Foreign language learning is nothing different from anything else you do in your life. People also make some common mistakes that should have been avoided.
1. Focus. When I started learning a foreign language, German for example, after due research and buying books that are expensive, I usually come cross some people that speak another language, French in this case, well. I couldn’t help looking into it and wondering if I could speak it, too. This distraction has happened to me between German, French, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese.
Just stay away from the thought of learning another language at least for right now as beginners. Otherwise, you will find out at last that you have learned nothing that is profound enough about any language.
Focus on the good things about the language you are working on. The things you love about this language will benefit you very much in avoiding the first mistake. For me, I like the pronunciation of French. But I love that of German because further steps into its pronunciation allowed me to find out that it’s the most sexy language when a man speaks it.
Secondly, learn something different everyday. If you keep reading the same article everyday, you will be bored. Change topics of your reading materials, and stay interested. Other than that, you can also change the media you use in learning the foreign language. For example, if you read today, you can listen tomorrow. What’s important is to do learning as a ritual on a daily basis.
Don’t study long hours one day when you like to while doing nothing on other days. Familiarity is the most important thing for learing a language. The more familiar you are with it, the more progressive you can get. So do it for 15 to 30 minitues everyday, which is better than 3 hours on sundays.
The third is to find your own featured way of learning foreign languages. If you like movies and TV plays, why not sitting in front of the great invention in the human history and watching some movies in the language you learn. If you like writing, why not keep a diary and ask someone to proofread it for you.
Take myself as an example. I am interested in reading aloud. I can do it for hours long. This could be attributted the teachers back in the primary school who often asked me to read texts aloud to the class. Now I did the same thing in learning a foreign language and found out that it worked to get my mouth familiar with the word flow.
In conclusion, these are three points that you need to keep in your mind if you want to learn or have alread been learning a foreign language. Wish you success in your language learning.