“I Want to Learn Another Language!” A Guide for the Absolute Beginner

You can do it.

You—my dear, dear reader—can learn another language!

For most of us, language learning can be both immensely frustrating yet also immensely rewarding.

This post is a guide for those who are totally new to language learning, and for those who’ve found it to be an insurmountable challenge in the past.

Contents

• Define Your Principal Motivation(s) for Learning the Language
• Use Your Overarching Motivation to Set Achievable Short-term Communicative Goals
• Tools for Language Learning That Are Linked to Your Motivation
• Staying Motivated as You Learn
• And One More Thing...

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Define Your Principal Motivation(s) for Learning the Language

Having a quality reason for learning a language is central to everything that comes in the weeks, months, and, yes, years that you will later spend studying, speaking, enjoying and maintaining it.

Let’s look at some examples. What do you think about the following reasons for learning a language? Are they likely to lead to success?

• “I want to have a second language on my CV.”
• “I want to seem like a more intellectual/educated/international sort of person.”
• “I want cute guys/girls to notice me in a bar when I answer my phone in another language.”

Sure, there is no problem with folks wanting these things out of life, and the last goal even has the benefit of being specific. But language learning is a long, challenging journey, and what none of these motivations provides is a personal, compelling reason to focus on improving your communication.

Compare the motivations above with these:

• “I want to be able to flirt with the Russian girl in my yoga class.”
• “I want to place my order in good African restaurants in French.”
• “I want to understand the lyrics of marabenta music.”
• “I want to be able to make sales to clients in Brazil.”
• “I want to hang out and make meaningful friends at salsa events.”

Can you see how the latter motivations offer specific objectives for study that will keep you coming back to your grammar book with a sense of excitement rather than duty?

Language learning is tough—when you’re on your thousandth Chinese character or trying to crack the mysteries of Russian cases, it can help enormously if your overall motivation is connected in some way to the detail that you’re trying to learn that day.

And if it’s not connected, guess what: Often you can skip it! There’s no reason, for example, to spend much time with the Arabic writing system if your ultimate driving motivation is a desire to be able to chat with Lebanese relatives (whose oral language doesn’t much resemble standard Arabic).

I may always be looking to improve my vocabulary even in my mother tongue English, but I will probably never be fluent in baseball or physics jargon. I pick my battles in any language, based on what I like doing with it.

Your motivation might even mean that “fluency” (whatever that is) is not necessary or desirable; there’s immense joy and usefulness to be had with low-level, rudimentary and even silly communication in another language.

Use Your Overarching Motivation to Set Achievable Short-term Communicative Goals

This overarching motivation above can then be broken down and used to set your week-to-week and lesson-to-lesson short term goals. Such goals should of course be specific, small, compelling and fun. The connection to your overall motivation then makes them personal to you—something that you can’t wait to dive into before and will really remember after.

If my motivation, for example, concerned sales to Brazilian clients, goals that I might set for individual weeks would include, at various points in the long process:

• “I want to be able to answer the phone in Portuguese.”
• “I want to be able to exchange pleasantries.”
• “I want to properly use a formal, business register—and understand when it’s likely that I will switch to informal Portuguese with clients.”
• “I want to understand the culture of dealmaking in Brazil.”
• “I want to be able to describe our key product’s specs in Portuguese.”

All of these are great small goals that connect back to the overall motivation. For more on setting good and specific lesson goals, see the link at the top of this section.

Tools for Language Learning That Are Linked to Your Motivation

We’ve covered a lot of the best tools for language learning, but a key point to make here is that your choice of tools will vary enormously according to the motivation that is driving your learning process.

To give one example, I own a Serbian textbook that gives lots of history on old, literary Serbian that most modern speakers don’t even know or use. As interesting as it all is, my principal motivation for learning is to be able to enjoy a rakija when I’m with friends in the Balkans and to complain together about life, so I focus rather on lessons about sevdahlinka songs (tragedy-tinged Bosnian laments), which give me the vocabulary that I enjoy and am more likely to actually use. Watching videos on the Internet and pausing to analyze, look up and make sentences from the new structures is thus a very useful learning method for me.

If your overarching motivation involves listening, speaking or cultural elements, watching videos can be an important part of your learning process too. That’s when a virtual immersion program can come in handy such as FluentU.

For nearly all learners, some sort of textbook and language classes or online language exchange sessions will also be appropriate. But as much as possible, try to ensure that these are geared towards the reason that you are learning the language. Grammar, for most, is a means, not an end. You don’t want to learn the literary past tense in French if you have no intention of ever writing a great French novel, for example, but you will definitely want to learn the spoken past tenses if you want to be able to hold a basic conversation in which you talk about things that you’ve done.

For those interested in oral communication, the Teach Yourself language books tend to be very good for many languages; but they should often not be your choice if your goal is to read and write the academic version of a language.

Staying Motivated as You Learn

If you have a good overarching motivation and your day-to-day goals are connected to it, your desire to learn at each lesson should be nearly automatic. That said, you’ll want to include a certain amount of variation as well as try methods like these for integrating language learning into your life.

Here are a few tips for creating a routine that you can stick with:

• Track your goals: Keep a notebook with the goals you’ve set for yourself; there’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to cross them off your list.

• Make it social: Interact with other learners, whether online or in conversation groups. And, of course, try to interact with native speakers as much as possible. Humans are social animals, so doing this project with others will make it more compelling.

• Make it daily: I’ve found that even a small amount of time every day (like a half-hour) can be far superior to setting aside a few hours once a week for a class or a study session. When a language is part of your daily life, you don’t forget your lessons as easily, and you find yourself thinking about what you’re learning and how you can use it at many points throughout the day.

• Integrate learning with your media consumption: Consuming the news, podcasts and entertainment media in your target language rather than your own language provides incentives to learn and a richer experience with the language.

Without giving any false hope for what is certainly an enormous undertaking, my wish is that you are leaving this post now with a more concrete and personally motivating desire to jump headlong into language learning.

Your fling with a Russian girl/first sale in Portuguese/conversation with the Lebanese grandparents will be a great reward, sure, but with whatever motivation you have in mind, the process itself will also hopefully be quite fun.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

And One More Thing...

If you dig the idea of learning on your own time from the comfort of your smart device with real-life authentic language content, you'll love using FluentU.

With FluentU, you'll learn real languages—as they're spoken by native speakers. FluentU has a wide variety of videos as you can see here:

FluentU App Browse Screen.

FluentU has interactive captions that let you tap on any word to see an image, definition, audio and useful examples. Now native language content is within reach with interactive transcripts.

Didn't catch something? Go back and listen again. Missed a word? Hover your mouse over the subtitles to instantly view definitions.

Interactive, dual-language subtitles.

You can learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU's "learn mode." Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.

FluentU Has Quizzes for Every Video

And FluentU always keeps track of vocabulary that you’re learning. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. You get a truly personalized experience.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)