HOW TO BECOME FLUENT LEARNING NOT MORE THAN 20 MINUTES A DAY

A FEW MINUTES A DAY ARE JUST ENOUGH TO BECOME FLUENT

1.Become aware of the fact that less is more. I’m sure everyone has tried to memorize the facts of what was taught during hours of classes right the day before the exam. How were the results? Probably not very satisfying. And, that’s not a surprise because your brain is simply overwhelmed with too much information in a short period of time. The less you learn in a session the easier it gets for your brain to understand and remember.

2.Find interesting learning material. It’s boring to learn something that you’re not interested in. And, if something is boring you won’t be able to focus on it. Search for books, movies, TV shows, comics, music, whatever catches your attention and makes you want to know the meaning of the given content. You will learn without even noticing it.

3.Listen and read. Before you start reading something you should listen to it. Small dialogues are perfect learning material to start with. Listen to the dialogues while reading along to get a feeling for the language, its pronunciation and written form.

4.Write it down. One of my former teachers always said: Writing something once is like reading it ten times. After listening to and reading the dialogue, you should write down what you heard. This step is probably the most important one. You rarely forget important things you wrote on your to-do list, right?

5.Become fluent is about consistency. This means repeat and use what you’ve already learned and add a little bit of new knowledge every day. Watching TV shows or movies and reading and writing texts will make you use and encounter words and expressions in various contexts. It doesn’t have to be a whole movie or a long text, even investing just 10 minutes can also be enough.

Following these steps every day saves a lot of time and is much more effective than hours of cramming. As a benchmark you can take a dialogue with eight lines. Once you have accumulated a certain amount of knowledge your sessions will get longer automatically because you won’t encounter unknown expressions as often as in the beginning of your language learning journey. Maybe you will end up doing everything in a foreign language some day 😉