Tips & tricks on getting better at speaking different languages

Hello everybody!

I have never talked about this before, but I am currently studying to become a translater. I know five langages : Dutch, French, English, German and Spanish. Now let's be honest, some of them I know better than others. But I love learning, and especially by myself, which is what works best for me. So today I wanted to share some of my tips to help you improving your langage skills.

The very first ones are the ones that are pretty common, like reading the newspaper in the langages you want to improve. Find some that you think are interesting, from different places and that are more or less difficult to read. I tried to read at least one article a day per langage. On some days I like to challenge myself by reading more "intelligent" kind of articles, that aren't as easy to read as others could be. 

Next up is another obvious one : movies and series. Watch them in the original language ! It helps a lot because you actually hear the people talking, which allows you to hear different accents. Also, I don't know about you, but I seem to always like the original voices better haha. 

You can also do a little mix of the newspapers and the movies by listening to the radio. I remember listening to the BBC every morning at my parents' house. With the internet, you can probably find web radios that stream in all kind of langages. 

What you can also do is read a book that is published in two langages at the same time. This way, you'll be able to compare your main langage to the one you're learning. I asked Santa a French/German book.

And last but not least, the thing that helped me the most : YouTube! I started doing this a few years ago, first with English, and then also with German and Spanish. The good thing about YouTube is that you can choose the subjects you want to hear about. Whether it be video games, beauty, lifestyle, fitness, anything really, find something that you like and watch videos about that. There even are videos of people about learning langages : I found one recently that I really like! It's a channel made by Damon & Jo, who I'm actually not even sure of where they're from. They make videos in english, portuguese and french, where they show where they travel to and help you learn words and sayings in the different langages they know. Here's an exemple of what they do :