How To Learn A New Language At Home

A practical guide to simulating a foreign learning environment.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Whatever language you’re currently learning, you probably want to improve. But with an inability to buy a plane ticket to the other side of the planet, heading to another country to learn a new language merely isn’t practical for most people.

Right? As much as we all love the idea of flying to Costa Rica for a few months, many other life commitments (Such as work or college) get in the way of assimilating into another culture by going abroad.

So what do you do? I can bet that you tend to download Duolingo, get a five-day streak, and then quit the language learning process altogether because it’s difficult to remember anything useful.

For the longest time, one of my biggest ambitions was to become fluent in another language. Although the process of learning Spanish in High School was horrific, I loved the idea of going abroad and not having to ask if someone speaks English before initiating a conversation.

So I began teaching myself sentence structure, frequently used words, and watched loads of Latin Netflix shows for “educational purposes.”

In case you’re wondering, that’s the excuse I told my parents to stay up until 2 am to watch Narcos.

Admittedly, It took a long time to reach conversational fluency. However, my life completely changed due to the ability to learn new languages in the comfort of my own home.

Below are a collection of techniques which will help you simulate a foreign learning environment at home. Each one of these insights helped me to enjoy the process of learning and eventually increased my confidence while speaking a foreign language abroad. I hope they do the same for you, too.

Focus On Frequent Vocabulary.

When learning a language, we’re often told to start with greetings and how to say that our favorite food is pizza, etc. Although this may occasionally be useful to introduce yourself, this common practice doesn’t help you understand what someone is saying during a conversation.

I’ve discovered that a better solution to learning a language is by writing down the…