Good language learners are made, not born. Anyone can become a good language learner, or at least a better language learner. What’s the best way to learn a language? Well, let’s start by reviewing the three elements of a successful learner: motivation, consistency, and the ability to notice patterns. 

The Three Elements for Success

Motivation

You need to enjoy your language and believe that you can succeed. In other words, you have to be motivated. Without a positive attitude, learning becomes more difficult and less pleasant. The likelihood of staying the course and staying curious depends heavily on your level of motivation. 

Consistency

You need to be in contact with the language daily. Personally, I aim for at least an hour a day. This consists mostly of listening to audio while doing other tasks. I make it easy for myself. For example, I’ll listen to a podcast while washing the dishes. I try to spend about half an hour reading, as through reading I’m able to focus on words and phrases more closely. Fluency may take months or even years to achieve, depending on how much time you put in every day. Regardless, consistency is fundamental.

Notice Patterns

We can’t learn what we don’t notice. However, to notice phenomena we need to experience them, over and over. As the Sufi saying goes, “you can only learn what you already know”. Through ample exposure, certain features of the language will become more noticeable. We will grow more attuned and aware of patterns through listening and reading. 

Action Steps for Motivation, Consistency, and Noticing Patterns

1) How to Start Noticing

All languages have their unique difficulties with regard to pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Chinese has tones. Romance languages gender their nouns. Slavic languages have cases. English spelling often misleads pronunciation. However, when we start in a new language, we don’t notice much.

Your ability to notice improves through 1) sufficient exposure to the language and 2) curiosity. Despite grammar explanations or pronunciation guides, what we notice and when varies. What type of content are you engaging with and what’s catching your eye?

The more you read and listen, the more chances you’re giving yourself to notice. If you’re curious about the language, you’ll inevitably stumble on structures or patterns that interest you. You may seek clarification through direct explanation, examples, etc., but ultimately you’re just letting yourself discover the language piece by piece.

2) Find Lots of Comprehensible Input

The brain is programmed to notice things and create patterns. However, we need lots of contact with the language (lots of input) for this to happen. As Manfred Spitzer points out in his book Learning: The Human Brain and the School of Life, we learn best when we have repetition and novelty. Comprehensible input, in short, is any material in the language that we can mostly understand. Ideally, we also want this material to also be interesting and meaningful.

Imagine learning a language like walking through a forest.

The first time, you’re just trying not to get lost—you don’t notice many details. But as you return, walking different paths and seeing things from new angles, you begin to recognize the trees, the plants, the landmarks.

If someone explained all the forest’s details before your first walk, you wouldn’t remember much. But after exploring a bit, those explanations become more meaningful.

After spending lots of time immersed in the forest, your knowledge solidifies and your familiarity with the forest becomes more intimate.

The same is true with language: we learn best when we receive input that’s both understandable and interesting—messages we care about. That’s comprehensible input.

3) Balance Repetition and Novelty 

Ideally we start with content that is easy to understand. New vocabulary is introduced gradually in short segments. Especially in the early stages, repetition is great. We can walk past a small flower tens of times and simply not see it. However, the more often we walk past the flower, the more likely we are to notice it.

When learning a language, we need to cover the same vocabulary and grammatical patterns over and over. And we need new stories. Repetition without novelty results in boredom. Most language books do not provide enough repetition. These books tend to value exercises and explanations over varied repetition. 

While learning Greek, I mostly used the mini-stories available in our Greek library at LingQ. I learned Greek quite quickly, and I’d attribute my success to these mini-stories. These stories are effective for two reasons. First, they are quite interesting and deal with daily life. Second, the each story includes the same text told from two different perspectives. Mini-stories also come with several comprehension questions. Personally, I prefer to just listen and read the answers.

I don’t stay on one story until I master it. We have to balance repetition and novelty. I just move on to the next story. The difficulty builds gradually, and I’m interested in trying out a new text. I’ll notice and forget things, but over time I am more consistent, interacting with a larger volume of content, and noticing a lot. As Robert Bjork teaches us, learning and forgetting is just part of the process. 

4) Enhance Your Learning with Review

The most important task in language learning is to continue feeding your brain comprehensible (or almost comprehensible) input via listening and reading. This cannot be overstated. Additionally, we can use review activities strategically to enhance how our brain absorbs this input. 

On LingQ, I save lots of words and phrases. The more the merrier. I review this new language immediately afterwards, using LingQ’s review activities. Choose the review activity that you enjoy: flashcards, dictation, multiple choice, fill in the blanks, etc..  Keep review entertaining, fun, and pleasant. Review activities should add another layer of novelty to our repetition. 

I find it useful to re-read a text, but change the words and phrases that I want to review. As I read these stories over and over, I move some words and phrases to “known” in our LingQ system, and then save new phrases. These new phrases contain patterns that I still find strange or unintuitive. I give myself another chance to review them, but with an added element of novelty.

5) Identify Gaps in Your Learning

There’s a lot of words and structures in a language. LingQ helps us measure what we know, but it’s not really possible to track everything that we don’t know. This is where speaking and writing come into play. Speaking and writing help us find holes in our learning. What are we struggling to say? Which areas of conversation are we less comfortable tackling? 

A teacher or conversation partner can help point us in the right direction, as they see our ability from an outside perspective. The mere act of speaking or writing in the language helps you to identify the words you are missing or the patterns that you can’t use correctly.

On a side note, corrections can also help us notice, but they are not necessary. I find corrections, especially during conversation, to be more distracting than helpful. When working with a tutor, I prefer phrases, vocabulary, and corrections to be given to me afterwards on document for later review. I then import this document into LingQ.

6) Push Yourself Towards Authentic Content

Authentic content just refers to content that is made for native speakers. The ultimate goal is to read and listen to content for native speakers. For example, if you’re learning Spanish, the end goal is to engage with content for Spaniards, not Spanish learners. How do we get there?

Fluency in a language requires a large vocabulary. In the early stages, we have to read and listen to the same content many times in order to ingrain new habits and get a feel for the patterns. We try not to overwhelm ourselves with new vocabulary. However, as you become more comfortable with the language, you need to increase the difficulty.

Try newspaper articles, books on topics that you’re familiar with, YouTube videos with predictable content or structure, etc.. Build your familiarity with the language’s natural rhythm and cadence. The emphasis on repetition decreases as the content becomes longer and more advanced. This is normal.  

I try to engage with authentic content as soon as possible. Using LingQ, I am able to import newspaper articles, songs, and even entire books, into my personal library. LingQ makes tackling these texts easier to chip away at. Ebooks, magazines, and audibooks eventually become my main learning material. I’ll go back to learner content, like the mini-stories. It gives me nice review and a boost of confidence, but the emphasis is still on authentic content. 

Final Thoughts:

So, what’s the best way to learn a language? Ensure that your routine is consistent, motivational, and full of opportunities to notice new things about your language.

Flood your brain with comprehensible input and stay curious about the language. As you identify areas of growth through speaking and writing and increase the difficulty of your input, you’re sure to make great progress. 

Anyone can become a successful language learner. Get started, stick with it, and enjoy the process. Happy learning! 

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