Prioritization problems: or, how to study fewer languages (I don’t know how)
Editor’s note: First of all, I am my own editor lol. 😝 But also, after reviewing what I’ve written in this post… I’m not sure it’s entirely true. There’s a bit of an “unreliable narrator” problem when I try to reflect on my own language-learning process, I guess, and some of my conclusions might be oversimplified or exaggerated. But I guess that’s what a blog is for — the more try to write about it, the closer to the truth I’ll get (or not, idk).
When I try to explain how I ended up studying such a ridiculous amount of languages (with varying results, of course), I don’t really like to attribute it to stuff like “talent” or “hard work.” 🙄 Instead, I tend to highlight my favorable starting conditions:
- I’m a native speaker of English and (Mandarin) Chinese, two of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
- The first foreign language I studied intensively in a classroom setting was Russian, a notoriously “hard” language, especially in terms of grammar.
- Another major language I put effort into early on was Arabic — back when my target was “only” to learn the six official working languages of the United Nations.
That serves as a pretty solid basis for polyglottery, I suppose. Most languages across Eurasia — from Romance and Germanic through Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Semitic and Turkic all the way to Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese— have significant linguistic or cultural ties to at least one of these four.
To put it another way, there have arguably only been a couple of times in my language learning history where I’ve really put a lot of work into learning something truly foreign and unfamiliar (Russian and Arabic), and the rest of the time I’ve just managed to coast along with the help of related vocabulary, analogies, and varying amounts of comprehensible input (assisted by my undergraduate linguistics degree, and by living in a global city).
Which more or less explains why I ended up getting “good” (B2-ish) at maybe a dozen languages while also giving up on dozens of others — and where I might want to focus my attention next.
Despite what this blog might lead you to believe, I’d say I’m a pretty lazy language learner most of the time.
I don’t want to memorize vocabulary or grammar. I get annoyed when I need to use a dictionary too often. I skip all the exercises in language textbooks where I have to form sentences myself.
And when I start getting tired of one language (which usually happens within 3 to 6 months after I start studying it) I just drop it and try a different one.
After all, as a native English speaker living in the U.S. right now, I don’t really have a pressing practical need to be learning any of this stuff. When I decide to learn some Surinamese Creole, or Romani, or Georgian, for example, the primary goal isn’t really “communicating with speakers of the language.”
It’s not even “being able to consume media in the language.”
Don’t get me wrong, being able to communicate and understand stuff in yet another language is always a great experience, and it’s a crucial factor if I decide to stick with a language for the long haul. But when I’m just deciding to start learning a bit of a new language (something that happens once every couple of months), the number one reason is simply to see how stuff fits together.
This happens at several different levels:
- how pieces of words fit together to form words
- how words fit together to form phrases and sentences
- how sentences and phrases fit together in various genres of texts
- how languages fit together through linguistic change and cultural influence
- how languages fit together in multilingual social contexts, etc.
And then, well, if I end up learning how to actually read or even say stuff in a new language, that’s a nice side effect. And then if I actually encounter people who speak the language too, even better! But that’s usually not the starting point.
As much as I like studying individual languages, I might actually enjoy studying relations between languages even more. Which is part of the reason I’m usually studying more than one at a time.
More times than I can count, I’ve started studying one language for a bit, only to get distracted by a related language, and then the next language over, and so on. (Earlier this year I had a sequence like Moroccan Arabic -> Maltese -> Italian -> Neapolitan -> Albanian -> Greek -> Ottoman Turkish -> Armenian…; back in 2016 I did something like French -> Catalan -> Romanian -> Albanian -> Turkish -> Persian -> Urdu -> Bengali -> Indonesian….)
If you drew these connections out as a graph, you’d get a densely connected network covering most of Eurasia, with three clusters in Europe, the (greater) Middle East, and East Asia, and maybe visibly distinct clusters for Eastern Europe and Central Asia too.
2020 was a bit of a milestone year for me, language learning-wise, since I finally got my Korean to an intermediate (generally conversational) level — it was the last of the “commonly studied” languages that I hadn’t really worked on previously, and one I just felt like I should know as a native Chinese-speaking polyglot. With my eastern flank secured, I could proceed to do whatever I wanted.
But this raised all sorts of new issues: What languages did I want to maintain? What ones did I want to improve? How would I allocate time for that, while also having time to scratch whatever random language-learning itch I had at the time — and of course, while having time for other pursuits, such as learning more about history and technology? (The maintenance issue was particularly pressing in early 2021, since a year of the pandemic plus a primary focus on Korean had left me rusty in many of my other languages.)
At first, I figured I’d make a list of all the languages I’d like to have at a B2 or C1 level and just “focus” on those. Just one problem: there would be at least a dozen languages in the list. 😬 Some more drastic trimming was needed.
That’s where the three clusters I mentioned above came into play: to maintain some sense of cultural-geographical balance, and also to benefit from synergy between languages within the same “cluster”, I decided I’d pick one language in Europe, one from the greater Middle East, and one from East Asia to focus on (i.e. to actively study using textbooks or other reading material) while just cycling through other languages in each region on occasion (e.g. watching a TV show in the language when a new season came out).
