Monolingual Immersion

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make early on is watching videos with subtitles. They think that if they can't understand anything, they can read the subtitles to help understand what is happening. In theory this sounds smart, but there's a problem. We are extremely bad at splitting our attention, especially if we are trying to speed read subtitles, which will take up most of our attention, and leave little to no brainpower left to listen and absorb the dialog. Even if you can't understand anything, there is value in listening to the language you want to learn, spoken by native speakers. Your brain is a powerful pattern recognition machine, and over time, your brain will start picking out repeated sounds, words, and phrases, and from there you can use a dictionary, or Google, but find the meaning of these bits and pieces. It is not fast, languages that are less like your native language may take longer than others, but it will come. Listening to the language should be how you spend most of your time studying, you can also use any number of programs to try and speed this process up, but be wary of spending too much time doing these kinds of lessons. These programs can be effective, to a degree, but also, they are often tedious, trying to memorize grammar rules and vocabulary.  People say learning a new language is hard, but that is because we treat it like school, and make it hard for ourselves. Regardless of the method, learning a new language take a lot of time, potentially several THOUSAND hours, and if you want to have any hope of crossing the finish line, it has to be as enjoyable.

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