Yes, you definitely can make a career out of language learning and there are multiple ways you can approach this. For example, the most traditional method in this area is teaching, translating or interpreting. However, teaching or translating etc. requires an advanced level in your language to do.
However, if you wish to do this you can follow different ways to get certified in these professions such as from university or other means. Often teaching a language can be done in multiple forms on multiple platforms. It can be done online or in person.
People will be looking for conversation practice in their target language as often people find speaking in another language to be more difficult because ideally, you will need other people to practice speaking the language.
Let’s have a look into these three career paths:
Teaching:
Often people say that native speakers are the best teachers of that language. In some ways, this is often right because no matter how hard you study a second language you will find that there will sometimes be expressions and idioms you will miss that a native speaker will pick up.
However, it is the case that non-native foreign language teachers do have their place. This happens especially because a native language teacher hasn’t had to go through the learning process of their language in the same way their student is going through then they cannot relate to aspects of the important journey.
Also, non-trained native speakers won’t be able to explain grammar structures or other parts of the language well so this proves to be extra difficult in trying to teach a student.
A non-native foreign language teacher therefore will be better equipped to help and emphasise students’ struggles in learning that particular language and also will be better to explain grammar concepts etc as they will have learnt it themselves.
Translator:
This involves dealing with and using the written texts of different languages. Translating it from one language into another for example. This requires a high level in the language being translated (as well as the language being translated from) and also other skills such as writing skills and general translation skills (which are separate from foreign language learning skills).
Interpreter:
This is different from translation. Rather it deals with speech and may potentially be a hard role due to the fact you need to listen to people’s speech and colloquiums and interpret into another language all on the spot.
For this, you will need people skills and to be able to think quickly and in some industries, it can be disastrous to interpret wrongly (such as between patients and doctors).
Other approaches:
Another approach to using your language experiences to make a career out of it is the communicative approach. This is where you use your communication skills in order further your career etc but it requires creativity. For example; if you’re abroad you use your native language.
You use your language skills to interact with the public such as a receptionist, barista etc talking in languages in an international environment.
You can also use what you’ve learnt about learning languages and use it to blog, start a YouTube channel etc. To document your journey and to inspire other language learners as well.
There’s also something else you could do called the cultural approach, this is where you have learnt another language and so have learnt another culture. So in a way, you would be a bridge between two cultures, helping each culture learn and understand the other. This would also require some creativity in order to come up with a job to do with this.
To discover how I managed to get into learning languages click here.
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