Cactus Language Blog

Can I Learn A Language On My Own?

Posted by Sarah under Cactus Languages Abroad, Learning a language

Simon Ager, language enthusiast, assesses self-study methods

It is possible to learn a language on your own with books, CDs and other materials and to reach a good conversational level.

First you need to find a language that really appeals to you – to fall in love with, in fact. This will help to motivate you and encourage you to spend as much time as possible with the language. If you choose a language that might be useful to you, or useful in general, but which doesn’t really appeal to you, you might find it more difficult to maintain your motivation and enthusiasm for it.

Some language learners prefer to stick to one or two textbooks or other language learning programs, while others use a range of materials. It can be very tempting to acquire more and more language books, CDs, DVDs etc., thinking that each will be the one that will help you become fluent, and to think that you will somehow absorb the language just because you have all that material, even if you rarely look at it. However what really matters is that you study regularly and practise your language whenever and wherever you can. Whether you use one language course or ten is not all that important.

Once you have a good foundation in the language, you can start to make use of a much wider range of material. This might include novels, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV programmes, films and so on. Many of these are available online and you can use them to achieve virtual immersion. For example you could have a radio station playing in the background while you’re doing other things, or record programmes that really interest you and listen to them as many times as you need to to understand everything. You could do the same sort of thing with written texts – read them through to get the gist, guessing any words you don’t know, and/or read them more analytically making sure you understand all the words and grammatical structures.

Language exchange is another way to practise using your language. You might be able to find people who speak the language you’re learning locally, and you can also find people online via language exchange websites.

Even if you are determined to learn a language on your own, it might well be useful to attend a class, if one is available. This will help you to structure your studies, and give you a chance to get feedback and corrections. You will also meet other learners with whom it can be useful to compare notes, and maybe to study together.

If possible it helps enormously if you can spend some time in a country or region where you chosen language is spoken. You could take language classes there, study something else through the medium of the language, travel or work. Being immersed in the language and having to use it every day is a great way to improve your fluency and confidence, and to pick up vocabulary.

There are links to many online language learning resources at:
http://www.omniglot/links/

About the author

Simon Ager has studied and taught himself many languages, and currently runs a company that provides information and advice about languages mainly via the website www.omniglot.com.

Related articles:

• How to make language part of your everyday life
• Language learning: setting yourself goals

Tags:language, self-study