KISWAHILI NOTES FOR FORM THREE – ALL TOPICS

TOP 10  LANGUAGES SPOKEN IN  AFRICA

As the second-largest
continent, both in population and land mass, Africa is one of the most diverse
places in the world. Really, it’s huge – bigger than the United
States, China, India, and most of Europe combined. But what’s the most spoken
language in Africa?

Because of its size,
Africa and its 54 countries are incredibly diverse – linguists
estimate that nearly 2,000 native languages are spoken in
Africa, along with more global languages
like English and French. And due to that diversity, many
Africans are at least bilingual, if not trilingual.

Below are the top 10 Languages spoken in Africa:

1.
Swahili:

Swahili,
which is also known as Kiswahili in the native tongue, is a Bantu language
spoken by some 150 million Africans in the African Great Lakes region in
Central and Southern Africa.

It is
the official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burundi,
and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Swahili holds quite an appeal for many
language learners owing to the wide number of people speaking this language and
its rich history. Many critics fault the decision of the African Union not to
include Swahili as a working language in the commission.

2.
Arabic:

The
presence of Arabic in the languages spoken in Africa may come as a surprise to
many, being that it is a foreign language. Again, this shows the level of
external influences on the continent. Arabic is spoken by more than 100 million
Africans, making it one of the most spoken languages in the continent.

It is
an official language in Egypt, Comoros, Djibouti, Chad, Algeria, Mauritania,
Morocco, and Libya and is mostly concentrated in the North African region.
Interestingly, although Arabic is regarded as one of the world’s most widely
spoken languages, 62% of the total speakers of Arabic in the world are
Africans.

3.
French:

French
comes third on the list; this means there are more French speakers in Africa
than in France. French is a European language that saw the light of Africa
after the Colonization period. Not surprisingly, 26 African states form part of
the top French-speaking countries on the continent.

In
some areas, such as Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and Gabon, French is spoken in the
highest percentage in Mauritius, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Sao Tome e Principe,
Seychelles, and Guinea. The fact that it has approximately 90 million speakers
in Africa comes as no big surprise then.

4.
Hausa:

Hausa,
one of Nigeria’s official languages, and a member of the Chadic branch of
Afro-Asiatic family of languages is spoken by more than 50 million Africans as
their first language. Other than Nigeria, Hausa is spoken in Niger, Benin,
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, and Chad.

Hausa
makes it to the list of most spoken languages in Africa due to its significance
in trade, commerce and business across Nigeria and the West African region.
Besides that, it is one of the few African languages that are taught in International
Universities due to the huge amount of literature that it possesses.

5.
Yoruba:

Yoruba
is one of the cardinal languages of Nigeria, accounting for over 30 million
speakers in Benin, Nigeria, and Togo. Other populations speaking Yoruba as an everyday
language are found in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

6.
Oromo:

Oromo,
a descendant of Cushitic language, is widely spoken across Africa by 30 million
people/ Spoken mainly in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and
Egypt, Oromo has significant speakers to its name.

The
people of Oromo account for more than 40% of the Ethiopian population and are
the largest ethnic group in the country.

7.
Igbo:

A
native language of the Igbo people and one of Nigeria’s official language, Igbo
is spoken by over 24 million people, with the greater portion of speakers
residing in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.

Igbo
has more than 20 dialects and descends from the Volta-Niger branch of the
Niger-Congo family of language, with the Igbo people being the largest ethnic
group in Africa.

8.
Amharic:

The
fifth most widely spoken language in Africa (25 million native and 3 million
emigrants), Amharic is the second-largest Semitic dialect on the continent
after Arabic and mainly spoken in Ethiopia.

Being
a native language, Amharic is one of the very few languages having its
alphabet, while most others use Arabic or Latin letters. Perhaps this is the
reason that it is host to a growing body of Ethiopian literature such as
poetry, novels, and journals.

9.
Zulu:

IsiZulu,
also known as Zulu, is one of South Africa’s official languages. Branching out
from the Bantu/Nguni family of languages, Zulu has more than 10 million
speakers and is the second most widely spoken Bantu language (after Shona).

Zulu
is written using the Latin alphabet and is influenced by the Khoisan language
which accounts for the unique “clicking” sounds within the dialect.

10.
Shona:

Shona
originates from the Bantu family of languages; Shona is the most spoken
language in Zimbabwe, with over 10 million speakers. Shona is an official
language in Zimbabwe, but also have English and Ndebele as the principal
languages.

