What Is The Best Language Learning Method?

After 25+ years of learning languages I've come to understand that certain fundamentals underpin every effective method.

Now, I have to give the usual caveat: there is no perfect method, everybody's different and the best language learning method is always going to be the one that works best for you.

But having tried so many different ways to learn a language, I see certain things you have to do if you want to learn quickly. Different methodologies might vary in approach, but every successful language learning method has to have certain fundamentals.

If you're wondering what the best language learning method is, here's my concise explanation of the most effective way to learn a language.

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

Get A Thorough Grounding In The Basics

First of all, you need to get a thorough grounding in the basics of the language. Lots of people skip this because either they want to get to the exciting stuff quicker or because they don't really ever get to grips with studying enough to learn the language properly.

Symptoms of this would include spending hours and hours on Duolingo every day learning random words with no particular structure, or finding yourself browsing the internet incessantly looking for new tricks or new videos.

You can't get away from the fact that learning a language fast involves acquiring a bunch of knowledge. You can acquire that knowledge quite quickly, and the best way to do that is simply to get a very good self-study book and go through it from cover to cover.

Whenever someone asks me how to start learning French, I say: go and get a good book and go through it. You might think it's dull. You might think it's not very twenty-first century.

But especially in the age we live in, with all these distractions and the internet trying to guide everything, the best thing you can do is get a good self-study book, sit down in a quiet room and focus for one hour every day, going through the book from cover to cover.

Quantity, Not Quality

There's a theory in accelerated learning which states that when you first start learning something, quantity over quality is better.

The reason is that because the language is new to you, you're not ready yet to learn all the different parts of the grammar, the different rules and the syntax. You only become ready to learn certain things later on.

By going for this quantity-over-quality approach, you expose yourself to as much of the language as you can.

I like to do this through a self-study book. You're looking at different rules and explanations of the different grammar points, and you're not trying to master all of it. You're not even necessarily trying to learn all of it. You're putting it on your radar.

So if you're learning French, for example, you learn that:

• There are masculine and feminine nouns.
• You have to conjugate the verbs.
• You form the past tense and the future tense in different ways.
• The French R is pronounced differently.
• There are different forms of addressing another person — the tu and the vous.

You learn all of this stuff as quickly as possible.

The idea is that you don't master it, of course, but because it's on your radar, when you then encounter it through listening, reading or talking to people, it's much easier for you to pick it up.

What many people do that I consider a mistake is to start at the beginning and try to master everything they come across from the outset. The problem with this is twofold.

Firstly, it's almost always very difficult to master certain grammatical points at the beginning. Secondly, all the time you're taking to master something, you could be spending just becoming familiar with something else.

Once you've got that general overview of all the different parts of the language, mastering things becomes much easier. It's much harder to master something right at the beginning when you're so unfamiliar with everything else that's going on.

So the first part of learning a language is to get a very good grounding. Take a quantity-over-quality approach and blitz through a good textbook so that you get all the basic knowledge on the map.

Start Speaking Early On

The second thing you need to do is start speaking early on with a language partner or language tutor.

Many people disagree with this. They say there's no rush to speak and you can start later. I have a lot of sympathy for that view. Here's the thing, though: most people I come across who have difficulty speaking a language struggle because they simply don't speak it.

They put it off. They wait and wait and get nervous about speaking. Speaking with native speakers becomes this big thing for them. The thought of interacting with a native speaker becomes quite scary.

One of the biggest problems you've got to guard against when learning a new language is actually becoming scared of speaking. If you never start speaking, you're never going to get good at it.

If you say to me that you're going to wait two or three months before you start speaking, I'll say that's absolutely fine — as long as you actually do it. What I prefer to do is beat the fear from the beginning.

Find a nice language exchange partner or a language tutor, meet with them regularly and simply practise the basic stuff you've been learning.

If you've been learning your simple Spanish verb conjugations — yo hablo, él habla — then simply practise that in a very easy, laidback way with your tutor or language partner.

It gets you used to speaking and interacting with another person, listening to what they say. It beats the fear and gets you using the language from the beginning.

How Can You Grow Your Vocabulary Effectively?

