The 2025 Guide: How to Learn a New Language by Yourself This Year

Your complete guide on how to learn a new language by yourself in 2025

New year’s finally here!

All those goals you’d wanted to breathe life into, all those dreams you had, all the resolutions you’d made in the past year thinking you’d start working on them when January comes—the time is now.

You must change your life and this is your moment to do it. If one of your new year goals is learning a language, then 2025 might just be your golden year for that. Why? Because you’ve decided it. Whichever year you decide, is your breakthrough year. End of story.

How to Learn a Language by Yourself

This is a new year, a completely new chance, a blank page for you to fill however you want.

But just deciding something doesn’t make it true. You need to put in the effort that will take you where you’ll proudly be able to say that you did it.

In this post, I’m going to outline a complete guide on how to learn a new language by yourself this 2025. You don’t need anything else, really.

You can be at your home, work a job, give time to your family, and still end up learning a language with just a device and wi-fi.

Really. It’s been more or less a year since I started learning Japanese, and I still remember, it was last February, I had some exams and the only thing I was worried about was—I don’t want to break my Duolingo streak.

While my Duolingo streak is non-existent now (it went up to some 162 days and then I started college and got busy in a bunch of other stuff so didn’t have time for that anymore), I’ve come across far better ways to self study a language than…an owl stuck in a phone app.

タヌ と申します。はじめまして。

While Japanese might not be your language of choice, any foreign language is at first hard to grasp and sometimes even complicated to understand in terms of grammar and sentence structure.

I’ve faced tons of troubles trying to understand Japanese grammar, and all of it has just re-instilled in my mind the fact not that it’s very hard but that I need to work harder.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s start learning a language.

how to learn a new language by yourself this year

How to Learn A New Language by Yourself

#1 Which Language Will You Learn

The first step in your process towards becoming a polyglot (I love the idea of speaking in one language and then switching to another the next second just to freak out your listener and show off your skills) is choosing your language.

I’m guessing if you’re here you already know which language you want to learn, but if that’s not the case, this might help you a bit. 10 Easiest Languages to Learn

#2 You (Surprisingly) Need A Routine

The Step 2 would be obviously to set a routine.

You need to completely integrate the language learning process in your daily routine. If you don’t set a standard benchmark and define a productive day, you’ll never feel like you’re doing enough. You need to decide how much time you want to spend studying this new language.

A beginner might need to spend more time on it, I guess, but once you’ve achieved basic knowledge of the language you can let yourself off a bit and adjust your routine again.

For now, though, the time you want to spend studying this language depends solely on your daily life and how many other commitments you usually have and how soon do you want to achieve fluency.

learning a language. self study a language

As for me, I’m just studying in college and writing my book and watching Netflix and have no issue in spending a couple hours from the rest of the time to self study a language.

Another method of setting language learning goals is to decide a number of words you’re going to learn and practice every day. And of course, since we’re talking about 2025, where do you want to reach till the end of this year?

#3 Trace the Alphabet Like You’re 5

The next step to learning a language would be practicing the alphabet. Listen to how the alphabet are spoken, practice the sounds and then learn how to write them.

It depends on the language you’re learning. If it has a different script than the one you’ve learned, then you’ll have to get workbooks and practice notebooks to get your hand used to making the alphabets in an understandable way.

I personally use Genki and Japanese from Zero! textbooks because they also have the theory and workbook part together.

Memorize the alphabets and trace them and you can do that even do that while you’re multitasking until it comes absolutely naturally to you.

#4 Make Your Vocabulary Notebook

Very early from your lessons, start making a vocabulary notebook. You need to keep track of new words you learn so that you don’t forget. Write the meaning, write them in the original alphabet, write the pronunciation if you want to, write sample sentences to take it to the next level.

All of that. It’s very fun maintaining a vocabulary notebook.

I write Japanese sentences in one line, then take my time to go through it again, reading and highlighting unfamiliar words. I write their meanings, then read again, all to get to the level where reading Japanese comes like reading my native language.

[….]I used loose leaf papers to make the list and then attached them in my Japanese file which is where I’m keeping track of my progress and recording how I went from basic beginner level to advanced level Japanese, all by myself.

Oh, and, don’t forget to make it aesthetic.

If you don’t want to maintain your own vocabulary notebook, and instead get one online, some textbook with all basic words and their meanings, then that would work too and is completely up to you.

#5 Buy Some More Books

Get the textbooks.

You don’t know which textbooks would work good for you, so it’s better to consult online recommendations for language learning regarding the language you’ve chosen to study.

