ONE TIP TO LEARN A LANGUAGE QUICKLY AND EFFECTIVELY

One tip to learn a language quickly and effectively

My favorite language learning tip

If you’ve ever felt burnt out browsing through language textbooks over and over again, or you’ve felt like you weren’t making any progress in a langauge despite weeks of intensive study, this tip may be for you. What I always do when I’m learning a new language is to write in my target language in a journal/diary/whatever you call it, preferably every day. Personally, I enjoy writing about my language learning journey, my travels and my reflections on life, but you can write about literally anything you want.

Reasons why this technique is so effective

Not only is writing a fun way to learn how to think in another language, but it can also be a great opportunity to practice your grammar and gain new vocabulary. But the most important reason why I consider it an amazing exercise is that when writing you can quickly see which vocabulary words you’re lacking. Moreover, this way you can learn to describe things that you often think about. All this may significantly contribute to the improvement of your speaking skills as well, since with practice you’ll find it easier to express yourself in this language.

Another benefit of writing in another language as often as you can is that you’re exposed to the language on a regular basis, which is essential espescially if you’re learning a new language from scratch. Plus, after a while you’ll be able to go back to the pages you wrote earlier and see how much progess you’ve made. From my experience, it’s a very rewarding feeling that’ll give you an extra boost of motivation to keep writing.

How to use it when you’re a beginner

What I usually do after a few weeks of learning a new language (mostly by immersion and using language apps) is I write a page in English e.g. about how my day has been, then use an online translator (DeepL is one of the best ones) to translate the text to my target language, and at the end write it in my journal/diary. It helps me to see how simple sentences are composed in this language and also introduces me to new vocabulary. I like that this way you don’t learn random words, but the frequently used ones, like ‘nice’, ‘very’ or ‘when’. I always underline the words I don’t know and usually make flashcards out of them. Over time you’ll start to understand most of what you write and that’s when I recommend to change your writing technique to benefit from it even more.

How to use it when you’re more advanced

When you start feeling you’re not making much progress anymore using the technique I described above, or simply want to take up a new challenge, you can start writing in the target language on your own. I recently started doing it in Swedish since I realized I had become too comfortable using the help of a translator. When I did it for the first time, I instantly noticed 2 things. The first one was that I was actually capable of creating my own sentences, which made me very proud of myself. And the second thing was that I couldn’t remember some of the vocabulary words that came up pretty often when I was still using the translator. I had to check these words later to be able to use them in the future. I learned that having to make an effort to check the meaning of specific words makes you more likely to remember them. This is a proof that this technique is way more efficient than the last one.

My language learning journal

I’ve been writing in my journal since the beginning of 2020. I started doing it in English, and over time changed the language in which I was writing to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and now Swedish. When I first started writing in it, I had no idea would be able to learn so many languages. I didn’t even dream I’d learn to write well in Spanish, so the thought of me becoming a polyglot in the future would have been insane to me. When I go back to my first pages, I can’t believe how much progress in learning languages I made over the years and I can’t help but smile.

Finally, I’d like to wish you the best of luck in your language learning journey. It’s not always easy, but you can achieve so much if you just keep going!