The hardest part of learning a language is exposure
I’ve been learning German at university for four years now as part of my course. That’s all come to an end now, and I’m left with a large collection of stored vocabulary in my brain and a limited amount of grammatical glue to arrange the words into something sensible.
The seminars in my German modules were two hours a week of speaking in class, learning a new construct, and practicing that construct. We would be set homework to complete each week, and occasionally it would be reviewed in class the week after it was set. Once every three or four weeks, we’d have a writing task of about 200 to 300 words, which the teacher would mark.
As anyone might be able to guess, going through only this material and nothing else, did not a good language learner make.
There was a lot of independent learning, which I will always defend as a Good Thing (tm), but when you’re a beginner, it’s hard to know where to go. You are overwhelmed with resources (I still am), some of which are of dubious quality, all trying to push their style of instruction as the One True Method. Instead of all that, I encourage everyone to just try their hardest to get exposure to your target language.
You don’t have to move there, or go on holiday. Listening through streaming shows or podcasts, wherever you get them, goes a long way. Or you can read free news sources of whatever your flavour of politics. The key thing is that it’s okay not to understand everything, in fact I’d argue that it’s not even desirable.
Throughout the entirety of your language journey, you want to form patterns of understanding. Sentence structures that appear frequently, which you may have no idea of meaning, will, once you have learned the vocabulary, become almost instinctive. I sound like I’m hand-waving magical incantations here, but I promise, consistent exposure to the language is the top thing you can do. Every day if you can.
For example, two years ago I started listening to the Easy German Podcast. It was at a level that was way too hard for me, but I stuck with it by having it on in the background while doing other things, to at least listen to something. Today, I play it on 1.5x speed and can understand almost everything. Of course, there are some words missing, but it’s amazing what you can fill in within the context of the conversation.
The best thing about living in the information age is that so much of it is free. You can learn pretty much any skill nowadays, so long as you’re willing to be patient and sort through the crud to get to useful content (therein lies the rub).
I’m not usually a life advice dispenser, but I have to say that learning German was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I don’t promise language learning is going to be good for everyone. But humans invented language, why not see what your brain can do?