Making progress in learning a language – key points to remember
Tuesday, 19th May 2009
Sometimes when learning a language you seem to make a lot of progress quite quickly, other times you don’t seem to be making much progress at all, and occasionally people even feel as though they're going backwards! How do you keep making progress?
The most important thing to do is to study and practise using the language as often as possible – ideally every day. If you only study once a week, or less frequently, you will probably forget a lot of what you learn and have to keep re-learning it. If you study every day though, things should stay in your memory better, and you will make more rapid progress.
You could use a number of different textbooks and other learning materials to avoid getting bored with the same types of lesson all the time. You could also try venturing beyond your textbooks into the wonderful world of material for native speakers. Books for children are a good place to start, as are comics and cartoons.
To help you internalise what you’re learning, it’s a good idea to use every opportunity to practise using the language. You could practise by speaking to yourself and others, listening and reading whatever material you can find, and writing notes, a diary or blog or similar things. At first you probably won’t be able to understand, say, read or write very much, but the more you practise, the better you’ll become. You could use example sentences from your textbooks and dictionaries as the basis for your own, and don’t worry if your sentences are short and simple at first as with practice you’ll become better at constructing longer, more complex ones.
When you can’t remember how to say something or hear an unfamiliar word and don’t have a dictionary or other sources of reference to hand, you could make note in a notebook or on a portable audio recorder, then check it later.
One way to assess how much progress you’re making is to record yourself speaking the language you’re learning every so often, and then to compare past recordings with more recent ones. You could also compare pieces of writing you’ve done at different times.
Another way to measure your progress is to set yourself challenges, such as ordering a meal in a restaurant, buying stamps in the post office, understanding the news and so on. Some of these you can only do if you’re in a country were your foreign language is spoken, but you could role play the others.
Tags: english, spanish, french, german, learning, italian, tailor-made, language
Posted by Simon Ager under Making Progress,
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