language language learning is an uphill battle sometimes you feel like you're
climbing and climbing and climbing and just not getting anywhere
Well, one of the big factors is time and how much time you're willing to give up
your spare time I gave up countless hours to get to where I am today
it's never easy is it but you know it's a good view it's a good view when you
get up here it's a very good view then you can enjoy all the fruits of your
work once you get to the top of that mountain once you've done that
overwhelming amount of work you get up here
I am a foreign language teacher and I have been for eight years but at the
same time I was also a foreign language student studying Chinese and Japanese
for many years abroad so I'm ready to give my tips and tricks' 20 tips and
tricks for studying a foreign language this applies to any language not just
Chinese or Japanese these are things that I learned over the years that
helped me that I'm ready to share with you now each method works for different
people but I feel like these are good things you could adopt
listen to music you can listen to podcasts you can listen to language
audio lessons just listen to something this is perfect time this is a golden
time to use you're walking down the street flip something on listen to that
target language get into it because this is really really good time to use right now
whenever you have some downtime flip something
I'm always listening to something as I'm walking around but
podcasts are more for advanced students if you're a beginner I recommend
Pimsleur it'll start you off with survival phrases you'll get talking
really fast and I'm a long-term customer of theirs
I bought their entire Japanese series from beginner all the way to the highest
level that they had and listened to them all
it's great because do you ever get the feeling you forgot words that you
learned almost immediately well Pimsleur just gets repetition and it tests you
every couple of minutes on words you just learned and that's their method and
it really does work very well especially for survival phrases later I moved on to
japanesepod101 and Chineseclass101 and I really liked their audio series especially
because I thought it was just funny and entertaining and that's really important
because nobody likes boring audio lessons so they did a very nice job with
these and they have printable PDFs which I used a lot utilize your downtime while
you're walking down the street take out your iPod or your phone or your iPad
listen to some podcasts listen to some audio lessons and take advantage of this time
textbooks now most of the Japanese textbooks are focused on test taking and
I always have some mixed feelings about that but these books right here this
series was pretty good and you can not only get these in n1 which is the
highest level of the Japanese proficiency exam but you can also get
them in some of the lower levels down below now studying from textbooks is
just one way to study I know Japanese people will use this red plastic card to
try to memorize long lists of words and that's a very focused on test and sight
reading but I recommend using a book series like this this is called
shadowing and what's really good about these is they have a CD it's always
important that a book can talk to you that you can hear the words and how
they're supposed to be pronounced correctly by native speakers that's why
this comes with a CD that's key to be honest I didn't care for a lot of
the books published by the Japanese publishing companies but the best book I
ever found for studying Japanese was written in Chinese because it's a heck
of a lot easier to go from Chinese to Japanese rather than English to Japanese
but if you don't know Chinese you can't read that one anyway as for some of the
Chinese books my recommendation is they series by the Beijing language and
cultural university that was great I did the entire series and my next tip is
that you read some novels or at least short stories if you're more of a
beginner in your target language that will help a lot especially if it's a
book you already read in your native language after doing all this studying
you're gonna need to talk to someone you know and that is how I reinforced most
of what I learned through language exchange that is meeting people and
practicing languages with them I met most people through this app called
hello talk I literally met about 200 people plus in the span of a couple
years but this was my main tool for doing that and it was awesome and I even
met my boyfriend then also getting a dictionary is very important you have to
be looking words up online dictionaries are great here's one that I used for
Japanese and you can also use it to create flashcards and review them when
you have downtime another good one for Chinese is pleco I use pleco all the
time it's very accurate it's got the tones and everything
next it's important to practice Chinese and Japanese characters with a character
app so you get the stroke order right so you know you're writing it correctly
this is how I learned stroke order in the very beginning before I went to
language school and it was very very helpful I recommend this one
welcome to the first Japanese language school that I ever went to this is in
Nishi Shinjuku west Shinjuku i went here for a month the first time and then
came back to japan again and stayed for six months here at this school before
switching to another one and going to language school has been really key in
my learning process it was the place where I learned most of my Japanese or
in China most of my Chinese but unfortunately one point that I wasn't
too satisfied with was the schools in Japan are very test focused the schools
in China not so much yeah I went here but I wish that they had focused more
on speaking instead of just passing the test but that's how most of the language
schools are in Japan and that's something you should know
but in China not so much like we had a very small classroom I just felt like
they tried to pack too many people into one classroom 20, 25 with one teacher
whereas in China I don't think I ever had a class that got more than 10 people in it
