Learning a new language is not an easy task for sure. You might see guides out there that will have you fluent in any language in 3 months or 6 months. Those are ambitious goals that a majority of people won’t be able to achieve. Instead of focusing on how to become fluent in an X amount of months, it is better to focus on making the learning part fun and incorporating it into your everyday life. This way you’ll find yourself studying regularly and overtime you will master the language for sure.
It’s a dream to become fluent in the language you want to learn. But language unlike maths has many irregularities that comes naturally to native speakers but is frustratingly confusing for anyone trying to learn it as a second language. There are sometimes no proper explanations for these nuances and you just have to accept it for the way it is. These nuances is what stops many second language learners from becoming completely fluent. Even expats who have lived in a foreign country for 10 years, despite studying hard, some still struggle to speak like a native speaker.
What mastering any language means to you might be different from my definition. My view on mastering any language is that the focus should not be on trying to become fluent or to speak like a native speaker. Instead, the focus should be on becoming able to communicate in everyday conversations.
If you are able to buy a train ticket to a city on the other side of the country, that’s a good start. If you are able to ask the guy at the ticket booth to change your ticket free of charge after you missed your train because someone snatched your bags so you had to chase them down, file a police report, cancel all your credit cards, get some emergency money etc. then you are doing amazing!
When learning a language, sometimes we put so much focus on excelling in reading and writing, we forget we also need to become just as good in listening and speaking. For many people, what prevents us from getting better in these two crucial abilities is that we’re afraid of making mistakes.
Mastering any language does not have to be about perfection. If you are able to understand other people and make yourself understood even with all the mistakes you make, I think that is enough. Of course, you should strive to continuously excel in the language, but there’s not need to beat yourself over it if you don’t speak like a native speaker. To become fluent in a language as I mentioned is incredibly hard because of all the inexplainable nuances that has developed in the language over time.
I speak 5 languages at a decent conversational level in the least, so I often get asked how I manage it. Personally I struggled with reading and writing because I found it incredibly boring, so making learning fun was important for me. After a lot of thought, I have thought about some things you must stick to, to effectively learn a language. Since language learning isn’t easy, I thought I’ll share tips here with everyone.
- Listen carefully to a native speaker’s pronunciation and try to memorise it. Spell out what you think the word sounds like to help you memorise the pronunciation.
- Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
- Immerse yourself in the language even if you’re not in the country and make it part of your everyday life
- Study regularly in small amounts.
Mastering any language starts with listening and memorising
When you first start off trying to learn a new language, just listen and memorise the simplest of things. It’s super boring to try and learn grammar right off the bat. Memorising is a great way to gain vocabulary and you’ll notice most language courses will start your beginner lessons with memorising useful words like basic greetings. What some people struggle with is listening and memorising how things are pronounced from the start to help you understand and speak better in the future.
When you hear words with a difficult pronunciation, it often helps to write it down how you think the words should be spelt out in your language based on the pronunciation. The reason is how you think the words should be pronounced might not always be how they are pronounced. This is especially confusing for English speakers when they learn a language that also uses the latin alphabet.
E.g. “Comment ça va?” in French means “How are you?”
For English speakers, how you think that is pronounced and how it is actually pronounced is quite different.
You might prefer to spell it out as: Ko-mon sa va?
Additionally, one the other hand if you’re a Japanese native speaker and you’re not used to the latin alphabet, writing it as コモン・サ・ヴァ might be helpful.
E.g. “Kyss” in Swedish means “kiss”.
But don’t be fooled, it is not actually pronounced “kiss” but “shyss”.
“Kiss” in Swedish, which has the exact same pronunciation in English means pee.
If you find a hot date with a Swedish girl/boy but mess up your pronunciation it might not be so romantic anymore.
My point is learning how to pronounce words properly from the beginning is helpful for you to understand and speak the language as you improve on it. Even if you know your pronunciation is terrible, you shouldn’t be afraid to make mistake and hold yourself back from any speaking opportunities you might get.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
I sometimes meet people who might be really good at reading, writing and listening to a particular language but unfortunately are not able to speak much. I think the main reason holding most of them back is fear of making mistakes.
Don’t be scared of making mistakes, you’re not going to sound “stupid”. In general, most native speakers would be impressed and be happy that you’re trying to learn their language. If anyone is being an asshole when you’re putting effort into learning the language, ask them; how many language can you speak? The answer is most likely one, and you know one more than them so that should shut them up.
Plus, how are you going to learn if you don’t make any mistakes?
Incorporate the language to your everyday life by making learning fun
Once you’ve memorised some basic phrases and realise it’s ok to make mistakes, here comes the fun part. If you’re serious about learning and mastering a language, as in you want be able to speak conversationally about your everyday life rather than just knowing those essential words to get you around, then immersing yourself in the language is the way to go.
