Four Easy Ways to Learn & Maintain a Language.
By: Ramez Moussa
Tags: Academia, Life, Travel, Language Learning, Education

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

While the task of learning and maintaining a good level in your target language may seem a big “to do”, it can be very simple if you follow a list of four things.

But First, it is essential that you put in mind the different skills you need to have to gain proficiency in your target language. These skills are:

Speaking Listening and comprehending Reading Grammar and writing

These next four rules will help you learn and maintain your target language.

1. Read

Reading has always been an excellent way to know more information. Hence, It is advised that you read a lot in your target language. This will definitely help you build up a very thorough vocabulary list depending on your interest.

However, as simple as the idea of reading may sound there are a lot of challenges you may face while starting to read in your target language such as getting bored too easily or that simply the language is too hard to understand!

Thanks to technology these problems can easily be solved. If you are one of these people that cannot stand reading, you can download any e-book or podcast app that will help you pick famous books and read it for you. Also, if you think the language is too hard, do not be ashamed to start with basic books such as children’s book and slowly build your up to the harder topics.

2. Find a pen-pal and/or a language exchange partner

There is nothing better than learning a language with a person your age and who shares the same interests with you. It is vital that you have someone whom you can trust and be comfortable to practice speaking or writing in your target language with. But how to find this person?

To find such a person you need to be a part of a certain community that shares the same language. Whether this community be a class, club or even an online group chat! Being a part of such a community gives you more opportunity to find different people who share the same goal of learning that language. After you find the community that suits and finding the person whom you can practice with, small talks can be arranged depending on the topic you two are interested in. Again, you need to start with small basic talks and build your way up to more intense ones such as climate change and political views.

Having these hours of hands-on practice will build up your confidence and control of the language and will teach you common slang (if you are practising with a native speaker).

3.Listen to Music, podcasts or watch movies/youtube videos in your target language

If you do not have the time, resources or patience for any of the other tips, this one is for you! You can easily pick up a language only by exposure!

Instead of playing your ordinary playlist, you can start building up a new one in your target language. Not only that you will be improving your connection to the culture accompanied with that language, but also, by listening to music or watching a movie while reading the lyrics/subtitles at the same time you are absorbing new words and noticing different sentence structures.

The extra benefit that may be accompanied by watching any music or video in your target language is that you can find it for free! Many platforms such as Youtube and Spotify will give you songs, videos, documentaries, series, podcasts and much more for free. The only thing you need to worry about is finding a good influencer.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

4. Challenge yourself

It is important that you challenge yourself to form sentences in your head or initiate/ make up a conversation with yourself. While the idea sounds crazy, many people found it very effective. If you start pushing yourself to use your target language and consume all the knowledge you have within your head, shortly enough you will run out of words and your sense of curiosity will push you to look up that word you did not know. After looking that word up and learning it, you can easily check your pronunciation via testing it on google translate’s speaker. If the word you pronounced came up on your screen then good job!

This way is an excellent way of learning of you do not have the money, confidence or resources to get a language partner or buy an expensive book.

By embedding these four easy tasks in your daily or weekly routine, you can shortly learn, gain confidence and comfort in understanding and speaking your target language as well as building new relationships locally or across the world.