Final Words

As evident from the wide
list of languages mentioned above, Africa is a mixture of many languages fused
into it, with each language apart and distinct from the other. The growing
influx of migrants, changing political situation, and effervescent law and
order situation in Africa has not been able to influence the number of most
spoken languages in Africa. To date, this region remains one of the largest
continents of the world with a wide number of languages to boast
of—which will, undoubtedly, continue to retain themselves in the future.

HOW
TO LEARN A LANGUAGE FAST – PART 3

6. Study pronunciation
very early on

With languages, you can
always learn vocabulary and grammar as you go along. But it’s essential to
avoid building bad habits at the beginning of your language learning journey.
“I’m a big believer that one of the first things you should do with a new language
is really study pronunciation,” says Richards. “It’s much easier to get it
right at the beginning than it is to try and fix it later on.” How can you
practice pronunciation? The best way is to learn by listening to audio
recordings or watching videos of native speakers so you can hear how they
pronounce things. Then copy them by repeating the same sounds over and over
until they begin to feel natural in your mouth. You can also use pronunciation
apps like Glossika, where you listen to a native speaker, record yourself
repeating what they said, and then compare your version to the native
speaker’s. To improve your pronunciation even faster, you can work with a private
tutor who’s a native speaker of your target language. They’ll notice
exactly what words you’re mispronouncing, demonstrate how they say them, and
help you practice until you get it right.

7. Classes Suck and Are
an Inefficient Use of Time and Money

All things considered,
you get a really poor return for your time and effort in group classes. There
are two problems. The first is that the class moves at the pace of its slowest
student. The second is that learning a foreign language is a fairly personal
process—everyone naturally learns some words or topics easier than others,
therefore a class is not going to be able to address each student’s personal
needs as well or in a timely fashion.

For instance, when I
took Russian classes I found verb conjugations to be simple because I had
already learned Spanish. But an English classmate struggled quite a bit with
them. As a result, I spent a lot of my class time waiting around for him to
catch up.

8. Understand how you
learn best

Different people have
different ways of learning. Some people need to watch others explain something
and others need to do it themselves. In either case, taking classes from a
platform for Lingoda was designed to be flexible for individual
learning needs. No matter whether you take individual classes or group classes,
classes are based on a particular topic and come with set learning materials.
All teachers are native speakers and take the time to explain the topic and any
related goals for that lesson. During the lesson, you’ll have a chance to
listen to those explanations and take notes, speak directly with the teacher,
and also speak with other classmates, giving you a well-rounded opportunity to
learn how it suits you best.

………

My answer is going to be very speculative, because you have not provided information about your language learning background and habits. Learning languages can be a great challenge but if you break things down into digestible chunks, you can make progress every day and that just accumulates over the years. There is no such thing as being fully able to speak a language, it is a never ending continuous process, that requires attention on a daily/weekly basis. So don’t expect to reach some ‘end’ of learning.

For English speakers, French is a moderately difficult ‘endeavour’. The vocabulary will be quite familiar to you from Latin and French loanwords. The grammar part is a bit tricky, but good reference material, a course and daily practice should help.

Chinese requires a lot more attention in the beginning, sailing around in the shallow waters of Pinyin Bay and Four Tones Islands, the Character Archipelago before you reach the ‘high seas’ of Mandarin.

In my own experience, if you don’t learn as often as you can, you will need to think of Chinese as a hobby, rather than a serious attempt of learning it. In my first years of learning Mandarin, I spent about 2-3 hours on average day by day, listening to hearing comprehension material, radio podcasts and watching movies with subtitles, once I was finished with grammar and pronunciation drills. You should not underestimate the pronunciation. Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the delicate differences of intonation make the difference between words that can mean wildly different things. (panda vs. chest hair). This is a part that needs daily drill, the more you spend practicing, the better you get. Some people never manage to get this right, and never get understood! The good news is, it can be learned.

The other big bite is the vocabulary. That does not only boil down to learning characters, that’s another fallacy about Chinese. China and it’s culture have developed over millennia on its own track, different from that of the West. Did you know that Chinese has a different for almost all family members, e.g. younger and elder uncles, paternal and maternal grandmothers are not the same? There are things that you cannot equate to English words and ideas directly, and coming to terms with Chinese, especially in China or over the phone, can take time. When you add the most common four character proverbs (chengyu) to you repertoir, you will really understand that learning Chinese is learning a language from scratch. Apart from rare international words like ‘Coca-Cola’ and ‘motor’, there is little that you can associate with what you have previously known from other languages. So this is a huge part of learning Chinese, it is not just learning 10 characters per day, and counting the days until you get to 3000 or so.