The fastest and arguably funnest way to do it would be to fly over to a country home to the language you want to learn and force yourself to speak it. You have to make a rule not to use your native tongue as little as possible and you’ll find yourself picking it up very quickly. But unfortunately not many of us have the time or money for that.
So, the second best thing to do, would be to constantly make yourself think in that language everyday. You need to be pretty motivated to keep doing it every single day, or every second day at least otherwise you’ll forget what you learn very quickly. There’s a couple of different things I do myself which I think can be applied to mastering any language in the world.
1) Keep a diary in that language about things you do in your everyday life.
If you have no idea how to say it, doesn’t matter google translate is your best friend. It might not be very accurate, but it will give you somewhere to start and will help you learn the vocabulary of talking about everyday things and may potentially help you think faster in when you need to speak in the language.
You can always ask your teacher (or if you’re self studying, a native speaker on a language learning forum) afterwards if that is how you say something.
2) Think out loud.
As you go about getting ready to go out, cooking dinner, taking a shower- anytime you’ve got some alone time, try talking out loud in that language you’re learning to yourself. You can talk about what you’re going to be doing later that day, what you have already done that day, whatever might be on your mind.
If your roommates think you’re going mad, just go along with it and start cackling away like a witch. (I may have freaked my roommates out a couple of times doing something like that.)
3) Watch movies, TV shows and listen to music in that language.
Not only does this help out with your listening, but you can learn a lot about the culture this way. When you become interested in the culture, I feel this is the best way to get your motivation to keep going in your language learning too!
4) Find a language buddy.
Having a buddy you can practice the language with is always best. This can be anyone who’s learning the language too or a native speaker.
The advantage of finding a native speaker buddy is if they are comfortable in correcting you on your mistakes, you’ll learn a lot pretty quickly. If you don’t know any native speakers, fear not, google up language exchange meet-ups in your area, and look for one there! If there are none, you could always find somebody in language forums who are up for skyping.
Create a regular study routine
You should also aim to study regularly ie. everyday or every couple of days. You don’t have to study for long- 1 hour is great, 30 minutes is good, if not at least try and spend 10 minutes going through what you’ve already learnt. Studying regularly in small amounts will be more beneficial than studying many hours but only once per week.
The less often you use a language the harder it becomes to learn it. That’s why as I mentioned above you should try and incorporate it into your everyday life. Studying with a textbook is useful as it teaches you grammar structures. However if you get bored and find it hard to concentrate you could try writing a diary with the help of google translate as I mentioned earlier. Since you can choose to write about whatever you found interesting in your day might be a more engaging alternative to only studying from a textbook.
As I mentioned, learning through movies and music is also a more interesting and fun way to study. But you should not rely solely on this. It might help you develop better listening skills, but you still need to improve you reading, writing and speaking through other methods.
How I learnt 5 languages
How you study best is very personal for everyone. If you’re curious what I personally did to master 5 languages to a conversational level, I will tell you what I did.
I knew 3 languages (English, Cantonese and Mandarin) from an early age. I was born in Australia and my parents were from Hong Kong so English and Cantonese were my first languages. When I was little, I lived in Singapore for 7 years where it was compulsory to learn a second language and my parents urged me to learn mandarin.
Perhaps learning different languages from a young age does give me an advantage when learning other new languages, but taking on a new language when you are older is no less daunting.
I became interested in learning other languages during high school and university, namely Japanese and French. But as learning languages is fun, I try to pick up as much of a country’s native language whenever I travel. I will give some examples from my own experience in sucessfully learning French and Japanese and reasons as to why I didn’t get far in learning others.
How I learnt French
Keeping a diary using google translate was actually how I self-studied French while I was there for a 4-month student exchange. After learning some fundamental basics, found it incredibly boring learning the grammar on my own and struggled to keep it up. Instead I tried learning the language by regularly writing a diary and asked around for people to correct my writing if they had time. I wanted to speak in French more but my knowledge was limited and the local students I met were great at English hence it was easier to speak English.
However, just before I returned home, I went on a 1 month trip to places where people barely spoke any English, forcing me to speak French. From what I learnt keeping a diary, I was able to communicate in very broken French. I didn’t improve much on the language until I returned home to Australia and self-studied on a regular basis, writing more diaries and looking up grammar structures online. On top of this, during my spare time I would watch entertaining Youtube videos, tv shows and listened to music in French.
While my grammar today is far from perfect as I didn’t build myself a strong base from the beginning, French speakers can understand me perfectly when I talk to them and I can engage in conversations more than just about everyday life. If there are words I don’t understand, I will be able to clarify it in French without needing to pull out a French to English dictionary. I would struggle on harder topics like politics but would self-rate myself as being advanced in the language.
