The Fastest Ways to Learn a Foreign Language

Oh, it is Tuesday and you only have three days before your vacation in Spain.  You want to learn how to speak their language fast, so you can connect with its citizen, but there's only few time left before your arrival.

Sound terrifying, isn't? Many people have an idea that learning a new language goes through a painful and tedious process. In connection with this, we have lived on a perspective that  learning a new language means you have to start from the scratch such as: grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and so on.

However, you can master a new language with these easy steps.

1. Set your learning goals

How much of the words do you want to learn? Do you want to learn how to go to the terminal and buy a ticket? or Do you want to learn how to order from a restaurant? When you think about how it is going to a help for you, it would save a lot of time a effort. Goals should be achievable and measurable. Take what only you can learn on a specific time frame. For example, you can set a 30 minute vocabulary on Spanish words related to shopping. 

Furthermore, long-term goal can be very overwhelming and difficult to attain without the use of  short-term goals. Find what's the common between the two and break them into chunks. Set a goal for today, week and month and evaluate your progress.

2. Challenge your self

As already mentioned, you can evaluate yourself throughout the day. How? create an evaluative criteria oh how proficient do you want to become. Say for example, you want to learn 100 Spanish words per week. Make a 100 item test on spelling, definition, comprehension and application. These will give you concrete data on what are the areas that you need to improve in learning a new language.

3. Study Smart

When learning a language, you can automatically learn fast by using different study techniques.

Visualization

Visualization is an effective way for the subconscious mind to dictate the usage of the word, definition and origin. So, when you are learning a new word try to visualize it. Link it to a specific object that you can relate to. Say for example, the word "ferro" in Spanish means dog in English.  You already know what a dog is, so you can understand the word well.

Gestures

We use 70 to 93%  of non-verbal communication every day, if you are planning to learn a new language one of the fastest way is to use physical actions. You can point at your shoes, if you want to remember the equivalent word of shoes in Spanish. Definitely, it will help your learning faster and easier.

4. Apply the language every day

As a beginner, learning a new language can be extremely hard at first. You might not a clue where to start. However, it is not as difficult as it seems. Here's how you do it.

First, list down all the words you have learned for a week. Take with you on the bus or a restaurant. You can read it for 2 minutes before meeting a native Spanish friend. In this way, you could easily turn your passive learning to active learning by normally conversing with an every day user of the language.

Second, if you are all alone in any country, you can try watching movies or listening to music in the language that you are learning. For example, watch drama series in Spanish or listen to Spanish songs. This is give you more exposure on your target language. 

5. Key Techniques

One of the best way to learn a language is to apply it by creating a sentence. You can also think of other words which you can connect its meaning. Say for example, the word "mesa" you can link it to words like, "table". What does your table look like? Create a sentence using it.