SIMPLE STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSFUL LANGUAGE LEARNING

1. People have their own individual learning styles. Find what works for you.

Ideas to try: - use cue cards to learn new vocabulary

- strategies such as rhyming or word associations can help

with vocabulary, and don’t forget to look for cognates.

- use the new words and structures you have learned:

- write your shopping lists in Spanish and pay using

Spanish numbers

- write notes to your roommate in Spanish

- talk in Spanish to native speakers or to each other!

- be creative: write a poem, watch a movie in Spanish,

read a newspaper or look up websites in Spanish.

2. Prepare for class each day. This will cut down on total study time.

3. Participate actively in class.

4. Establish a regular study schedule. Do homework as soon as it is assigned; it is often an effective way to review what you learned in class. Spend some time in each study session reviewing old material. Go over new material before trying a new exercise.

5. Don’t try to do too much! It is better to study in short but effective sessions than to exhaust yourself with all-nighters; you will retain more information while spending less time overall.

6. Mistakes are part of the learning process! Use them to learn from: ask for help with a problem area, spend more time on these topics when reviewing for tests. Make sure to correct any wrong answers in your notebook.

7. Learn some ideas as wholes. Idiomatic expressions in languages often do not make literal sense (for example, "What’s up?"), so learn the expressions in context. Dialogues in texts have many expressions that may be useful. Learn appropriate expressions for greeting someone, asking for or offering help, accepting invitations, and so on, in order to help maintain a conversation.

8. Memorisation of dialogues as well as vocabulary can be a great help in learning new structures.