Hindi, English, French, Japanese, Tamil, Telugu, German, and the names would never end. The whole world revolves around people having conversations with each other, personal and professional. And for that, we have our own languages, one or two of which are mother tongues, that we have known since our childhood, and the others that we speak are what we learn in order to sustain with different sets of people.
Different systems of communication involve different languages, the exact degree of this difference which is needed to establish a different language is not known. It is hard to always match the intelligibility when language gap precisely exists, even with translation.
‘Taste the words before you spit them out.’
And so, the people who travel a lot might urgently need to learn a different language in a very short span of time, in most of the circumstances. Or people even want to get their hands on a language out of hobby, but they want it real fast. So how do they do it?
Let’s get a hang about the basics of a language and then interestingly, how exactly could a person learn a new one in a mere amount of 12 hours.
What Do We Call a ‘Language’?
According to Wikipedia, ‘a language is a structured system of communication used by humans consisting of speech (spoken language) and gestures (sign language). Most languages have a visual or graphical representation encoded into a writing system, composed of glyphs to inscribe the original sound or gesture and their meaning, and the scientific study of language is called linguistics.’
In short, any way of communication through which people could express and understand each other, is basically known as a language.
Basic Components of a Language
If we dig into the components, then you might find terms like- phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, syntax, context. But remember we’re here to learn a language in just 12 hours, so we might not want to dig in so deep, rather just focus on what might come really handful, and that is syntax and context. Every language has a particular syntax to structure it and a context to make some sense out of it accordingly.
Syntax - It is a set of rules through which a person could construct a full sentence.
Context - It is how everything within language would work together in order to convey the full meaning.
The Big Question: How To Learn a Language in 12 Hours?
Make a Realistically Specific Goal - If you think you can manage to learn all about a language in a few hours, then don’t fool yourself. We don’t even know all the things about our native language, forget about getting to know everything about a new one. Stick onto the basic things you might need.
The salutations, wishes and few other basic sentences for starters. It won’t ever be possible that you will get to have a whole form conversation within 12 hours, but manageable things could be learnt. Focus on simpler goals, and not the hypothetical ones.
2. Keep up the Pace - When you’re in urgent need of learning a language, you might feel a wave of optimism at first, but it will decrease down in a matter of a few hours. It’s not important to achieve everything from the language completely, but to be fluent with your pace and learning is necessarily the best idea. Be consistent.
3. Keep Reminding Yourself the Purpose of Your Learning - You’re here to learn a language so you can survive within the new place, for instance. Keep reminding yourself that you don’t have to give exams out of it. It doesn’t need to be polished perfectly, and no scores have to be given. Just stand out for the needful enough.
It sounds obvious, but when we’re into something, we often forget the actual purpose of it. Self-reminder is extremely important.
4. Learn With Pleasure - Although it might get very crucial to learn with seriousness, I'd prefer you to not lead it with such seriousness, take it a bit easy and enjoy learning. Don’t oblige, rather pleasure yourself.
5. Memorizing a Complete List of Vocabulary Isn’t Needed- It could be challenging and not to say, but unthinkably dull. A better way for building vocabulary is to make sure that those lists should come from the situations you think that might come in handy very often, so that it could connect you to some common background experiences.
6. Age Is Just a Number - Never belittle yourself through the age standards set by the society. Learn what you wish and whenever you want to.
7. Never Misconstrue the Importance of Translation - Even if you’ve got a pretty good hang upon the language, never underestimate the usage of translations. Translation doesn’t only allow you to paraphrase, but also forces the learner on to the next level.
8. Fluency - Don’t opt for getting to know everything, but bring out a perfect fluency and consistency upon whatever little you learn, and be confident in that.
9. Accent - Learn a basic way of speaking and accent through some videos or movies in that particular language. Don’t go for a whole conversation, but just basic sentences, like- ‘Can I get this food from the menu chart’, ‘Could you please direct me to this address’, in the desired language.
10. Watch movies/shows - Do try watching some basic decent movies or shows with the subtitles in your own known language, to have a gist of how to speak the language you desire. It’s just another way of translation in a much more real way of visualization.
The Bottom Line
Language is the way that evolves a culture and organizes and encodes the thoughts of people residing. It allows us to communicate and build a bond with each other.
Moreover, not only for a one-time conversation with somebody, language shapes one’s relationship with other people as well. And it is also prominently notable that different languages would shape that relationship differently.
Know more about: Why learning a second language is important?
Written By - Pavas Shrigyan
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