by Glen Sadley

Created on: March 03, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Anyone can be a good language learner, but developing the following skills will help you in the process.

Many people harbor the common misconception that learning a foreign language is too difficult and that only certain personality types can really grasp it. In fact, learning a foreign language is actually quite simple if one works toward developing the following skills:

1. Train your ear - A person who studies music will immediately understand the importance of this skill. A trained ear is one that can pick up the subtleties of a language. This gives a language learner less of an "accent" and helps them to be clear when communicating. Training your ear for a language involves paying attention to the cadence and tone of the language as well as the words themselves. This helps a person to remember vocabulary by activating more of the brain, and it makes them a more fluent speaker.

Here is one example of the importance of having a "trained ear" for language. The inflections in Mandarin Chinese can completely change the meaning of a word. Once, when speaking to my Chinese teacher, I tried to express that I had gone shopping with my mother. Though I had said all the words correctly, I used the wrong inflection and ended up saying that I had gone shopping with my horse! This was definitely a case that taught me to pay attention to the sound of the words I used.

2. Learn about grammar - Without a basic understanding of the difference between a verb and a noun, a person is definitely going to have a hard time learning a foreign language. I have often heard it said that learning a foreign language teaches you to speak your own language. This is true due to the fact that it is necessary to know the parts of speech in order to conjugate verbs, match appropriate adjectives with nouns, and structure sentences properly.

For example, in the German language, there are three different "genders" of nouns. Each adjective must agree with the noun and each verb must be conjugated to agree as well. This complex structure makes even the simplest sentence such as: "I saw the blue candy - ich sah die blauen sussigkeiten" into a grammar gymnastic.

3. Finally, strengthen your memory! - Certainly learning a language well means a lot of memorizing. The average person has a vocabulary of 5,000 - 10,000 words. If you want to be fluent, get ready to double that knowledge bank!

The good news: A lot of languages have similar roots. For example, Spanish, french, and Italian are all "romance languages" and have a latin basis. This means that they will share a lot of common words, which mean the same thing. These words are known as "cognates." Here is an example of a few Spanish/English cognates: benevolence - benevolencia, manuscript - manuscrito, unity - unidad. As you can see, memorizing cognates is a helpful way to easily improve one's vocabulary without doing a lot of extra memorization.

All in all, learning a language is a great way to expand your mind and increase your awareness of the world. If you build your skills in memorization, listening, and grammatics, you will be aptly prepared to learn a foreign language.

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