How to improve foreign language skills: 20 secrets to find balance and build fluency

Parallel texts are perfect for both intensive and extensive reading purposes. For an intensive reading activity, treat each chapter as a lesson where you take notes on new vocabulary, grammar or syntax. Once you’ve got a good grasp on vocab and grammar, you can move onto extensive reading, which simply means reading for pleasure.
Read Like a Child

Need another less intimidating way to practice reading in a foreign language? Go for easy language books. You know, the ones that use simple language and are filled with tons of pictures.

That’s right. I’m talking about children’s books.
Dual language children’s books let you embrace your inner child, learning language basics in the most adorable, imaginative and uncomplicated context. In all honesty, learning a new language as an adult can be complex and boring at times. Thus, reading children’s stories helps you dial back on the seriousness of language acquisition. It also lets you have some fun with it.
Children’s literature is an escape and an easy way to track your progress. Just as teachers do in school, you can use graded readers to level up your reading and thinking skills in your target language.
Venture into Comic Books

Believe it or not, you don’t have to love superheroes or be a graphic novel collector to benefit from foreign language comics. In fact, comics are ideal for visual learners, as the graphics offer picture translations of the comic captions.

Comics are a quick read, yet they also can function as extensive reading activities for teaching language. Instead of immediately blitzing through the comics, read through them in two stages.
First, skip the pictures, skim through the captions for unknown vocabulary, do basic translations and make a prediction about the plot. Next, read through the story, compare it to your prediction was and then reflect on the story overall.
Read Literature You’ve Read Before


Bilingual parallel texts are blessings for language learners. But once you reach a certain stage of fluency, you need to progress from bilingual books and move on to foreign language reading material.
To ease the transition, don’t dive into the deep end with new literature. Instead, opt for stories and books that you’ve read before. That way, you don’t get lost in all the foreign words since you already know the plot of the text.
What if you want to read the news in your target language?
For news articles, one of the foreign language reading strategies you can implement is reading related articles in English beforehand. Doing so will provide you with contextual information needed to understand the foreign language headlines.
How to Improve Writing Skills in a Foreign Language
Lastly, let’s discuss the ways to enhance your writing skills.
Write by Hand Whenever You Can


Writing in a foreign language can be quite challenging, especially character-based languages such as Japanese or Mandarin Chinese. But whether your target language uses symbols or the Latin alphabet, the fastest way to improve your writing skills is simply writing by hand. There’s really no other way around it.
Because many of us are learning through our gadgets these days, it’s more important than ever to put a pen to paper as much as we can. Take all the chances you can to write things down. If you don’t have a pen and paper, just handwrite it on your phone’s notetaking app.
Now, improving your writing skills doesn’t mean you have to write an essay by hand every day. Daily writing exercises can be as small as jotting down a list of groceries or as extensive as writing a book review. It’s less about the word count of each writing exercise and more about the frequency of writing to build that muscle memory.
Keep a Journal
A language learning diary is an effective way to monitor your writing skills and generally very convenient for daily writing practice.
If you have no idea how to keep a language journal because you can’t even write full sentences in your target language just yet, that’s okay! The truth is that you don’t have to be fluent to keep a language journal. The earliest entries in a journal always begin as a tracker for new words you’ve learned in your lessons. Once you’ve obtained enough knowledge to formulate sentences, you can start using foreign language writing prompts to guide your entries.
When you’re comfortable enough with your writing skills, you can treat the language journal like a regular journal, sharing your daily thoughts, feelings, accomplishments and happenings in your target language instead of English!
Install Foreign Language Keyboards
This seems counterintuitive considering the emphasis on the physical act of writing in the first two tips. Let me explain.
In order to write in a foreign language, not only do you need to learn how to write by hand, but you also need to learn how to type in that language. Typing Cyrillic on your phone or computer is a completely different experience from typing in English.
Foreign language keyboards aren’t just about the symbols. Even if your target language does use the Latin alphabet, having that foreign language keyboard installed on your devices is still extremely helpful since it instantly detects the right spelling in that language.
Have a Native Speaker Provide Feedback

You could be writing every day. However, that daily foreign language writing practice wouldn’t be as productive without feedback.

Traditionally, feedback comes from language teachers and tutors. So what happens if you’re studying independently, with no authority figure to grade your assignments?
Text exchanges with a language partner would take care of that. If you want to go old-school, another option would be to have a foreign language penpal and communicate via snail mail. Whatever method you choose for feedback, be sure to pay attention to the colloquialisms in the correspondences and request for your language partner to mention any glaring mistakes in your writing.
How to Improve Grammar and Vocabulary in a Foreign Language
You don’t have to be a walking, talking thesaurus to communicate with native speakers of your target language. However, that doesn’t change the fact that your ability to communicate with them depends on your grammar and vocabulary knowledge.
Let’s face it. Without a strong grasp on vocab terms and sentence structures, your foreign language skills will never move beyond the beginner stage.