For the three languages I selected, I’d set a goal of actually taking a C1 proficiency test in at least one of them within the next few years. With all other languages, I’d just pick them up and drop them at will, without worrying too much about maintenance. (From experience, I’ve noticed that recovering my ability in a language after even a few years of neglect isn’t too hard. Provided I had reached a lower intermediate level once.)
- For East Asia, there were really just two options — Japanese or Korean — since my Vietnamese was much weaker (and my Chinese dialects too). Since I was already studying Korean at the time (and had magically not yet gotten tired of it), I decided to stick with it.
- For Europe, the decision was a bit trickier since there were so many more languages to choose from. I ended up picking German because I liked the structure of the language more, and because of its central position within Europe with ties both towards the west and the east.
- For the greater Middle East, I had a hard time deciding between Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, or maybe even Uzbek or Hebrew. I went with Turkish… at least for a while.
Nicely balanced and symmetrical, this seemed like a good plan. Just a few problems: First of all, what about Russian, ostensibly my strongest foreign language? Was I really already satisfied with my Russian proficiency? Turns out the answer was “no” —al though I can read and listen to most non-fiction stuff in Russian with little trouble, highly literary and very informal language can still often be a challenge.
Secondly, after leaving my old job and moving to a new city, I decided that the total amount of time I spent each day on languages also had to be reduced to make time for other interests, making in-depth study of three languages impractical.
Thirdly, for the Middle East cluster in particular, it was proving hard to maintain a primary focus on Turkish at the expense of all the other languages in the region. Maybe because of its central geographic position, or maybe just because it’s more “exotic” to me as a native speaker of one West European and one East Asian language, the area stretching from southeast Europe to north India has always been a particularly interesting linguistic area for me.
So now, I’ve pared down my concrete language goals even more: German is the only language that I make sure to study systematically every day. Tentatively, I’m hoping to obtain a C1 certification in the language later in 2022. (I might look into doing the same for Korean, but only afterwards.)
Then again, that absolutely does not mean I’m just learning one language nowadays. On an average day, here’s what I’ve been doing lately:
- Anki decks: Japanese (20 new cards/day), Japanese proper nouns (just 2 new cards/day), Hebrew (20 new cards/day), Uzbek (10 new cards/day), Persian (10 new cards/day), Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm (no new cards)
- Duolingo: At least one Polish lesson a day, in anticipation of next year’s Polyglot Gathering (assuming it’s officially confirmed soon). Undecided if I’ll do any other language after I finish the Polish tree in about a month.
- Glossika: A bit of Taiwanese Hokkien most days, which is available for free since it’s considered a minority language. (Just to listen to casually — I don’t know if I’m retaining all that much honestly.)
- Youtube: At least an hour of German, mainly news programs and talk shows. An hour of Russian most days too. Randomly listen to some Korean, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Uzbek, Hindi/Urdu, Polish, Serbian, Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, etc. based on what the algorithm serves up and I feel like listening to. (I generally listen while doing other stuff at the same time.)
- TV shows: Korean shows about three times a week. Other shows as they come out (e.g. I recently watched Money Heist in Spanish, Alice in Borderland in Japanese, The Club in Turkish etc.) American shows with either German or Russian audio.
- Reading: Books in German every day, and in Russian most days. Right now in German I’m reading one book on medieval European history and another one on Kurdish history and politics, and in Russian I’m reading a book about the Yezidi religion as well as the fantasy series The Witcher, which was originally written in Polish so it makes some sense to read it in another Slavic language. (I also recently finished an interesting Chinese sci-fi novel, The Waste Tide. If I decide to read something else in Chinese I’ll have to cut back on Russian reading temporarily.)
- Textbooks (serious): Using German Vocabulary most days, Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage a few times a week. Some other books on German synonyms and usage. Korean Grammar in Use: Advanced occasionally.
- Dabbling/Microdosing 😛: Skimming books on Kurdish, Aramaic, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Georgian, Dutch, Catalan, Nahuatl etc. etc. with no strict schedule whenever I feel like it.
Which might seem like a lot, but tends to fit in two to three hours a day if I multitask. Once I start working again I’ll probably just have to cut back on the “dabbling” portion first.
My language plans are always subject to change on a whim, but with just one specific goal amid a lot of lower-priority maintenance and dabbling, it seems like this general framework shouldn’t be too hard to stick with for a while.
So that’s where I’m at right now, language learning-wise. For the next couple of posts, I’ll try to make them less about me and more about the languages themselves: I’ll look at some of the languages I’ve been dabbling in recently as well as related languages I’ve studied previously.
To make sure I stick to a schedule, here’s what I have lined up (and yeah, here you can see what I meant when I said I had trouble sticking to one language in the Middle East):
- early January: Aramaic/Syriac and other Semitic languages
- mid-January: Kurdish and other Iranian languages
- early February: Armenian and other… “semi-isolate” languages? (tbd)
See you in 2022!