What really helps in learning languages is motivation. Find out why you want to learn them and commit yourself to it. Never try to learn too much at once, but rather break up things and stop when you fill exhausted. Also, the biggest keyword is REPEAT & REVIEW. By the third or fourth time you see, hear or read something, you are more intimate with it than when you first started eyeballing it.

So there is no definite answer, it depends a lot on the circumstances and your ability to schedule learning as often as you can. Use your mornings, afternoons or whenever you have time, the more time you spend on it, the sooner you get to a level at which you can use your languages in real situations.

……………

It depends.

Mostly on what you think, “learn” means.

If “learn” means “acquire fluency”

No. Duolingo isn’t going to make you fluent. Fluency comes when you spend time having conversations —especially with native speakers. An hour a day in a piece of software will not make you fluent.

If “learn” means “acquire communication skills”

Yes. Duolingo will give you the skills you need to communicate orally and in writing in a language. It teaches you about 2,000 words (which is all you need to communicate basic thoughts and ideas in a language). It teaches you most of the grammar needed to be an effective communicator.

You will be able to express wishes, thoughts, and ideas about a variety of subjects in present, past, and future tenses.

It helped me substantially in Portugal

When I was at 48% “fluency” in Portuguese, I was able to hold about a 2-hour conversation with a man on a train in Portugal. And all I knew at the time was present tense. I was also able to navigate the country, ask questions, order food, and get basic help.

I should also caution that I speak Spanish fluently. So I when I was stumped for a word or a grammar rule, I relied on my Spanish to help me estimate a Portuguese equivalent.

I’ve started reading the New Testament in Portuguese and I can tell you that I am struggling a little bit, but I’m still able to comprehend a solid amount.

I might fair decently well in Israel

I’m at roughly 45% in Hebrew and I’m not nearly so confident that I could hold a 2-hour conversation. But I know that if I were dropped in Israel tomorrow, I could read menus, ask for directions, and generally get around.

Language learning does not exist in a binary state

People always ask these questions about, “if I did Y, will I learn X language?”

Language is not something that is either learned or unlearned. You are always learning a language.

I think Duolingo does a good job of getting you on a pathway to fluency. After you complete a course, if you are able to find native speakers with whom you can practice, or books that you can read, you will get to fluency.

……………

I didn’t study linguistics. I studied mathematics. But language learning is my passion. I was recently invited to give a talk at Oxford University on how to effectively learn Russian or any language (you can watch it here http://livediversified.com/how-to-learn-russian-talk-at-oxford-university-russian-society/). Below you can find the gist of my favourite language learning methods which are backed by research results in cognitive psychology – the science of learning.

Before I say anything about learning methods I want to stress one thing. As with most things in life, including learning a language, outstanding results are achieved because of the love for something. You should feel happy when you learn a language or anything else; otherwise, learning is not effective. You should imagine learning a language as a delicious gourmet dish of which you savor each and every mouthful. It’s important that you feel a language with all your senses. If it fills you with joy, immerse yourself in a song, a poem, a book, a film, or anything you find interesting in the language. Don’t be obsessed with timeframes, even if your goal is to speak the language very quickly. It will happen anyway if you nurture love for it.

OK, I’d better move on to the methods before I get too cheesy.

1. Walk and practice out loudly: This is the number one method that has helped me to learn languages while walking. How? While you walk (or cycle, or drive) look at things around you and practice the language out loud. Say things like: “This is a car, this is a tree, people are walking on the street etc.” Practice verb conjugation, simple phrases. Say anything you can see or imagine out loud. Why does this method work? Because you engage multiple senses. You see a real object, you speak out loud, you listen to your voice and all this happens while you move. To learn more about this technique you can watch my YouTube video here
2. Make associations: To make something stick to your memory, you need to tie it to what you already know. If you leave it unassociated in a corner somewhere in your memory you will forget it. For this reason, when you learn a new word, try to find its root, synonyms, antonyms, words that sound or look similar. What does this word remind you of? Don’t learn it, investigate it as a detective! Create mind maps and connect words together based on their meaning, grammar, or anything you can imagine. Watch out for patterns. The following mind map is an example from my notebook when I was learning Russian. I started by writing down a phrase in the middle. Then I tried to remember other nouns that take the same preposition на. The word неделя means week. That made me want to test myself on the spelling of the days of the week. And then, I wanted to remember how to say “weekday” or “weekend”. When you do this process rack your brains to remember. Don’t rush to look something up. The cognitive effort spent to recall something makes that something grow roots in your memory. This has been found by numerous studies in cognitive psychology. Below you can also watch a video I made on the importance of association and how you can use them.

