The Best Way to Learn an Additional Language in My Experience (Satoe Konuma)

“What’s the best way to learn a foreign language?”

“What’s the quickest way to master a new language?”

We ask ourselves these kinds of questions when we start studying a language.

We all want to use effective study methods so we can learn a language quickly and speak it well.

However, I think there are no methods to learn a language quickly and easily. This thought is based on my experience.
I studied six foreign languages (except English) at university ; Chinese (for a year), Korean, Thai, Russian, French and German (for four months). Moreover, I got high scores in the tests of them. 
Then, you would wonder "How did Satoca get high scores?" In fact, I was not able to find any methods by which anyone can master a new language easily. Instead, I found five important things about learning a language from this experience.

Here, I will show you the best way to learn an additional language.

Five important things when learning languages!!

I think there are five important things when learning an additional language : to love a language itself, to master its characters and pronunciation, to learn its vocabularies, to learn grammars, and to read sentences aloud every day. It is true that they are hard, boring, and not special, but they are essential in learning a language and eventually the simplest way.

1.Love a language itself

This is the most important thing. Perhaps the first question to address is why you want to learn  a foreign language? There are some answers : to travel abroad, to enjoy foreign movies, to communicate with people from other countries, and so on. But if you must use your hating language in order to achieve your goal, it is terrible. As a partner, you should love a language. With love, you are eager to study and know about him(or her).

2.Master the characters and pronunciation

This is the second important thing. Look at the characters below.

안녕하세요?

Can you understand this? Naturally, if you don’t know these characters, you cannot understand words. So before you memorize vocabularies, you must master characters. Then, if you don’t know its pronunciation, you cannot speak with people, so the pronunciation is essential too.

But you don’t have to speak like “a native speaker” because few people pronounce words “precisely”, including native speakers. For example, there are a lot of English users in the world, but there are also a lot of dialects of it, such as British, American, Australian and Canadian. So there is no clear definition about “precise pronunciation”. Of course, You must try to pronounse words precisely, but you don’t have to do that perfectly.

3. Memorize the vocabularies

Can you understand the word above?(안녕하세요?)  Just learning and pronouncing the characters don’t lead to understanding of the meaning, so you must memorize words and their meanings. I recommend to use a book which includes writing words or sentences in your target language on one side and a picture or translation on the other. To learn the words or sentences, you look at one side, see if you can remember what’s on the other side, then turn it over to see if you’d remembered it correctly.

Also, you should check the words constantly. This means that you’ll remember a word much better if you look at it once a day for five days, rather than five times in the same day.

Another tip for remembering vocabularies is that people tend to remember things better when they can link them to personal experiences. Linking words in the language you’re learning to words and images in your own language helps you memorize words easily.

4. Learn grammars

Do you really need to study grammar when you master your mother tongue? Almost all of us say, “No.”
But how about a foreign language? A foreign language is different from a native language, so the way to learn a foreign language is also different from the way to master our mother tongue.
Grammar rules do help people speak more accurately. This statement comes from my experience as a language learner. Knowing the grammar helps me understand what the sentences say and I can read books written in my target languages.

5. Read sentences aloud every day

Now, you know the importance of learning characters, pronunciation, words and grammar, but if you can’t be bothered, it’s never going to happen. You must use it. Ideally, you can speak with your friends who speak your target language, but this case is rare.
Instead of this, an easier way to use it is to read sentences aloud every day. Reading helps you revisit learned vocabularies and see those words in new sentences and contexts. One excellent source of foreign language exposure is through graded readers, which are designed specifically for language learners.
Moreover, reading sentences aloud every day helps you get used to the sound and rhythm of the language, which leads to improving your speaking and reading  skill.

The Best Way to Learn an Additional Language in My Experience

In conclusion, the best way to learn a new language is to master its characters and pronunciation, to learn its vocabularies, to learn grammars, and to read sentences aloud every day. This way is not special, but it is the simplest and the most essential process in learning an additional language and this is how I have studied seven foreign languages.