Learning a New Language? This Is How I Do It!

It's been a while since I wrote my last post. I've got good excuses, though! Let's go back in time and see what happened. Well, majority of people travel in August. But I got to the conclusion that the weather in Canada is still very nice in August. So instead of traveling I decided to stay in Waterloo, work hard on my research, and party with friends. Then, most of September I was away; traveling around Europe. Among others, I went to Portugal, Spain (including Majorca!), and Italy. As usually, thanks to CouchSurfing and GzowskiClub I met very generous and adventurous people. As the weather in southern Europe is great in September, it was another summer month for me. That was definitely good strategy for prolonging the summer. Now, I'm back to Canada, and besides doing research and supervising students, I am learning Portuguese. How cool is that?

Learning a new language is always a great adventure. In fact, it's not just about the language. You learn a lot about another culture, you get the opportunity to meet new people, and experience another country. Ideally, you'd like to move to that country to learn the language. In many cases, it's not that easy. Houston, we've got a problem! My grandma used to say that there are no problems, there are only solutions. Let's focus on solutions then. Throughout the years I came up with a combination of techniques that helped me learn English, German, and Swedish. Now, I'm employing them to learn Portuguese. Truth to be told, I never used German and forgot it. Polish is my native language, I'm fluent in English and can still understand a good part of Swedish. After Portuguese, I'd like to pick up some Spanish and maybe French.

The main idea is to immerse yourself into the new language. Anything you can do to learn counts. Here is how I do it:

• Know why you learn. To be successful at something you need to have an ultimate goal. You need to know why you want to achieve it and what benefits it will bring. This is very important to stay motivated and eager to learn. Learning a new language is typically a huge time commitment. Think about the goal, write it down, and read it whenever you feel too lazy to learn. For example, one of my goals in life is to play in a Brazilian soap-opera :-)
  To those Canadians who don't care about French classes. I just wanted to tell you that Paris is chock-full of beautiful models! I met some of them, and well, too bad they didn't speak English.
• Find a language course. If the language you want to learn is popular (like English or Spanish), you can almost always find teachers and schools in your area. Alternatively, you can learn a language on your own. I know it's possible, because I taught myself Swedish. In that case, you need to buy textbooks, workbooks, and to find (non-)professional teachers to help you.
• Find a group of interest. Try to find other people who want to learn the same language and practice with them. Meetup is good place to find local communities, language exchange meetings, and conversation classes. You can find language events on CouchSurfing. There are also lots of online communities, such as LiveMocha and SharedTalk. I haven't used the last two websites, but heard good things about each of them.
• Find penpals. Thanks to the Internet, it's very easy to find people located in the country of your interest. When I started learning Swedish, I used ICQ to find a random Swedish partner. These days you can use other websites like Facebook, MSN, Badoo. If you are looking for random penpals, you may have to message a lot of them before you get a good response. But hey, that's fun! Of course if you want to make the search less random, use LiveMocha or SharedTalk. You can practice with your penpal every day. It's especially useful to practice informal language, writing, speaking, and listening. Skype allows for audio chats with good voice quality. I ask penpals to type/speak in their native language. I do my best to reply in the same language. At the beginning it's difficult, so if I cannot, I reply in the language I know.
• Ask friends for help. If your local friends speak the language you want to learn, schedule meetings with them. Those meeting are invaluable for improving your accent, speaking, and listening skills. Ask your friends to speak only the native language. In practice, you would be switching between languages at the beginning.
• Radio. Internet gives you access to all the radio stations in the world. Isn't it wondeful? TuneIn is one of such websites. Find a radio station where they talk all the time. It can be fun, it can be boring. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you listen to the language whenever possible (several hours a day). At the beginning you don't understand anything, but after several days you will see that you can recognize certain phrases. Even if I don't understand the phrases, I repeat them to myself.
• Music. Listen to the music in the language you want to learn. Check out the lyrics, try to sing along. If you like the music, it'll be a fun way for learning catchy phrases very quickly. The lyrics are not necessarily the best source of vocabulary, but they are also not the worst one.
• Subtitles. When watching a movie use subtitles in the language you want to learn. To be honest, I never liked switching my attention between the movie and the subtitles, but it's a way of relating subtitles to what you see.
• Online translators and dictionaries. Those are essential for translating words and phrases. They are especially useful when you learn the language on your own and when practicing with a penpal. These days, however, you can get much more from online translators. Personally I really like Google Translate. While its translations are not perfect, it has a great speech synthesizer. It can fluently read phrases in any language it offers. I use it a lot to work on my accent.
• Record yourself. This is something I actually do. It's very hard to improve your accent unless you hear how it sounds. What you think it sounds like is very different from how it sounds to others. You can record yourself and later record a native speaker reading the same text. Compare and try to fix the problems with accent.
• Travel. If you cannot move to the country to practice the foreign language you're learning, do your best to visit it from time to time. There are always multiple opportunities.