So, you don’t have much experience learning a language? And I mean “really” learning a language, not just sitting bored through a class as a kid, hoping the teacher ignores you as much as you’re ignoring them? And for whatever reason – maybe a big move, newfound cultural curiosity, an increasingly multilingual circle of friends – you want to change that? That’s great!
You have landed on the right page, my friend! And I am going to answer your question – how to learn a new language fast, according to a Polyglot. Which means that I will be sharing my experience of learning languages as a Polyglot with you guys and sharing practical tips that can help you immensely in your learning journey.
Table Of Contents
Can I Learn A New Language Easily?
More and more people are embracing how international and interconnected the world is becoming. Learning new languages is one of the most important ways to do that. But you’re also wondering: Can I learn a new language, like “really” learn it? Can anyone? Is there a best time and place in your day, week, or life? Is there a best method for learning languages? A best routine?
As with learning so many things in life, there isn’t a single, one-size-fits-all way to learn a language. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t general guidelines, things to consider, and helpful hints that can help anyone confronting this seemingly daunting task!
Can You Learn A New Language After 35?
Wondering what is the best age to learn a new language? Many worry they’re “too old” to learn a new language. It’s important to understand that linguists acknowledge people can learn languages at any age. Every day, migrants and motivated adults in their 20s or older learn new languages, despite being past the “critical period” identified by linguists.
The “critical period” debates focus on when children must start speaking their first language and at what age one can learn a second language and pass as a native speaker. Children often learn second languages more impressively, becoming indistinguishable from native speakers, a rare feat for adults.
But your goal as a language student shouldn’t be to trick native speakers into thinking you’re one of them! It should be to be able to speak with them, to watch and read media in the language you’re learning, to enrich your life and the lives of those around you by bridging a cultural gap.
There is no reason to imagine you can’t do that, not only do I believe you can do it, I believe
you will!
How Long Will It Take Me To Learn A New Language?
I’ve met many adults who have learned, for example, English as adults. They could all make themselves understood, many of them could discuss complex and interesting things. But let’s say you’re very motivated to learn a new language, how long will it actually take?
In a sense, the process never ends – a unilingual person, someone who only speaks one language, still never “finishes” learning language. People read and learn new terms from the book they read, new terms are invented and they learn them from younger people, you go to a new city and discover local people speak a different dialect of the same language.
But, what if I’m in the position of one of our hypothetical migrants? What if I have a week until I’m in a new country with a whole new language? Can I learn their language in a week before arrival? Or if I can’t, how long am I doomed to being unable to express myself after I arrive? And if I can express myself, how long will it take to express myself “well”?
These are some great questions that don’t have simple yes/no or quantifiable number answers. But that doesn’t mean they have “no” answer. Years ago, there was a popular YouTube account from Ireland by a guy who claimed you could become “fluent” in “any language” in “3 months”. A lot of people contested this claim for reasons I’ve already alluded to – not everyone is learning languages the same way, and as the author quickly discovered, no matter how many languages you speak, your relationship to a new one won’t be the same if they share a lot of grammatical assumptions and vocabulary as if they don’t.
But it’s true that our friend, despite some errors in generalization, showed that with a certain work ethic, open mind, and lifestyle around the language learning, could quickly dive into speaking a new language. Because often he would study languages very similar to ones he already knew, by the end of a week, yes, he might really have been having real and meaningful conversations a new language.
The diversity of languages you can learn and other languages you may already know is something everyone should consider when they set out to learn a new language, in terms of setting goals and expectations.
If you speak English and nothing else, and the first language you set about learning is French and German, you’re likely to find that it takes you less time to start putting together simple sentences and having short conversations than with a language that shares less vocabulary and grammatical rules with English. Many are the students of Japanese who after months of work still can’t compete with their friend’s first month of Spanish!
Does that mean some languages are “too hard” for you? Not at all!
How Do I Learn A Hard Language?
Do you often wonder, “I really want to learn a hard language! I want to learn it fast! But what is the best way to learn a language?” Maybe I can help.
I am something of a “polyglot”, in so far as I have studied more than a dozen languages and every day speak at least three. When you’ve studied a lot of languages, and especially a lot of quite different languages as I have, learning a new one is much easier. Part of that is a diversity of knowledge which can only be gained by experience. But part of that experience can be distilled into practical advice.
