If you’re learning a foreign language as a hobby and there’s no pressure for time, you can just follow whatever lesson plan is laid out by the course you’re taking.   Doing so will usually help you learn the language in an optimized step-by-step process, as most courses have been refined from hours upon hours of applied testing.

Things are slightly different, however, when you’re learning a language because you need to.  Whether it be for an upcoming trip or a job requirement, there’s usually time pressure involved.    As such, you need to take a firmer hand in setting priorities for your study materials.  If you’re situation, the following guidelines should help:

1. Dive immediately into what you need to learn.  If you need business French, then don’t bother with survival phrases for travel.  Grab yourself a business-focused language software and get cracking on that.
2. Play to your strengths.  If you can’t stand grammar, then don’t take a grammar-based language course.   Choose a language course that plays to your strengths — you’ll get faster results that way.
3. Practice the core items you need again and again.   Language learning relies heavily on repetition to help things kick in.  Do your language software exercises several times over — it helps.

Here are a few things you can start with:

1. Check one of the free language learning websites. There are tons of them available online.  Some are good, others are bad and a few are quite excellent.  Read through the lessons a couple of times and see how you like it.  Once you find yourself enjoying it, you can then consider investing more resources into it.

2. Play some vocabulary games. Vocabulary games are an effective way to begin language learning.  They’re fun, light and a lot of them are free.  Heck, many of them are useful too, so try going that route for a start.

3. Language flash cards. Flash cards are cheap and extremely useful for vocabulary building, especially for beginning language learners.  They’re also incredibly easy to get into and are a great first step for those with an eye towards developing skills in this area.

4. Listen to songs. Even the mere act of listening to a radio station in the target language can be enough to get you started on the road to learning.  The availability of thousands of foreign language radio stations online should be enough to get you started.

Fixed Sentences

One of the lessons I’ve seen a lot of beginning students try to steamroll through are memorizing fixed sentences. When you’re starting out in a new language, it’s common to integrate it into your patterns by memorizing sentences, such as how to say things like “Good evening” and “Thank you for help.”

Almost every language training software I’ve seen required students to memorize a lot of these types of common phrases. Many students find the process inane, thinking it’s much better to teach them to formulate sentences than to memorize pre-made ones.

Actual Learning

While it is, indeed, better to learn to string your own statements than spout them off memory, language learning just doesn’t work like that. The reality is that memorized phrases, for the most part, are all that anyone who’s new to a language can handle. Vocabulary is best assimilated through this process, as well as certain amounts of grammar.

Instead of shocking you with grammar constructs you don’t have a clue of, language courses are designed to build off from these memorized phrases to teach you actual sentence construction. Without them at the foundation, you’ll have little to refer to, making the process of learning all that much more difficult.

Put simply, never underestimate the value of memorized phrases in language learning. It can help you in more ways than you probably expect.