Learning a language outside one’s lingua franca can be tedious, demoralizing and sometimes, frustrating. It may take a visitor a very long time to learn the spoken language in the country, while to some others, it may be an easy ride.
Your language skills will not pick up immediately as this is not rocket science. It is necessary you take it slowly and remain focused. When it comes to learning any language, the greatest obstacle will most likely be staying motivated for the long term. Having passion or a goal makes it easier to take the steps to get there.
There are some things aside staying motivated one can do in ensuring he/she scales through within a short term. Just search for whatever interests you and engage in it.
These listed points may just be the magic:
Listen (and read). You need to adjust your ear to the sounds of the language. Depending on your level, what you listen to and especially what you read will differ. Listening will help most with pronunciation and intonation and reading will help most with expanding your vocabulary and grammar. By watching and listening to music, film, and television’ you’ll also gain a cultural reference point that is helpful in speaking with native speakers.
Make notes. In the beginning, understanding every word is not as important as exposing yourself and getting the basic idea of what’s happening. As you progress and want to learn a new word or phrase, make a note of it. Have a notebook and have an application on your phone that you will use only for this purpose. These notes make it easy to review the words. The process of writing itself will help you remember it.
Practice. This is an important step and must be taken seriously. If you want to get better at speaking, there is need to speak out .
(1) Speak- If you want to communicate with people you need to start speaking
(2) Ask and answer questions
(3) Watch movies, real-life conversations on YouTube
(4) Read articles and listen to podcast on topics you care about
(5) Write
– Play with flashcards just to collect points/memorize some words.
You need to start using the words you are learning in sentences and real conversations.
Pronunciation of the language.
Starting with pronunciation first does a few things. It helps in knowing how language sounds. Start vocabulary training, to know how words should sound and how they should be spelled.
Have the magic software that promises to teach you the language. It is just a textbook with exercises in the online format. These days it comes with fancy flashcards and pictures, but essentially it does not help you start speaking, or listening, or writing, the main objective is not to learn the correct pronunciation but rather the objective is fluency in a language that you are learning – the ability to handle any conversation, with anyone, any time.
Pronunciation is merely a thing to pay attention to, and it should not be an objective of language studies. If the learner focuses on pronunciation only, there is a risk that they become eventually accustomed to one particular accent only.
How To learn Pronunciation?
There are a few routes here, and a lot of excellent online and in-print resources (Pronunciation guides with CDs or mp3s are usually very good). One can also create time to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
If you’re still finding it difficult to engage in a face-to-face conversation which can sometimes be intimidating, you can try this – SpeakMate.
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