How To Ensure Your Language-Learning Efforts Go To Waste

Posted on 14. Jul, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life, Relocation, Tools & Resources
1 comment

So you’ve rolled up your sleeves, broken out the flash cards and sharpened your pen. You’re serious about learning the language, and you’re ready to immerse yourself into your studies. Congratulations!

But before you dive too deep, I would like to give you a short list of the biggest mistakes I see eager language learners make over and over again.

5 ways to waste your time, sound like a fool and end up unable to communicate

1. Learn the wrong language

As dumb as it sounds, it happens more often than you’d think. I am not talking about learning Kazakh by mistake when you’re actually bound for The Netherlands (now that would be dumb).

But studying Gulf Arabic when you’re headed to Morocco? Yes, I have seen that happen – and sadly, the two dialects are so different that what you’ve learned won’t get you far.

2. Overlook the dialects, regional languages or local variations

While you may expect huge, multi-ethnic countries like China or India to have a myriad dialects, you might be surprised to learn that Europe still has a number of very vibrant regional languages. And when I say vibrant, I mean that you may find it hard to buy produce at the market or make local friends in Barcelona if you speak Spanish but no Catalan.

So read up on your future destination and find out if you need to learn a bit of both languages – the official state language and the regional one.

3. Sound too formal, or too casual, for your environment

Unlike English, many foreign languages are extremely specific about the proper way to address people depending on their age, rank or station in life.

What will most of your daily interactions be like? How will you need to word things to avoid rubbing people the wrong way?

In other words, if you’re moving to a super laid-back beach town somewhere in the tropics, don’t waste too much time studying a highly literary form of the language. Casual will do nicely.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you are stepping into a corporate role in hierarchy-loving Tokyo, then, yes – formal is probably the way to go.

4. Believe that your self-study course is teaching you “the real language”

Fair warning: most of the CD-Roms, tapes and home-study courses out there will teach you a version of the language that ranges from weirdly stiff-sounding to ridiculously formal.

Of course, I suppose that’s better than sloppy to downright insulting. You might get laughed out of town, but hey, at least you won’t be provoked to a duel. Isn’t that good news?

Seriously though, if at all possible, get a fluent speaker to take a look at your materials to make sure you’re not learning anything too outlandish or outdated.

A friend of mine recently showed me her brand new French vocabulary book, published in 2007. I was most impressed. The author had gathered all sorts of useful slang phrases, the kind that would have made you sound like a real insider in the streets of Paris – back in 1963.

5. Think theory rather than practical application

Listen, I am a language geek. I completely understand getting lost in the finer nuances of the vocabulary, or being endlessly fascinated by some obscure syntax feature. But frankly, you can get to that later.

You will eventually want to learn the full range of the language, but for now focus on getting through the first few weeks. Learn the 500 most common words.

Play everyday scenarios in your head, like reading rental ads or asking “how much per 100g?”, and learn what you need to know to deal with these situations. First things first, or you’ll end up either tongue-tied or totally overwhelmed, and that’s not fun at all.

The holy trinity of language learning

• Relevance
• Appropriateness
• Usefulness
  

Keep these 3 criteria in mind while studying, and you can’t really go wrong.
Most of all, have fun learning your new language and gathering cultural insights on your new country!

Do you have any funny (or cringe-worthy, depending on your point of view!) language-learning stories to share? Comments are open!

Emmanuelle

Image by Kaustav Bhattacharya, via Flickr Creative Commons