Tips for Improving your Heritage Language Skills
Many heritage language speakers experience periods when they are frustrated with their language skills. They may feel like a failure because they are not fluent in their heritage language or family or others set unrealistic expectations about what their language skills should be. These feelings and expectations can lead to frustration and lack of motivation to advance in the heritage language. It is important to realize that these feelings are normal and that learning a heritage language is a process that takes time and can be difficult.
Sheeren Marisol Meraji and Audrey Nguyen of National Public Radio (NPR) investigated tools that all heritage language learners, regardless of skill level, can benefit from considering. The list that NPR curated follows below:
Give yourself credit for what you know. This means affirming the things you do know, instead of only focusing on the things you don’t know. Thsi is empowering and helps to build more motivation.
Build on your strengths. Analyze your heritage language skills in the areas of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Identify your area of strength and use this to springboard improvement in other areas. For example, if your strength is listening, listen to a podcast, then try to write about it, and then tell someone about the podcast using the language.
Set clear realistic goals. Instead of setting the unrealistic goal of becoming fluent, identify a realistic goal, such as understanding most of conversation with a relative in the heritage language or watching a movie in the heritage language. These more relasitic goals will add motivation.
Find the tools that work for you. There are many tools out there that can help you learn the heritage language. Evaluate how you learn best. Do you learn better in a classroom with other students, online with a tutor, in person with a tutor, or with a learning app? Avoid programs that make promises that seem to good to be true.
Focus on the joy. Connect with what makes you feel good about your heritage language and why you are learning it.
Photo Credit: Eliott Reyna on Unspash.
Information for this piece comes from: How to Learn a Heritage Language, Sheeren Marisol Meraji & Audrey Nguyen. National Public Radio. 21 December 2022.
