7 tips to learn languages faster and easier

With these simple tips for learning languages you will see how everything becomes easier and more fun.

Although many people think that children learn languages more easily, the truth is that children and adults have the same possibilities to achieve it. So, why not give it a try and read on.

Conversations
Conversation puts everything you learn into practice. Mark Manson states that one hour of conversation (with people who speak the language you are learning) is enough to learn the same as 5 hours of classes or 10 hours on your own. Conversation is a complex process that involves listening to the other person speaking, understanding what they are saying, planning your response in your mind and then expressing it orally. Remember that language is something that needs to be processed, not memorized.

Practice in your mind
As we mentioned earlier, language is processed in our mind. Every moment we are thinking of a new idea, remembering a moment in our life or planning things we have to do in the future. This is usually done in our mother tongue; but why not force our brain to think in any language. Forming sentences in another language and designing responses to different situations will help us prepare for when they arrive.

Start simple
In every language there are perhaps 150 to 250 basic words. These most common words are equivalent to 50% of the spoken communication that a person uses on a daily basis. Under this condition, it is possible to achieve a gradual and truly significant progress in learning a new language, it is enough to start with the most obvious and gradually move towards the complex. But remember, constancy is something fundamental that you must take into account.

Take a small dictionary with you
No matter how hard we try, it is a fact that learning all the words used in another language is not an easy thing to do. So, to help you a little, try to have a dictionary handy for every time you hear or read a word you don't know. No need to carry around a big book, nowadays the wonder of smart phones can get you everything you need at a touch of a button.

Listen and read
Practice makes perfect. But, so as not to make your learning a boring and tedious process, use every opportunity you have to introduce the new language into your daily life. For example, you can watch more movies with subtitles, listen to music and look up song lyrics, read news in another language, listen to podcasts or audiobooks, some even say that a very effective method is to label all the objects in your house with their respective names in the language you are learning, this will help you learn a lot of vocabulary.

Use technology
A super simple trick is to change the language of your mobile and your computer to the language you want to learn, this way, every time you use them -and boy, do we use them a lot- you will be practicing and learning. You can also install some dictionary applications, pronunciation or some of the language learning services we mentioned at the beginning, because to make learning more fun, they also have mobile applications that employ different learning strategies.

Make new friends
Interacting in a real way with the language is very important, especially when you do it with other native speakers of the language, because from them you can also learn to express your thoughts correctly and some everyday expressions that you never learn well with dictionaries; and the proper pronunciation for each word or expression. Besides making new friends, you can both benefit from teaching or learning a different language.