How To Learn Languages Abroad: 7 Tips To Learn On The Move

A lot of people have the same daydream: if only I could move to another country, I'd be fluent in no time. Live in Japan and Japanese would simply seep in; spend a few months in France and French would take care of itself.

It's a lovely idea, and one I've tested more thoroughly than most. Over the years I've lived in France, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Qatar and Egypt, and a while back I spent a few months living in Hong Kong, doing everything I could to improve my Cantonese.

So if you want to learn languages abroad, let me share the honest truth I've arrived at after all those moves, along with the specific things that worked for me there.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the YouTube version of this post at the top of the page. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this post:

Does Moving Abroad Really Make You Fluent?

Here's the uncomfortable part: simply being in a country does far less than people imagine.

I've certainly met people who move abroad and become wonderfully fluent. A friend of mine, Alex Rawlings, spent around fourteen months in Hong Kong on a university exchange and went from zero Cantonese to speaking it really fluently — better than me, in fact.

But when I look at the people who pull that off, they tend to have something in common. They're very social and outgoing, and they're often thrust into a situation, like a university exchange, where they're surrounded by the language and simply have to talk to people.

If that's not you — if, like me, you don't relish striking up conversations with strangers in the street, and you're not in a job or a course where everyone around you speaks the language — then fluency won't arrive on its own.

You have to create your own opportunities. Anyone who has been abroad to learn a language will recognise this: it's rarely as easy as it looks from the outside, and all sorts of things can get in the way.

Why It's So Easy To Live Abroad And Still Speak English

The biggest obstacle is one most people never see coming. When you move somewhere new, especially on your own, you yank yourself out of your normal life.

Suddenly your friends, your food and your routine are all gone, and that can leave you feeling quite lonely. Our very natural need to feel comfortable and at home then nudges us towards decisions that aren't much help for language learning.

What tends to happen is that people fall in with a group of expats, or with locals who speak excellent English, simply because it's easier and more fun.

Before you know it, you're living abroad with a life conducted almost entirely in English — at which point you may as well have stayed at home. Avoiding that fate is the whole game.

So here's what I actually did in Hong Kong to build the Cantonese environment I needed.

1. Create Dedicated Opportunities To Speak

This is the most important one. I know that if I leave things to chance, I won't get much Cantonese practice at all.

Casual exchanges with people on the street tend to be short, and in a place like Hong Kong many people speak great English and will happily switch to it — especially with someone who looks like me, with blond hair and blue eyes.

So rather than hoping for practice, I manufactured it. I used language exchange websites — conversationexchange.com and mylanguageexchange.com — to find people who wanted to swap English and Cantonese.

Because I had time while I was there, I could spend an hour or two with someone, part of it in English and part in Cantonese, which guaranteed me real speaking practice every single time.

I met some great people this way, and I quickly settled into a rhythm where, on any given day, I could arrange a language exchange and get that guaranteed practice.

It made a real difference: I'd studied Cantonese for a couple of years through online lessons and books and could say plenty, but I had almost no confidence with everyday interaction until I started surrounding myself with people.

That confidence grew noticeably in just a few weeks.

2. Capture Useful Vocabulary The Moment You Meet It

The single biggest thing I could learn there that I never could back in the UK was everyday vocabulary — the word for the platform on the metro, how to say “I'll start eating first,” how to ask for directions.

These are the small, practical bits of language you pick up astonishingly quickly when you live abroad and almost never encounter in an online lesson.

So I captured everything. Every time I came across a useful new word, I got my phone out and dropped it straight into my flashcards.

I've talked before about why flashcards are so valuable, but one of their best features is exactly this: the moment you hear something new, you can record it on the spot and it's there for good.

Make it a habit, and your vocabulary grows in step with your daily life.

3. Keep A Separate List Of Things You Want To Say

There's a useful flip side to capturing new words, and that's keeping a record of the things you wish you could say but can't yet.

One evening while I was there, my Octopus card — the card you use to get in and out of the metro — wouldn't let me through the gate.

I had to find the guard and explain the problem, and I simply didn't know how to say “the card won't let me out.” I'm sure there's a neat local way of expressing it, but in the moment it escaped me.

So I kept a separate deck in my flashcards: a growing list, in English, of things I wanted to be able to say in Cantonese.

Whenever I next met a language exchange partner, I could pull out the list, ask them how to say each one, and add the translations.

It's a brilliant way to make sure you're steadily building the ability to say the things you actually need in daily life.

4. How Many People Do You Actually Need?

Far fewer than you might think. When you're living abroad, you really only need one or two great connections to create a genuinely good learning environment.

It's lovely to know lots of people, but you don't need hundreds; one or two who you click with — perhaps people who don't speak much English and are happy to talk to you in the local language — can become your entire setup.

You can see them often, and they'll cheerfully help you with all sorts of things.

The catch is that to find those one or two people, you have to roll the dice, which means putting yourself in front of as many people as possible.

So I went to as many social events as I could. meetup.com is fantastic for this — language meetups, social gatherings, pub crawls and the like.

In my first couple of weeks there I went to as many as possible, simply to increase the odds of meeting the handful of people who'd end up making the real difference.

5. Make Your Commute Count

Where I was staying, out in Yuen Long in the New Territories, it took about forty-five minutes to get into central Hong Kong.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to sit back and do nothing, but I used that time to study.

It takes a bit of effort to pull a book out on the train, yet doing so handed me an extra hour and a half of study a day — forty-five minutes each way.

Even when you live abroad, you have to keep using the time you've got, because it all compounds.

6. Use Your Dead Time For Revision

In the same spirit, I used all my dead time for revision. Whenever I was waiting for a bus, or waiting for someone, out came the flashcards and I'd try to hammer through the vocabulary I was working on.

Note: Back then I was a big flashcard head, but now I'd much rather read in a foreign language and get exposed to vocabulary naturally than grind a flashcard app!

The point is simple: don't stop studying just because you've moved abroad. It's tempting to think you'll now absorb the language effortlessly, but it really doesn't work that way.

You have to keep studying — learning vocabulary, reading stories, working out how to say particular things — and the spare minutes are perfect for it.

7. Create Your Own Learning Materials

This last one is very me, but anyone can do it: look for ways to involve yourself a little more deeply in the language.

What I started doing was creating my own Cantonese materials. I found Cantonese-speaking friends to record real conversations, and another friend transcribed and translated them into English so I could use them as study material.

It was enormously useful, and my hope was to build up a decent library and turn it into something other learners could use too, since there's so little Cantonese material out there.

The lovely side effect was that asking people to help — “Would you be up for recording a few Cantonese conversations with me?” — introduced me to even more people, who were genuinely keen to get involved.

The principle underneath all of this is to think outside the box and be proactive. Create the opportunities; don't wait for them to appear.

What It Really Takes To Learn Languages Abroad

If there's a single thread running through all of this, it's that moving abroad is an opportunity, not a guarantee.

The country won't teach you its language while you get on with your life; what it offers is a rich set of raw materials that you then have to do something with.

Everything I've described — engineering chances to speak, capturing vocabulary as it appears, building a couple of real friendships, squeezing study into your commute and dead time, even making your own resources — comes down to refusing to leave your progress to chance.

That mindset is the real difference between people who learn languages abroad and people who simply live there.

I'll leave you with a line from Francis Bacon that summed up my whole attitude throughout that time: “A wise man will create more opportunities than he finds.”

Be proactive, stay curious, put yourself in the way of the language as often as you can, and the fluency you came for will follow.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.