Before you buy a ticket to a new country, consider practicing the language at home. Often immersion is recommended as a method of learning a new language fast.
These tips can help you practice at home!
One: Learn essential phrases
Just like preparing a recipe for dinner you need to make sure you have all the ingredients before you start.
You need to make sure you have some essential phrases, mainly for safety and emergencies before you go to a new country.
This ensures that in a moment of panic, you’re not scrambling through your guidebook or dictionary or translator app on your phone.
So practice at home!
Essential (especially at home) can be more than just safety phrases.
Essential phrases can include the words or phrases you use daily. For me as a mom of 3 young boys, ‘stop’ and ‘gentle hands’ are essential phrases!
Two: preparation is key.
I know I mentioned the first one is to learn some essential phrases but when going into a new environment prepare some new words for just that situation.
How this works at home is to learn the words you will need. You can turn them into flashcards, sticky notes all over your home (that’s a favorite of mine!), or memorize a few at a time.
You don’t need to memorize or write 100 notes the first day. Start with just a few words that you’ll use often. You are welcome to fully immerse yourself (as if you were abroad) but don’t feel the need to depending on your capacity or comfort.
Three: give yourself grace.
Immersion is difficult even when you have a basic language foundation.
Native speakers have different accents, colloquialisms, or different ways of saying words that aren’t the same as you learn in a classroom.
Consider even in the United States, going from the West Coast to the East Coast or even to the South, English is spoken but sounds so different! There’s soda, pop, and Coke for just a quick example.
Four: Change your phone language to your target language
This one can seem daunting at first, but you use your phone every day and immersion relies on constant use for essential functions!
I do recommend at least noting what the words are in the target language to change it back to English before starting in case you need to switch back before you earn enough.
I did this in Berlin (partially because the phone was from a German phone store) and it wasn’t as hard as I imagined it would be. Even my husband’s computer at home is all in German (keyboard too!).
Phones today are very intuitive so swapping languages isn’t as overwhelming as one would think.
Five: Set a time or activity that’s always in your target language
Another option is to have a set time of day (either scheduled or activity based) that is in the target language.
We started with dinner in German at our house since it’s consistent and both my husband and I are there to practice with the kids. The hard part for me is when he’s talking about work (as an electrician) and I’m learning those career specific words I have no background for otherwise. That slows the conversation down but with some practice (and mixing English), I got better!
Language learning is a journey and every adventure has its ups and downs. Remember even a little bit of effort takes you closer to your goal and consistency is key!
Which tip do you think you’ll use first?
