Top 3 Language Learning Tips

Read this article in English | 11-05-2010| How to Learn Spanish

The other day Joe Gregory asked me on Facebook for my top three language learning tips:

Practice makes perfect

Any tips on learning Spanish more quickly? I’ve never been good at foreign languages so just wondered what your top 3 attitudes/strategies were that made you good at it?

I thought about it for a few days and came up with the following three tips, which summarise fifteen years of language learning, teaching and translation:

1. Be proactive: learn to criticise and correct yourself; imitate people like an excited parrot until people start complementing you on your pronunciation and writing. Don’t be afraid to make lots of really stupid mistakes, more than once, until you get it right;
2. Persevere & practice: always, at all times, practice, practice and practice some more. Practice the individual bits (word formation, pronunciation of an individual word), the combined parts (sentence formation, pronunciation of sentences, transformation of sentences) and the complex skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening). Practice as much as you can, as often as you can and for as long as you can; when it breaks you, forget about it and take a break for a couple of weeks or a month and then come back to it. Don’t doubt that you will get better if you keep going;
3. Keep notes: or some kind of record of expressions, bits of expressions and words you that you like, as well as questions and doubts you have. You’ll find that the same ones come up again and again so by keeping track of them and revising from time to time, you won’t feel like you’re stuck in the same place.