Learning a new language, whether for business or pleasure, is an attractive prospect. Most people would love to be able to speak more than one language, but it’s something at which the great majority of people never succeed. Even though many people take foreign language courses in secondary school, few of them ever feel comfortable enough with the language to try speaking it frequently.
That’s unfortunate because if people knew the facts below, they’d realise that it’s not as difficult as they once thought. If you’re about to embark upon a language learning course like the corsi inglese a londra, you must engrain these facts into your mind. The information contained in this article can put you at ease and guide you as you attempt to learn a new language.
You Don’t Need to Know as Much as You Might Think
When people begin to learn foreign languages, they quickly become overwhelmed by how much they don’t know. There are tens of thousands of words to be learned, and unlike some other areas of study, the only way to learn is to memorise. This can be enough to cause a normal person to give up, but it’s important to understand that you don’t need to know anywhere near as much as you think to be able to communicate and understand a native speaker. In reality, knowing just three hundred words will be enough for you to understand over sixty percent of what is said in any language, and contextual clues can help you pick up the rest. You just need to know which words to learn, and spend your time memorising those.
Learn Cognates
Whether you’ve spent any time learning your target language or not, you most likely already know a couple of dozen words. This may be hard to believe, but it will make more sense once you understand what a cognate is. A cognate is a word that sounds similar in both languages. English, for example, borrows or loans nearly all of its words from other languages, and then modifies them slightly. Most Latin-derived languages also loan most of their words from one another, and this means that there are many words that you don’t need to spend any time memorising at all. In fact, there are probably dozens of words with which a simple guess on your part will be good enough to enable you to communicate. Just doing a quick web search for cognates shared by your native language and your target language should return numerous results. This can give you a huge head-start on your language learning journey.
Use Mnemonics
As mentioned above, learning a new language will require that you memorise hundreds of words, and this is the hardest part. Most people know very little about the actual grammatical rules of their mother tongue, but instead, rely on memorisation to communicate. Can you explain your native language’s rules of verb conjugation to a language learner? Probably not, and that’s okay because almost nobody can unless they need to teach it professionally. The point is that you need tools to help you memorise new words. Mnemonics allow you to use word associations and word pictures to make it much easier for you to memorise important words. Using this tool and the many others that are at your disposal will help you to learn your target language much more quickly.
