What is your motivation to learn a foreign language and how we can help you to maintain this motivation?
To motivate you in the long term, even if it is difficult in most labour-intensive phases, we have a lot of tips to help you and to integrate the new language in your life. Ask us about it. Here are a few valuable techniques that we have put together for you.
Foreign language speaking practice
You have studied vocabulary and grammar and now want to practically apply your knowledge? Go ahead, there are many ways every day to use the new language: How about beginning to think in the foreign language? You can even ask yourself questions about the different areas of your life. You can run your diary in a foreign language and also talk with yourself, practice small musical pieces. Perhaps there is a particular genre that you love to study in the chosen language, for example Salsa for students of Spanish or Samba and Bossa Nova when learning Portuguese. Also watching TV series in the original language will bring you benefits while practicing the spoken language. Try also to come in contact with native speakers, no matter how simple the conversation may be. This will motivate you and your curiosity about the new language.
Learning in the Community
If you attend a group course, you can form learning groups and practice what you have learned outside the classroom. If you have individual tuition, look for students at the same level and practice the new foreign language! Write text messages or short emails and surprise each other with new words and phrases. Let your foreign language study be a language adventure. The advantage: you have someone with whom you can communicate – and that is the main objective of language learning.
First things first
If your goal from the outset is to be able to talk, you will not lose yourself in any textbooks. If you actually talk to other people in the new language, your learning process remains relevant for you. To create a useful, everyday context for the chosen language, that is the real creative part in learning languages. Self-motivation, self-talk, little poems or lyrics can be of great help. Have you ever been at a restaurant with specialties from the country of your chosen language and ordered your meal there in the foreign language?
Fun, fun, fun
The learning of a foreign language should be fun! It should enrich your positive attitude to life and encourage new experiences. In what way could you practice your new language? Repeat dialogues of TV series with a language partner, write lyrics and take every opportunity to speak.
Playfully dealing with the foreign language
How does a child learn a language? Watch little children as they repeat the words of adults, without first of all understanding the meaning, as they slowly form small sentences and then longer ones. How they begin to understand what the adults tell them and then respond to them. So in order to learn as easily as a child, you should try to adapt some childish behaviour: no inhibitions to playfully deal with the language and speak and not be afraid of making mistakes. We learn by making mistakes. Children are expected to make mistakes, for adults it is usually a taboo that needs to be overcome. Adults are more prone to statements like “I cannot” than to say: “I have not yet learned.”(“I cannot swim,” “I cannot drive,” “I cannot speak Spanish”, …) The fear in the eyes of others to fail (or even only to struggle with something under observation) is a social taboo that children do not care about. The key to success in language learning is to admit that you do not know everything and to accept that that is absolutely fine. Get rid of your adult self-consciousness!
Get out into life
The willingness to make mistakes also means to provoke potentially embarrassing situations. This can be frightening, but it is the only way to move forward and to become better. No matter how much you’ve learned – you do not learn speaking without going out of yourself: whether it’s about a conversation with a foreigner about directions, ordering food or an attempt to tell a joke. The more you enter this type of situation, the more comfortable and relaxed you will feel and thereby enter new linguistic territory.
Listening and mimicking
If you want to paint something, you have to learn to observe correctly before you take the brush in your hand. The same is true for language learning: In order to speak, you must learn to listen. Each language may sound strange and alien when you hear it for the first time, but the more you expose yourself to the new language, the more familiar you will become with it and the easier it will be to talk:
We can say anything we’re just not used to. The rolled, R perhaps does not exist in your native language. If you are going to learn Spanish, there are words like “perro” and “Reunion”, which have a hard, R. The best way of mastering this is to constantly hear it. You need to listen carefully and try to picture how it is pronounced correctly: because there is a certain part of every sound in your mouth or throat, which you use to produce it.
Observation
Different languages make different demands on the tongue, lips and throat. Pronunciation is as much a physical as a mental phenomenon:
It makes sense to look at someone exactly as he or she pronounce words with a particular sound, and then try to imitate them as closely as possible. It may be hard at first, but it works. It just requires a little practice.
When there are no native speakers, you can get up close to observe and imitate, foreign language films and television are a good substitute; especially in series you will hear a lot of useful ways of talking.
Soliloquies (speaking with oneself)
If you have no one with whom you can chat, there is no objection to carrying on a conversation with yourself:
This may sound strange, but to talk to yourself in another language is a great way to practice speaking a foreign language when it is otherwise not constantly used.
In this way you can memorize vocabulary and phrases just learned and be more confident when you talk to someone in that language the next time.
(Bonus tip) Relax!
You will not get on someone’s nerves, just because you speak their language badly. When you initiate a conversation by saying: “I’m still learning and I’d love to practice …”, most people will meet you with respect and patience and even encourage you. German is only spoken in a few countries and even if you might have a good command of English, it is worth more to learn another foreign language. Although there are about one billion people in the world who speak English as a foreign language, most of them would prefer a conversation in their own language when they are faced with the choice. To take the initiative and to go into the world of another language helps relaxing your conversation partner and ensures a positive atmosphere:
Sure, you can go abroad and speak your own mother tongue, but you gain so much more when you are actually embarking on the site – conduct conversations, understand what is going on and interact in any situation with people.