Learning a new language is not the easiest thing to achieve. However, as a lover of languages and a translator, it is within the framework of my duties to excel at understanding and moving between my working languages. This may seem simple for someone who has chosen to focus their studies on this art but it actually requires a lot of practice and determination. Whether you’re studying languages or not, here are some tips and tricks to make your language learning journey a success.

My first tip would be to choose a language or a culture whose language you are interested in. For example, I’ve always loved listening to Latin music, but I never understood any of the songs’ lyrics. Duolingo wasn’t much help either by the way. It’s only when I enrolled into university and took Spanish courses that I was finally able to understand and truly learn about the Hispanic/Latin culture I was very curious about.

My second tip is to stay consistent. Learning a new language can be a difficult process at times. Especially if you’re faced with a different alphabet. Don’t procrastinate, do your homework, even if it seems hard or confusing. Get feedback from your teachers and keep progressing, any mistake you make will only help you differentiate between wrong and right.

A trick that might help you improve your skills could be to use various methods. By that I mean don’t stick to your textbook and class notes, you can try bettering yourself through music like me, or you could watch a show in the language you wish to acquire with subtitles, you could even read stories or newspapers in said language. Basically, anything that you normally do in your everyday life, do it in another language too.

Here’s another cool trick that I recently discovered via YouTube. This person claimed to have learned an entire language in the span of year. But how, you ask, don’t you need about two to three years to become almost as fluent as a native speaker? Well, they worked each day for 10 minutes on reading, followed by listening, then speaking, and writing, a total of 40 minutes. Doing this was obviously tough but they achieved an amazing goal in a short period. So, if you’ve got some time to spare why not try it out? Challenge yourself!

Finally, I would advise you to simply have fun with it! Learning a language is exciting, it can open new horizons for you and help you communicate with different people. You can meet friends, you can travel to an exotic country, and you can add it to your CV! In sum, when you become more familiar with another culture’s mother tongue, you unlock another vision of the world, another perspective of life if I may, it surely is, in my opinion, an indispensable skill to have.