Learning Languages — the only article you need to read

The Internet has changed the game. From YouTube videos to language learning apps, podcasts, and e-books, accessing language learning resources is no longer a challenge. There are endless options for language schools, courses, and methods. Some even suggest you can learn a language in your sleep. As a result, now that there is a wealth of materials, choosing what to focus on has become a challenge. Sometimes too much can be hurtful, we jump from one resource to another, never making any real progress. The scale of the endeavour is also intimidating, especially when there are so many different materials we could explore and use.

I have been learning languages my whole life and have tried many different approaches. Some helped, others were a waste of time. I now speak fluent English, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish, none of which is my mother tongue. But along with the languages I have been able to learn successfully, I have also tried and failed to learn French, German, Persian, and Hebrew. A few months ago I decided to start studying Spanish and before jumping into it, I spent a couple of weeks reviewing and deciding on the methods I would use. In this article, I want to share my experience on what has worked for me in my quest to learn Spanish (few months in, I am at the B2 level), and my views on how you can keep language learning relatively simple, yet effective.

1. Formulate a Plan

Start by choosing the language to learn. Your choice may be related to your work or a hobby, you might be interested in the particular culture, literature, or music. You may want to learn the language your significant other speaks. You need to have good reasons which are uniquely yours, to want to invest a significant amount of time and effort in learning a language.

Plan to study consistently. Once or twice a week won’t cut it. 4–6 times a week is optimal. If you can do it every day, even better. Keep in mind, some days you won’t be in the mood to study, but make sure to study something on those days too. As Jocko Willink says, if you don’t feel like going through the motions, you need to go through the motions. It is the cumulative effect of studies that counts, not a heroic effort on a particular study day.

Try to make your objective time-bound and specific — for example, you want to reach a certain CEFL level within 3 or 6 months, to read particular books in the original, travel to the country where the language is spoken, or get a job there. You can have interim objectives — for example, within 1 month, to have the first 15-minute conversation with a native speaker, or to read a short story by your favorite author.

Decide on a way to track and measure your progress. Keeping track of your studies is an important tool to help maintain motivation, but also identify and address problems along the way.

Decide on the resources you will use. Again, some resources are relatively less known, while others have significant money and advertising behind them. If you are a complete beginner, the truth is, pretty much any resource will do. As you become more and more proficient in a language, you will be able to pick resources that suit your style and your needs.

Finally, understand that your plans will change. At the beginning of learning a skill, your “field of vision” is limited, you don’t know what you don’t know. You might be clear about your targets, but your priorities and objectives will change as you progress. So, review and adjust your plans, though don’t do it too often.

2. Fundamentals

Perhaps the hardest and yet the most fun part of language learning. Here I focus on three things.

a) Building a conversational foundation. The idea is to prepare for the first conversation with a native speaker and to learn some of the most important, most frequently used words and phrases. In most languages, 100–200 most frequently used words typically constitute 50% of the vocabulary used daily. Once you get the basics out of the way, you could use, for example, Wyner’s 625 words to build up your vocabulary.

b) Pronunciation. People generally don’t mind accents but nothing impresses a native speaker as much as correct pronunciation. This is one aspect of learning languages that I like to pay close attention to.

Make sure you listen to the language from day one. Listen to music, podcasts, watch a movie or a TV show just to get a general feeling of what the language sounds like. There are specific exercises you can do to work on the pronunciation. Gabriel Wyner in his book Fluent Forever gives good advice on this issue and shares a long list of resources you can use.

Pronunciation is something you will need to invest in a lot at the beginning. As your vocabulary expands and you get more advanced, you will develop an intuitive feel for how words should be pronounced.

c) Essential grammar. Focus on what you need. Ignore the rest. You need to be careful not to be sucked into studying the grammar of the target language too deeply at this point. The idea is simply to understand the following:

• how plurals are formed;
• whether there is an article or not and its use;
• whether there are genders and how they are expressed;
• use of adjectives with nouns;
• word order in a sentence, use of pronouns;
• how to form questions and negative sentences;
• use of numerals;
• verbs and fundamentals of tenses and conjugation — just the present tense at the beginning;
• useful constructs (want smth, like smth, and structures involving verbs can, should, must).

All three elements will complement one another. As you learn more words and phrases, you will practice your pronunciation and you will also be able to see the application of the grammar principles in context.

I repeat, at this stage, it does not matter much what material you will be using. Pretty much any manual or a short course will do as long as it teaches the basics outlined above.

3. Expanding — investing in reading, writing, listening, and speaking

From here on, put aside textbooks and manuals. Practice the skill you want to master. You need to concentrate on acquiring the actual skill you want to acquire and not just learning more about it.