3) Be more sociable: Do not allow yourself to miss not even ONE opportunity to practice the language with a native speaker. Do you hear someone speaking your target language on the street, on the bus, in the elevator, at the restaurant? Stop them, interrupt them, don’t let them go! Say hello and start a conversation! They will respond with kindness. This conversation will make you feel great and make them feel great too. You may end up becoming friends with them. If that happens, you will become fluent either you want it or not! I have made so many friends like this, on the bus, in the grocery, on the beach… Language learning brings people together. Speak up on the bus, show up to language exchange events, and find native speakers in your city. Internations (www.internations.org) is another great website where you can find native speakers. If you live in a remote village in the middle of nowhere you can find people to practice on the Internet. You don’t have to travel to get language practice any more. And remember, we don’t learn a language for ourselves. We learn it to travel, communicate, and share experiences with other people.

4) Watch films like a language learning pro: Let’s say you are learning Spanish. Set up your screen having three windows (3 browser windows – like Chrome) simultaneously opened: actual film with English subtitles, transcript in Spanish, and a Google Translate window like below:

You watch the film. Do you find something interesting? Press pause. Have a look at the translation and the transcript/subtitles on the left. You can see how something is written in your target language. Are you still not sure about the initial form of a verb or a noun etc? Look it up instantly on the small Google Translate window at the bottom left. Press the Google Translate Play button to listen to the pronunciation. Repeat out loud. You also have a notebook on the side so you can write down new words and take notes.

Please note that you can open any .srt subtitles file with any browser. Popular subtitle websites are http://www.opensubtitles.org/ or http://subscene.com/ I am currently putting together a big list with more than 300 films and subtitle files for the most popular languages. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel or drop me a message here http://livediversified.com/contact/ and I will share it with you once it’s ready.

As a final word, don’t give speed to your language learning. Give it more motivation, curiosity and love. Find genuine interest in it. I have also written an article about effective learning in general and how to study for better long-term memorisation. You can read it here http://livediversified.com/characteristics-effective-learning/.

If you feel more motivated after reading this answer I want to ask you to do 2 things:

1) Tomorrow speak out loud for 10 min while you walk and leave a message below to tell me how you found it. 10 min is enough. Remember I said LOUD. Don’t cheat. And if people look at you with surprise thinking you went crazy, it means you are doing it right!

2) Upvote and share this answer to Facebook because I wanna see more enthusiastic people practicing out loud on the street instead of looking down silent.

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Well, I happen to teach this stuff to master’s and doctoral students, and I just finished one iteration of the course in December; my usual fury over the broad misunderstanding of the extremely complex issues is still fresh. I’ll write a detailed answer, but, for the TL;DR crowd, you can just scroll down to the very last sentence.

This is still a relatively short post that cuts through decades of deep-seated misconceptions and nonsense, so bear with me.

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), there have by now been several meta-analyses (studies that aggregate the quantitative findings of other studies) that have compared trying to acquire grammar with and without explicit instruction, deliberate study, and explicit correction.

For misguided and ideological reasons, there had been decades of resistance among English-speaking researchers to the notion of deliberate study of grammar for adults. At least eight things conspired to cause this:

(1) Noam Chomsky’s views on (first) language acquisition (themselves theoretically and empirically very problematic, but that’s a story for another time) were fashionable. They were made even more problematic (and a bit intellectually vulgar, if you ask me) by a guy called Stephen Krashen and several of his graduate students, all of whom became influential in the field (and are now retired).

(2) It was wrongly assumed that adults could acquire grammar like infants and toddlers.

(3) The nature of children’s and adults’ acquisition of grammar and their neurocognitive and social/environmental underpinnings was poorly understood. In particular, it wasn’t understood how extraordinarily involved, sohisticated, and laborious child language acquisition is and how much input, sophisticated learning, and caregiver support goes into it (and it’s enormous amounts).

(4) Most SLA researchers studying this stuff were monolingual Anglophones and had never successfully learned another language as adults, which gave them lots of really silly ideas about the process.

