Create Your Plan

Ideally, your study plan should include the three basic aspects of language learning - listening, reading and speaking. Early on, focus on input - listening and reading.

Build your vocabulary

Study common word lists. Memorize the words and quiz yourself. You shouldn’t stop there. Make sure you should also encounter the words in context by reading and listening to material you are interested in.

You can use the Langa Learn website and app to look up unfamiliar words and then quiz yourself later. You can even have vocabulary quizzes sent to your phone throughout the day.

Listening

You can listen to the words in your vocabulary list to not only increase your vocabulary, but recognize the words by ear.

Try listening to words even without understanding them. Become familiar with the sounds of a language. You should develop a sense of how the sounds of language translate to the written word.

Ultimately, you want to develop a spontaneous understanding of a word without having to translate it in your head.

Listen to some texts you are interested in or familiar with at a pace you can handle. Read along as you listen to look up unfamiliar words.

The Langa Learn mobile app is an excellent way to do this. Use the app to listen to articles personalized to your interests. Choose from a variety of different voices. Set a reading speed you can handle.

Reading

Reading is an important way to pick up vocabulary. It’s also a great way for you to discover how a language works. You can pick up a great deal how the grammar works from simply reading sentences and getting translations.

The theory of Comprehensible Input emphasizes getting a lot of exposure to the new language through listening and reading.

Studying grammar in context is important. You can use grammar books to help you figure out unfamiliar grammatical structures. However, you need to encounter these structures on the page over and over.

In the long run, this will enhance your understanding of grammar more than simply memorizing grammar structures. You will internalize the structures, allowing you to spontaneously understand what you hear and read without translating in your head.

Use Langa Learn to get daily articles in your target language tailored to your interests. Always have something interesting to read so you can stay engaged with the language you are learning.

Speaking

Early on, focus on input - reading and listening. As your language skills get stronger, gradually introduce speaking exercises into your study schedule.

Speaking partners

Obviously, a great way to improve your speaking skills is to speak to other people. Assuming you aren’t able to move to an area full of native speakers, here are options.

Tutors

You can find a tutor. However, tutors cost money. Most often, you will meet with a tutor once a week. You often will want to practice your speaking skills more than once a week.

Language Partners

You find a language partner using different apps or websites.

However, even this can be challenging. You may find it difficult to find a time where you speak with your language partner. Maybe there is a big time difference.

Even signing up for these apps can involve a lengthy waiting period depending on what language you are learning.

Language Clubs

If you live in a large enough city, there may even be language clubs for learners. Some language learning apps sponsor them. You can sometimes find them as a meet up.

Local School Conversation Labs

You could see if local schools, like a university or community college that allows outside people to participate in their conversation labs. If you already took a language course at the school, they may allow you to sit in even after the class ends.

Speaking Exercises On Your Own

You may not be able to find another person to speak with to practice speaking with as often you would like. Luckly, there are techniques you can use to practice speaking on your own.

Shadow Boxing

You may want to try shadow boxing, a technique used by a few prominent polyglots to keep up their speaking skills.

When you ‘shadow box’, you speak along with a text while someone else is speaking. You speak the words right after the original speaker, trying your best to mimic the proper pronunciation.

Using this technique helps train your mouth muscles with forming words with a proper accent. Often, you may find trying to pronounce words with a proper accent can use entirely different mouth muscles.

Of course, a foreign language will often include sounds that may not be found in native language. For example, English does not have the gutteral sound used in words like ‘ich.’

Speaking a foreign language is not simply an intellectual exercise. Many times language learning is a physical exercise that involves training your muscles.

Rember, this technique is valuable even if you don’t fully understand the text being read. You’ll improve your familiarity with the sounds of the language, which will ultimately help your listening comprehension as your vocabulary grows.

You can use the Langa Learn app, you can read the text of a recommended article and speak along as a voice of your choosing speaks the text.

Speak about your surroundings

As you go about your day, identify objects in your surroundings with words from your target language. Identify activities people around you are doing. It’s important to use newly acquired vocabulary right away so you don’t forget it.

‘There’s a table.’

‘There’s a window.’

‘A man is running on the road.’

Say the target word out loud. This way, you can connect the image of the object directly to the sound of the word and muscles used to say it.

This way you can limit the problem of intermediate translation many language learners face. You will translate in your head. There is no way around it during your language journey. However, you can use this technique to move beyond this tendency and toward a native understanding of your target language.

When you see a flat circular slab of wood held up by two 4 legs, you can immediately think ‘la mesa’ instead of ‘the table -> la mesa.’

Memorizing vocabulary is always going to be an important part of language learning, especially early on. However, techniques that get you thinking in the target language as much as possible will greatly enhance and accelerate your learning.

You will begin to learn words in multiple dimensions.

• Conceptual meaning - You can think of the features of a table, it’s different forms and what tables are commonly used for.
• Visual - Recognize the time by sight. Images of different sorts of tables. But also, you’ll recognize the word ‘table’ as written. This can be especially important when learning languages with alphabets different than your native one.
• Auditory - Recognize the sound of the word
• Physical - The muscle memory that develops in learning to speak

Learning vocabulary in this multidimensional way ultimately helps you develop the ability to spontaneously understand and speak your target language without translating in your head.

How long should you study

Early on, you should probably keep the study sessions short and more frequent.

Cramming is not effective with genuine language learning. Immersion is effective if you manage it. However, spending 3 hours of continuous study once a week is not as effective, short, but frequent exposure to your new language. Half an hour or less should be sufficient.

It is better to do four 30 minute sessions a week than a 2 hour session once or twice a week. Gaps can lead to memory loss, both with memorization and the skills you are working on. Short sessions also allow you to make incremental gains and solidify the words or skills you just learned.

You will probably come to the point in a study session where you will hit a wall. Your brain will just stop processing the new language and everything will become like the adults talking in a Charlie Brown cartoon - wah wah, wah.

When you hit this wall, continue just a bit further. If you’ve been listening for 10 minutes, go a minute more even if you barely understand anything. A half hour? Do an additional 5 minutes.

This actually requires your language comprehension ‘muscle’ to strengthen faster. You may notice significant gains a short time after you start using this technique. You may not have been able to follow full sentences because you were translating in your head too much. Pretty soon, if you can just keep going a bit after hitting the wall, you will understand full sentences. You will translate in your head less and less.

Conclusion

Ultimately, creating a study plan is all about making one you can stick to and will deliver progress. Just maintaining consistent engagement with your new language is half the battle.

A half hour to an hour of dedicated study 3-5 times a week should allow you to make steady progress. Start off focusing mainly on comprehension to build your vocabulary and understanding how the language works. Later on, you can aim for a schedule of ⅔ comprehension and ⅓ speech production, whether speaking or writing.

You really should try to incorporate your new language into your everyday life. Try speaking or thinking in your new language throughout your day. If you have language partners, text with them.

Many successful polyglots use these same techniques to acquire and maintain multiple languages.

Of course, you can use Langa Learn to help you with many of these techniques. 

Sign up and give it a try!