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Throughout my life, I have met several people who struggle to learn a new language, with some of them being unable to communicate at a basic level despite having studied for several years.
I believe that learning a language is not a matter of talent, but that of dedication and following a good process. In this article, I would like to share the process I used more than once (and am still using) to tackle the challenge of learning a new language with great success. I currently speak three languages (native Portuguese, English, Swedish), and am in the process of learning a fourth (Japanese).
My process
For me, learning a new language consists of three major steps:
- Learning basic grammar
- Becoming good at reading and listening
- Becoming good at speaking
Learning basic grammar
My first step towards learning a new language consists of understanding the basics of the language. This includes things like learning how sentences are structured, how words should be pronounced, how to count, and any other language-specific basics that may apply (for example, for Swedish, learning the difference between en / ett, or the concept of soft / hard vowels).
The word “basic” here is very important. I want to have a good understanding of how things work in that language, but I don’t want to waste time reasoning about complex grammar rules. Think of the sorts of things a mom would correct a child for; my mom would correct me if I used a word in the wrong place, but she wouldn’t lecture me about the theory of participle clauses.
Knowledge of basic grammar massively pays off because later on it will simplify the process of expanding the vocabulary. Although at this point I will not know many words, my knowledge of basic grammar will allow me to more easily figure out how to pronounce any new words that I may encounter in the future, to properly classify them (subject? verb? noun? adjective? present? past tense?) based on their format and position in a sentence, and in some cases even accurately guess their meaning based on this information.
Although in the next section I’m going to complain about traditional language learning books / schools, I think they are one of the best resources for learning basic grammar. It’s also usually straightforward and can be mastered in just a couple of months.
Becoming good at reading and listening
But this is about as far as those language schools and books will help you out, because in my opinion they massively fuck up pretty much everything beyond this point.
In my experience, after learning basic grammar, schools and books usually follow up by teaching advanced grammar. I think this is a complete waste of time and is why in my opinion many adults struggle with learning a language despite attending classes for multiple years. Learning complex grammar rules will not help you learn the language, even natives don’t know this stuff!
What natives know is vocabulary, and this is what I believe is the right focus at this stage. My goal then becomes to expand my vocabulary as much as possible by immersing myself in the language, consuming as much media as I can and as frequently as possible. This is something that is usually referred to as the immersion method.
Here are some examples of things I do in this step:
- Changing the language of my phone / computer
- Watching shows with either sound or subtitles in that language, preferably both if available
- Listening to podcasts, sometimes actively and sometimes passively as background noise
- Finding internet forums / subreddits / YouTube channels for topics I like
- Reading the news
You might think that this doesn’t make sense because you won’t understand anything, but that’s exactly the point. Children also don’t understand anything at first, yet magically they seem to just “get it” after one point, simply by being exposed to the language. This is because our brains are big pattern-matching machines; the more you expose yourself to a language, the more patterns / words you discover, which leads to further discoveries until you eventually reach a point where everything just clicks. In other words, the purpose of this step is to try to replicate how a child would learn a language at home.
I find watching shows / YouTube videos to be particularly excellent for this because you can usually guess what a word means based on the context of the scene, meaning you don’t need to spend as much time translating words as you would when compared to other types of media.
Duolingo can also be a good tool to expand your vocabulary, as long as you don’t use it in isolation. This is because although Duolingo is a good way to learn new words, it tends to be quite bad at everything else (e.g grammar), so I think it’s important to back it up with the other methods mentioned in this section. It’s important to note also that the quality of Duolingo’s exercises varies greatly between languages, so looking for reviews before getting started is a must here.
If you tend to quickly forget things like I do, a spaced repetition system can greatly assist you with fixating all of this new knowledge. In my case I quite enjoyed using Readwise for this, but I know many who have used Anki / traditional flashcards with great success.
This entire process is very painful at first, but gets easier with time as your vocabulary improves. The unfortunate part is that this is a lengthy process; it can take several years of doing this before reaching a point where reading / listening to the language becomes effortless, and I think there’s no way around it.
Becoming good at speaking
Although the previous step is excellent at making me good at reading and listening, in my experience it doesn’t necessarily help me become good at speaking. When I was learning Swedish for example, although I had an easy time understanding what people were saying and knew in theory what to answer back, I still had a very hard time doing so, mostly because I just wasn’t used to it. Although I knew the vocabulary in theory, it would still take several seconds for the right words to emerge in my mind when having a conversation with someone.
Unlike the other steps, I don’t think there is any special method that one can use to become good at speaking a new language. This is something you just have to keep doing until your brain gets used to it. It’s a massive advantage if you actually live in the country in question, but this is doable even if you don’t as there are many online services designed around connecting you with native speakers of a particular language. I personally never used them though, so I cannot comment on their efficiency.
Another interesting to mention is that nowadays there are websites that connect LLMs to voice recognition models, allowing you to chat with something like ChatGPT with your voice for the purpose of language learning. I’ve tried one but personally didn’t like the experience as talking to a robot felt completely different from talking to a real person, but if you’d like to try it out, you can easily find them on Google (there are hundreds of websites for this as of writing).
I think the most important part here is to resist the urge to switch to another language when you start to struggle, especially if you live in a country like Sweden where the natives are good at English. (In fact I would say that the hardest thing about learning a language like Swedish is not the language itself, but rather that Swedes are so good at English that they automatically switch to it when they see you struggling with Swedish, making it almost impossible for you to improve!)
Conclusion
Although we can divide the process of learning a new language in logical steps, we’re still talking about a multi-year effort. That’s just how it works, there are no shortcuts. If you struggle with learning a new language, I hope this post was able to teach you something new that can help you in your journey!