Stay tuned for my next post: "How to scale Mount Everest in 30 Seconds!"

“A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years” — Mark Twain

Four things constitute every language: grammar, accent, vocabulary, and idiom/usage. To learn a language is simply to learn these four things.

Unfortunately, the first item, grammar, is actually the easiest. You simply memorize the rules and practice using them a bit. Then it’s done. (See my post on memorization techniques for help in this area.) Grammar is memorization, pure and simple. There’s no way to romanticize it.

Then you must tackle accent. This is a bit trickier. Here are some bullet points:

• Listen to songs in the language you’re learning over and over. Listen carefully to the singer’s pronunciation and imitate it like an impressionist.
• When listening to your professor speak or when watching a movie in class or listening to a song, write down pronunciation notes for certain words. Write it out words phonetically and then practice them. For example, write the Spanish word for butterfly, Mariposa, down thus: M-ah-rr-ee-p-oh-s-ah; or, if the butterfly is German, you could write Schmetterling thus: sh-m-eh-t-e-ah-l-ing. Then practice saying it.
• Watch out on those vowels! This is where accents always go awry. And this especially applies to vowel-heavy languages such as Spanish and Italian.

Then there’s vocabulary. The main difference between learning a language’s lexicon fluently and climbing Mount Everest is that the latter is slightly easier. You have to be either utterly desperate or clinically insane to actually pull it off. But here are some techniques anyhow:

• Immerse yourself in the language. Be with people who speak the language as much as possible.
• Sometimes there are Spanish Clubs, German Clubs, Japanese Clubs, etc. on campus to help cure monolinguism. If there is such a club for your language on your campus, join it.
• Study abroad.
• Listen to enjoyable music from the language. Decipher the words’ meaning.
• If you read the news, stop reading it in English and start reading it in your foreign language (with a dictionary in hand, of course).
• Read. Read. Read. Read fiction, non-fiction, comics, lyrics, high literature, low literature, poetry, proverbs, opera libretti, screenplays—anything from the language that interests you. Wear out that dictionary.
• Make flash-cards, physical or digital. Set a daily quota of words to study and study them.

But if vocabulary is Mount Everest, learning a language’s idiom is Olympus Mons.

Idiom involves the way people say things. For example, English-speakers say “I’m giving up” rather than “I’m giving down.” These little twists take a lifetime to learn. And, frankly, this is where the intrepid language-learner is out of luck: there is no way to become fluent in idiom and usage other than to actually live in a community where the language is spoken. That’s it. There are idiom dictionaries; but these don’t help.

So the outlook isn’t brilliant for the would-be polyglot. No one learns languages in thirty seconds. Nevertheless, learning languages is altogether worth it. A language is the expression of the accumulated human experiences of millions over the course of thousands of years. Each language has a different way of looking at the world. Thus learning languages enriches us and enhances our consciousness.