The Best Way to Learn a Language: Research and Practical Tips
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“What's the best way to learn a language?”
“What's the quickest way to learn new words?”
“How can I sound like a native speaker?”
“Do I really have to study grammar?”
Language hackers ask themselves these kinds of questions all the time.
We all want to use effective study methods so we can learn a language fast and speak it well.
But many language teachers and programs are giving conflicting advice. How can we know if we're spending our time on the right things?
Fortunately, language learners aren't the only ones who've been puzzling over these questions.
Linguists, the people who study the science of language, have spent decades observing how people learn languages. And while they don't have all the answers yet, they have discovered a lot about what works and what doesn't.
So let's take a look at some of the most common questions in language learning and what science has to say about them. We'll look at research-backed techniques you can try, rather than promise one best method for everyone.
A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.
Table of contents
- 1. Speak From Day One
- 2. Create a “Home Immersion” Situation
- 3. Use the Best Language Learning Apps to Learn a Language Fast
- 4. Try the Science of Flashcards
- 5. Use Context to Learn Words the Natural Way
- 6. Read a Lot
- 7. Take a New Approach to Grammar
- 8. Keep the Motivation Up (With These Techniques)
- Let’s Sum Up – Frequently Asked Language Learning Questions
- The Best Way to Learn a Language: Play Around With It!
We’ll be covering:
- The fastest way to learn new words in another language
- The best way to learn a language by yourself or online
- The best language learning apps and resources
- How to make the most out of flashcards
- How to learn words the natural way
- Do you really need to study grammar?
- The best way to stay motivated to learn a language
- How to find a friend to study with and set mini-goals
- FAQs about pronunciation, accents, and more
Before we get into the article, if you are interested in learning any of these languages yourself, you should know that I’ve created a bunch of digital products to help with many aspects of language learning, and run a coaching program (Bootcamp) that has had many aspiring learners take part and successfully speak after 3 intensive months.
You can see that I have specific courses for beginners struggling with Spanish, French, German, Italian, English and Chinese.
Please do check out these offerings, since I have put a lot of work into all of these, and I know they’ll make a huge difference to your language learning project! Thanks for considering, and now, back to the article:
1. Speak From Day One
Related Learning: 5 Rituals to Help You Learn a Language Faster
What's the fastest way to learn new words in another language?
There are as many ways to learn vocabulary as there are successful language learners.
The most important debate – as far as science is concerned – is often about which approach is best. Should we memorise words using flashcards? Or should we pick them up naturally through reading and listening?
In reality, they're both a bit right. Both techniques are useful for different reasons and if you can balance the two, you'll be onto a winner.
Here at Fluent in 3 Months, the tried-and-true method is speaking from day one to help you use and remember what you learn.
Here’s a video about how to practice this approach:
You can also check out our articles about the best ways to learn a language faster in Spanish, Japanese, German, English, French, Korean, and even Latin.
2. Create a “Home Immersion” Situation
Related Learning: 16 Ways to Immerse Yourself at Home
What’s the best way to learn a language by yourself or online? We can’t all get up and go travel abroad until we become fluent.
Well, one way to do that is through home immersion.
It’s possible to create an immersive environment at home. It just takes a bit of effort and patience.
For example, you can use social media to immerse yourself at home. You can also use social media to find communities to chat with.
Switching your phone’s language or watching shows in your target language will help you achieve an immersive experience, too. And of course, you’ll want as much speaking and writing practice as possible.
Online tutors are one of the best ways to get great-quality speaking practice from home – including AI tutors. At Fluent in 3 Months we’ve found Teacher AI and Preply (our review is here) to be good platforms for high quality language tuition.
Here’s a short video with more details about home immersion:
3. Use the Best Language Learning Apps to Learn a Language Fast
Related Learning: Our Recommended Resources
If you’re learning a language by yourself at home, you’ll want to use the best language learning apps to get you going.
But there are so many of them… So how do you know which to use?
Well, it depends on the language you're learning, your goals, and what you enjoy doing.
If you're still unsure which methods fit your goals and preferences, you can work through the choice with Benny in a one-to-one Language Breakthrough Session.
That’s why the Fluent in 3 Months team review tons of language apps and resources, like:
…And so many more.
When deciding on the best language learning apps to use, pick only 1 – 3 to begin with. If you use too many at once, it’ll become repetitive and distracting.
It’s a good idea to have a vocab app you like and at least one app that teaches you the language structure. After that, you could pick one that gives you practice in the way you learn best.
So for example, if you prefer listening, try Pod101 language podcasts. If you prefer reading, try LingQ.
You can use something untraditional, too, like learning through Netflix or Nintendo. Here’s a video about how to do that:
4. Try the Science of Flashcards
Related Learning: How to Use a Memory Palace to Boost Your Vocabulary
Lots of learners use flashcard systems.
These days, most people use apps like Anki which leave a specific time-lapse between card reviews using a system called spaced repetition.