(5) Most SLA researchers had a poor-to-appalling grasp of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

(6) SLA studies were often not methodologically and statistically rigorous; the samples were small, not enough detail was reported to make studies replicable, data were kept unpublished, the constructs and tests were wonky, the statistical procedures were inadequate, and often the very designs were fatally flawed; for instance, they relied on completely unfair strawman comparisons, predictably favouring the experimental condition the researcher was emotionally invested in.

(7) English speakers aren’t taught the grammar of their own language in school. When you don’t understand something, you (i) often fail to see its relevance and (ii) feel insecure about discussing, researching, or teaching it.

(8) English speakers are extremely concerned with saving face and extremely reluctant to give or receive direct, honest, explicit correction. Essentially, more insecurity.

It may or may not come as a shock to you that Anglophone academics of course thought they knew best, and it never really seriously occurred to them to consult people from other language backgrounds, particularly professors and students in any one of the hundreds upon hundreds of language departments at universities abroad, to see how these extremely successful learners were reaching their native-like and near-native levels of proficiency as adults. (Spoiler alert: It was through lots of explicit instruction, deliberate study, and explicit correction, coupled with tons of communicative practice.) No. They knew better. Of course they did. The wogs begin at Calais.

To cut a long story short, because it’s a convoluted and infuriating one that I slowly unpack for my students over a semester’s worth of readings, lectures, discussions, and assignments, the above led to decades, entire careers, and hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on pursuing evidence that adults could acquire second languages through immersion and without instruction. That evidence never came.

This, unfortunately, got translated into decades of (a majority of) language teachers in Anglophone countries prematurely and misguidedly kicking grammar out of the classroom and basically just chatting and playing games with their students. It led to scruffy Aussie backpackers teaching English to Japanese people without a day of training. Hey, all you had to do was get ’em to talk!

This is one of the reasons (but not the only reason) why language instruction is still so poor in English-speaking countries.

Meanwhile, those who knew what they were doing, including a minority of teachers in Anglophone countries (many of them in foreign-language departments), kept teaching grammar, making their students study it, and explicitly and directly correcting errors without fear of hurting someone’s feelings. And a minority of SLA researchers continued systematically studying the effects of communicative language teaching with and without explicit instruction, but making sure they avoided poor methodological decisions and strawman experimental conditions.

Then we had the first meta-analysis around 2000 followed by a bigger and more focused one around 2010 (actually done by my former professor and a grad school classmate), followed by several even more focused ones. These were accompanied by significant strides in our understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of second language learning.

The answers that unambiguously emerge are:

1. Adults who are systematically and explicitly taught grammar rules outperform those who are not, all other things being equal. The effect size is large.
2. This advantage is seen both for formally simple and formally complex rules.
3. The advantage is also evident for local rules (applying to one word or several adjacent words) and long-distance rules (applying to words that are separated by other words).
4. The effects of explicit instruction transfer to communicative tasks and to measures of spontaneous language use, that is, they are not just limited to explicit paper-and-pencil-test situations.
5. Learners fail to notice most recasts (“gentle Anglo-style corrections”, often unobtrusively delivered with a smile). If they do notice them, they often misinterpret them.
6. Corrections of errors must be short, emphatic, and focused on the error.
7. It makes little difference to learning whether corrections are immediate (which is sometimes inappropriate because it disrupts communication) or delayed. However, some learners prefer one or the other for reasons such as embarrassment. For instance, a friend of mine conducted a study with Japanese learners of English, and his participants preferred immediate correction because the alternative (a debriefing session at the end) felt like a raking over the coals. [EDIT: The author of this study just reminded me via a text message that another reason his participants preferred immediate feedback was that they sometimes forgot what the error had been by the time they were being corrected. He also says that evidence has recently been building up for a somewhat bigger benefit of immediate feedback, which makes sense to me.]
8. If the learner can handle it (i.e., if they have enough mental bandwidth, which low-lever learners typically don’t), it’s beneficial to interrupt them, point out the error, and prompt them to correct it themselves, then later make sure they understand the nature of the error and the correction.
9. Learners tend to ignore peer corrections. They need to be trained to accept and process these.
10. Communicative practice is particularly effective for grammar acquisition when the completion of the task critically hinges on the learner noticing and using the structure that is being taught. For example, if you’re teaching past tense {-ed}, your practice tasks need to be constructed such that they can’t be successfully completed unless this structure is used and processed. In this particular example, this means you must remove all other clues that point to the fact that the event is completed (such as time adverbials like “yesterday”).
11. Successful teaching needs to incorporate a continuous cycle of short bursts of instruction and correction accompanied by lots of practice using the target language for communication, with any malformed output receiving explicit correction and being used to guide further curricular choices.

