I Tried Learning A Language In 30 Days
Unsurprisingly, I failed — but I learnt something more valuable in the process.
This 30-day challenge originally appeared in the second issue of Antigone, Daydreamer. You can read it here.
The Goal
To dedicate 30 consecutive days to learning Norwegian from scratch. Well, mostly from scratch: when I started I knew how to say “eat” and “potato” (which is about as much as I need to know in any language).
The Experience
Let’s be real here. Nobody thinks you can reach fluency or even simply become conversational in a language in 30 days, right? RIGHT!? Well… Maybe you can.
If the language you are learning is similar enough to any language you already know, you actually stand a pretty good chance. Norwegian is a great choice for English-speakers because it is grammatically quite close to English.
However, the fact remains that is is still a whole language that you’re trying to learn here! When I first started thinking about doing this challenge I foolishly thought Dutch would be too easy a choice because it is almost mutually intelligible to Afrikaans, my native tongue.
I couldn’t find any sort of 30-day challenge with the end goal of having learnt a whole language. Which makes sense, because it is simply not possible; it’s just not how language works and it’s not how our minds learn. And, when I thought about how long I’ve been “learning” French (since 7th grade), I started feeling a bit discouraged.
But, the difference lies in the quality of the hours I am putting in. After high school, my French-Learning consisted of a few minutes on Duolingo and the odd burst of enthusiasm when I had a free hour on a Saturday afternoon. That’s a wholly different approach from the mindset I had going into this 30-day challenge.
The Verdict
As luck would have it, life got in the way and I didn’t stick to my plan quite as closely as I hoped. While I am by no stretch of the imagine fluent, I wanted to share some tips that any prospective language-learner can hopefully benefit from. Whether you’re going all-in or being a little saner about it, here are some things I would do differently next time.
- Make a commitment.
Hypocritically, I’m going to advise you not to learn a language for the sake of it (nor for a 30-day challenge). You need a much stronger internal motivator. Having everyone on my social media platforms holding me accountable to my 30-day challenge was a very powerful motivator, but halfway through I found myself thinking that I would much rather be learning French or Xhosa because those are languages I am truly interested in learning.
Combining strong internal motivation with external accountability will make for a killer combo, I’m sure.
2. Stop trying to “hack” it.
Realise that there is no magic bullet: you have to put in the work. There are ways to streamline your process, but there is no way around the day-to-day learning you have to do.
3. Have a plan and make it easy to stick to.
This one I did not achieve at all. I had a very ambitious plan at the start of November, and by no means managed to stick to it. However, I did make a new plan when I realised I couldn’t keep up with it and set up my daily learning in a way that made it almost automatic to do.
I want to end off with a final word of encouragement from polyglot Kato Lómb. This quote made me realise how valuable the learning process itself is. I can’t count the number of positive messages I received on my blog and on Instagram from Norwegians who were simply ecstatic to hear I was interested in their language. People were willing to help every step of the way with every little grammar question I had or simply to wish me luck.
Ultimately, language learning is about building bridges and making connections. It is about other people, not about me or how many languages I can claim to speak. Here’s what Lómb has to say about being an amateur in the language you want to learn:
“We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly. If someone knows how to play the violin only a little, he will find that the painful minutes he causes are not in proportion to the possible joy he gains from his playing. The amateur chemist spares himself ridicule only as long as he doesn’t aspire for professional laurels. (…) Solely in the world of languages is the amateur of value. Well-intentioned sentences full of mistakes can still build bridges between people. Asking in broken Italian which train we are supposed to board at the Venice railway station is far from useless. Indeed, it is better to do that than to remain uncertain and silent and end up back in Budapest rather than in Milan.”
