1. Make New Friends
Friendship is one of the best ways to learn a foreign language, and the easiest way to get comfortable with the slang, intonation, and mannerisms. You can casually chat with your friends in local cafés, bars, and restaurants and slowly build a foundation on the language you want to learn.
2. Copy Elementary School Kids
Find an international pen pal and trade language expertise and knowledge. Edit each other's letters (keeping what you both originally wrote), so you can see the correct format and spelling. You’ll help each other learn, your skills for writing in a foreign language will increase tenfold, and you may even have someone to visit abroad when you’re ready to put those skills to use!
3. Watch a Movie
or the people who want to take advantage of one of the best ways to learn a language from the comfort of their own home, put on a foreign movie in another language — without subtitles if you can! Not only is this one of the best ways to learn a foreign language, but you will also get a greater sense of that language’s culture as well! If you don’t know enough of the language to turn the subtitles off, keep a list of new vocabulary words you hear and what you think they mean.
4. Pretend You’re at a Restaurant
Read a menu in your target language and pick a dish you would order every day — then look up what it means. The names of your food choices will stick with you! Plus, if you end up choosing something that translates to “dog” or “sheep intestine,” you’ll know to steer clear of them when you’re abroad (unless those are your favorite foods).
5. Seek Out Online Resources
The internet is a truly magical place. If you’re looking for the best ways to learn a foreign language, look no further! You can fall back on ol' reliable Google Translate, but why not utilize helpful browser extensions like Toucan? What else can you do to learn a language online? You can connect with other language learners via online chat groups, watch YouTube videos, and read articles.
6. Try Online Courses (like Lingodeer and Italki!)
For online language courses, you can check out LingoDeer. LingoDeer
will take your language learning to the next level. Choose from Korean,
Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and more! Their curricula is built
by language teachers, and the app provides a built-in flashcard
function.
7. Teach Yourself
The key to this one is small steps of dedicated research – and while obvious, remains one of the best ways to learn a new language. Take a little bit of time every day to write out a sentence you would like to know how to say in your target language. Look up each word/section and try to construct the sentence yourself. If you have a language partner, have them double check your sentences when you meet up.
8. Break it Down
we’re not talking about break dancing here — sadly those crazy moves will most likely not help you learn a language (anything is possible, though!). Instead, focus on vocabulary for one area or topic each week (i.e., transportation or food items), and then move onto another topic the next week.
9. Listen to the Radio
Similar to watching a foreign movie, try listening to a radio station in your target language either in the car, on a podcast, or online. Try to see how much you can understand, and write down words that you recognize but do not understand to look up (Pro tip: listening to the news in another language is an incredible and really intense way to start learning vocab and conversational structures fast!).
10. Go Abroad!
One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to visit a country that speaks your target language and live with a host family that doesn’t speak your native language. You’ll be absolutely amazed at how much information you can communicate and how quickly you pick up a language when you don’t have any other option. This full-on immersion style training will have you speaking fluently in months.