This technique is based on research by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. His research showed that people learn more when they space learning out rather than cramming it in.
For example, reviewing a word across five days will generally help you remember it longer than repeating it five times in one sitting. The most useful gap between reviews depends on how well you know it and how long you want to remember it.
Another option is to make a word more memorable by linking it to something familiar or personal. Memory aids like these are called mnemonics.
One mnemonic technique involves linking a new word to a similar-sounding word in your own language, then making a mental image that connects it to the meaning.
For example, to remember the Mandarin Chinese word for book, 书 (shū), you could imagine a book with a shoe on it. That helps you link the image of a book to its Chinese translation.
Using these techniques can help you balance learning new things and reviewing, as talked about in this video:
Spaced repetition and mnemonics can boost your word power quickly and make your brain feel like an awesome vocabulary learning machine. But they're not the be-all and end-all of memory strategies.
But flashcards alone won't show you all the ways a word is used. That's where context comes in.
5. Use Context to Learn Words the Natural Way
Related Learning: Contextese – The Most Useful Language You’re Already Fluent In
Your brain also learns from the context around a word. Reading and listening give you examples of how words work together, alongside the deliberate practice you do with flashcards.
When you read or listen to something, your brain doesn't take each word at face value. Instead, it's taking statistics about which words appear together often so that it can anticipate what's coming next and process speech faster.
Neuroscientists study this through the brain's electrical activity, which changes as we process language.
Scientists can read some of these, using a technique called electroencephalography, to study how your brain processes language (but don't worry, they can't read your mind… yet!).
One response, called the N400, is sensitive to meaning and context. Unexpected words often produce a more negative response than expected ones. Think of the surprise in “coffee and crap” compared with “coffee and cream”.
Researchers compare responses across many trials to study how context affects word processing. They can't use a single N400 response to work out how on earth you've been drinking your coffee.
Language proficiency can affect the timing and size of N400 responses. Patterns also depend on factors such as when someone learned the language, so this isn't a simple test of how native-like they are.
So, an important part of fluency is taking statistics and building expectations about what words usually appear together, like native speakers do.
6. Read a Lot
Related Learning: Learn a Language by Reading: 5 Easy-to-Follow Steps
To get better at building expectations about word combinations, we need to flood our brains with bucket loads of natural content. So we can build a picture of which kinds of words usually appear together.
Reading is a great way to do this. And there's lots of research that shows that reading works wonders for your vocabulary skills.
Choose resources that are right for your level, though. If the percentage of unknown words is too high, it can be difficult to figure out what they mean from the context. And it's frustrating having to stop every two minutes to look up a word.
Graded readers, which adapt books to make them easier to understand at lower levels, are perfect for this.
7. Take a New Approach to Grammar
Related Learning: Learning Grammar… Do I Have To?
Do you really need to study grammar?
Grammarphobes often ask themselves whether it's necessary to learn all those grammar rules. Can't we pick it up with the natural method, that is, through reading, listening and talking?
Linguists struggle to answer this question because it's very difficult to control and measure.
Experiments usually compare one group who learn grammar rules with another who learns the natural way.
But how do we know each group has paid attention to the same grammar structure the same number of times? What if the ones who aren't taught the rules are secretly trying to figure out the rules in their heads, or running off home and learning it on their own?
How do you know if they've learned the grammar?
Researchers have been comparing results across studies for decades, looking for patterns in when and how grammar instruction helps.
Reviews of the research have found substantial benefits from focused instruction, including explicit grammar teaching. The size of the benefit depends partly on how learning is tested. Doing well on a grammar test doesn't automatically mean you can use the structure fluently in conversation.
These results fit in with my experience as a language learner. Knowing the grammar does help, but spending the majority of my time memorising complicated grammar rules isn’t the most effective way to learn.
Here’s Fluent in 3 Months founder Benny Lewis’s thoughts on this:
8. Keep the Motivation Up (With These Techniques)
Related Learning: Why Language Learners Quit – and How to Beat the “Motivational Killers”
What's the best way to stay motivated in language learning?
This is probably the most important question of all.
You can know all the best ways to learn pronunciation, words, and grammar. But if you can't maintain your motivation, it's never going to happen.
Luckily there's loads of cool research on motivation that'll help you get your language learning act together. Here are a couple of ways to get started:
Find a Friend or Language Partner to Study With
In a series of experiments, feeling part of a team helped people stay interested and persist longer on tasks, even when they worked alone. For language learning, a supportive partner can help in a few practical ways:
- Social: We're social animals and sharing our experiences with others makes us feel more positive about them.
- Accountability: Agreeing to check in with a supportive partner can help you follow through on your plans.
- Support: You get access to a lovely support network who can give you advice and encouragement.
One of the best ways to do this is by finding a language exchange partner or community of like-minded learners who can support you.
The Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp is one such community with amazing support groups, language exchanges, and challenges to push you to the next level.
