How to Learn Languages

Some tricks that time taught me:

I- Establish a greater goal only possible if you know the language. Examples: learn English to read about finance, learn Spanish in order to emigrate, learn Latin to read classics in the original, learn Russian to read what has not yet been translated etc. etc.

II- From basic to intermediate: first, the ear; then speech; then reading; and finally: writing.

III- Learning a language is not a matter of intelligence, aptitude, nothing. Learning a language is insistence, it’s discipline. All you have to do is not to give up. It is a question that can be summed up in: how long can you persist in a text without understanding anything at all?

IV- At first, it is hard; shortly thereafter, progress begins to appear and continue to the intermediate level when contact with the literature begins. Here comes the most difficult, painful and discouraging part: understanding the texts seems impossible, vocabulary seems like an insurmountable wall, reading is not at all pleasurable and you have the feeling of wasting a lot of time in front of a text that will not deliver nothing. Well, it is precisely at this point that, persisting, one learns a language definitely.

V- Being versed in native language grammar contributes incalculably to learn any other language.

VI- I will repeat: teachers and courses are absolutely expendable. The self-taught is not the smart one, but one that resists amid discomfort.

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