In other words: Adults can’t just magically learn a second language through osmosis; they aren’t babies; they need explicit instruction, deliberate study, and explicit, direct, unambiguous correction.

…………

You need to know it won’t be an easy journey, but if you followed the steps below, I can assure you it will be possible, it worked for me already. The best part it will cost you nothing.

1. Learn a lot of vocabulary, German is a rich language the more you learn new words, the faster you will learn the language. Use color-coded sticky notes to learn the gender of each noun, I use pink for a feminine, blue for masculine, and yellow for neuter.
2. Use the vocabulary that you learned in step one to construct sentences, construct thousands of them. The easy way to do this is whenever you learn a new word you use it in ten different sentences, this will make your mind ready to use the word whenever it needs.
3. Listen to a lot of German. I will suggest starting with Easy Germanthere is also super easy german in the channel where they speak so slowly so new learners can understand. Once you feel comfortable with the language go to ZDFmediathek, where you can watch a German movie with German subtitles. At least listen to 3 hours of German a day.
4. Remember languages are about building up knowledge over a long period of time, so you shouldn’t slack off for a day, instead, add more to your language so you won’t forget what you learned in the first place.
5. Focus on pronunciation. Some people think it is the last step or it is not important for language learning. It is extremely important to learn the correct pronunciation from the far beginning. I would suggest that when you learn a new word, learn its correct pronunciation. Use Forvo: the pronunciation dictionary. All the words in the world pronounced by native speakersto practice every word as you learn.
6. DEUTSCH LERNEN | DWprovides fantastic materials, for different levels. You can start with A1 till C1 level.
7. Speak out loud. If you are not in a German-speaking country and don’t have someone to practice with, go to https://www.italki.com/signup.Although they have amateur and professional tutorials that will cost you money. You can search through their community for a person with the same level as you, and you guys can practice your German in Skype call.
8. Create conversations with yourself, imagine yourself in a supermarket in Germany, what will ask the cashier and how will he respond, think about the conversation itself as if you are both the customer and the cashier. Try it in a restaurant, in a mall, with a stranger on the bus, or with the hotel receptionist.
9. Make German part of your life, think in German, sing in German, Watch movies in German, or just watch it with German subtitles

………….

This is a difficult question because there are so many variables. You can get a first idea at Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers, because the language you’re learning (and the language(s) you speak already) are the most important factors. If you’re Chinese and trying to learn Dutch, you may need more than 2000 hours, while as a native English speaker you only need around 600 – and if you’re a native German speaker with some knowledge of English, you may be able to make do with 300 even!

So that table is not the end-all of estimates; it also depends on which languages you have learned already and if you have any experience at all in learning languages. The first foreign language is always the hardest, which is why Benny Lewis (author of “Fluent in 3 Months”) and I recommend spending at least 2 weeks learning Esperanto (which is completely regular and easy) in order to wrap your head around a lot of features that would be much harder to figure out when learning a less regular language.

Apart from your language knowledge and experience, the next biggest factor is the level you’re trying to reach. The numbers on the site I gave are all going for the lower end of professional working capacity. If you have a less lofty goal, you may be able to reach it faster, especially if you optimize for what you want to achieve. As you can read in the linked blog article I wrote for Benny’s site, I have been able to understand a Japanese TV series after 30 days, test at A2 level in Finnish after 30 days, give a public speech in Indonesian after 6 weeks, and so on. It’s all a matter of optimization for your goal. Few people really want to be an expert at every aspect of a language, at least not urgently. They urgently need one skill, but they develop all skills at once because that’s what textbooks and classes generally do. It slows them down a lot though. When I needed to urgently get comfortable reading Spanish in order to quote Spanish linguistics journals for my thesis, I reached that level in a few dozen hours of study rather than the 575+ that the FSI cites – but I don’t have professional working capacity in Spanish, I just learned enough for my purposes. It’s another example of the optimization I’ll do, accepting lopsided language knowledge in exchange for achieving surprising feats very quickly. Unfortunately, you don’t really get an idea of how to optimize your path until you’re already an experienced language learner. Here a coach may be helpful.

