headphones womanGavin Whitner/Flickr

  • Learning a new language takes time and effort, but there are ways to expedite and reinforce your learning.
  • Here, author Jennifer Still shares tips on several things she’s done to help her retain new languages.

 

I’ve had a passion for learning languages ever since I was a child.

The first one I taught myself was French. I was 12 years old and in love with the melodic, beautiful sounds of the language, but it wasn’t offered at my school, so I had to take matters in my own hands.

Now, more than two decades later, I can carry conversations in Paris’s native tongue whenever I visit without much of a struggle.

In addition to spending years learning Spanish both in high school and on my feet at work, I’ve also dabbled in self-taught German, Italian, Korean, and even Russian. While I’m not fluent in all of these, I have found it easy to retain the vocabulary I have learned by doing these six things: