Hi everyone and welcome to 5-Minute Language. My name is Agnieszka Murdoch
and I'm here to help you figure out how you can start learning a foreign
language. Are you ready? Let's get started! So I've just shown you what you should
not do if you want to start learning a foreign language. Let's rewind a little
bit for a second. If you want to start learning a foreign language, you
definitely shouldn't go and get lots of language books. They're just going to
clutter your apartment – believe me, I've done this before. It goes something like
this: you go to a bookshop and you get really excited about all the language
books and resources they have there. You get really excited about all the books
on the shelves and you end up spending almost your entire bank account balance
on a pile of books that you can't even carry back home. Then you're really
excited for a couple of weeks, maybe a few days, and then you begin to realise
that it's actually quite overwhelming. You've got all these books but you don't
actually know where to start. So perhaps there's a better way to start learning a
foreign language, and that's exactly something I'm going
to talk to you about in this video. Before I do that, though, I just want to
let you know that I've got a free resource that you can download from a
page that I've linked to in the description box underneath this video,
and it's a starter guide that I offer for free so just go to the description
box and you can download it there. It's full of advice for people who want to
start learning a new language or it can also be useful for you if you've been
learning a language for a while but if you want to kind of relaunch your
language studies, so to speak. So let's move on to the main part of the video:
how do you start learning a foreign language? The first step is
to determine why it is that you want to learn a foreign language. Why
specifically do you want to learn that language and not another one? It's
important to formulate this in your head and also maybe write it down on paper.
Formulating the reason why you're learning is important because it gives
you motivation, not just at the start of the process, but also throughout the
language learning journey. So whenever you get frustrated, you can come back to
it, and ,obviously, every language learner gets frustrated, it happens to all of us.
But it's good to have a kind of written down mission that you can come back to
and remind yourself why it is that you're learning. So that was step 1.
Step 2 is to set your SMART objectives. SMART objectives are basically language
learning goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic and time-bound. There
is really no point buying any language learning resources or paying for any
language courses before you set your SMART objectives. Once you've set your
objectives, you will be clearer about what it is that you're trying to achieve
and you can then set an action plan that involves maybe using tools, such as
language resources or classes, or books, or specific dictionaries that you may
want to buy. But before you know your SMART objectives, you don't know what
tools you should use. So make sure you set your SMART objectives first. If you'd
like some more advice on how to set your SMART objectives well, so that they
actually work, then make sure that you check the page I've linked to underneath
this video where you can download a free starter guide where I go into the detail
of how to set objectives which are SMART and how to make sure that you set your
actions based on those objectives. Step 3 is to make a commitment. What I mean by
that is you should commit a specific amount of time to learning the language
you're trying to learn. So do that before you even start to learn. My main piece of
advice here is that you should start small. When I started learning Japanese, I
committed to studying a few times a week for half an
hour and it was too much, so I didn't keep that commitment. It's because,
obviously, you've got other stuff to get on with. You've got your life, you might
have a job, you might have a family, you might have other commitments that will
get in the way. So make sure you start small and you commit to something tiny
to start with. So commit to learning for 15 minutes once a week, and once you
get there, once you manage to do it consistently over a period of time, you
will know that you can increase that commitment and you can maybe go to
learning for half an hour once a week or learning twice a week. But make sure you
commit to something small at the start. By making that commitment,
you almost sign a contract with yourself and you promise yourself that you will
be learning, and it then becomes more difficult to actually procrastinate. Step 4
is to investigate, and what I mean by that is that you should look at your
SMART objectives, look at the little things that you're trying to achieve and
investigate different ways in which you can learn them. So, for example, if your
objective is to learn how to introduce yourself in Swedish, for example, then you
should investigate different ways in which you can learn this. You can perhaps
use an app or you can ask somebody online, or you can just Google it, or you
can translate the individual words. Investigate the different ways and that
will help you establish a routine and work out techniques that will work for
you. Obviously, this is just an overview. It's a 4-step plan that I've got for
you if you want to start learning a new language or restart learning an
existing language that you've been learning before. Obviously, I'll be making
similar videos in the future so make sure you subscribe to the channel, that
you like the video, and you share it with people who might be interested – I really
appreciate it, and let me know in the comments below if you would like to hear
any more on this topic or any other topic, and I will try and make a video
about it because it's exciting and, you know, I want to help you guys with as
much language learning advice as I can. So I hope you enjoyed
this little video and I'll see you next time! Bye!