Few Tips for Learning a New Language

From a presentation that I shared for “share your interest” in previous work. Presentation Link (Canva)

The foundation of the language

Grammar structure

• Why do you need to learn Grammar? The main reason is if you want
• What is Grammar? This is the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence
• Tip: Learn how the words are possibly structured

Characters (and/or radicals for more complex language)

• Learn what are the characters you need to be familiar with
• This is important if you are learning a language to read books and use it for writing
• Tip: For Japanese or Chinese, learning radicals is the first step you need to be aware of because there are thousands of kanji or hanzi characters which is overwhelming for beginners

Phonetics

• Learn how do the characters or words sound
• Fun fact: Other people like Americans have a hard time speaking rolling “r” of Roman languages such as Spanish and Italian.
• Tip: Learning homographs (or word that shares the same written form) can also help you familiarize yourself with the correct sounds

But how can we really effectively learn a language? Expanding vocabulary is the key! Context, context, context!

Storytime of me learning English

Most of the English terms I am “fluent” in are quite limited to basic thought in high school to the language that we often use in my course. However, after I graduated from college, I realized I could not express well myself. I met online friends from different countries with different fields of study and backgrounds (gender studies, music, etc) and it was hard to ask and express my thoughts because my English wasn’t really conversational.

What helped me improve is thru watching TV series seriously— I used to watch TV without really listening well to what they are talking about, and there’s this brain exercise called Elevate app* that helped me expand my vocabulary.

*Not a sponsored post

Learn through increasing vocabulary

Reason why you need to increase vocabulary

• Increasing vocabulary is more of input rather than output. Just remember the sound or word and how it is used in the sentence
• Comprehend the context and understand how the word is used
• Learn grammar if it gets frustrating to connect the words within the sentence

AVOID: You can’t truly comprehend words foreign to you if you kept looking at the words you already know. For example, looking at English subs while watching anime.

Three simple techniques in expanding vocabulary

#1 Find the area of interest why you want to broaden your vocabulary

Why do you want to learn a language? Does just having fun and spontaneously using it would really effectively help you learn? Maybe but most of the time, you would likely stop without being able to speak using that language.

There are times some people feel like “oh this language is interesting”, always ask yourself why would you want to learn it and how do you plan to use it. It is like finding the MVP or let’s say MVU (Minimum Viable Usage).

#2 Expand through different vocabulary usage

If you would closely, the framing of words and words used varies in different types of messaging in the ff.:

• News and current affairs thru TV, social media trends
• Fictional narratives thru novels, stories, films, etc.
• History thru books, documentaries, old news articles
• Technical thru technical books, documentation, academic journals

Example observation for the area of Business, Management, and Tech.

AVOID: Common mistakes people do is they are randomly learning words without even learning the context and usage. Thus they have a hard time when trying to not only express their thoughts but construct and articulate things in mind. If you are a musician, treat learning a language as if you are learning a new musical instrument.

#3 Program an effective routine based on your goal (as you answered in #1)

Learning a new language shouldn’t be as exhausting as studying (at least in most situations). You don’t want to get burned out just because you wanted to cram learning a language in a week. And the thing is, learning a language is continuous learning.

Tip: Having a set of words you want to expand with more than one (1) sample sentence helps. Make sure this set of words is based on your goal as stated in step #1 as it would be hard to retain words if you have no use for them.

Important reminder: Last but not the least

You may not be learning a language for just fun superficial purposes, but if you do not enjoy the process of learning it then probably you are doing it wrong.

Check out Marayum!

I am not affiliated with Marayum but if you know native Filipino languages like Bicolano, Cebuano, Maranao, etc., you can sign up to their platform and contribute native Filipino words! https://marayum.ph/

I want to advocate engaging my fellow countrymen to be fluent in language especially Filipino as it has been used as a tool to flip the context of sentences which does not make discussions meaningful.