Note also that intensity is an issue. The FSI assumes that you will study very intensively, as their students do, at least 4 hours a day. However, the average adult language learner only studies two hours a week or so. At that speed, you will forget much more and waste time having to review it, so you will inevitably need longer than their estimates. The more intensively you study, the less total time you’ll need. I recommend intensive study especially at the beginning, to quickly leave the textbook stage behind and reach a level where “study” becomes self-motivating and fun, for example because you’re watching movies or reading interesting articles in your target language.

And that’s the real key: motivation. The more weeks and months you spend on a language, the more motivation you need in order not to quit. The vast majority of language learners quit before they reach their goal. So ensure that either a) the language is easy enough to pick up quickly or b) you’re studying very intensively or c) you have enough motivation to sustain you for the really long run – or a mixture of the three.

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It’s useful to start learning. Not to learn. When I tried Duolingo, I completed the English tree just to see if I would come across any unknown word (I didn’t… that’s how poor that tree was). In total, that tree had around 800 words. Far from enough to be proficient. That would land you somewhere between A2 and B1.

Besides, Duolingo doesn’t allow for interactions with speakers of your target language, so you won’t progress in oral comprehensin and speaking if you use only that app. Repeating the same sentences over and over is not enough to learn a language either. You don’t get any real writing practice.

I completed the Italian tree in 2022, that one had 3,800 words (still very low considering it’s estimated Italian has 450,000 words). It helped me enroll in an Italian class in university, the level test had estimated I should go in a B2 class but I asked to go to the level just below. I hadn’t had any chance to practice speaking and hearing the language outside of Duolingo. It was pretty apparent in class. If you play an audio in Italian, I’ll probably understand a quarter of it at most. Duolingo’s audios don’t reflect how fast people really speak.

I’ve been able to use a bit of Italian in a non-academic context, but it was only an order in a restaurant in Italy, and even then, I didn’t understand everything the employees said and had to rely on context. And that’s despite the fact Italian and French are similar. The only practice I had between the moment I finished the tree and the moment I joined an Italian class was through text messages with an Italian speaker on Discord for a few months.

Duolingo is not bad as a starter, but don’t trust it to be enough on its own. It won’t be. Especially if you don’t read the lessons on the app and rely on the app for your whole practice and learning.

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Before even attempting to answer this, the first question one needs to ask themselves is: what is your goal when “learning a new language!” Is it to read, write, or speak a new language? Most people’s ultimate goal is to, first and foremost, learn to actually speak.

However, most methods are focused on reading and writing skills so ensuring that you use a tool tailored to your goal is essential.

Matching images and words on a screen is great to develop reading skills, but does little to help you break down a new sound system aurally or teach you the rhythm and cadence of the spoken language. Aural and oral skills need to be addressed very deliberately when learning to speak a new language.

Reading, writing and speaking skills are taught very differently. Trying to learn to speak with a method focused on reading is only slowing you down and delaying the work needed to prepare yourself aurally/orally for conversational skills.

After all, there is nothing hard about saying the French word for “son,” which is pronounced “feess”—until you see it written down: fils. And no one has ever mastered the French “r” visually. That is a process that needs to happen aurally/orally. So ignoring that conversational-specific training is just hindering and delaying your progress.

Of course, if your ultimate goal is to learn to read a new language because you want to read Victor Hugo’s classics then using a phonetic method dedicated to reading skills is the obvious choice. Again, it all comes back to your personal goal and what your focus is for learning a new language!

Nowadays, there are apps that focus uniquely on conversational skills like Pimsleur that can help you quickly and effectively learn to speak a new language.

Pimsleur is a language learning program accessible via an app (iOS/Android) and a companion web-based app for desktop computers, that focuses on listening and conversational language skills.

We currently offer over 50 different languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Korean, Portuguese, and more. We also teach Ukrainian, which is free until March 31st, 2023.

You can download the app on your Android or iOS phone or use the desktop web-based app to use all of its features through your favorite browser.

The program emphasizes conversational skills by introducing vocabulary and grammar in everyday situations. In a way, it is similar to listening to a podcast or how you learned to speak your native tongue as a child.

The program is split into 30 minute conversational lessons. Each lesson focuses on basic speaking scenarios like asking for directions, ordering at a restaurant, or making new friends.

Pimsleur has two golden rules:

1. Listen to one lesson a day and try not to take notes or look anything up while doing a lesson (remember a French “r” looks the same on paper in English and French! Your eyes are no substitute for aural training.)
2. Always respond to lesson prompts aloud.

