Learning a new language is incredibly satisfied and fun, but there are moments when our brain seems to work against us.
Being a person who has learned to speak four new languages from scratch, I know that there are concrete steps that you can follow to overcome a learning crisis and to make your learning more efficient.
Here are three ways in which you can deceive your brain to learn a new language faster:
1. Create a sense of emergency
A complaint commonly met in the study of a new language? Lack of time.
After a whole day at work or school, when you expose your brain to enormous quantities of information, your brain can refuse at any price to study a new language for a simple reason: it does not want to consume additional energy!
So how to respond?
Participate in a course with other people
Any course. An online course, a person in person or a Saturday seminar. The aim is that someone will take you to take into account. The commitment to participate with other people, in particular with a class and a teacher, will give you a healthy pressure.
Follow your progress … and share it
Have you ever thought about recording audio or video to trace your progress? What would you say to distribute your last essay, the last letter or your favorite expressions on social networks? There is a huge learning community of foreign languages on Twitter and several Facebook groups that will support you and from which you will have to learn.
Do not give the brain the opportunity to get rid of the target language
Listening to music while I go to school or work, watch Netflix movies or shows during the weekend, reading a magazine during lunch or publishing on social networks in your target language are all excellent ways to start learning.
You can also tags objects at home with post-it notes in the destination language. In this way, you are exposed to a new vocabulary all day. The goal is to send to your brain the message you have to use this language … because it is everywhere around you.
2. Make learning as much person as possible
Our brain tends to forget the things we don’t need. Or things that seem not very interesting for us. In fact, most of us complain that we have a bad memory and do not remember the new vocabulary, for example, but it is natural given the amount of information with which our brain is bombed every day.
Your mission? Praise your brain to believe that these foreign words are significant, necessary and personal.
Use your photos
The next time you create a sheet for the word «dog» in Spanish, French or German, it is easier for the brain to remember the word if you take a photo with your pet and then use it on an image card, rather than using the equivalent English translation, for example.
And doing it on your smartphone is very simple: install a free Flashcard app, such as Quizlet or Ankiapp and upload your photos.
Choose key expressions instead of lists
Instead of memorizing lists of vocabularies, choose significant words for your life experiences, routines and relationships.
For example, it is common to learn useful words to several jobs when you start learning a new language. Instead of memorizing the infinite lists of posts, start with the work of your partner, your parents or your best friend! It is more likely that you use what you have learned and therefore reminds them more time.
Write on you as soon as possible
Use a new vocabulary to talk about your life and to explain your feelings, opinions and personal history, rather than following the generic examples of textbooks. What you see in the textbooks is the starting point of your learning, not the final point: the final point is the use of the language in real life and in a natural and useful way.
3. Learn to repeat in a way that really works
Some people may remember live their entire tables of English or Spanish verbs who have learned in high school. However, ask these people to combine them, use them in the context or apply them while telling a story … and therefore you will understand why the repetition of the repetition is not always the best way to follow.
While learning through repetition has its benefits, the secret is not to learn everything very quickly. But repeat effectively.
Familiarize with a distance repetition
In his book Flucent Forever: how to learn any language and never forget it, Polyglot Gabriel Wyner presents us to the technique of repetition for learning a second language. Instead of learning quickly, in a session, information and therefore never look at the study materials, the goal is to repeat the vocabulary from time to time, for a longer period of time and with longer intervals.
The goal is to expose the brain to the target tongue just when it is about to forget it. As Wyner says, «in a period of four months, practicing 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and keep 3600 image cards with 90-95 percent».
Be more visual
Do you remember what I said previously on the personalization of learning using your photos with the images?
Not only to use your images helps your brain to better memorize things, but the simple gesture of looking for a foreign word on Google images and saving one of the images on the phone to use them as a flashcard can really help memorize. Try using your custom cards with funny images, places you know, family holidays or loved ones. You will surely remember them better after some repetitions than to use only words!
Repeat and put what you learn immediately immediately
Remembering whole lists of verbs is not the same to know how to use them and our brain has more possibility to remember things once they have been used in real life conversations.
The use of the things you learned to speak with a teacher, a classmate or a group is crucial, because the external reward supports our learning. You can also practice writing the same word in at least ten different sentences as soon as you learn: its repetition in the context will not only help you remember, but it will help you and understand what you have just learned.
