Today , knowledge of a foreign language is a hobby for one person, and a professional necessity for another. Everyone decides for themselves how to learn a language. If the basic knowledge of a foreign language is obtained at a school or a higher educational institution, students can improve their level at special courses and trainings. For those who decide to learn a new foreign language for themselves, it may be more advisable to attend individual lessons with a tutor, which will help to quickly penetrate into an unfamiliar language environment.
If you have sufficient language training, as well as self-discipline and determination, you can use an alternative method of training, namely, learn a foreign language according to your own developed method, taking into account the current and desired level of knowledge in a certain professional field. This method may not be as effective, but much less expensive than course counterparts, as well as allowing you to independently determine the time, place and thematic focus of the classes.
The most difficult moment in independent study of the language is to force yourself to continue classes that can quickly get bored. To prevent this from happening, you must constantly strive to diversify self-education, approaching it from an interesting and creative perspective. Some of the approaches to learning a foreign language described below can be useful and will make classes truly fascinating and productive.
1) Watching TV shows and films in a foreign language. This method will be convenient for students with the highest level of knowledge, who are able to perceive dialogues or words behind the scenes by ear, the rate of pronunciation of which is close to ordinary colloquial speech. To facilitate the perception and training of visual memory, you can watch films with subtitles in a foreign language. Viewing on the player also allows you to scroll back the recording if you could not hear the word or phrase.
2) Reading books in a foreign language. The advantage of this method is the active training of visual memory, which helps to increase literacy. Everyone has their favorite books, so why not try re-reading an old adventure novel or modern literature in a foreign language. After several pages, especially if the book has already been read more than once in Russian, the attention from individual foreign words and expressions will shift to the plot, which to some extent will allow you to combine business with pleasure.
3) Communication on the Internet in a foreign language. As you know, the World Wide Web is able to "erase" the boundaries of communication, and this property can usefully be used to learn the language. It is not for nothing that interactive training via Skype is currently gaining popularity. Here, again, you can do it yourself, for example, communicate on various thematic forums, chat in chat rooms, etc.
4) Communication with relatives in a foreign language. Almost everyone has friends or relatives who are able to maintain a conversation in a foreign language, most often on the most common . The level of language proficiency mainly depends on practice, and if it becomes possible to constantly train your skills while talking with children studying at school or colleagues, you should not miss it.
5) Systematization of the study of a foreign language. In almost any foreign language, there are many hundreds of thousands of words, which can be accommodated only by dictionaries the thickness of the palm. Unsystematic language learning may turn out to be unproductive, because such an enormous amount of phrases and expressions from different areas of knowledge is difficult to perceive. Moreover, often the interest in learning a language is due to the need to acquire a vocabulary in a professional field. It is logical that it is in this direction that it is better to direct most of their efforts. To do this, it is advisable to distribute the field of knowledge of interest into several smaller topics, each of which can be studied during a certain time interval, for example, a month. This will help streamline the study of a foreign language and facilitate the translation of texts in the studied professional fields.
6) Compilation of a glossary of foreign terms and expressions. To systematize the vocabulary acquired through the use of the previous method, you can turn to the classic "school" technique: compiling a glossary. While working on a topic, a student may encounter many unfamiliar words that are carefully entered into the dictionary, usually with several meanings and transcription. This method helps to memorize a large number of words and expressions precisely due to its “clustering” (in this case, thematic breakdown) of terms.
7) Listening to radio and audio recordings in a foreign language. It happens that the study of a foreign language is hindered by the lack of time that could be devoted to classes. This is especially true for people with a busy work schedule, who can be advised to use the time during which they go to work. With seeming insignificance, these 30-40 minutes, and in some cases one and a half hours almost daily per month, can add up to tens of hours of effective training. Today, the market has a lot of audio courses that you can listen to both in the car and in the headphones on public transport. Even listening to ordinary radio, which has songs of foreign performers in its repertoire, may be useful for the student of the language, although it is probably not necessary to wait for any impressive results from this particular method.
In addition to the above, there are many more options for learning a foreign language, most of which require a more serious approach and certain material costs. However, these possibly more effective teaching methods can be perfectly used together with those described to accelerate the achievement of the desired result.