Basic Guide of Learning foreign language

Reading in a foreign language

So, now that you have some material in your target language, you need the right approach. If it's written, find a part (for example an article of El Financiero) that interests you, and begin to read it. Everytime you find a word you don't understand, write it down on a blank flash cardand look it up in the dictionary. You can miss some words if there are too many but if you look them up and don't write them, you can bet your grandmother that the next time they show up in the text you will have to search them again. And while you're at it, you can bet your grandfather that they will show up again. This is a strange law, but useful when you think about it : words you find in an article have a tendency to be used again in the same article, or book. And it's also true for newspapers. Once you've looked up and written words like event, occured, investigation, president, declared, etc... , you can read most newspaper articles. But remember that you have to write them unless you want to look them up every time. I can tell you as at first I did not write them, and these words have the nasty habit of coming to your mind after you looked them up for the second time "Aaaah now I remember what it meant"-too late. So if already you made the effort of looking them up, write them. And remember to use flash cards, because they are so superior and much more convenient to use once you started. If you make a list you will maybe look at it a couple of times and then forget it.

Don't worry about grammar, it's not a thing to be learned before, but after. First read a lot, and when you will hear spanish phrases in your head under the shower, then you can open the grammar book again and see if it's more meaningful.

The 3000 most common words in italian make 95% of normal speech. This rule is probably also valid for the language you want to learn. Once you master these words, you have a vocabulary that is sufficient for most general conversations. If you also mastered all the important grammatical structures, then you can begin advanced learning. How should you work now ?

Read, listen to radio, watch TV. There are thousands of resources on the internet, hundreds of magazines and newspapers where you can see your language "live" and confront your skills with a permanent test.

Find people you speak your language, be it trough travel, ads, local community centers, or whatever other mean. Speak with them, listen to what they say.

You should NOT be happy with being understood. It's easy to be understood and you will not command respect from the people you talk to if you speak to them in what will look to them like baby talk. Instead, you should always try to make your pronunciation perfect, including intonations (it's very difficult in english, very irregular). When you make a mistake, insist to be corrected and write the correct phrase.

How not to forget the language you learned :

You must organise your life so that chances to practice your language come by themselves : travels, newspapers, setting your TV on foreign channels as default, marrying a foreign wife, etc...