How To Learn A New Language At Home

A practical guide to simulating a foreign learning environment.

Matt Lillywhite
4 min readNov 26, 2019
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.

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Matt Lillywhite

Full-time storyteller. Want to talk about writing? I'm offering video calls for people who sign up to my Substack. https://mattlillywhite.substack.com/