Is it real to learn a foreign language alone? Where to start and how to continue? What resources to use? These tips will make learning foreign languages at home even easier than sports betting or Facebook chatting.
Set a Goal to Languages at Home
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Just wanting is not enough. You need goal-setting skills to formulate a concrete and achievable goal, to set realistic deadlines, and not to give up halfway.
“Learning a language for yourself” is just a desire. But “to watch in three months an episode of your favorite TV series without subtitles and understand everything” is a specific and achievable goal.
After achieving it, you can set the next one, which is more difficult. This is the only way to achieve great heights – small confident steps.
Make a Habit
It’s better to practice for half an hour every day than for five hours once a week. Memory is constructed in such a way that a person forgets 90% of the information perceived once. To ensure that new knowledge isn’t sifted out together with the information garbage, they must be repeated daily. And so it doesn’t become routine, use different ways of immersion in the language, involve all the channels of perception.
Immerse Yourself in the Language
Surround yourself with the language you are learning. Start by changing the language on your phone and computer. It will be awkward at first, but you’ll get the hang of it quickly because you remember visually where the right functions are.
Turn on the radio in the language you are learning, just in the background noise. That way you can get a feel for the correct intonation, pronunciation, and pace of speech. And most importantly, you will get used to the new language and stop perceiving it as something alien. Here are dozens of radio stations from around the world. Choose a genre and turn it up!
Subscribe to speakers on social networks. Find foreign bloggers of your interest and mix business with pleasure. Flip through the feeds and learn conversational vocabulary.
Watch cartoons and TV shows in your target language. With subtitles in the same language. Start with your favorites which you watch often and remember well; this way it’s easier to understand what’s being talked about.
Memorize the Most Important Words for Languages at Home
Every language has a limited number of the most commonly used words – it’s a must to know them. The most important words are always the most important ones – each language has them in turn. They are followed by the most important concepts.
You can use special frequency dictionaries. It’s desirable that the dictionary was published in the country whose language you learn, and the year of publication was more recent. The same applies to textbooks.
Look for and Create Context for Languages at Home
Knowing vocabulary means understanding the meaning of words and using them appropriately. It also means guessing the meaning from the context. If you don’t know how to use a word, find a context for it. Context.reverso will help you: enter a word or a phrase into the search field and get variants of translation with usage examples from real texts. Also, the program knows how to pick up synonyms.
It’s not enough to simply read the translation of a word once, even in context, and forget it quickly. For a word to be truly memorable, you need to create your own context, and not just one, but several.
Think of five to ten phrases with the word. Use your imagination: they can be absurd and funny – most importantly, they should be memorable.
Then draw your own context or find suitable pictures on the Web.
Make cards. On one side is a word or phrase with the picture, on the other side the translation, or better yet, the definition in the original language. We advise you to do it this way: you will remember more words, including grammatical concepts, such as the names of parts of speech.
It’s better to get used to doing it this way, because we do not have the task of translation, we have the task of learning to think in another language. And to do that, we need to separate the native language from the language we are learning as much as possible. 9 Masks of Fire is a simple slot game set on a 5 reel, 3 rows grid. The game comes with 20 paylines on which you can create winning combinations
Cards can be cut out of cardboard, glue pictures and write the words by hand – so you engage the mechanical memory. But if you don’t have time to cut with scissors and glue, use Anki: you can create the same cards, but virtually. They will always be on your device, so you won’t forget to take them with you. Besides, the algorithm of the program is good at determining which card is worth showing more often, and which is worth saving for a month.
