How to Learn a Foreign Language Locally If COVID-19 Spoiled Your Study Abroad Plans
The COVID-19 outbreak has led to an unprecedented reduction in international travel, with the average number of daily commercial flights slashed dramatically. Study abroad programs have also taken a hard hit, as a growing number of U.S. colleges opt to withdraw or reroute summer and fall offerings abroad.
For students who had an exciting semester planned overseas, as well as those whose spring semesters were dramatically cut short, the cancellation of study abroad programs has been an enormous disappointment. Feeling disenchanted about this situation is normal and understandable. However, students will hopefully realize that the decision, though not an easy one, was made with everyone’s best interest in mind.
The reasons for studying abroad are numerous, yet one of the most cited is to learn or improve in a foreign language. Study abroad is an appealing way to learn a language because it provides so many authentic everyday contexts for practicing the language. It has also proven to be one of the quickest methods, provided that students take advantage of the opportunity by totally immersing themselves in the language.
But while studying abroad is one of the most effective ways to learn a foreign language, it is certainly not the only way. Rest assured that you can become proficient in a language this year without ever leaving your home country. In fact, people do it all the time.
When you learn a foreign language, there are four distinct skills you must hone: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When people study abroad, they are typically most interested in working on the first two (listening and speaking), so these are the skill sets we’ll focus on here.
Foreign language skill: listening
Adapting your brain and ears to the sounds of a new foreign language is considered by many to be the hardest part of the learning process. For this reason, listening may require more work from you than the other three skills.
Listening is a passive skill, meaning it requires the student to process—rather than produce—language. Input-based learning, which involves exposing the student to natural utterances (for instance, through television), is the best approach for improving your listening comprehension. A more extreme interpretation of this method involves “flooding” the brain with the foreign language, in hopes the student will sharpen their auditory skills and acquire new vocabulary.
By tuning into foreign podcasts and news channels daily, you can get used to the pronunciation and prosody (patterns of stress and intonation) of the language relatively quickly. Watching movies—but without subtitles so you can focus on the sounds, rather than the written words—can help you accomplish the same goal.
It is imperative to mention that students need not understand everything they hear to improve their listening. They also do not need to pay complete attention to the medium they have on. In fact, much language learning is done subconsciously. Students will therefore still benefit from listening to podcasts, the news, or movies as they engage in other tasks, like cleaning their rooms or exercising.
Foreign language skill: speaking
To improve your accent, a highly recommended technique is to record yourself speaking. If you’re not sure what to say, try reading a text in the foreign language aloud. How you sound on a recording is how you sound to others, which is often different from how we sound in our own heads. Recordings thus provide a more objective assessment of our foreign language pronunciation.
Speaking the foreign language to yourself isn’t enough, though. You must practice with others—preferably with native speakers—to learn beyond what the textbooks teach and to receive personalized feedback. This is not to say that speaking the foreign language with other students is unhelpful, but communicating with natives tends to afford additional benefits. For instance, natives often employ a wider variety of linguistic structures, may be more proficient in slang and cultural knowledge, and have stronger instincts about what sounds natural and what doesn’t.
Amid the current pandemic, however, meeting with natives in-person is likely not a smart course of action. For this reason, personalized online classes may be the wisest alternative for now. If finances are a concern for you, you could also join a free conversation group on Meetup.com. Later, when social distancing recommendations are lifted, you can meet with your group in person at the location of your choice.
Bonus foreign language “skill”: vocabulary
Though not technically one of the four language skills, vocabulary lies at the heart of each of them. Without a well-rounded vocabulary, you won’t be able to understand or express much in the language you’re learning. Thus, you should work to improve your vocabulary no matter how far along you are in the foreign language.
Language experts recommend students learn vocabulary through a process known as spaced repetition, or a “repeated review of content following a schedule determined by a spaced repetition algorithm to improve long-term retention.” Visit BrainScape or Anki to access pre-existing flash cards based on the spaced repetition principle.
Fulfilling your study abroad dream may be off the table for 2020, but operations will likely return to normal—relatively speaking—by 2021. You may just need to wait another semester or two before hopping on that flight.
For college seniors, though, there may not be a next semester, making this unforeseen change especially heartbreaking. So, what can you do if you’re graduating and still want to spend time overseas? Several different options are available to you:
Taking a vacation with classmates who are learning the language
Teaching English abroad.
Tiffany Sorensen holds a Master of Science in Spanish-English Translation from New York University. She works remotely from sunny Mexico, where she gives English and Spanish classes, writes educational articles, and designs practice tests for the ACT.