You may want to prioritize a particular skill over the others, for example, focus almost exclusively on speaking. But if you don’t have a clear preference, I recommend balancing input-based (reading, watching, listening) and output-based (speaking, writing) activities.

a) Reading. Focus on extensive reading — which is when you read for pleasure, without the need to look up every word you don’t know. The more you read, the better. Try to find materials at a level slightly beyond comfortable. It should be challenging, but not impossible to understand. I find Olly Richards’ books very useful in this sense. Reading is an enjoyable activity in and of itself, but as a bonus, it will expose you to all kinds of interesting vocabulary and help normalize grammar rules that you might have struggled with.

b) Listening/watching. Podcasts, YouTube, and Netflix offer an endless supply of materials here. The old-school method of starting with books, then moving to audio, and then video is just wrong. Start watching videos in your target language from early on, even if you understand very little. Videos offer most context accompanying the language used and are the easiest way to consume and learn the language. I prefer TV shows to movies since the longer format allows us to build familiarity with the characters and storylines. An excellent resource on YouTube is EasyLanguages.

c) Speaking. Other than the obvious way of practicing speaking — through conversations, I love script-building. Working on scripts serves as preparation for actual conversations in the target language by equipping you with topic-specific phrases and sentences, or even a monologue. This exercise will also help memorize your ever-expanding vocabulary. Update your scripts periodically. Typical topics to look into might include:

• Introductions
• My job, what I do, what I love (or hate) about it, etc.
• My country
• My favorite movie, book, music
• My hobbies
• My favorite sport
• Asking for and understanding directions when moving around a city
• Why I am learning this language
• At a restaurant
• Shopping

You can add any number of topics to this list. As you are preparing your monologue/dialogue, make sure you run it by a native speaker to avoid any embarrassment in an actual conversation.

Something that Benny Lewis popularized, is adding conversational connectors to your vocabulary. These are the words and phrases that are commonly used to keep the conversations flowing. Use them and you will immediately sound much more like a native speaker.

Go ahead and schedule meetings with native speakers. You can use italki, HelloTalk, or any other apps, but make sure to practice speaking, or else, this may be and often is the most difficult skill to develop.

Every time you do this and use your scripts in a conversation, you get valuable feedback. Keep upgrading your scripts until you don’t need them anymore.

d) Writing. As you work on your scripts, your writing will naturally improve. I recommend writing letters or postcards in the target language. Journaling is another great method for improving your writing.

As you read, write, listen/watch and speak in your target language, your vocabulary will expand and your grammar will improve naturally. This is the most important point. I am not saying you should not work on your vocabulary or grammar. Just don’t do it in isolation, without context. Let’s examine this a little bit.

About vocabulary and grammar

I believe vocabulary acquisition has to meet three principles. Firstly, you need to learn the words that are most frequently used. Frequency dictionaries are an excellent resource that will help with that. This approach immediately enhances the efficiency of your learning. Secondly, learn the words in context, to immediately see how they are used in a phrase or a sentence. Thirdly, learn the words that are relevant to you, to your life, your work, your interests. Using frequency as the key parameter is excellent at the beginning, but you should gradually add things that you are more likely to use yourself. Memorizing the words you won’t be using is pointless. Focusing on reading, script-building, listening to podcasts, watching videos do precisely all of the above.

Vocabulary mining is something I do when I hit a material that I find particularly compelling. I study the material in-depth and write down the words and phrases that I might use myself in a conversation. This might then feed into script-building.

As to grammar, from here on, use it tactically. Unless you just love studying grammar, I would recommend only looking into a particular topic if you seem to have a problem with it. Otherwise, let it be. Enjoy the language, do it regularly and practice will inevitably pay off.

Finally, a quick word about apps. I tried two dozen apps and the only one that worked for me was Babbel. You might find that another app works for you better, but for me, Babbel was the one app that offered the best balance of short lessons, good structure, and depth.

To conclude, use every opportunity to practice the language you are learning. Aim to do something daily, but not randomly. Formulate a plan, then build a foundation in the target language. This should take you to the A2 level.

As you expand, you will reach B1 and go beyond, make sure to practice the skills you want to develop without wasting too much time on language methodologies, grammar or exercise books. Read, listen, watch, speak, write. Track your progress and review your goalposts as your “field of vision” expands.

Try to set specific targets. For example, for reading — to read certain number of pages a day, make a list of books you want to finish, etc. For speaking, schedule weekly conversations or plan to prepare and practice, even record a script every week. Choose podcasts you want to listen to and decide on how often you will listen to one. Decide on TV shows you want to watch and watch an episode regularly. Journal every day, or weekly, however suits you. Hold yourself accountable to the targets, keep track of progress. Test your knowledge, identify the gaps and problems, zoom in on those and keep practicing. Don’t forget to have fun with the language and learn about the culture of the language.

Good luck!