The next thing you have to focus on — and this is a period that lasts for quite some time and is often where people get stuck — is growing your vocabulary.

At the beginning of learning a language, the one thing that will stop you communicating with people and understanding the language is the fact that you don't know enough words. It's as simple as that.

Your main aim after you've covered the basics is to grow your vocabulary as quickly as you can.

The best way to do that is to spend a lot of time reading things you're interested in, in that language — not only reading it but also listening along at the same time.

The challenge can be finding interesting material to read that also has audio, or vice versa. This doesn't include films. Films are no good for you this at this stage because they're too hard, the subtitles are often different from the spoken dialogue, and they're not conducive to study.

What you really want to do is find material on topics you're interested in — or at least can stomach without getting too bored — and then spend time every day reading and listening along, or vice versa.

This is the best way to do two things. Firstly, you grow your vocabulary because in order to understand the material, you have to study it, so you're going to learn words.

Secondly, you get used to the sounds of the language. If you're doing a lot of listening, you improve your listening skills, and having the text there to follow along means that whenever you don't understand something, you can go straight to the source and check the actual words being used.

Practise What You Learn In Conversation

The next thing you need to do, once you start this process of listening and reading lots of interesting material, is deliberately practise the things you learn in speaking with your partner or tutor.

This is the best way to develop the ability to speak confidently. One of the most common complaints from people learning a language is that whenever they come to speak with somebody, they freeze up.

It takes too long to form sentences, they forget words and so on. It is a big problem, but there's a very simple solution: practise speaking more with the things you're trying to learn.

What I usually recommend is that you take the textbook or the material you're listening to, extract what you've learnt from that chapter or listening session, and bring it to your session with your tutor or language partner.

Say to them: “Here's what I want to practise. Help me practise this, please.” Then literally hand them a list of words, grammar points, example sentences or topics and ask if you can talk about them.

If they're any good, they'll say sure, and you can have a conversation on that topic.

What this means is you can start to recycle the stuff you've been learning. It's not just in your head — you're getting it out of your mouth as well and learning to put sentences together.

Create A Language Learning Lifestyle

The last thing you have to do is create a lifestyle that involves using your new language as much as possible.

Very often, the mistake people make is keeping it too cerebral. You're studying at home with your textbooks, maybe you go to a class, but outside your study time you never actually use the language.

You don't have to travel abroad to learn a language. If you're learning Japanese, you don't have to go to Japan. It can help, but equally, sometimes it can be a little hard as well. It is perfectly possible to learn a language from home.

What you do need to do is create a lifestyle that involves using that language. I'm talking here about when you're a bit more advanced — certainly intermediate level or above — when you can already speak the language and understand a certain amount.

The way to take it to the next level is to make it an integral part of your life.

• Get your news from sources in that language.
• Watch TV and films in the language.
• Go out and look for activities — whether it's salsa, yoga or even learning another language through your target language.

For example, let's say Spanish is the language you're learning. You could go to a French class that's delivered in Spanish.

You've just got to be creative and think of all the different ways you can make the language part of your life. That's the way you're going to stay motivated and keep it all up for long enough to be successful.

Best Language Learning Method FAQ

What Is the Best Method for Learning A Language?

So there you have it — the most fundamental aspects of learning a language that ensure you not only learn fast but learn to understand people, learn to speak and stay motivated enough to actually become fluent.

Let's quickly recap the best language learning method:

• Get a thorough grounding in the basics. Find a good self-study book and go through it from beginning to end, aiming for quantity over quality.
• Start speaking very early on with a language tutor or speaking partner of some kind. Don't delay. Don't let it become a big fear.
• Grow your vocabulary by focusing on learning new words and phrases. The best way to do that is by reading and listening to interesting material, ideally at the same time.
• Practise what you learn directly in speaking. Everything you learn in your study time, take it to a partner or tutor and say: “Help me practise this, please.”
• Create a lifestyle that involves using your new language as much as possible.

It would be a very good exercise for you to think about how you've been learning in the last six months or so. Ask yourself: which of these am I not doing?

Then, for the next month or two, focus on that missing element and see what happens. You'll be very surprised how quickly you can start to gain confidence.

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.