The most important thing with language learning is to set yourself meaningful and achievable goals and hold yourself to them. Some of these goals take the form of stages of learning: a good first one is “I want to be able to take apart and put together simple written sentences in my target language”. A good second one is “I want to be able to understand short videos or audio in my target language”. Having stages like this, based on comprehending or producing successively more difficult kinds of language, is a good motivator and easy to do even without a teacher to judge you.
Achieving these qualitative goals, and achieving them at a reasonable pace, can best be achieved by setting daily goals for quantitative work. How much should you study in a day if you want to start speaking ASAP?
If you’re a seasoned language learner, you could easily do more than what I’m about to recommend, but I would say that anyone who is serious about learning a new language ought to dedicate at least an hour a day to it. I say “at least” because outside of conscious time you set aside for study, any chance you get to talk with speakers of the language, to listen to or watch media in that language, to immerse yourself, will increase the effects of your study considerably.
But you also can’t learn a totally new language by pure osmosis. And the more different to languages you already speak a new language is, the harder that language will feel, and the more important it becomes to sit down and do conscious study.
How Should I Learn A Language Daily?
What should your daily hour of study look like? If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve already dipped your toe in learning some language already, so you likely know that a few of the areas where you’re likely to struggle and for which you need to have a regular regimen designed to help you improve include:
- Listening
- Pronunciation
- Reading
- Writing
You may have noticed that I’ve basically divided the language into two different binaries, one of comprehension (listening and reading) vs production (pronunciation and writing), and one of spoken (listening and pronunciation) vs written (reading and writing).
Why split the language this way? Because although these skills are all related, we can use the divisions between them to focus on ways in which each can help the student to identify and improve aspects of the language learning process which might be more apparent in one or the other area.
In any language, including your first language, written or spoken, we always comprehend more than we speak. If I asked most readers right now to produce a one or two word utterance in Zaza, a small Iranian language spoken in Turkey they are extremely unlikely to speak and probably don’t speak any of its close relatives (Kurdish, Persian, etc.), they would almost certainly not be able to. Your productive abilities in Zaza are 0. Now your comprehension of Zaza is not much higher than zero, but crucially it is NOT zero. Here is a short paragraph in Zaza:
“Namey mı Danielo. Ez Dewletê Amerikaê Yewbiyaey rao. Madzıwanê mı İngılızkio. Ez musayışu musnayışê zıwana ra hez kena. Her roc ez ferhengi waneno kelimey newi bander va. Bilgisayarê mı de şeş klavye estê ez bı zaf zıwana bınusa.”
Read that paragraph very slowly. It’s statistically extremely unlikely you’ll understand everything. But you should be able to pick out a couple of words. Some of you may get enough words to guess what the paragraph is basically saying despite having never seen this specific language before.
Okay, how useful is that information to you? You don’t speak Zaza! But that’s just the point: you can always understand a little more (not a lot more of course) than you think you can with effort and focus. And conversely, you should not trust how much you “understand” as a test of how much you can “speak” a language you’re learning!
The other binary, between written and spoken, is important for a language learner to think about in this context – you may perfectly understand a spoken sentence in a language and consider the job done, the moment of speech being passed. But written language allows us to put the language under more of a microscope and see how much we really understand how the language works. Let’s go back to our Zaza example to the very first sentence:
“Namey mı Danielo.”
You can probably guess that this means “my name is Daniel”, and if I said it out loud, although “name” (the Zaza word for “name”) sounds less like the English word than it looks like it, it still sounds similar enough that you’d probably still be able to guess what it meant. But now that you’ve got the sentence written in front of you, if you were learning Zaza, you’d actually have a series of problems to solve laid out: what is that “-y” doing after “name”? Is “mı” exactly “my”? It goes after “namey” and not before, why is that? What does the “-o” at the end of “Daniel” do? Is it part of the name or part of the sentence?
This isn’t a Zaza lesson, so I won’t answer any of those questions, I just want to show you that if you stare long enough at a halfway familiar sentence in a language you’re learning, you’ll be able to come up with that sort of list of questions for yourself. Your reading time should be much more focused on important sentence structure questions than the time you spend speaking and listening, where you can’t interrupt the flow of conversation to ask much of this kind at all.
How Do You Use Your Spare Time For Your Language Learning?
It can be a lot to ask of an inexperienced and new learner to listen for new vocabulary words, practice pronunciation, read and write so that every word is in its right place, every day! If you don’t need a language for survival, and aren’t being regularly tutored in person, it’s easy to fall behind.
