Knowledge of foreign languages is no longer a luxury but a necessity. However, even if you have learned a foreign language for a certain time, it is sometimes quite difficult to overcome a language barrier and communicate with native speakers. Since communication in a foreign language is crucial, overcoming a language barrier is a must. To begin with, let’s understand what the language barrier is and why it occurs so often.
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Causes Of Language Barrier
1. Fear Of Making Mistakes When Speaking A Foreign Language.
Language learners often fear looking ridiculous because they are not sure their speech will be entirely correct. Psychologists say that the fear of making mistakes is a psychological attitude.
2. Lack Of Communication Practice.
School courses and studying foreign languages in the university often provide a limited range of topics. The main task of such training is to teach grammar and writing. When a person, even perfectly knowing how to build sentences and what tense to use for a particular case, needs more conversational practice, he is confused by the need to conduct a conversation.
3. Accent In Foreign Language.
No matter how hard people try, speaking a foreign language with an accent is easier. After their early teens, language learners often struggle to speak like a native speaker without an accent.
4. Lack Of Vocabulary In Foreign Language.
The fewer words you know, the more difficult it is to state your thoughts. This is indeed a significant reason for refusing even the most amicable conversations.
5. Fear Of Being Misunderstood.
What if suddenly we can’t understand the person we’re talking to? Many people think it will be very uncomfortable and unpleasant.
Due to these causes, language barriers are an incredibly common problem many language learners know. The good news is that there are various effective strategies for overcoming language barriers in communication. To study and communicate with foreigners, try developing an individual tactic for yourself. By using it, you will begin to speak foreign languages effortlessly.
Strategies For Combating Language Barrier
- Be bold and ask. One of the biggest mistakes is to pretend everything is fine when it’s not. If you need help understanding what people you speak to mean, ask them to speak slower and admit that you have yet to understand them completely.
- Stay calm. First, it is worth understanding that communication difficulties can always arise, even for those who have thoroughly mastered a foreign language. Whatever language skills you have, anxiety has a negative effect on conversational abilities.
- Be concrete. Every conversation has a goal. When starting a conversation in a foreign language, focus on the desired result. You need to stop paying too much attention to mistakes; your task is to achieve the communicative goal. The more such goals you achieve, the more confident you will be in speaking a foreign language next time.
- Listen. Language learners who have a better-developed visual memory than an auditory memory usually find it more difficult to overcome the language barrier. In this case, you need to make an effort to listen to more auditory learning materials. Watch films in a foreign language with subtitles and enjoy betting on a website in a foreign language you learn.
- Focus on only certain words you understand in a conversation. It often happens that a person focuses on the unknown word during communication. All you have to do to converse in a foreign language is understand its essence.
- Build both passive and active vocabularies in foreign languages. Before you start a conversation in a foreign language, look for dialogues corresponding to your topic in English and read and speak them. This will help you be more prepared and feel confident when speaking.
And remember to practice! The more often you speak a foreign language, the sooner you overcome the language barrier.
