Language Learning Tips to Speak Like a Native
- Blue Bear
- Sep 6, 2023
- 3 min read
I speak, read, and write four languages. Although two of them are pretty similar, their scripts are completely different. I learned all of those scripts in school. It is kind of a part of our culture.
Today, I’m going to help you with your language-learning journey. The best tip I can give to keep up with your languages is to speak them and practice reading and writing in them. Speak it so much that you don’t need to go through the ‘translation phase’ in your head. That is what I have been experiencing with learning French these days. It takes me about 3 seconds longer to understand basic French sentences with the vocabulary I have learned.
Alright, my number one tip is grammar.
In one line: “If you focus on grammar early on enough and work hard at it, you will thank yourself later.”
Grammar is such an important part of speaking like a native that I can’t really find any better tip than this(except learning vocab ;)). If you can string together a bunch of words to make a sentence, you will probably be understood by native speakers, but if you want to sound like one, pay attention to grammar. For languages like French and Spanish, it’s just memorize, memorize, memorize.
Once you learn how to use the past, present and future tense, you will be able to have an easy conversation.
Let’s take the example of two teenagers having a conversation after school while walking home.
“Hey, what did you do in Math class?”
“Oh, nothing much, just practice questions. We got lots of homework though,”
“Man, that’s sad. I have no homework, I am going to watch the football game tonight,”
In this short conversation, you can notice that most of what we say is either what we did, or what we are going to do.
So, learn the tenses, and you will sound so much better.
The second tip is accent.
If you are learning a language you have not heard much, you will most likely have an accent. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But to sound like a native speaker of let’s say, French, you will need to know how to say the ‘R’s.
The only piece of advice I can give here is to listen. I lived in a French-speaking country for a few years. Unknowingly, I picked up the accent there. When I moved to another country and saw people learning French, their accents surprised me. I did not know that people didn’t instantly learn the accent right away. Yes, ignorance on my part. But then I looked back to what taught me my accent. It was listening and copying.
Listen and watch how the sounds are made. Where the pauses are, where the words are shortened.
To do this from home, watch shows and movies in the language you are learning.
Also, don’t exhaust yourself, speaking in another language and accent is tiring at times. I know that when I speak French for a lot of time, my throat hurts with all the R sounds I am making. So be hydrated as well.
The third tip I have is to practice it like a toddler.
Do exercise worksheets like you did as a child, and read children’s books. The more you read in that language, the more you will have an easier time understanding it. You will spend way less time deciphering the letters, and more time getting the meaning of them.
That’s all for today. See you next week!
Medium: https://medium.com/@bluebearss
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