakened by the bilingual graded book. Read the grammar book to find out how you can use your target language more precisely. Follow this order – first read a reading book, then use a grammar book and exercises to make your learning experience uninterrupted.
    Language text with a parallel translation has helped many to uncover their potential for learning multiple languages. Whether you are learning a language as a hobby or for a necessary purpose, you will find such books are supportive. Using them is by far more pragmatic, efficient way to learn a new language than a “learn a language in two weeks” program. However you should frequently use the target language by using bilingual graded books with audio tracks, grammar books, chats, internet pages and even songs to maintain your motivation and progress. Remember – twenty minutes a day does the magic!

    Reply

  7. Thanks so much- I love your book and resources- they really helped me pick up Spanish.

    I found your book because it was recommended in a great Language Learning Guide I found online; the link is here if you want to see: https://whywhathow.xyz/how-to-a-language-learning-guide/

    Highly recommend that article as it adds some additional tactics and resources to compliment what you recommend 🙂 Thanks again!

    Reply

  9. i wish it was as easy as you say but it doesnt seem to work out like this ive used anki etc practised writing listening its really not as easy as you say.
    ive been trying to learn arabic for over 5 years i feel im no further on then when i started, ive watched every arabic video on youtube im on about hundreds in dialects MSA and i can barley understand anything only hundreds of words with no real meaning of whats been said.

    Reply

  11. Thanks so much for this article, I’m going to try some of this for sure! I’m learning Italian because I want to visit Italy (I’m American), so thanks for the info! 🙂

    Reply

  15. Hi! I wanted to learn German for sometime now I have been trying to use multiple apps and stuff but nothing helped much any suggestions or help.

    Reply

  18. Please… I need advice… I’m bilingual (technically trilingual but I’m not really fluent with Spanish for years) who lives in a place that’s also surrounded with bilingual people. When I talk to people (and vice-versa) we don’t have a difficulty to switch languages but I would really love to learn French and be able to be fluent with Spanish. I think I would learn the language faster and better if I were surrounded by people who speak it but I just can’t financially and with my current situation.

    Thank you!

    Reply

    • Hi Alexis!

      Two options for you:
      – Lowish cost: https://fluent-forever.com/italki-tutor-guide/
      – No cost: Same deal, just find exchange partners on iTalki where you practice your native language with them and then they speak French with you (and I imagine there are a few other exchange sites – check with our Facebook group and you can probably get more recommendations there too)

      Or do both (iTalki tutor once every 1-4 weeks for extra flashcards and then exchange partners just for speaking practice)

      Best regards
      -Gabe

      Reply

  19. Great tips! I used a few of them to learn Spanish myself, it’s really helpful.
    Also if you want to boost your skills in almost any foreign language, I recommend RocketLanguages. This learning program includes audio lessons, culture and language lessons, pronunciation practice, progress tracking, flash cards, mobile app and more. In a few months you’ll be close to fluent in Spanish. Check out the reviews here goo.gl/F4qQKW

    Reply

  20. Hi. I wanted to learn English and I try to connect to a native person. can you recommend me a site or software than can help me? thanks

    Reply

  21. Hi I would like to learn Tagalog can you please make some suggestions. I have already learnt Auslan which has taken 8 years now I would like to learn to communicate with a large population of people who speak Tagalog. Thank you

    Reply

  22. this all looks great and I’d really like to learn Portuguese as I’m living in Portugal at the moment, but two immediate things: 1. I have very little money and 2. where do I start? any ideas? thanks, matt

    Reply

    • Hi Matt,

      Thank you for your message.
      We have materials for Portuguese which are not that expensive. Out pronunciation trainer uses Anki for the process which is a free program to download on PC.

      Our app which we are planning to release in August is also not expensive. For only Portuguese the costs will be (as current info shows) $ 8,- per month. You can also back us now on Indiegogo and get a significant discount.

      Best of luck with your learning process.
      Aleks

      Reply

  23. Any suggestions for someone wanting to learn Bulgarian? My pronunciation is already pretty ok due to years singing in a Bulgarian choir, but I would like to be able to have conversations. Any advice?

    thanks

    Reply

    • Hi Hiwot,

      Thanks so much you for your message.

      We are currently not working on Norwegian.

      However, below is a link for languages that we offer and also individually suggested. If it is not in here, we do not have it. Feel free to send any materials you find useful to us to add for our other community members.

      https://fluent-forever.com/resources/

      I hope this helps.

      If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them.

      Best wishes,
      Kay

      Reply

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