Top 5 Best Language Study Techniques

1- Watching TV

Watching tv is a fantastic way to study your target language!

With Tv, you can practice your listening skills! With subtitles and you can practice your reading as well.

Whenever you see a word or phrase in the tv show/movie your watching that you’ve recently been studying you’ll also be more likely to remember it as your brain will see it as more important because your using it in a real world context, aside from flashcards and textbooks.

Watching Tv shows is also a great way to increase your vocabulary as with sites such as Viki and Mango Languages you can look up words and phrases as you watch and even use subtitles in your native tongue and your target!

~Mango Languages is free to use with most libraries! If your library does not offer it ask them about it, it is a great learning tool 👍

2- Reading Books, Manga, Comics, and Webtoons!

Reading is an amazing way to use what you’ve learned and acquire new words!

Especially mangas and comics as the visual aspect of these I feel helps a lot with understanding what is going on, and focusing on the dialogue.

Sites and apps such as Webtoons and lehzin has many webcomics translated into many different languages, and they have a large amount of genres and stories to choose from.

There is also for example Amazon kindle has a dictionary option with highlighters and etc which make studying a language with reading very enjoyable!

3. Shadowing Technique

Shadowing is a great way to improve ones accent in their target language and it can also be very fun.

For languages such as Japanese there is a plethora of apps available to help with this technique as well as a few textbooks, however you can use this technique on your own with any language easily as well.

For the shadowing technique you can use a YouTube video, Duolingo, Netflix, just any audio of a native speaker. You listen to the audio, you repeat after the native speaker, then you say the same sentence at the same time as the native speaker.

It’s helpful to record yourself as well so you can compare it.

The apps for Japanese (I’m not sure if there’s any for other languages, I believe there is some for English however) are especially helpful as they also show a graph of the native speakers voice and your recording so you can more easily see what you need to do to sound more native.

4. Cross Talk Method

This is a language exchange studying technique that I haven’t yet tried myself but am wanting to do so.

Instead of speaking your target language with your partner, you would speak only your native language which would be their target language. They would speak their native language, your target language.

You all would try to communicate like this, videos of seen of people attempting a cross talk language exchange often will use genstures, pictures, drawings, and etc. to help their partner understand what is being said.

This is helpful especially for improving ones comprehension in their target language, and while speaking is very important as well, you can’t have much of a conversation if you can’t understand anyhing being said.

https://youtu.be/y2iS9XAIC7c — Here is a link for a video of a Mandarin Chinese to Spanish Cross Talk Language Exchange

If you need help finding a language exchange partner, I’d suggest the two apps Amino and Hello Talk.

Amino has many communities on there dedicated to language learning and even communities in other languages such as Arabic, Spanish, and French.

Hello talk has many different users of many languages on the app, my favorite part is the social media like section where you can make posts and get corrected by native speakers while learning more about one another’s cultures!

5. Singing and Music

Singing is a fantastic way to study a language, it can be especially helpful for memorizing vocab and phrases.

As a bonus by singing you can also practice pronunciation in your target language and your listening.

It is also enjoyable too.

Think about songs like the alphabet, or the days of the week song we learned as children to help us learn these words and the order of things.

There are many ways to find music in your target language you will like. The best way is through YouTube, just search up in your target language a genre of music you like and then your target language. So like for Japanese rap music,

You’d type that, the first part meaning rap music the second word nihongo being for Japanese.

From there like music you enjoy, and YouTube will suggest more songs like it.

There’s also different apps and etc like for Spanish and French music pandora is a great way to discover new music, Xiami for Chinese and Japanese, Apple Music and Amazon music have a decent selection for German, Italian, French, and Spanish music as well.

Sound cloud is another great option.

Another great way to use music is with word pie which is on YouTube. They have many catchy songs for Korean, Spanish, French, English, and Chinese as well where they’ll say words in both languages to help you memorize them.

On their site, which is linked in most of their videos you can also find PDFs with the vocab spoken in videos.

Searching up children’s music is another great way to find catchy music for vocabulary especially, and I’ve found putting words/phrases you wish to learn to song tunes your familiar with also helps a lot as well.

Hope you all found this helpful, thank you for reading and have a great day!