The Habits of Successful Language Learners
It will be as certain as day that sometimes in life you will look in awe at those successful language learners. They seem to toggle effortlessly between the two languages and it appears that no strained thought has gone into those bilingual skills. But it leaves us wondering: how on earth do they do it?
As with all life skills, practicing good habits makes us excel at the task we strive to achieve. This could be adopting positive habits as a cook, athlete, musician or language learner. The skills you gain through these habits will mean you’ll get much better at whatever it is you are trying to aim for – none more so than a language learner.
Get Active!
Don’t wait for things to happen, make them! Learning a language means, you should not hang around waiting for an evening class or a summer trip to Spain – get going today, right now. Successful language learners look for world drama plays on television, make friends online with people whose native tongue is the one they’re trying to learn and they practice by listening to audio recordings of the language instead of their favorite rock tunes.
Accept It Will Take Time, A Lot of Time
Rome wasn’t built in a day and you will not speak a foreign language from scratch in any short period of time. Good habits that language learners adopt are the regular spots they select every day to try to improve their linguistic skills. Not once or twice a month, or weekly but every single day like in an immersion program. Regular language learning can mean the difference between taking a few years to learn a language or six months.
Mix and Synergize
Studying a language alone can be a hard road to go down. Humans tend to work better in teams and where communication is involved, one has to interact, socialize and mix with the very people speaking the language we strive to learn.
Place your foreign language-speaking chums on speed dial, seek them out abroad and don’t fear those early failures – every language learner will make mistakes, accept that as fact.
Successful language learners can also spend a great deal of time on prep work. In learning a foreign language, this is the part where we try and memorize word patterns, add numbers and study punctuation. Sometimes it’s a good habit to “sharpen the saw” rather than just use it to cut.