4 Essential Pieces of Advice to Become Fluent in Any Language
Let me guess, you traveled to Italy, you absolutely loved the culture, food, people and you thought to yourself: Maybe I want to move here one day. You even started to look for an Italian teacher.
Or you can't get that cool K-pop song out of your head even though you don’t understand the lyrics.
Maybe you fell in love with a funny and beautiful foreigner, and you feel pumped up to learn some cute phrases and surprise them.
Whatever the reason, let me give it to you straight. Learning a new language is like embarking on a complex and emotional mind rollercoaster. But if you know how to prepare, you might have much better odds of getting fluent than 99 % of others who give up within the first couple of weeks.
Buckle up and let’s see how to survive the common twists and turns.
#1 Create and hang on to a strong, emotional reason why you want to learn
Motivation might be fleeting when it is based on intensity, not consistency. If your reason is to sing along to a few songs, I am not sure you are going to make it past the “honeymoon phase”. Language learning is difficult and when the times get tough, you need something deeper that moves you to action.
If a person you want to marry speaks the language or you are planning to move to a specific country, that is something you can work with.
Why? The price of giving up is too high. It will crush your dreams, which is a strong emotional lever to push you through difficult times.
#2 Find your tribe — learning a language only by yourself is a recipe for disaster
Look, I get it. You are an introvert. Maybe you have learned coding by yourself. Or other difficult subjects. You trust yourself to make it on your own.
I am going to be the devil’s advocate now. Not because I want to make you feel like you won’t manage, but because this way, you will give up faster than me finishing this blog post.
Language is about connecting to other people and speaking. Out loud. Not in front of the mirror. Tracking progress gets extremely difficult when you are learning by yourself, too.
There are ways how to learn the basics using apps such as Babbel or Duolingo, but they will only take you so far.
A useful tip — drop your pride. And find a language teacher or a group course.
The next step to becoming proficient is to fuse the learning with your daily life. Those two hours a week in your language class are a great start, but they won’t guarantee you a full immersion into the language. Try to mix one of your hobbies with the new language, e.g. listen to the news or music, join book clubs, sport teams.
If this is too much, make at least one very good foreigner friend — they will not only show you how people use the language daily but the little nuances in the use of words and the slang that you won’t find in books.
#3 Get over your shame and kick-start your learning momentum
There is something strange about learning a language. It is such a basic human need to be able to express yourself that being confronted with a struggle to make a simple sentence can trigger deep shame.
Consider this. When you are studying law or accounting and you fail an exam, it sucks, but you still don’t feel deeply ashamed. Because most people can’t even reach the level of getting into a university studying law or accounting. So even if you fail, you still feel better than most people.
But not being able to form a sentence? Oh, boy. That makes us feel like kids again, cheeks turning red, feeling embarrassed.
Work on turning your shame into curiosity. Force yourself to speak up and ask questions, because being corrected means you will learn instantly.
#4 Make peace with all the learning stages and trust the process
This can be particularly difficult if you are learning your first foreign language. You have no idea how the process looks like, which can create anxiety, because you falsely believe it will be the same as learning Math.
Language is one of the most complex structures to learn. There are people to whom languages come easier than others, but I dare to say the majority of people who gave up and said: “I am just not talented in languages.” were just unaware of the learning process.
Trust me on this, I speak two languages as mother tongues, learned three more till the end of my university and now, in my 30s, I am learning German — the most difficult one so far. The process for me always looks the same and I believe it might happen in a similar order to you as well:
Phase 1: Honeymoon — Oh, the sweet beginnings. This is not just the first days, it might be the first weeks of learning a language. You are gobbling up everything about the culture, food, music, people. And it feels effortless because you are so motivated to show up, do your homework regularly, and are convinced you can do this. It is beautiful and romantic like falling in love.
Phase 2: The morning after — You would expect this phase to come, right? But many of us see it simply as a drop in motivation when things get tough. It is more complex than that.
This phase may last a few months (usually on levels A2-B1). You feel so confused that you sometimes have difficulties creating simple sentences that were a piece of cake in the honeymoon phase. You feel you are going backward and that is when self-doubt creeps in. “What is wrong with me? I learned this already. I feel so tired. Nothing makes sense anymore. I feel dumb. Maybe this is not for me.” Here we are in the spiral of giving up, where even the most motivated people contemplate whether it is worth it.
If your brain would be a person, it would probably scream at you: “Don’t freaking give up. Do you know how much work am I doing in the background, so everything falls into the place? You, human, are wasting my energy.”
If you remember only one thing from this article, let it be this one. The confusion phase always occurs. And it is long. And you feel like an idiot. But your brain is working so damn hard to process everything and to make sense of it. If you manage to persevere, I congratulate you. You have become a more resilient person and managed to do what a small fraction of people can.
Phase 3: The sudden click
The middle part kinda sucks, right? But there is a reward at the end of it. It is what I call: It all makes sense now. One day, you will wake up and realize you not only understand the new language without sweating it so hard, but the words you couldn’t remember suddenly pop up in your head. And hey, that sentence was quite well built.
Wow! When did this all happen?
At this point, your brain would roll its eyes: “Are you kidding me? I was working nightshifts here!” (Literally, since the most processing happens in our sleep)
Phase 4: Leveling up
Later it becomes less about grammar rules and more about practice. Talk and write as much as you can and the time you need for a response will shorten and you will learn cooler phrases and new vocabulary to level up the way you express yourself. At this point, you have made it through the worst dip, and it gets fun again.
What was your learning journey with a new language? Which language was the hardest to learn?