Teach Yourself a Foreign Language

Last updated 2024-09-29

Introduction

Welcome to Teach Yourself a Foreign Language, a practical guide containing the skills and strategies you need to learn any language as effectively and quickly as possible. Whether this is your first time or you’ve already started, this guide will provide you with the essential tools to take you from an absolute beginner through to the upper-intermediate stages.

How this guide works

This guide does not contain the perfect technique to learn a language (such a thing doesn’t exist). Nor will I focus on what I do personally. Instead, I’ve distilled the best insights and strategies from language learners around the world and packaged them in a way that is practical, insightful, and easy to follow.

I will do this by guiding you through:

• The resources you need

• Where to find resources

• How to use your resources optimally

• What activities to do

• How to learn more effectively and efficiently

The approach is simple: start with the essentials. You don’t need to read the full guide before you begin learning. If you are new to language learning, the main chapter is Resources, but I recommend you read at least until the end of Activities—that’s just a few pages. However, if you’d like a more solid foundation, I recommend you read on after that. You don’t need to read the chapters in order, and you can skip around based on your preference.

For help reading this guide, here is a breakdown of the chapters:

• The Essentials—These take you through the basics

  • Before you start—Key info to know before you begin

  • Resources—The main chapter, containing guidance on what resources you need

  • Activities—The best activities to do with your resources

  • Your Study Routine—Covers your study habits

• Advice for Beginners—These explain how to use your resources well, covering the key topics

  • Input
  • Grammar
  • Vocabulary
  • Flashcards
  • Speaking
  • Pronunciation

• Advice for Intermediate Learners

  • Moving to the Intermediate Stage—Advice on how your study changes later on

  • How to Learn Your Language—Provides a framework you can use to build your ability

  • Choosing What to Study—Helps you think about your strengths and weaknesses, and provides some ideas for improving

• Extras—Some more advice on specific topics

  • Mistakes—Ideas on how to deal with mistakes

  • Building Your Own Method—Guidance for those looking to diverge from following the standard activities

  • Becoming Conversational in Lots of Languages—Some people like to learn lots of languages less deeply, and this section shows you how it’s done

  • Learning Theory—A set of ideas about learning more generally, applied to language learning

  • The Final Chapter—A quick summary with some parting words from me

Though there may seem to be a lot of information here, think of it as an investment. If you start with a bit of theory now, you will save time in the long run by doing it better the first time.

Principles

Principles are the basic underlying rules and ideas that enable you to be an effective language learner. If there is something I want to highlight as especially important, you will usually find it displayed as a principle in a blue box as seen below. The key to principles is that they apply to broadly in your learning, so you should be paying close attention to them and thinking about where else you can apply them.¹

Principle: Example
This is an example principle.

About me

In case you were wondering about me, I’m a long-time language learner who moderates the r/languagelearning community on Reddit. I have spent a lot of time learning languages, learning how to learn them, and searching the web for answers to common questions. Over that time, I’ve gained a lot of insight into what a beginner needs to start. That’s what I’m aiming to share with you here.

Support

This guide has taken many hundreds of hours of research and writing to create. If you appreciate what I’ve done here and would like to say thank you, please consider buying me a coffee or purchasing the guide.

If you think something is missing, you have any queries, or would just like to say thanks, I’d love to hear from you! Please use the contact form here.

The full guide

The guide on this website contains the first few chapters of Teach Yourself a Foreign Language, which contain the essential tools to get started. The rest of the guide is available for free in ebook form, and contains even more to help you become a confident and effective language learner. Check here for more info.

Click here to start your journey

1. Many principles you will sometimes hear called “language hacks” elsewhere online, though this is somewhat of a misnomer. Elaboration can be found in the section Why is the term “language hacks” a misnomer? ↩