5 Simple Principles to Learn Languages for Beginner Language Learners
Today I signed my class attendance sheet to confirm the 10th hour of Vietnamese lessons. Despite having studied so few hours of Vietnamese, I have observed some principles that have been helping in consistently making progress. These same principles are drawn from my experiences learning Chinese (Mandarin) to an intermediate level.
Continuing to apply them will be crucial in sustaining my current rate of improvement if not accelerating it.
1. Accept that the early stages is mostly making errors and learning from it.
Most inexperienced language learners who care about doing well are hesitant to use the language they’re learning because they’re afraid to make mistakes, but there’s almost no other way to learn. However, nobody speaks a language flawlessly from the moment they start learning it.
By saying it the wrong way while practicing with a teacher or another native speaker, you’ve at the very minimum created an opportunity to be taught how to say it properly. Embrace this as inevitable, as a necessity in fact. Even better — seek it out.
While it’s unpleasant to constantly feel like you’re failing, failure is a sign that you’re about to grow, which is essentially going from unable to able. When you reach a point where you are unable to express yourself, whether completely or partially, you have discovered a new area to work on and improve in. Even native speakers still discover entire subjects and fields within their own mother tongue that they have no familiarity with, such as a medical students or technical jargon.
The language learners who grow the fastest are relentless about using their target language. They don’t expect immediate perfection. Instead, they focus on perfecting.
2. Think of learning languages as learning to play music.
Whether it’s a trumpet, flute, piano, guitar, saxophone or almost any other instrument, there’s a great deal of muscle memory that you need to acquire. Your mouth (i.e., a vocal instrument) needs enormous amounts of repetitions (think in the hundreds) to develop the muscle memory that makes speaking the language feel effortless.
It also helps to approach learning languages as if you’re learning to sing new songs. Treat each word as a new note that you’re trying to hit, and each new song has its own cadence and rhythm to help it sound smooth and natural.
In the same way that learning a song requires singing or playing it over and over again until the tempo, rhythm, and pitch are perfect, learning a new language is practically the same, specially with tonal languages like Mandarin and Vietnamese. With tonal languages, speaking accurately in meaning requires creating certain fluctuations in the pitches of sounds.
3. Speaking a language is a skill, so approach it like a professional in pursuit of mastery.
One of the most eye-opening pieces of advice I ever received about learning Chinese came from Olle Linge, a Swedish man. He explained that one of the most important metrics you can track and focus on in learning a language is the number of hours you’re investing into mastering it.
To clarify, where most people go wrong is thinking in weeks or months. If someone says they have been learning a language for 10 months but can barely speak the language, they might actually be investing very few hours per month. If that same person only takes lessons for 2 hours per week and never uses it outside of those lessons, then at 10 months where each month is 4 weeks, then they’ve only been learning a language for 80 hours.
You can complete the same total of learning a language for 80 hours in just 1 month (4 weeks) if you spend for 20 hours per week. Even at just 1 hour per day, you could surpass 80 hours in 3 months (12 weeks).
Instead of treating learning a language as a hobby you do on the weekends, treat it like a part-time job that you have a shift for everyday.
Professional bodybuilders have multiple workouts per days.
Professional athletes are training constantly on a daily basis.
Professional musicians practice for six hours or more every day as well.
You don’t have to pursue it at that intensity, but the closer you are to it, the more likely you are to go from clueless beginner to world class performer.
4. Have clear and measurable goals in what you you want to achieve on both a macro and micro level.
My own macro goal is to be able to have conversations with my native speaking friends, family, and colleagues in about 80% Vietnamese or more. When I’m barely using English to express myself in everyday conversations, that’s when I will have reached my goal.
To achieve that macro goal, I have to break it down into micro goals. Here are some examples:
Be able to talk about timing — when something happened — without stumbling or strenuous effort. I should comfortably, without much hard thinking required, be able to pinpoint if an event happened last Friday, three years ago, after I graduated college, or will happen at the end of August. There are only so many words I would need to learn to cover days, weeks, months, and years, before and after, at the beginning or middle or end of something. Mastering each one is like learning how to sing a song in an artist’s discography, and I can perfect each song one at a time like a musical rehearsal.
Learn about 1,000 vocabulary words, specifically the most frequently used in what I want to be able to discuss. This is less a goal and more of a reminder that it’s okay to have a gap and not be discouraged by how much I don’t know, just continue closing it every day, little by little, which leads me to my micro goal of just trying to master 10–15 words per day. No matter how large I feel the gap still is, as long as I’m learning 10–15 words per day, I will get there eventually.
5. Speak your target language first, then English only if you have to.
Applying this as a rule helps to reinforce and master what you can already do while revealing where you still need to improve. While the gap of what you can’t say yet might seem insurmountable, you’ll be able to figure out what you should learn next more quickly as you’ll start to notice that there are specific phrases or expressions that you keep encountering as a gap.
For example, because I kept asking “how do I say [this]?” I prioritized learning how to ask that in Vietnamese so that I could ask any person who spoke Vietnamese fluently and understood enough English to teach me. Other examples include “tomorrow” and “yesterday,” which I learned just today during my tenth hour of lessons, but have been repeating since the beginning.
Even if you can’t fully express something in your target language, you are still putting in reps for what you can say, which count as short training sessions.
In the beginning, mindset, effort, time, and repetition matter more than clever tricks and methodical strategies. Every attempt can be an improvement even if it feels like you’re making a mistake or messing up.
Most language learners learn a language to speak it, but they end up underutilizing what they already know. Even if you only know a little, use the little that you know. If you aspire to speak a new language, just keep speaking it. Every attempt will count.
