How to learn a language when you don’t know where to start

 General Plan:

Weeks 1 and 2:
Purpose:

1. Learn the fundamentals sentence construction
2. Learn how to spell and count
3. Start building a phrase stockpile with basic greetings

• The Alphabet
• Numbers 1 - 100
• Subject Pronouns
• Common Greetings
• Conjugate the Two Most Important Verbs: to be and to have
• Basic Definite and Indefinite Articles

Weeks 3 and 4:
Purpose:

1. Learn essential vocabulary for the day-to-day
2. Start conjugating regular verbs

• Days of the Week and Months of the Year
• How to tell the time
• How to talk about the weather
• Family Vocabulary
• Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 5 and 6:
Purpose:

1. Warm up with the last of the day-to-day vocabulary
2. Add more complex types of sentences to your grammar

• Colours
• House vocabulary
• How to ask questions
• Present Tense Conjugations Verbs
• Forming negatives

Weeks 7 and 8:
Purpose:

1. Learn how to navigate basic situations in a region of your target language country
2. Finish memorising regular conjugation rules

• Food Vocabulary and Ordering at Restaurants
• Money and Shopping Phrases
• Present Tense Conjugations Verbs

Weeks 9 and 10:
Purpose:

1. Start constructing descriptive and more complex sentences

• Adjectives
• Reflective verbs
• Places vocabulary

Weeks 11 and 12:
Purpose:

1. Add more complex descriptions to your sentences with adverbs
2. Wrap up vocabulary essentials

• Adverbs
• Parts of the body and medical vocabulary

Tips for Learning a Foreign Language:

Learning Vocabulary:

What vocabulary should I be learning?

• There are hundreds of thousands of words in every language, and the large majority of them won’t be immediately relevant to you when you’re starting out.Typically, the most frequent 3000 words make up 90% of the language that a native speaker uses on any given day. Instead try to learn the most useful words in a language, and then expand outwards from there according to your needs and interests.

1. Choose the words you want/need to learn.
2. Relate them to what you already know.
3. Review them until they’ve reached your long-term memory.
4. Record them so learning is never lost.
5. Use them in meaningful human conversation and communication.

How should I record the vocabulary?

• Learners need to see and/or hear a new word of phrase 6 to 17 times before they really know a piece of vocabulary.
• Keep a careful record of new vocabulary.
• Record the vocabulary in a way that is helpful to you and will ensure that you will practice the vocabulary, e.g. flashcards.
• Vocabulary should be organised so that words are easier to find, e.g. alphabetically or according to topic.
• Ideally when noting vocabulary you should write down not only the meaning, but the grammatical class, and example in a sentence, and where needed information about structure.

How should I practice using the vocabulary?

• Look, Say, Cover, Write and Check - Use this method for learning and remembering vocabulary. This method is really good for learning spellings.
• Make flashcards. Write the vocabulary on the front with the definition and examples on the back.
• Draw mind maps or make visual representations of the new vocabulary groups.
• Stick labels or post it notes on corresponding objects, e.g when learning kitchen vocabulary you could label items in your house.

How often should I be practising vocabulary?

• A valuable technique is ‘the principle of expanding rehearsal’. This means reviewing vocabulary shortly after first learning them then at increasingly longer intervals.
• Ideally, words should be reviewed:
• 5-10 minutes later
• 24 hours later
• One week later
• 1-2 months later
• 6 months later

Knowing a vocabulary item well enough to use it productively means knowing:

• Its written and spoken forms (spelling and pronunciation).
• Its grammatical category and other grammatical information
• Related words and word families, e.g. adjective, adverb, verb, noun.
• Common collocations (Words that often come before or after it).

Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

• Reading is probably one of the most effective ways of building vocabulary knowledge.
• Listening is also important because it occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating.

Tips for reading in a foreign language:

• Start basic and small.  Children’s books are great practice for beginners. Don’t try to dive into a novel or newspaper too early, since it can be discouraging and time consuming if you have to look up every other word.
• Read things you’ve already read in your native language. The fact that you at least know the gist of the story will help you to pick up context clues, learn new vocabulary and grammatical constructions.
• Read books with their accompanying audio books. Reading a book while listening to the accompanying audio will improve your “ear training”. It will also help you to learn the pronunciation of words.

Tips for listening in a foreign language:

• Watch films in your target language.
• Read a book while also listening along to the audio book version.
• Listen to the radio in your target language.
• Watch videos online in your target language.

Activities to do to show that you’ve understood what you’ve been listening to:

• Try drawing a picture of what was said.
• Ask yourself some questions about it and try to answer them.
• Provide a summary of what was said.
• Suggest what might come next in the “story.”
• Translate what was said into another language.
• “Talk back” to the speaker to engage in imaginary conversation.

Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

Tips for speaking in a foreign language:

• If you can, try to speak the language every day either out loud to yourself or chat to another native speaker whether it is a colleague, a friend, a tutor or a language exchange partner. 
• Write a list of topics and think about what you could say about each one. First you could write out your thoughts and then read them out loud. Look up the words you don’t know. You could also come up with questions at the end to ask someone else.
• A really good way to improve your own speaking is to listen to how native speakers talk and imitate their accent, their rhythm of speech and tone of voice. Watch how their lips move and pay attention to the stressed sounds. You could watch interviews on YouTube or online news websites and pause every so often to copy what you have just heard. You could even sing along to songs sung in the target language.
• Walk around the house and describe what you say. Say what you like or dislike about the room or the furniture or the decor. Talk about what you want to change.This gets you to practise every day vocabulary.

Tips for writing in a foreign language:

• Practice writing in your target language. Keep it simple to start with. Beginner vocabulary and grammar concepts are generally very descriptive and concrete.
• Practice writing by hand. Here are some things you can write out by hand:
• Diary entries
• Shopping lists
• Reminders

What could I write about?

• Write about your day, an interesting event, how you’re feeling, or what you’re thinking.
• Make up a conversation between two people. 
• Write a letter to a friend, yourself, or a celebrity. You don’t need to send it; just writing it will be helpful.
• Translate a text you’ve written in your native language into your foreign language.
• Write a review or a book you’ve recently read or a film you’ve recently watched.
• Write Facebook statuses, Tweets or Tumblr posts (whether you post them or not will be up to you).
• Write a short story or poem.

Writing is one of the hardest things to do well as a non-native speaker of a language, because there’s no room to hide. 

There are lots of ways to improve your writing ability, but they can be essentially boiled down to three key components:

• Read a lot
• Write a lot
• Get your writing corrected