Are you a language learner? Are having trouble to progress after some point? Don’t worry! It happens to all language learners. When I was trying to learn language I used some methods to overcome these difficulties. Here are those methods! Good luck!
- Listen and Read
If you want to start learning languages, I think this should be your first move. To learn a language, you must first adopt it. The way to do this is through listening. Even if you don’t understand, listen. Especially watching foreign series will be an excellent tool in this regard.
You will probably read the subtitles in all the series you watched when you first started. However, in the future, you will start to understand without even realizing it. In this regard, I recommend you to prefer the TV series that are more prone to language in daily life. It will provide you with great convenience in the learning process. In addition, watching TV series instead of movies will benefit you more. The series are longer running and the same characters talking with the same accent will make it easier for you to become familiar with some expressions. Personally, I have repeatedly watched some foreign series in my language learning process. Especially when I felt that I started to understand, I watched the series I watched before with English subtitles this time. Then I tried to watch it without subtitles. This process was very useful in my language learning process. I have no doubt that it will be for you.
- Translate
Translation will make a great difference in this process, especially in learning spelling rules and patterns. My method of translation was actually quite simple. I would translate 10-15 sentences of English texts into Turkish. In fact, I did this regularly every day. You can copy these texts from news sites, social media, blogs, etc. The content of the text is not very important. You can even use applications when translating.
Continue this practice for 10 days. After 10 days, you will have 10 texts translated from English to your own language. Now it’s time to do the opposite. Translate the texts that you previously translated into your native language into English. Then compare it with the original text. In this way, you will be able to see more easily where you made mistakes. I continued this practice for about 6 months. It is a very useful method when you do it regularly.
- Learning Basic Sentences
Probably everyone interested in learning a language started out with a single word memorization. In fact, this is not a very useful method. Especially if your goal is to speak and agree with a stranger, knowing just the word will not be a great advantage for you.
Learn patterns instead of memorizing words! As in your mother tongue, many conversations start with a pattern like “Hello, how are you today?” Alternatives to this, and frequently used expressions such as “What’s up, man?” Learn these sentences. Learning such patterns will provide great convenience especially when talking to foreigners.
- Speak
One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is of course speaking. Unfortunately, there is no way to teach you to speak in an instant.
You should be careful to practice often and talk to different people as much as possible. You don’t need to be in that country to learn a language. Thanks to technology, it is very simple to communicate with anyone from all over the world. Just use social media for this. TANDEM, which is a very useful application in this regard, is my special recommendation. In this application, you can message, send a voice message, make a voice call or make a video call. I have been using this app regularly for about 5-6 years and have made many foreign friends.
In addition, one of the points that come to the fore about language learning is that it is necessary to speak to a person who is the mother tongue of the language to be learned. In fact, this is also not quite true. If you do not speak a language, trying to talk to a native speaker can be tiring or even discouraging. It will be more advantageous to start with talking to someone at your own level.
This article was written by Eda, volunteer at Sunrise Project France since April 2020. She lives in Turkey, She is 21. Travelling, meeting new people and cooking are her greatest passions in life. She also enjoys learning languages and swimming.
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