so there was a lot of individual attention but language school
is very very key if you have the time that's the best way to do it it really
is the best way to do it and the one month, the one month trip was good
but it really just wasn't enough time six months will do it
University classes going to university in that country or language school in
that country but if you don't have time for that a tutor is always a good
decision I had a tutor on top of getting language school classes and university
classes I had several tutors I think one in Chinese and three different tutors in
Japanese and a good thing about a tutor is as you're climbing the mountain as
you're going up and climb in these steep hills they're guiding you and they're
correcting you because self-study is very limited in that you don't have
anyone to correct you so a tutor once a week twice a week an hour a week two
hours a week who would help a lot the more hours you do the better off you'll
be but remember with a tutor at that point you're just going at your own pace
and there's no motivation like a group class that's going to make you try
harder and keep up with other people so don't lose motivation while you're
taking your tutors class woo
it's important as you're studying to take advantage of all your spare time
when you're idling around you're not doing much
get out your audio lessons get out your flashcards get out something and make
use of all that time because it's all precious and don't be afraid to make
mistakes because making mistakes is how you learn if you're into the Japanese
community the Chinese community whatever language you're learning get into that
community get involved in stuff for me it meant going to church in China and
Japan for other people it might mean getting involved in other ways attending
cultural events going to a community center for that culture it depends on
what area you live in but the important thing is to get involved another thing
that's important is watching movies watching TV I started watching Spongebob
in Chinese as an adult and I already pretty much knew the lines so watch TV
in your target language if you're a beginner start simple if it's advanced
go up to the high levels listen to podcasts get that repetition every day
and use your downtime to do it as well make use of your time especially if
you're a busy person with a family or a career not everybody has that much time
right so make use of your downtime every day just get in the rhythm make the
language a part of your life that is a really key point right there is don't
just make it a study subject make it a part of your life an inseparable part of
your life studying a foreign language can be pretty boring if you do it in a
really boring way nobody said it had to be boring might be hard but it doesn't
have to be boring all of the time if it's really boring for you maybe you're
doing it in a boring way mix it up make it fun
(Japanese)
Well I said language learning didn't have to be boring right?
well we could spice it up a little try some international dating you
might just find someone you really love after all and I mean I have to be
careful with this one yes because I did find my boyfriend on the language
exchange website but I was really there to learn you know another thing you can
do is put post-it notes around your house on daily items if you're trying to
memorize vocabulary but sometimes they fall off the wall and they're kind of
they kind of get in the way so you don't have to put them there but you could
also put them on a wall of your own I use this method a lot put it in a place
that you see every day that you will look at every day and you'll just kind
of absorb these words if you look at them the idea is repetition another
thing that you can do is make a database of all your words I kept track of every
single word I ever learned in Chinese no joke this goes back eight years it's
like 223 pages and of course when I learned Japanese a few years later I
made a list for that too though it's not quite as long and you can make
flashcards from those words as well first write the character on the front
write on the back write the English on the back and also how to pronounce the
word in addition to that make sure you say new words out loud don't just keep
everything in your head read out loud say things out loud it will help a lot
with your pronunciation to memorize new words my method is I write them again
and again and again and I have tons of pads of paper that are just filled up
with words I wrote down also do dictation where you listen to a
recording and you try to write the kanji or write the spelling of the word that
you're trying to learn and record your voice and listen to yourself make sure
it sounds beautiful
there are literally billions of people in the world so what makes you think
that you're any different than everyone else
you're not we're all capable of learning another language the difference comes
down to those who give up in those who do not it comes down to being a matter
of willpower how badly do you want it how badly do you want to know this
language how much are you willing to sacrifice and I'm talking about your
spare time and your energy and that is where that is the point where you make
it or break it and a lot of people can't get over that or they don't want to be
corrected or they don't want to sound stupid and at the end of the day it ends
up being us they'll hold ourselves back from from doing something
at the end of the day we're not that different from everybody else here we're
not we're all pretty much the same more or less when it comes to learning
languages are you disciplined can you force yourself to study can you make
sacrifices and that will make you stand out from the crowd because at the end of
the day we're all kind of the same aren't we
but it really comes down to how much you want to push yourself okay well
thanks for watching today I think we learned a couple things about how to be
successful with learning a language and how at the end of the day there's not
too much different between all of us here in this world