Following these rules will enable you to learn the language through the conversations and narratives that are in the scientifically-sequenced program.

The user is encouraged to speak along with the audio, both filling in vocabulary and responding to conversational prompts.

Sound will be your guide to learning new vocabulary and grammatical structures. You’ll hear how the word is pronounced. If it is a tricky one, it will be broken down one syllable at a time from the end (a linguistic technique called back-chaining) for you to properly enunciate it.

The Pimsleur program has many benefits such as:

• Helps build confidence in speaking
• It’s hands-free and convenient
• Aids in long-term memorization
• Teaches vocabulary you can use in everyday contexts
• It doesn’t require a lot of time to follow the program
• Helps you improve your pronunciation

If you want to quickly and easily learn to speak a new language, check Pimsleur. We are sure you’ll find it useful.

If you have more questions about how to learn a new language, let us know and we’ll do our best to help.

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Strategies to Successfully Teach Yourself A Foreign Language

One of my biggest achievements, and I’m very proud of it, is that I have learned Japanese by myself, and did a 2 months internship in Tokyo that no one spoke English or Chinese in the company.

I started self-studying in high school after I traveled to Japan in 2008 for the first time. To be honest, it wasn’t fun (the time I decided not to join group tour from then on), but something ignited inside of me, and I thought It would be cool to learn Japanese. I kept learning it through college, and passed the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, N1, in 2014.

It was a long process looking back, but I enjoyed every single moment of the learning curve.

“So, how did you do it?”

This might be the second to most question I’ve been asked other than “Where’re you from?” So I decided it’s time for me to document out the process.

It’s not easy, but it’s certainly not as hard as getting a Ph.D. in applied physics, either. I tore it down to 5 steps that have helped me self-learn Japanese, and I believe it works for other languages too:

Step 1: Figure Out The Curiosity. What Makes You Want to Learn The Language?

First starts with why. What about the language or culture that attracts you?

I remember I’ve been listening to Japanese pop music since young although I had absolutely no idea what the lyrics were about. It was the Japanese entertainment that held my interest in wanting to learn more about the language.

My point is: Find a topic(s) that you’re interested in, and stick your focus to that topic(s) as you learn. For instance, if you are interested in the food culture, consume materials (e.g. videos, articles, blogs, etc.) around that topic instead of something you’re not interested about (e.g. political system.)

Having a focus not only gives you joy during your study, but also avoids topics that make you bored. Think about a time when you were so concentrated on solving your favorite problem that you forgot the time. It’s the same idea.

Step 2: Gather The Right Tools For You

This is a trial and error approach, and you will discover what works best for you through your studying.

Books — I’m leery of grammar books for few reasons, and one of them is that the conversation examples in the books are as stiff as strained necks after some bad dreams, and nobody I know talks like that in real life.

Here’s what I did: I bought one book for beginner lessons and few more after I reached advanced level (because by the time I’ve figured out how to learn more appropriately). But I didn’t just study off the examples in the book. Instead, I Googled the grammar/vocabs/phrases and looked for some practical uses in “real life” articles or blogs.

Google/YouTube — Most stuffs on the internet are free, and are tailored to your need and interest if you search right. YouTube is my all-time favorite resource to practice listening skill as well as colloquial conversations.

Here’s what I did: I watched YouTube on topics that I’m interested, only. For beginners, see if there are children’s stories or short (tutorial) clips on YouTube that you can follow along. Write down words/phrases/grammar (regardless of what level you’re in after you learned the basic grammatical structures), and review them consistently.

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Form a Habit

The learning curve doesn’t stop after you’ve passed the highest language level exam. There’s no limit in learning a foreign language, and most of the things I assume.

Form a habit to re-visit the vocabulary and grammar lists, and consistently consume articles and videos of your interest. I always learn something new either about Japanese’ daily lives, or popular trend that’s going on when I study. And once the habit becomes a hobby that you can’t live without, trust me, learning a foreign language is just as easy as putting on your pajamas.

Of course, it is best to learn with native speakers or a teachers because they can help you clear up complicated questions. But again, self-learning a foreign language is definitely possible with the right resources. Treat the learning process as a journey, not a destination. And prepare to enjoy the fulfillment when you can successfully laugh with and talk to someone fluently with the language, after those blood, sweat, and tears you’ve put in.