Hello everyone! I often receive questions about language learning, so I'd like to share some helpful tips and tricks that I discovered while learning Spanish and French. Hopefully I can help you on your journey to learn a language.
Translating is a bad habit
If anything, you should become worse at translating the further you go on, and the more independently you can stand on your own in another language.
Whenever I read Spanish, I can read and comprehend it very well, but when asked to translate, I find that a bit more challenging for me the better I read Spanish, even though Spanish and English are very similar.
Most normies that learn a foreign language in school just see a language as a set of lots of different words they use, so what they will do is they will read something and translate every single word into English. When they try to say a sentence, they will need to think of a sentence in English, translate it word-to-word into their target language, and then say the sentence in their target language. What a pain!
When you speak in English (or whatever your native language is), you probably are not thinking out word-by-word the meaning of what you want to say. Usually it just comes out, and this is what you want to try and aim for in your target language.
How to memorize words in a foreign language: Using Anki
Anki is an app that is used for learning words in a foreign language but it is also used for other stuff aswell.
When you put a word in Anki, it will ask you for the front of the card and the back of the card. You can just put the word on the front and the meaning on the back, however you shouldn't put the translation on the back, instead you should put a monolingual defenition or a picture on the back and translate only when absolutely necessary. You can study the deck by clicking on the name and pressing study deck.
Anki works because it gives you the card right before you forget it, and therefore you remember the word for longer. The cards will appear again after a certain time period
To make Anki be the most effective, you should not add less than 10 words a day, but you should also not add over 30 cards a day. I like to just do 20 cards a day which is the default limit on Anki. You also should not select the "hard" or "easy" buttons on Anki, because they will probably just mess up your deck. Whenever I am on Anki, I just press the "again" button if I couldn't remember it, and the "good" button if I did remember it.
"The Critical Period" is fake.
There's an idea in academic and clinical linguistics as well as popular culture that children have a magical plasticy of the brain that makes them uniquely good at learning languages. This is supposed to be the reason why children learn languages "fast" and adults don't. I think this is a myth.
According to the critical period hypothesis, language can be acquired only within a critical period, extending from early infancy until puberty.
Babies take about 6 years to even reach reasonable fluency in their target language, while most adults could easily learn a language to fluency in under a quarter of that time if they put in the effort.
Outputting Early
Most people in the language learning community think that outputting early is a bad idea, as it can lead to non-native sounding speech and it could cause bad and hard to undo habits. Most people recommend that you output after about 1,000 hours of input and 100 hours of study (with Spanish).
Really I think the only way to get good at speaking and writing is to practice from the very beginning, or atleast as soon as you can without making too many mistakes.
I started outputting in Spanish after I learned the basic sentence structure, knew a bit of grammar and after about 50 hours of input (which isn't that much).