A Basic Guide to Language Learning

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Have you ever wanted to learn a language, but not known where to start or how to go about it? Well worry no more! In this video we go over all of the basic information you might need to help get you started on your language learning journey! Also, to any of our usual viewers, yes this is very different from our usual type of content, but it was a project I made for a class, so I figured I'd turn it into a video for you guys as well. Enjoy!

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Good advice! I like to get to a low-intermediate level and then just jump to listening and reading as much as I can. Once I feel comfortable doing that, I pay more attention to speaking and writing. Maybe not the most efficient way, but because my main goal is to be able to understand the language I'm studying, it works for me.

erburu

russian flag is wrong on the thumbnail

kewlad

Thanks so much for this video! :) as someone who is bilingual, I was told that I was born with the ability to speak a language clearly though I never thought I would be in the process of learning languages, I got into the idea of challenging myself with a language that was hard to speak read and write. Since I watched the first Naruto series, I was inspired to learn Japanese and stayed with that goal of getting into things like watching anime videos and helpful how-to guides on how to learn this specific language. So I continuously searched the internet for ways on how to begin learning my target language. Growing up in a Hispanic/Spanish-speaking family and household, I was able to pick up my understandings from my parents and family members. My aunt, said the best way to learn a new language is to learn the alphabet in my chosen language so that way I would learn to write in Japanese and I have to say it helped out a lot. So for anyone who reads this try learning your target language by practicing the alphabet.

alexacordova

I completely agree with what you said about speaking a language. English is not my first language and I've been learning it in school for 9 years and we never spoke in English. As a result of that my speaking is significantly worse then other things (grammar, writing/spelling, reading, vocabulary...).

lux_b

Do you also have solutions for these problems when learning a new language?
1: You want to try having a conversation with someone that fluently speaks your target language, but they speak too fast for you to be able to understand and respond properly.
2: You are relatively shy and don’t like talking to strangers much, especially not when the language you need to speak in isn’t your native language.

scorpionhdkid

Keep in mind that it makes a huge difference also WHY you are learning the language. If you are just trying to learn a language because you want to seem cool, or because you think it sounds cool, statistically, you're not going to make it to true fluency. This is because the vast majority of people who start for this reason when they DO inevitably hit that dead zone where you're seeing diminishing returns on your time investment they end up dropping off like flies in winter (the initial slope to get to a very basic level is not steep at all - learning your first thousand words feels like you're flying because you know 1, 000 times more than when you first started with one word, but the more you learn the less you notice an improvement - you hit a plateau where you feel like you've been doing this for YEARS and fast-talking native speakers who speak unclearly and take verbal shortcuts are STILL impossible to understand no matter how hard you try, and that is a HUGE motivation killer and if you're thinking you'll power through it, well, 99% of people who aren't TRULY invested in the language for a real reason aren't really going to because it's going to suck, a LOT, when you've been doing it 5 years and you STILL find it frustratingly difficult to understand many things that are not presented in slow, deliberately spoken textbook way) .

So you really DO need to have a fire in your belly for it to really push through that dead zone where you feel like you're just treading water to stay in the same place or like you're walking toward a mountain range in the distance (the mountain range peaks being true fluency) and they never seem to get any closer no matter how long you walk - if you're learning Japanese just because you like anime, PROBABLY not going to carry you through that ESPECIALLY when you actually GO to Japan, talk to real Japanese people and realize that while you could understand quite a lot in anime you watch, real people don't TALK like anime characters and suddenly, you find yourself struggling with how people really speak. Suddenly all of that effort seems to have been wasted - you take a long break, you forget a lot that you learned, when you start again you feel like you're now trying to make it back to where you were before and yeah, that'll do it.

SO, learn a language that's IMPORTANT to you to learn. A loved one or family member who speaks that language natively for instance - learning it for them can be a huge motivator - because you have that goal of being able to freely converse with them in the language. Another great reason is because it's your heritage - my family came from Estonia but only spoke the language a little bit when I was a kid, so I had to really improve my level a lot by myself later - and Estonian is one of the most difficult languages an English speaker could possibly take on - I speak Mandarin and I can tell you that it's actually in terms of spoken language HARDER - by far - than Mandarin or Japanese because it is grammatically exponentially more complicated by the fact that it has 14 cases per word and you just need to know all of them - 14 ways words can change depending on context and guess what? There's VERY little material to learn from online that would take you even past a B1 level and the vast majority of native speakers live IN Estonia - so it's not like Spanish or Chinese where you can find native speakers everywhere. There's virtually NO reason anyone who isn't Estonian by blood would need to learn Estonian in other words - none. You'd only be able to communicate with about a million people from one small country you'll never go to and probably have never heard of, it's completely unrelated to languages like English or German or Spanish - it's in a completely different language TREE in fact (English is more closely related to Hindi - spoken in India - than it is to Estonian or Finnish) - and people speak it really really quickly and often not very clearly articulated (especially with a few vodkas in them, a popular drink). So for a language like that, you have almost no chance at all of EVER being truly fluent unless you are born and raised there, and very little reason to even try to be.

So those are a few important factors - motivation, available materials and logical application of the language even if you do try to learn it - if you want to learn Navajo, great, but good luck - it's most likely going to be a thousand times harder than learning Spanish to reach actual fluency because there's nobody to talk to and not much motivation to push past the hard dead-zone / plateau you WILL hit.

Just be prepared. When you start learning any new language it's fun but you ALWAYS hit the plateau and you have to be able and willing to push through it, sometimes for years and years, to get very achingly slowly to a point where you can REALLY call yourself *actually* fluent. There's no shortcut to it. There's more effective learning methods but you STILL need a lot of time, repetition and determination and that's true for easy AND hard languages. So pick one you are hell-bent on learning, not one you think sounds cool.

kalevipoeg

I what to learn a language so bad(I need it to expected in my family) but I don’t know witch one to learn 😭😭😭

Tumtumtickler

In miniture, it is a mistake. there is russia letters on dutch flag I suppose in plan was to use russian flag but it's dutch flag with Russian letters

matthewjohnskrzyniecki

Did you stifle a sneeze @ 05:06?

In any event, good video.

IanK

YOu can dig out your old DVDs and watch your favorite movies with a Spanish dub and subtitles....obviously, this will onlly work for Spanish or

dragonchr

"I assume you're an english speaker"
Me: wiping my italian tears because there's no good content in my native language

Trollface

2.37 or buy one of his graded reader books (collections of short stories)

janus

A question, the letter font in the first words is the font of zelda breath of the Wild?

elvoxo

When I first started talking to people on hellotalk... the first day I said “你好吗” and all the people were like "what do you mean?" Now I say 很高兴认识你, because it's more usable

Adam-vvco

These all are great tips but they are for intermediate level students. However learning another language is easier and faster than you might think IF you do it the right way.

sandydegener