Language Learning Strategies For Beginners

Posted on 23. Jul, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life, Relocation, Tools & Resources
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Learning a language as a beginner can sometimes feel like a long, arduous slog – especially if you are stuck with an old-fashioned method that is heavy on the grammar and the vocabulary lists.

Here are a few tricks that I like to use to keep language learning rewarding in the early stages:

1. Learn the most common words first

To get a feel for the words you will be hearing over and over again, do an online search on the most common words in your target language. If you are going to be learning vocabulary by heart anyway, I would recommend focusing on the 100 (or 500, or however many you want) most common words first.

By the way, you may notice by comparison that your books and CDs are not doing a very good job of teaching you the most common words. Sometimes, it’s downright comical – like that beginner’s Russian course that had me memorize entire paragraphs about thunder and how it rolled over the valley in the night. To their credit, the whole thing was so absurd that I still remember the word grom (thunder) some 18 years later. So maybe it does work!

2. Learn common sentences

Along the same lines, learn the sentences that you think you will need the most after arriving in your new country. You will need to greet people, introduce yourself, and make small talk. You will need to ask basic questions. You will need to ask people to speak slowly or write down/spell something for you.

Focusing on common sentences will give you a much greater sense of accomplishment. After just a few days of studying, you will have gained practical, directly applicable language skills – isn’t that a great, rewarding feeling?

3. Focus on full sentences

It is much easier to learn full sentences and progressively work out the grammar rules, rather than study the grammar and vocabulary separately, and hope to somehow form sentences from there…

Hopefully any modern language method will teach you full sentences only, but there are still some products out there that use the old “piecemeal” approach to grammar and vocabulary, especially for less common languages.

4. Find mental hooks to help you remember words

See if you can find common roots, and group words together by families or categories. For example, if you know that the root k-t-b in Arabic has to do with writing, you can easily remember the meaning of words such as KiTaaB (book), maKTaB (office, ie. where you write) or meKTuB (written).

If you are learning a European language, you will probably recognise some words or roots that are very similar to English. Beware of false friends (such as embarazada in Spanish or demande in French), but other than that, enjoy these little shortcuts that will make your life much easier!

If you can’t spot any similarities, feel free to invent your own! Some words are bound to remind you of another word in English just because of the way they sound.

For example, trout in German is Forelle. Imagine that it is spelled with “four L’s” and you will be well on your way to remember a German word that is very different from its English counterpart!

Most associations will come to you naturally. Don’t discount them because they seem silly or nonsensical! The idea is simply to associate a word you are trying to learn with something you already know, so that it’s easier to remember.

5. Have something to look forward to

Remember when we were discussing ways to stay motivated? When I start learning a language, I like having something to look forward to once I get more advanced.

If you have the opportunity to take a recon trip to your new country before you move, go to a bookstore and buy a couple of fascinating-looking books in the local language – they could be translations of your absolute favourite novels of all times, or really beautiful art books with stunning illustrations. Don’t worry if they seem too difficult for you – they are not for right now, but to give yourself something to look forward to as you keep studying.

Oh, and guilty pleasures count too: comics, trashy magazines or anything involving your favourite celebrities (I will draw the line at boys’ bands, though) will work fine, as long as they make learning rewarding and motivating for you.

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Emmanuelle

Images by banlon1964 (top and centre) and A30_Tsitika, all via Flickr Creative Commons