Counseling Education

How To Learn Language Faster & Reaching Fluency

Most people have goals that they want to achieve in life, either for practical or material gain or simply for the satisfaction of having done so. Regardless of your reasons, learning a second language is a great goal to have – the sense of achievement you get each time you manage to successfully communicate in your chosen language makes it worth all of the effort.

The downside is that for most people, learning a language is very difficult. It takes a lot of hard work and can take many years to get to a point where you can call yourself fluent. You have to be prepared to put in the work, but there are plenty of ways to speed up the process!

Structure Before Words

You might know all of the words required to say something, but that doesn’t mean that you will be able to string together a coherent sentence. Arguably the most important part of any language is knowing how it is structured.

This is essentially grammar:
Learning how words interact and how sentences are formed

One you understand the structure of a language you can start playing thought games in your head and trying to translate various sentences. You will probably also find that you can make educated guesses as to what is being said when you hear someone speak in that language.

Only Learn What You Need

There is a principal that says that in life 80% of the results come from 20% of the input. This is called Pareto’s principal and it holds true surprisingly often. So let’s apply it to languages shall we?

You probably know thousands of words in your own language, and there are thousands that you don’t know; but in spite of all those extra words, you probably only use 10-20% of your available vocabulary.

Rather than learning lists of words that you will probably not use, try to find a list of the 5,000 most commonly spoken words in your chosen language. If you can commit those to memory over the course of several months, you will be surprisingly close to functional fluency.

Use It Or Lose It!

The fastest way to get fluent in a language is to be fully immersed and use it every day, unfortunately for most people that isn’t practical since you would probably have to move to another country.

But there are other ways to get partially immersed:

• Get a personal tutor who can speak to you in the language for at least a few hours per week. A personal tutor will also be able to help you with tricky grammar and vocab mistakes.
• Get a pen pal – or email pen pal and communicate regularly, this is a good way to practice your writing skills too. You can even use skype to practice spoken language.
• Buy copies of your favourite TV shows in the foreign language and watch them with English sub-titles, watch them over and over until you can turn off the sub-titles.
• Buy foreign magazines (on a topic you are interested in) and read the articles. This is a great way to learn vocab relevant to your interests.

Time To Practice

A lot of learning a language is about building up your confidence to actually use it and unfortunately the only way to do that is with practice. The more you practice the more the language will imprint itself in your fast memory so that you can use it without thinking.

Finding people to practice with can be tricky, hiring a tutor is a good idea or joining a local class is another good option.

Go out of your way to speak the language and don’t be afraid to make mistakes!

About The Author

Hi there, my name is Ricky. I am a personal tutor and I work for UK Tutors, where you can find private tutors for your educational needs. Learn more about UK Tutors here, thanks for reading.

Image Credit: Wiki Commons