After this article you shouldn’t have any more
excuses not to start learning a foreign language today. Even though the blog is
about learning Russian, these tips can be applied to any foreign language that
you want to master. In most of the cases people who want to speak a foreign
language fluently, don’t do so only because they find excuses instead of
looking for solutions. This is in our human nature and there is nothing to be
ashamed of.
Excuses are the only
barrier on the way to speaking a foreign language - not the difficult grammar,
not the lack of time and not even the lack of money.
Excuse #1: no time.
The cure: could you find 30 minutes of free time every
day? Any time when you can read or listen counts: in the commute / while
waiting for a bus / while having a coffee break / before starting your day /
before going to bed? Maybe not 30 minutes all at once, but 15+15 or even
10+10+10. If you use this time to study a language, every week you will spend
3,5 hours learning. This is almost the same amount of time as if you attended a
language course twice a week, the only difference is that you spend NO time to
get there and back.
… 40
minutes a day make 4,7 hours a week,
1 hour a
day make 7 hours a week,
even with just
15 min a day you can study as much as going to a course once a week, without
spending time to get there. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be able to find
15-20 min every day! :-)
Excuse #2: no money.
The cure: nowadays you can find dozens of online websites and Apps that can help
you learn a language for free and there are many more that can help you learn
without spending a lot. Just google it! :-) Even if you don’t have a smartphone
that can use all the language learning apps or you don’t have Internet access
at home, there are still some offline
programs and good old books that can help you. For example, there is no
need to buy a lot of expensive books and dictionaries. Buy just one and study
with it from cover to cover. Once learning on your own is not enough any more,
you can find a language partner and
exchange languages practice for free.
If you have
some money but not a lot, spend it on online
lessons with a native speaker. You will be surprised to find out that the
prices vary from 5 to 30$ per lessons. The ones that cost very little are not
necessary bad, as all teachers go through a selection (look on italki.com and
other websites). Instead of taking a classical course that is very expensive
because you buy a lot of hours at once, ask for language practice and
correction of your mistakes. Even if you can only afford 5-10 lessons in total,
it can greatly help you to overcome a language barrier. Use these lessons to
ask all the questions you had while studying on your own.
For those
who learn Russian, for example, you can easily find the book “Russian
for dummies” that has all the basic information you need explained in a
simple and well-organized way. In future posts I will keep introducing various
learning tools, for now look at these posts
with some useful links
Excuse #3: the grammar is too difficult
The cure: usually people think that it will take too
much time to study in order to start to speak the language. This excuse is
directly connected to the imaginative lack of time.
I often hear people complaining about the
impossible Russian grammar. It is difficult indeed, but it DOES NOT mean that
you cannot speak Russian after a couple of months of learning it. Most of any and every language is
a mix of standard phrases. Not even native speakers think of grammar while
using them. They remember them as a whole (for example, “How do you do?”). This
is what intensive learning courses are based on. Start with this instead of
learning everything. Learn the sentences you need, first, without worrying too
much about “why” those words (verbs, ending, order of the words, and so on) are
used. Once you are more familiar with the language you will start to pick up
grammar rules and it will eventually make sense to you! Learn first what you
need most and you will start to speak and write very quickly.
Excuse #4: the sounds are impossible to pronounce
The cure: the official description of a phonetic mistake
is when the person pronounces the sound in a way that prevents other people
from understanding or changes the original meaning. It is fine not to pronounce
sounds as natives, do so as long as people can understand what you want to say.
For example, there are a lot of Russians that are not able to pronounce “R” (“Р” in Russian) it doesn’t stop them from speaking
Russian!
Excuse #5: I will
never speak without an accent, so why even try?
The cure: in some languages is it almost
completely impossible to avoid having an accent if you are not born in an
environment of people speaking this language. For example, Danish and most
likely Russian, too. Russians can distinguish if a native person comes from a
village, from Moscow or from far East Siberia by the little difference in the
pronunciation and vocabulary, so there is no way they won’t hear that you are a
foreigner, even if you pronounce everything “by the book”. :-) You will not
speak without any accent, ever, just take it as it is and live with it. But if
you try hard and learn the language, you will get countless complements form
Russians every day of your stay. As they know that it is a hard work for a
foreigner to speak Russian.
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