Matt Little, Founder and Managing Director of Festoon House, shares a practical solution. “One tip that really helped me was setting aside dedicated time each day for practice. It doesn’t have to be hours on end, even just 20-30 minutes of focused practice can make a significant difference over time,” he states.
Moreover, you should always try to get in diverse kinds of practice wherever you can, as previously mentioned, but you need a regimen, a baseline of discipline, to push you forward and fill in the gaps even on relatively “weak” or “lazy” days.
Technology has somewhat provided an answer, as many language apps provide diverse kinds of input and output, spoken and written. The student is taught and drilled through what are effectively a growing and diverse set of audio-enabled digital flash cards. This is a great starting point for intensive study, as it can help acclimate you quickly with a new language, provide you with new vocabulary or novel sentences, introducing you diverse topics in many languages often available through the same app.
Learning A New Language With A Language App
For someone who is interested in the study of many different languages at once, I often recommend like-minded learners check out Ling. It offers many language learning activities. It’s the only app for many of the languages it does have, and has a wider selection of languages in one place than almost all competitors.
Ling offers dozens of units full of essential vocabulary on practical topics in languages that, even where other language learning apps might offer them, might limit them to fewer lessons, or constrain the education to an assumed cultural sphere. Ling doesn’t just teach the Armenian you need to attend a church service, or the Cantonese you need to order dim sum. Each language’s lessons cover diverse and practical topics, with plenty of example sentences and vocabulary that can be applied immediately or studied to advance further in the language.
While some language learning apps – or at least some of their lessons – are available for free, they simply don’t offer the diversity and quality of content that Ling does. Ling is one of the most across-the-globe useful language learning apps, which you can use to immerse yourself in many new languages you can’t get elsewhere. What’s more? You can learn a new language through your native language.
Alex C Marcher, a Ling user, vouches for it’s efficacy. “Amazing app! One brilliant thing about the Ling app is that you can learn any of the available languages through any of the others. My kid played around with Chinese though Danish, I’m learning Hindi through Malayalam to get to practice both languages at the same time,” he shares. Alex shares how Ling is helping him in his language learning journey. “I love that each new word is used in a sentence, and I live the dialogues at the end of each lesson for a longer context of how the language sounds. Highly recommend it,” he remarks!
FAQs About Learning A New Language
What Is The Best Way To Master A New Language?
The best way to master a new language involves setting meaningful and achievable goals, dedicating regular study time, immersing yourself in the language, and using technology and resources that provide diverse and practical input and output. Apps like Ling offer a comprehensive and efficient way to practice and learn multiple languages, with lessons that cover a wide range of topics and practical vocabulary.
Why Am I Struggling To Learn A New Language?
Struggling to learn a new language is common and can be due to various factors, such as lack of regular practice, insufficient immersion, unrealistic goals, or the inherent difficulty of the language compared to those you already know. Setting achievable goals, dedicating regular study time, and immersing yourself in the language can help overcome these challenges.
How Long Does It Take To Master A New Language?
There is no definitive answer to how long it takes to master a new language, as it depends on various factors, including the learner’s motivation, the similarity of the new language to ones already known, and the amount of time dedicated to study and practice. With regular practice and immersion, it is possible to start having meaningful conversations in a relatively short period.
Is It Possible To Learn A New Language In 1 Week?
While it is not realistic to master a new language in one week, it is possible to make significant progress and start having basic conversations with intensive study and immersion. Focusing on essential vocabulary, phrases, and practical usage is the best way to learn a language and maximize learning in a short time.
How To Learn A Language When You Don’t Have Time?
When you don’t have much time, it’s crucial to make the most of the time you do have. Utilize spare moments for quick language practice, such as using language apps, listening to audio lessons during commutes, and practicing speaking with friends or language partners whenever possible. Setting small, achievable goals and incorporating language learning into your daily routine can help you progress even with limited time.
Learn A New Language In Your Spare Time With Ling
A yearly subscription that covers all of Ling’s lessons and content costs less than a couple of high quality audio-inclusive textbooks for some languages, or a single textbook and a couple of lessons with a teacher. And lifetime subscriptions covering all of this well tailored content are available for about the cost of the industry standard Arabic textbook!
In my opinion, a Ling subscription is one of the best investments you can make in your language learning as a global citizen! There’s even a 7-day free trial to help you gauge your compatibility with the app. Isn’t that a nice deal? So, don’t waste your time and quickly download the Ling app. It is available on App Store as well as Google Play Store.
