How I Lost 2 Years in my Language Learning Journey
And how you can avoid making the same mistake
Two years ago, when I set out to learn Portuguese, I made a grave mistake. I don’t know if it was arrogance, hubris, ignorance, or what it was that caused it, but the mistake was made nonetheless. In fact, I probably made multiple mistakes, but one of them certainly takes the cake, and if I hadn’t made that mistake when I started, I’d probably be able to write this article in Portuguese. Yet, two years in, I am barely able to get a sentence out.
That mistake — for those of you who are looking to avoid making the same one — was assuming that it would be easy.
Of course, assuming that Portuguese would be easy to learn alone wouldn’t have doomed me to two years of scant progress, but because of the mindset that I went in with, I made a whole lot of bad decisions in my approach to learning the language.
The Grave Mistake
In my mind, there are two very important questions that every language learner has to ask themself when they approach learning a new language. Those two questions are:
Why (What is your motivation for learning the language?), and
How (What will your methods be for learning the language?)
Why
For me, the why seemed fairly easy. I am a history student, and I am most interested in Latin America. I learned Spanish in high school, but Brazil is the largest country in the region, and they speak Portuguese, so that is my logical next step. Not only that, but the Portuguese language expands out into several countries in Africa and in small fragments around Asia, both of which interest me greatly.
I also believe that we should always be striving to learn something new, improve ourselves, and broaden our horizons. Learning a new language is a great way to do that because you open up whole new worlds that revolve around languages, including music, traditions, history, culture, and much more. Not to mention the fact that language learning is one of the best brain workouts that you can do.
How
But once I had resolved to learn the language, I had to figure out how I was going to do it. Enter: my grave mistake.
I had watched a few TV shows in Portuguese before and heard people speaking it, and since I had spent all of high school becoming fluent in Spanish, I was able to make the connections and understand generally what people were saying. So, I thought that Portuguese was going to be a breeze because all I had to do was fill in a few gaps in understanding, since it’s basically Spanish, right?
Wrong. And so, the saga continued. I resolved that a language learning strategy called the Solar System Method, paired up with Duolingo, would be enough for me to reach fluency in one year. Now, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the Solar System Method, but I had placed too much faith in my ability to memorize the concepts and vocabulary lists necessary to build the base for learning the language.
I also failed in another critical area, and that was because I hadn’t set a specific, dedicated time each day that I was going to use to study Portuguese. I had made the goal of practicing 30 minutes or an hour each day, but nothing was set in stone, and nothing was attached to a specific time in my schedule. Thus, I was just trying to fit it in wherever I could, and among my other priorities, it just got buried, and I never got around to it.
This eventually led to me relying solely on Duolingo to keep my language learning going. But, in my experience, Duolingo is at best a supplementary material even when used to its full potential. As the days went by, Duolingo became a chore that I tried to finish as fast as I could just to get that streak to extend one day further — regardless of whether I had learned or gained anything from my time spent on the app.
As of the writing of this article, my Duolingo streak is on around day 285, and I still struggle to actually speak and comprehend the language. I teach English as a Second Language as one of my jobs, and I have Brazilian students all the time who I just wish I could converse with in Portuguese, but the words just simply aren’t there yet.
But two years into this long dredging process, it is time to make some changes and turn this ship around.
The Reconciliation
Two years down the drain cannot be the end of the story. There has got to be something that I picked up along the way and something that I can do to right this wrong.
For those of you who are struggling to learn a language and want to change course, you can. I don’t believe that learning a language should be a chore like it became for me. So, here is how I plan on rectifying my mistakes and getting back on track with my Portuguese studies.
At first, when looking back and trying to figure out where I went wrong, I blamed my experience learning Spanish as the reason why I couldn’t learn Portuguese. They were too similar, so it was too confusing and hard to separate them out, and they were at the same time too different, so it was hard to make the connections to learn the language faster.
However, it turned out that my Spanish learning experience held the key to my success in Portuguese. So, rather than hoping that the language itself would make it easy to understand Portuguese, I imported the techniques that made my Spanish learning so enjoyable and successful.
Daily Practice
When I was learning Spanish, it was in school, so there was a class with a set time that I had to go to every day and focus on the language. Not only that, but the class consisted mostly of grammar study and practice learning the rules, pronunciation, and intricacies of the language. With Portuguese, I needed to find a time to set aside for the language and a curriculum that I could follow, which for me ended up being a course on Udemy. This is to help me track progress and ensure that I am constantly interacting with the language with the intent of understanding its mechanics.
This also involved a qualitative shift in what daily practice meant. Instead of speed-running a Duolingo lesson in 30 seconds and calling it a day, I have to sit down and spend time watching the lessons and studying the material. Now, this is not meant to be a Duolingo slander article because I still use Duolingo as more of a fun game or a warmup before I get to work on lessons.
Comprehensible Input
Comprehensible input is a term I picked up the other day during a Spanish grammar class, and this is probably the most fun and important part of the language-learning process. It is, of course, a practice that most of us language learners probably already do, but I learned there’s a term for it, which is great.
Essentially, it is just taking in language input, whether that be through listening to or reading media in that language, at a level that is comprehensible. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand every word of everything that you hear or read in your target language, but it does mean that you get the gist of what you’re reading. That is where the real language learning happens.
The important part of this whole concept that I think a lot of people miss, is that you aren’t just passively taking in language because you understand it. It has to be intentional. Comprehensible input is about reading and listening for comprehension, understanding, and betterment of your own language skills, which means the input has to have your full attention.
For me, this is going to look like maybe watching a show or listening to a podcast. It is also going to look like printing out articles that interest me in Portuguese to go through, marking the words I don’t know or phrases I don’t understand, really picking apart the language in the article to figure out what is being said, and then maybe attempting to summarize what I have read to assure that I understood it.
Conclusion
All in all, I don’t know exactly what this new strategy is going to yield in terms of my language progress, but I do know a few things. I know that treating my learning like a chore and trying to passively inherit the language because I spoke a similar one is a strategy that gives no results and might have even set me back. I also know that the new strategies I’ve employed are specific to my language learning strengths because they are the same ones that worked for me when I learned Spanish.
I also know that with a renewed focus and energy, I can give new life to the journey of learning Portuguese and start to enjoy it more, which is a win in and of itself even without concrete results.
Over a long five years of studying Spanish, and a long two years of trying and failing to learn Portuguese, I have taken away lots of lessons and figured out a lot about myself and the world around me. I hope that you all are able to avoid making the same mistakes I did and can enjoy language learning. And who knows, maybe some of the techniques that helped me get back on my feet can help you improve in your language learning as well. Tchau!
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