Happy New Year
Welcome to 2025. As it’s the New Year, people often make resolutions about learning or relearning foreign languages. People also often give up on resolutions so how can you stop this from happening? For 10 days, we are giving out a tip per day to help you to learn a language starting this New Year.
Choosing the language to learn
What do you want to learn and why? This is really important as you will keep coming back to the what and the why throughout your language journey. It may even change, that’s ok (more of this later). For some people, they want to learn a language as they want to move to a different country. Others, it may be because their partner speaks a different language. Some people may want to read the Iliad in the original Greek. What happens if you don’t know which language to choose to learn?
Your goal may be to learn French. Ok, so get a notebook, file, word document whatever works for you and write it down.
Learn French.
Ok good. What about the why?
Learn French because I like France.
Yes. What about more information? Write all the reasons you can think of.
Learn to speak French because I like going on holiday to France, eating French food, visiting museums and not speaking English.
Right. Do you understand any French now? Where are you starting from?
I can only do very basic greetings and struggle with basic numbers. I can’t understand very much from what people say.
Great! So you have chosen your language and know the reasons why. Your starting point in the language is here. Check out our second tip for where to go from here.