While I wouldn’t say I have completely mastered the language, I think being able to quickly switch my brain from any other language to French is a level of mastery I am happy with. Of course, I would like to keep improving my French, but I think how you decide if you’ve “mastered” the language should be how satisfied you are with your language skills rather than being completely fluent.
How I learnt Japanese
I did something similar when learning Japanese but did take proper lessons for this language and have been learning it for longer hence have better grammar usage overall. After two years of formal Japanese learning in high school, I also had the chance to meet many Japanese people when I was studying in university in Australia.
Without leaving the country, my Japanese improved rapidly as every time I spent time with them, if they just wanted to talk about something quick to each other, they would use Japanese. While it was hard to understand at first, I was able to pick up the language as I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes and would try and clarify what they said using my broken Japanese.
I did get the chance to go to Japan on exchange later on, but before I started my exchange, I was already able to have a normal conversation with other Japanese people, so the exchange just forced me to think in Japanese on a daily basis and I became so used to it I sometimes had trouble speaking english.
Now that I don’t use Japanese on a daily basis, my language skills have dropped but I am always able to pick it up again very quickly if I need to. Even with my wavering skill levels, I am still able to talk about more than just everyday life subjects and can have a very deep and meaningful conversation with friends- but would probably still struggle a little if I were to talk about politics.
If I was being harsh with myself, I would not say I have not mastered Japanese because I am far from fluent. But if I’m thinking only about my ability to communicate in Japanese, then yes I suppose I have mastered the language.
Why I wasn’t able to master Swedish or Russian
From personal experience, I think you definitely need a combination of all the tips I’ve written here to advance in language learning. In addition to the two languages I have tried learning seriously, I have also tried to learn other languages like Russian and Swedish.
I was in Central Asia for 5 months, where Russian is widely spoken. Unfortunately at the end of the 5 months, I only knew very basic phrases that was good enough for me to shop for necessities. There were friendly hosts I stayed with, and wonderful people who gave us rides when hitchhiking whom I unfortunately was never able to communicate with. They had so much to tell me, but unfortunately I could never understand. I had 5 months to learn the language- which is a lot of time to become conversational in a language even if far from perfect, but I was not consistent in actively trying to learn it.
I also tried to learn Swedish while travelling with my Swedish boyfriend for 7 months. I had the perfect native speaker to practice with whenever I wanted to, but we rarely ever did. I’m not sure why, but it was likely because we were always moving around so much and we were to tired or lazy to consciously set aside time to sit down and do some study as well as speaking practice.
I think what I did well with Russian was I memorised a lot of basic phrases and used them without fear of making mistakes. For Swedish, I did the same though I tended to memorise more useless but funny phrases like “You are the dumbest person in the world” rather than how to buy coffee. These are great ways to start learning a language, but not enough to advance in learning.
I think my biggest problem was inconsistency. While I did sit down to study these languages, my studies were very infrequent, ranging from once a week to once a fortnight which then further dropped to once a month. This meant I’d forget anything new I learnt pretty quickly. I’m certain if I seriously tried immersing myself with these languages like I did with French and Japanese I will see improvements.
Now you try mastering any language you want
Given my own successes and lack of progress in language learning, I have came up with the above tips and suggestions that I think will have anyone mastering any language with patience and consistency. I think it’s a combination of all these things I’m mentioning here are what got me so advanced in Japanese and French- two languages I chose to learn in my own spare time. A majority of the learning I did was self-taught and though I did take formal lessons for Japanese but found myself learning more outside of the classroom than in it.
Everybody’s learning style is different. So how you go about mastering any language may be different to how I do it. But if you’re not too sure where to start, you could try out some of the methods I’ve been using. Most of my tips are on improving speaking and listening skills which will be beneficial for mastering any language.
But to truly become fluent, or near fluent I should say, you will need more reading and writing practice outside of simply keeping a diary. I want to emphasise keeping a diary is great writing practice that will help your speaking as well, but will not be enough for getting your grammar towards a native speaker standard especially if you use google translate to help you.
As you may have gathered from how I learnt French, my grammar is not great, perhaps because I didn’t do much reading and writing exercises. My Japanese on the other hand is more grammatically correct because I did proper reading and writing exercises.
What are your goals?
Perhaps before you begin mastering any language, think about what your goals are. What is your aim in terms of mastery? Remember mastery doesn’t mean perfection.
Becoming completely fluent and able to speak like a native speaker as I have mentioned is incredibly hard. It is something that will take years and years of continuous studying, seeking actively to improve and will not happen in less than a year. But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, definitely go for it!
At the end of the day, mastering any language takes a lot of time and work. Even when it seems difficult, persevere, don’t give up and you’ll find yourself improving slowly over time!