How To Start Speaking a Second Language: #1 Define Your Why

Hi Everyone!

This is post 1 of 5. Every Friday I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned on my language learning journey. If you’ve always wanted to learn a second language, now is the time. It took me years, lots of trail and error, and listening to a lot of advice to come away with this super practical advice. I’m sharing this to help keep it simple for you. You can start speaking in less than a year.

#1. Define Your Why

Why do you want to learn this language?

For travel? For work? To meet new friends? To be able to watch your favorite series without subtitles?

I encourage you to learn the language you want to learn because it has the most meaningful reason to you. Maybe your family speaks it, or you’re wanting to read your favorite books in the original text. Or learn the language because you like the sound of it, or you like the culture, the shows, or the food.

Don’t just choose the most “practical language” because learning and maintaining another language turns into a bigger commitment later on and if you get bored of the language and get stuck midway through your studies.

In 1 year where do you see yourself with in learning and knowing this language?

Next week I’ll share the beginning steps to learning a language, so be sure to click follow on the blog if you want to be notified as soon as it posts or check back in on Friday.

Have a good day!

Bonne journée!

So now that you’ve got the info you needed, here’s the intro at the end (just because I don’t like scrolling past the intro to get to the content).

For those of you who are new or who don’t know this about me yet, I speak English and French. My goal is to become fluent in French and then start learning Hebrew. I’ve always had a passion for languages, and I like to help people.

Each of these steps took me such a long time because I didn’t know what to do next and I didn’t have a clear goal. Once I got the clarity I needed, I learned a lot faster. It was things like Alex Rawlings’ book, How to Speak Any Language Fluently, and YouTube videos by polyglots like Lindie Botes that encouraged me to book my first iTalki lesson and start speaking! My goal is to be the encouragement you need to start speaking too.

If you have any questions or advice, feel free to leave them in the comments.