Language learning tip #3
If you’re a complete beginner, one of the best things you can do to jumpstart your language learning journey is spend some time absorbing the sounds of the language. To begin with, just listen without actually trying to understand anything.
This will help to embed these unfamiliar sounds in your brain and allow you gain a certain familiarity with them. That way, when you dive into active learning, the strange sounds aren’t so strange any more, which makes it easier to concentrate on meaning.
Even if you’ve already been learning casually for a while, you can probably still benefit from this technique. It’s never a bad idea to listen to the new language, as long as you’re able to do so without getting distracted because you’re worrying about trying to understand every word.
After a while, you might find yourself mimicking these sounds, babbling like a baby. It might feel silly, but that brings us to another language learning tip.
Once you’ve got a bit of grammar under your belt, be sure to sign up for a Kwiziq account to get personalized study recommendations!
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Author info
Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.