Break Down Your Big Goals into Mini-Missions
Small, near-term goals can make a big task easier to tackle. There's experimental evidence for this, though it doesn't prove that every smaller goal will work for every learner.
In a study of 40 children who struggled with maths, one group was encouraged to aim for at least six pages of practice per session. Another aimed for 42 pages over seven sessions. There were also groups with no specific goal and no training. The comparison was about goal-setting, not simply handing out different amounts of work.
The children with near-term goals progressed faster through the material and developed stronger subtraction skills. That's a useful reason to try mini-goals, while remembering that this was a maths study with children, not a direct test of adult language learning.
Breaking down the task is essential in something like language learning, where the outcome feels big and scary.
Instead of trying to “speak German”, aim for something smaller and more concrete, like having a 15-minute conversation in German. Come up with a plan to get there, like studying 30 minutes a day with your apps and resources you picked out (as we talked about earlier!).
By breaking it down this way, you're much more likely to do it. And if you keep it up day by day, you'll be speaking a language before you know it.
Let’s Sum Up – Frequently Asked Language Learning Questions
Phew! That was a lot to cover, but now you know what you need to find your own best way to learn a language.
But you may still have some questions about language learning. Like how to sound more like a native speaker and correcting pronunciation.
So here are a few more in-depth answers for your curious linguistic minds:
Perhaps the first question to address is why you want to sound more like a native speaker. Lots of language learners don't worry much about pronunciation. They think that as long as people can get what they're saying, that's all that matters. And there's some truth in this: you don't need a perfect accent to communicate well with native speakers. A noticeable accent can still be perfectly easy to understand. Pronunciation practice is useful when it makes your speech clearer; sounding native doesn't have to be the goal. Clearer speech can make those conversations easier to keep going.
Here are some articles to help you with this:
How to Improve Your Spanish Pronunciation
Benny’s French Pronunciation Guide
German Pronunciation Guide
Learn Better Pronunciation While Speaking Your Native Language
But why do we have accents in the first place? And what can we do about them?
Two common challenges contribute to a foreign accent.
First, it can be difficult to tell the difference between two sounds that our native language doesn't treat as distinct.
Second, other languages can have sounds that make us use our mouth muscles in a new way. Essentially, we need to learn how to train our mouth muscles to form these new sounds. And train our ears to hear the sounds that don’t exist in our native language.
When I started learning Italian, I spent a few months desperately trying to avoid the word anno (“year”), for fear of accidentally saying the word ano (“anus”). I couldn't hear the difference at all.
On the flip side, I'm a native English speaker, so the difference between the “sheep” and “ship” vowels seems obvious. But lots of learners struggle with the difference, which explains why everyone's terrified of speaking English on holiday, with all those beaches and sheets and what not.
In early infancy, our little polyglot brains can distinguish many speech sounds that aren't used in the language around us. That sensitivity changes as we get more experience with our native language.
As we grow older, our brain focuses on sounds that are important for our native language and filters out sounds that are not. This is good, as it helps us understand our own language better. But it causes problems for language learners because they filter out sounds that might be in the language they're learning.
But it’s important to note that this does not mean that there’s such a thing as being “too old to learn a language”. It just means that we need to focus our attention on this area of our learning.
Linguists have been studying this phenomenon for years. And they've found a way to help learners hear and pronounce the difference between these tricky sounds.
This method, known as minimal pair training, involves listening to a word that has the sound difference you want to learn (like ship or sheep), deciding which one you think it is, and getting immediate feedback about whether you were right or wrong.
With practice, you can get better at hearing the difference. Producing it may need separate speaking practice, and progress varies. You can set up your own minimal pair training by using forvo
to download sound files of the words you want to learn to tell apart.
Then use Anki to put the sound file on the question side and the written word on the other. Listen to the word, try to guess which one it is, then flip the flashcard over to see if you were right.
Some sounds are difficult because they involve completely new mouth positions, like the rolled “R” in Spanish or the “U” in French. For these sounds, science has some good news. It turns out that with a little perseverance, it's absolutely possible to train your mouth muscles to pronounce sounds more like native speakers.
To do this, you need to learn a little about articulatory phonetics (which is a fancy-pants way of saying mouth positions). This helps us find out exactly where the tongue, teeth and lips should be in the sounds you want to learn. Then practice them until your mouth naturally moves to that position.
To learn more about this, try doing a quick search on YouTube. There are tons of pronunciation videos which explain the mouth positions in the language you're learning. A good example is Glossika Phonics.
The Best Way to Learn a Language: Play Around With It!
Okay, okay. That was a lot to take in. But here’s the main idea: the best way to learn a language on your own is going to depend on you. And to find your best way to learn, you’ll have to play around a bit.
So take the scientific reasoning and the tips here as evidence of what may be best for you, and run with it. Make it your own!
And if you want structure, accountability, and a community while you find your best way, the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp puts the techniques above into practice and gets you speaking from day one.
How do you best learn a language? Leave a comment and let us know.
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