Advice for language-learning
Learning a language “just for fun” is a great reason by itself.
In fact, “fun” has the perk of being more controllable than other motives such as travel and society. You may grow to dislike the language’s culture, lose your friends, realize the language is useless, be unable to travel, and so on, but if you’re simply learning for fun, nothing can take that joy away from you.
Studying multiple at once is usually ineffective.
As they say, “if you run after two hares at once, you will catch neither.” Not only does it slow your proficiency in each language, but it may lead you to confuse grammatical concepts. I advise especially strongly against simultaneously learning languages in the same language family (e.g. Spanish and Italian, Polish and Ukrainian.) The words sound similar and you may confuse them.
Keeping a diary in your target language may be helpful.
(Self-explanatory.)
Vocabulary is much, much more important than grammar.
If you learn grammatical concepts before vocabulary, you’ll have a harder time remembering those concepts because you’ll have little to practice applying them to. Furthermore, when reading, you can usually infer texts’ meanings without fully understanding the grammar, but if you don’t know what certain words mean, there’s no way to evade it. Read tons of (reliable) Quizlet and Anki decks, and lists of common words.
Duolingo can be less effective for complex or unpopular languages.
Duolingo is fine for German, Spanish, and French, but languages such as Latin and Vietnamese have fewer people contributing to their lessons, and sometimes contain grammatical errors.
Generally, Duolingo should only serve as a supplement to actual lessons. Duolingo tries to make language-learning seem overtly simple by not teaching you things like declension tables, voices, aspects, and so on—instead, they’ll just leave you to guess them, which is considerably less effective than simply memorizing tables.
If you want to make serious progress, I strongly recommend a textbook. My biggest regret in language-learning is not buying one earlier. For Russian, I used this series.
Study daily.
This will help you build a routine. Plus, the language will be on your mind more, making it harder to forget or lose interest in the language.
Languages are most difficult when you just begin to learn them.
At first, it’ll feel like you know nothing and that there’s an endless mountain of concepts to be memorized, but the more you learn, the easier it grows. You’ll grow familiar with the grammar and vocabulary over time, and in some cases, the language may eventually even feel as smooth and natural as your mother tongue. If a language feels frustrating at first, just keep holding on.
The same is true for language-learning as a skill. At first, understanding things like the dative, the passive voice, the pluperfect, etc. will seem difficult, but the more languages you learn, the easier it’ll be to apply grammatical concepts.
Back
Page created March ???, 2024. Last updated October 13, 2024.