Aside from textbooks you can get dictionaries of the language or download them online, however, I’m gonna make sure that I don’t end this post without giving you a list of online language learning resources that are of tremendous help for people who self study a language.

#6 Regardless of What People Say, You Have to Learn the Grammar

I once heard someone ask if learning a language could be accomplished without learning the grammar, and I’m still trying to find the answer to that because it seems pointless—impossible even, maybe—to learn a language without choosing to spend time getting it’s grammar.

Grammar is what helps you form sentences in an understandable way. It’s what we learn when we first study sentences in our native languages.

And even though some might say that grammar is not that important for learning a language, that it’s possible to eliminate grammar study form your language learning, I simply don’t understand how anyone can master a language without getting through the rules regarding how that language is spoken and understood.

So, the technique I used to understand the grammar bit of Japanese (it’s pretty complicated because there are again, a ton of particles which I often confuse together) I used to write sentences from this book I had and I’d highlight instances of where the grammar rules were used so that I could study their pattern and usage even later on.

Also, you can get a dictionary for the grammar of the language. It’s very useful.

#7 Making Notes

Check out this amazing set of loose leaf papers and study material to set your journey off. It’s possible to learn suff and still be aesthetic, yeah, it’s a proven fact.

I love working hard and then looking at that hard work later on to see how beautiful it looks. So don’t be worried about making mistakes, the pen can smell it, and instead just focus on doing it for the sake of it, because it is a beautiful human activity to spend your time learning the culture and complete way of life of some other country’s people. And that begins with learning their language.

#8 Practice Speaking so that You don’t Embarrass Yourself in front of Natives

The textbooks I got came with audio recordings so that was one way to hear the pronunciation of all words and mimic it.

But you can also watch movies in your target language, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos of native speakers to get a hang of how they pronounce stuff which might be different from how you, at first, would pronounce it.

#9 Put in the Work for 365 Days.

And yeah, for that, you have to practice every single day.

If you want to accomplish learning a language, it is essential to practice it every single day. Practice reading, writing, speaking. Do it again and again.

Don’t think about whether it is even worth it or not, it is.

You have to do this.

Malcolm Gladwell talks in Outliers about achieving mastery in a skill if you practice it for 10,000 hours. Here’s me telling you that…I don’t know, you might achieve your perfection before 10,000 hours, or you might take only a bit longer, but your hard work in this process is going to pay up.

You just need to do it every single day of 2025. That’s 365 days of focused effort to learn something completely new and unfamiliar, all by yourself, with your complete social circle trying to distract you and pull your attention away from what is truly important.

#10 Achieving Goals and Testing Yourself.

You have to set your goals and rejoice when you achieve them, but have patience when you don’t. If it’s taking a little longer, don’t worry. If you’re unable to understand something, don’t worry. If someone’s telling you that you can’t do it alone, please don’t worry. You can.

You have to be patient with yourself.

You have to not lose hope.

#11 Coming here at the end of 2025 and saying I did it.

Now, I don’t care when you’re reading this post, but I’d like it if you would come here one year later and say that you did it, you accomplished learning a language, that it was hard and frustrating at times, and exhausting, but you did it.

How to self study a language. How to Learn a language by yourself this 2025. A complete guide.

Online Resources

As I said, I wasn’t going to end the post without sharing with your all resources I had come across that could facilitate your journey and be your teachers in the process of learning a language.

So we all know about Duolingo, but check out some other apps too: MemRise. Babbel. Lingopie. Tandem.

Lingopie has these amazing movies and stuff that you can watch in your target language, along with their translation right alongside the subtitles. So, once you’ve got basic knowledge of how the language works, you can go watch it and enhance your vocabulary and your conversational fluency.

Whatever language you’re learning, I guarantee there is a YouTube channel that teaches it. For Japanese, check out JapanesePod.101, which is my favorite. You can find similar extensive channels for Thai, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic and any other you might put your mind to.

Podcasts are a great way to focus on the pronunciation after a long day when you only want one more lesson to progress. Learn Japanese with Masa. Korean with David.

Take the help of AI to make a foolproof language learning plan to learn a language in 2025. Or better yet, try asking AI to be your very own language tutor.

Learn with Oliver. An amazing website I regret for not being able to find earlier. Literally, this is one of the the most helpful websites I’ve come across while learning Japanese. It breaks down sentences and has lists you can add them into, and has a complete flashcard learning system with frequent self-testing and review.

I’ll add to this post whenever I come across new resources to learn my languages in a better an easier way. For now, this is what it is. It’s a new year, 2025, and learning a language by yourself has never been easier.

So what are you waiting for? Go start learning a language.

Productivity tips: How to Hack Your To-Do List and Get Something Better

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