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There are countless helpful and not so helpful posts about how to learn a foreign language so I will try to offer a new perspective based on my experience learning Mandarin and teaching English to 300+ Chinese students.
Some people have natural advantages when it comes to learning languages: people who already are bilingual or have learnt a foreign language before, students who already need to use the language
Firstly, your third language will be easier to learn than your second, and your fourth will be easier to learn than your third.
Basically, there are compound advantages that come with learning new languages. Not only do you learn the discipline of sitting down and reading texts in multiple languages or hearing people speak different languages. Your mind also develops the ability to intuitively switch context.
Second, if you do not need it regularly, you will lose it.
Instead of learning a language first, then using it, I recommend the approach of getting a critical mass of knowledge of vocabulary and grammar to have a basic conversation (5 minutes when you meet a stranger at a cocktail party) then adding multiple hours of effort daily. This is the huge advantage that students who live in the right language environment have. Firstly, the need to learn provides you with the necessary motivation to do the work instead of putting it off because more important priorities have filled up your time. Secondly, the emotional ‘high’ that comes with a successful conversation where you have spoken with someone in their native tongue motivates you to study harder and have more conversations like that. It also builds up the confidence that you need to keep trying and practicing, which is how you crystallize knowledge in your mind. Finally, you learn best by doing.
In this way, for the best students, learning a language is not seen as a means to an end but an end in itself. Success is being able to effectively communicate with your taxi driver, shopkeeper or even your teacher, in the language of instruction despite your imperfect grammar or weird accent. The journey is far more important than the destination. In that journey, everyone becomes your teacher by correcting you when you are wrong, which helps build rapport and friendship. It helps you empathize with the other person and their culture, which will serve you in good stead when you are actually negotiating a deal or doing business with someone like them.
Third, you learn best by crossing the bridge
I have always found ‘language partners’ to be quite inefficient: each person teaches the other. What’s significantly more useful is to befriend someone who does not know your language at all. This forces the student to cross the bridge of misunderstanding to understand the other person. This is what every single interaction will be as a student is ascending the steep curve of learning the language: figuring out what the other person means when it is ambiguous. So teachers of students above the basic level should minimize the usage of the students’ native language. Initially, this will seem very difficult and incomprehensible to the students, but their level of comprehension will rise with time, which is the goal: deciphering the meaning of sentences in the target language.
Tawanda Michael Mahere 