Advice for language-learning
When you reach a conversational level, think of everything you use in your everyday life, and change it to your target language.
For example, your phone, your schedule, your online accounts, video games you play. However, I’d recommend drawing the line at stuff you use for school or work, because miscommunicating there would be risky
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 popular languages like German 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 instead. My biggest regret in language-learning is not buying one earlier.
Facebook Marketplace is great for getting foreign books (at least, in the U.S.)
It’s filled with immigrants who are selling books from the their old countries, often very cheaply because of low demand.
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.
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Page created March 2024.