Useful Tips Where and How to Practice Foreign Language

Not only does our rewriting company help students and writers with editing, but we also publish from time to time useful tips on learning English. This post, for instance, is devoted to interesting, sometimes even unorthodox ways of practicing a foreign language. You will find these tips useful if you cannot afford a journey to another country to practice your language in a native environment. So, get ready to boost your knowledge in creative ways.

Start with top common words

If you start with learning top 100 common words in the language you want to master, then, provided you have a general understanding of grammar, you will be able to keep up a friendly conversation quite at ease. Statistics show that these 100 words will cover half of spoken communication, while 1,000 top used words will make you a proficient speaker with the efficiency up to 80%. In order to cover 99% of spoken communication, you will have to learn about 3,000 words from the same list. It is true for the most part of world languages, so there is no need to worry at the amount of vocabulary you have to keep in mind!

Trying to learn a lot of new words before simple grammar structures will result in a waste of time. You will not be able to apply your lexicon in practice. It is especially true when you try to learn vocabulary from a specific field of knowledge, say, law or medicine. To sum it up, grammar goes first, then you can move on to top common words.

Read books for children

This is a useful piece of advice from our company to beginners. The thing is that children’s books are very simple for understanding, including their plots and vocabulary. It makes it easier for you to grasp the basic grammar of the language you study to complement the previous tip.

Another great advantage of these books is that you can access them at will. Whether you download them on your PC or go to a book shop in order to buy a printed version, the result of your studies will still be high. Read them whenever you have a spare minute, and soon you will find yourself completely absorbed in enchanting fairy tales and the foreign language at the same time.

Keep speaking

Find somebody who is willing to practice the language with you. It does not necessarily have to be a native speaker (although if you have such an opportunity, do not miss it). Any person who is as eager as you will become a perfect partner in learning.

Nowadays you can not only organize personal meetings, but also communicate via chat rooms on the Internet. It makes language practice accessible and removes boundaries. Of course, spoken communication proves to be more effective, but the written one is still better than nothing.

Watch sports

This tip will help those who are fond of watching sports in their native language. Sports vocabulary contains a lot of international words, so switching into another language should not be a problem for a fan. You will soon be able to understand what a commentator says without any additional hints: the players will be a great illustration themselves. Practicing a language like this, you kill two birds with one stone: you watch a favorite program and you boost your knowledge.

Intensify your studies

The more time you devote to your language practice during one day, the better your result will be. If you have a choice to stretch out your practice and complete it in a month or rally your forces and do it in a week (for example, to read a new book during this time), stick with the second option. If you take long breaks between your studies, new material has enough time to vanish from your brain, and you will have to start anew.

Carry a dictionary with you

If previously you had to buy a small pocket book that contained only several thousand words, now you can download the whole dictionary on your tablet or smartphone and carry it with you all the time. It will come in handy directly during communication when you fail to remember a certain word. Alternatively, you can use the dictionary to fill the gaps in your knowledge whenever you feel like it. We will elaborate on this in our next tip.

Practice in your thoughts

Walking alone or taking public transport, you may find yourself bored. Listening to favorite music is, of course, great, but have you thought that you could use this time to act out different conversations in your head using the language you learn? Imagine that you are somebody else and have to speak on various topics. When you cannot recall a necessary word, take out your smartphone and go to the dictionary app, and then continue talking to yourself. This is a great way to practice a foreign language that does not require any specific tools.

In the same way you can get ready for important events: a job interview, for example. Apart from preparing an attractive CV, try out this strategy too. If you know that you will have to face questions in a foreign language, you could try to think over your answers beforehand. Possible ways of using this advice are limited only by your imagination.

Figure out linguistic patterns

Here is a life hack from polyglots: many languages have international words that are spelled and pronounced similarly. The only thing you should do is to figure out these linguistic patterns, and the mere fact considerably enlarges your vocabulary. You will have to change the ending of a word to translate it into another language. For instance, to say the Spanish word for destiny you should change the ending into o – destino. The life hack applies to a lot of languages, especially the ones with the same origin.

Insert new words into your speech

There is no use of learning new words unless you are going to employ them. Try to intersperse your speech with recently learnt words and phrases. First, it gives you the chance to memorize them better; second, you practice their usage in real-life situations. This approach combines theory with practice, giving you the best result possible.

Switch the language of your entertainment

Learning a foreign language does not mean giving up your hobbies to spare some time. On the contrary, you can artistically combine those two activities. For example, you can watch your favorite movies and read your favorite books in the language you are struggling to master; you can read newspapers and magazines as well. Simply do not get deluded that these pastimes will be a sound substitute for actual learning. They are only supplementary activities to keep you on track.

Since Smart Essay Rewriter deals with rewriting texts into grammatically correct ones, we can tell you for sure that many people, even native speakers, from time to time make mistakes. That is why practice is so important: in the long run it helps us make our language grammatically correct. Do not expect to become an expert in several month as most people need at least several years to master a foreign language. But tips from this post will help you become a confident speaker quicker than an average language course.