Foreign Language Learning Tips:
Share Your Tips and Stories

What are your best foreign language learning tips? We'd like to hear from you. What have you done to learn a new language faster and better? What are your favorite language learning systems? What tools and techniques are most helpful to you?

Recently, we published a list of 10 language learning tips to help accelerate your language acquisition. We've also shared some of the things that we are doing to teach our children Spanish. This was part of the language learning mom's carnival, where a group of us moms got together and all published our ideas about how to teach ourselves and our children a new language. We also reviewed Owen Lee's Ultimate Language Secrets which is jam packed with foreign language learning tips.

As you make your comments be sure to include enough detail so that others can learn from your ideas. A one word answer won't be as useful as an explanation with several paragraphs. As you write, ask yourself: "How can I make this tip useful for other language learners like me?"

And you don't just have to weigh in on your language learning tips, we'd love to hear your opinions:

• Share your stories of Culture Shock and Cultural Differences here.
• Share your best language learning tips.
• Tell interesting or amusing stories about children learning language here.
• Share your ideas on how to teach a child a new language.
• Tell about your experiences traveling in India.
• Share your study abroad tips.
• Give more information about bilingual celebrities.
• Tell us why you are learning a foreign language.
• Write a review of The Whole World Guide to Language Learning: How to Live and Learn a Foreign Language by Terry Marshall.
  

Top Five Foreign Language Learning Tips
from Your Language Guides

Now, for our top five foreign language learning tips.

1. Set goals. Know what you want to learn. Take a look at our Rate Yourself Guide to rate your current language ability, then set goals of where you'd like to be in a month, six months or a year. Learn more about goal setting.
2. Listen. Spend as much time as you can listening to the language you want to learn. If your ear is surrounded by the sounds of the new language--even if you can't make sense of the words, you will be able to pick up the rhythm and cadence of the new language.
3. Speak. Speaking your new language is the fastest way to mastery. There are lots of ways to find native speakers, for example, you can join an online community, look for specialty shops in your area that sell products from that country, check the foreign student office at your local university. To get started building basic dialogs pick up a copy of the Walkabout Language Learning Action Guide.
4. Read. After you have a foundation, read to build your vocabulary. I like to start with children's books in my target language because the language is simple and often includes repetition. Your local library may offer books in your language or you can buy them online. We like the selection offered by Languages Direct.
5. Evaluate. This is the oft forgotten step of many language learning systems. Stopping to evaluate your progress. Take time to reflect on how well your dialogs went when you tried them with native speakers. Check your progress against your goals, then keep on working. For more tips about evaluating your progress, click here.

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