Learning a new foreign langauge is always a difficult task, but if you're planning to travel to another country it really helps to be able to communicate with the locals. If you set this as a reasonable goal for yourself, the job of learning a new language becomes much more manageable. Essentially there are three areas you need to focus on separately: grammar, vocabulary, and reading the langauge.

    With the aim of becoming proficient enough to move around freely in a foreign country, vocabulary should be your top priority. Simply knowing the words will usually allow you to make yourself understood, even if you don't string them together perfectly. Lucky for you, vocab is also the easiest thing to tackle. The key to learning the vocabulary is simple: make flashcards. Start by searching the internet or looking through a phrasebook, and pick out some categories you want to learn. Dining, asking directions, using public transportation, and navigating through customs are usually the most important areas where you'll want to develop your language skills. If you don't have a lot of time, don't waste it by learning phrases such as "Do you speak English?".

    Make the vocab from each category into stacks of flashcards. At this point, the amount you have to learn may look intimidating, but you'll soon find that by breaking it up into chunks you'll quickly learn and retain the vocabulary. Pick a category to start with, shuffle the stack, and pull out about 5 cards to go through. Start by learning to recognize the foreign word, quizzing yourself on the English translation. When you have those down, flip the cards over and go through them again. By following this pattern you're less likely to have cards that you get eternally stuck on. Once you feel like you have a good grasp of these 5 cards, put them aside and grab another 5. Repeat the same process, then add your new 5 to the pile you've set aside, shuffle, and go through all of them. Keep doing this until you've conquered the entire stack. As you progress, you will be constantly reinforcing the words, making it very unlikely that you'll forget them.

    A smaller part of your language learning should be devoted to picking up some of the basic grammar. If you were studying the language in college, this would probably be the bulk of your work. Thankfully, though, you don't have to worry nearly as much about it since you just need to establish basic communication skills. Languages vary significantly in the complexity of their grammar, which means some will be much more difficult to learn than others. But, you need to make sure you know the basic word order. In English, the subject of a sentence goes before the verb, and the object goes after the verb. If I say "I kicked the ball", I am the subject, kicked （or "to kick"） is the verb, and the ball is the object. Some langauges, though, do funny things with this order. Japanese is subject-object-verb, which means the action comes at the very end of the sentence. And slavic languages like Russian don't have any fixed order at all, vastly complicating things. In langauges without word order, nouns have to be changed according to their function in a sentence. This is called gramatical case, and while it's a big portion of learning these langauges, it's not for the faint of hearted. For this reason, you can probably safely ignore it for now.liuxuepaper.com