You’ve probably heard it time and time again: immersion is the best way to acquire a language. However, immersing yourself doesn’t always mean that you’ll have to spend the next couple of months in a foreign country. There are many ways you can simulate the experience, even while you work.
Naturally, we don’t mean talking to your English-speaking customers in a foreign tongue. That’s just a shortcut to getting fired. Instead, you can do little things that expose you to the target language during the course of performing your everyday tasks. Do this for a significant amount of time and you’ll end up with a nice supplement to your software-based language lessons.
Do you regularly keep up with news and current events for work? Add feeds, blogs and newspapers in the target language to your regular stable of reading materials. Not only will you be exposed to new words and usage, it might show you certain traits that are native to the speakers of the language.
Do you use a computer at work? Change the language in your OS to the target language. Updating your Macbook’s interface from English to French will force you to learn a pile of new vocabulary just to keep up. Once you get the hang of it, you can do the same for every application you have installed on your machine.
Do you have clients or associates who speak the target language? You can practice your new skills on them. Make sure to inform them beforehand, though, so they’ll know what to expect.
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