How you can learn a new language quickly
Anyone who sets out to learn a new language within a very short time, must use all of their senses: building on existing knowledge, talking a lot, hearing the sound of the words of the new language and repeating them a lot. If someone can handle new languages easily and quickly, people often say that this person has a talent for languages. However, according to a study, a ‘language learning talent’ does not exist. Rather, this study indicates that learning is strongly influenced by the persons own motivations. And so there are people who just naturally bring that motivation and others who find it difficult to apply the necessary motivation for learning a foreign language.
Small children can quickly learn languages – But even in old age, everyone can learn a new language.
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How does this motivation appear?
Small children, who are learning their mother tongue, have an interest for communicating with their environment from birth. The brains of babies are readily made for learning multiple languages at the same time. You can even teach up to three languages simultaneously, or in succession, to your children. The fear that you can overwhelm your children is thus unfounded. The kind of language learning is crucial here. What’s intuitive and playful to the children is compulsory in school. Many rules, a lot of grammar and direct assessments in the form of class work can often make motivation fall by the wayside. Linguistic researchers have found that learning process and motivation are of great importance when you can initiate and control the learning process yourself. In school, however, this is often not the case.
Find their way into long-term memory
People and people’s brains are different. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the memory can store content in a variety of ways. When the brain saves vocabulary only in the so-called ‘working memory’, it’s quickly forgotten. The brain only stores the information in the long term memory that it considers to be important. This decision, what is important and what is not, is very much driven by the motivation.
Learning with links
A connection of the learning content to what is learned already, is the key to rapidly learning a foreign language. Through linking, the new knowledge is integrated in the brain into existing networks. So content is stored in many different places in the brain and thus anchored.
Anyone who can itself initiate and control their learning process, has a greater motivation and usually more success.
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Learning with all your senses and learning languages quickly
When learning, it is important that you speak to as many senses at once – if possible. This is perceived by the mind as a kind of unit that you can remember better. The fact that several senses are addressed means that whatever you have learned is stored in several places. Accordingly, in hindsight the brain can get this information from multiple locations. A practical example is not just learning vocabulary from a list, but also having the vocabulary pre-spoken, if possible, and directly repeated. PC-language courses and online-language courses are very well suited for this.
Motivation through variety
During everyday school life, you can’t always easily meet the above factors. Teenagers are easily bored and lose interest in German and French lessons. One way to bring variety in everyday school life is a language learning tour. If you have friends in Germany, then the motivation will be very different towards learning German. Many digital language courses provide learners with a wide variety innately. Many PC courses have integrated learning games or they talk to the learner with appropriate images and sounds. By being read text snippets by native speakers you train your listening comprehension as well.
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Here you will get even more tricks and tips :
- The different ways of learning languages
- Learning vocabulary successfully
- Motivated language learning
- It is so easy to train your understanding of a language at the same time
- Learning languages quickly? – Is it possible?
- The different types of learners when learning languages
Here you’ll find this article in other languages:
- Dansk – Lære sprog hurtigt? – Er det muligt?
- Deutsch – Schnell Sprachen lernen? – Ist das möglich?
- Nederlands – Snel talen leren? – Is het mogelijk?
- Norsk – Å lære språk raskt. – Er det mulig?
- Svenska – Lära sig ett nytt språk snabbt? – Är det möjligt?