Welcome back. If you’re new here, you might want to start with N° 1: Genesis to get a sense of what this publication is about. I’ve also got a few others that tie in with this piece, such as N° 3: Don’t Wait and N° 4: How to Cook.
Today we’re going to talk about learning languages. The bottom line is that learning languages isn’t that difficult per se, it’s just that quite often, people don’t really go about it in an effective way1.
They try and understand it instead of being able to demonstrate it.
They don’t viciously lazer-prioritise Minimum Viable Product, as the business people say2.
I sense eye-rolling already, and possibly some upset people.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of language learning is just dumb donkey-work memorisation and repetitive practice producing sounds until you reach critical velocity.
Action, not intellect3.
I’ll break this down into components, and then below, I’ll offer some tips for conquering these.
Here’s the familiar method that language schools and assessment centres use. The Goethe Institute, DELF/DALF, IELTS, and so on, all divide language learning up like this:
Speaking
Reading
Writing
Listening.
They teach all these things as different skills and test them as separate processes.
And yes, all those things really are the bones of language skills. All these organisations are absolutely right in that regard. But the process of actually LEARNING a language isn’t like that.
The skills you actually need look more like this:
Producing sounds physically. This means training your body (yes, your body, NOT your mind, your actual body) to make unfamiliar noises on command consistently good enough that people who speak the language recognise these noises as words in their language.4
Memorisation of words and patterns. This is most of language learning: a bunch of boring, tedious donkey work. Bash, bash, bash, into the head it goes so you can recite it by rote without thinking. The faster you do this, the faster you will know the language.
Recognition of the written form. Understanding how these sounds translate to the written form of the language, and the written form translates to sounds.
If the language uses the same alphabet or nearly as another language you know, this means merely relearning some of the sounds associated with the shapes. It’s kind of like remembering the right outfit for the right occasion.
If the language uses a different alphabet, this means memorising what those different shapes and shape combinations mean in terms of sounds. This is more like learning what a dress code actually means.
And that’s it.
Do those things, and you will demonstrably and useably learn a language.
If you’re able or prepared to do the worst of the soldiering and donkey work without consideration for how much your brain protests about how boring or embarrassing it is, you can learn a language devastatingly quickly with some practice.
Let’s break the processes down.
Concepts
Metaphorically, your progress kind of works like this:
At the beginning you are going to be like a child drawing pictures of things.
“Look what little Timmy drew”
Yeah, I have no idea wtf that is.
“It’s a giraffe”.
Blimey, could have fooled me, but GREAT, keep AT it until, um, it’s a giraffe to everyone.
Later you will progress to the Albrecht Dürer Rhinocerous Level, where you’ve been told something or had it described enough times where it will start to more than just resemble the real thing, but anyone who’s actually got the real thing will definitely know that you’re not it.
And then you reach the place where you can draw things that are kind of the thing. This level is actually grand.
You don’t have to reach the Joseph Conrad Level of Absurdist Mastery5.
This does pretty much line up with the A, B, C level language assessment systems mostly in use, so I agree with that.
Note that different languages have different thresholds of tolerance for how badly you can abuse their grammar or pronunciation without becoming utterly incoherent.
French tolerates terrible pronunciation much less than German, for example. Get the pronunciation wrong in French and you are incoherent; do that in German and they will probably still be able to make you out.
May God and the old Gods alike help you if you are trying to learn a slavic language and you don’t have slavic blood.
Out of the Gate Winning
Anyways, the absolute first thing you should do, is learn a handful of words, and some very simple phrases. You must feel as though you are winning at least a bit, straightaway.
Here are some good ones to start with:
A simple hello or greeting.
A simple please AND thank you.
A simple goodbye
Say those words out loud over and over until you have them memorised. Find a youtube video to spin back and copy. As many times as it takes.
THEN, use these words every single opportunity you get so that they stay put, even if they are the only words you know.
At this stage, people will know or sense that you don’t know your head from a pumpkin, but they will still appreciate the effort, and probably smile at you, even if moderately condescendingly. If your pronunciation is a mess, they’ll probably correct it for you. Say thank you to them in their language again. Imagine the thick skin of the rhino.
Your next step from here will be to memorise some slightly more complex things to add to the arsenol:
I’m learning to speak [language].
How do you say _______ in [the language you are learning]?
What is _______ called in [the language you are learning]?
See you soon!
Surprisingly, you will likely find that if you can explain that you are learning someone’s language, they will be vastly more patient with you being terrible at it, which will make everything that follows much nicer and easier for you.
The final step in this basic stage involves learning the following things:
How to order something in a shop or restaurant. “I would like (here you can point if you don’t know the word) please”
Something like introducing yourself, et cetera. “I’m ______” or “my name is _____”.
On to the actual skillsets involved.
Pronouncing Sounds Physically
Most of the actual work of this involves basically getting over your own silliness while making a bunch of silly noises.
Read that again, because that’s the magic here.
Your body simply must mess about a bunch until it learns the shapes and muscle control to get it to make the sounds that other people will recognise as you making the world for a kind of food, or telling them they are pretty. You can experiment by making silly faces, or moving your mouth and lips and tongue and jaw about while making sounds.
NOTE For those who who are shy
Some people will struggle more than others with being comfortable with this silliness, especially around other people. And that is ok, but not strictly a language-learning issue. It will hold you back, but it is beyond the scope of this article to address directly6.
The only real secret is to embrace silliness and lean into the humiliation.
There is no way to skip it, none.
Take it like an adult, or embrace it like a child. Do it in private to remove self-consciousness and make this much easier.
If you are struggling to make a particular sound, read a bit about how the bits of your face are supposed to be shaped, find some pictures, or go on youtube7. But don’t read too much.
Get back to making sounds asap.
I would suggest trying to learn the alphabet with a youtube video. Search for ‘how to say the alphabet in [the language you are learning]’ and you will almost certainly find some helpful person who you can copy and who will help.
Memorisation: how to stick the unsticky things
This is donkey work. We march, and we repeat out loud, and we do it again and again and again.
It’s boring, and tedious, and the good news is that there isn’t much magic to it as far as I’m concerned. In fact, the more you can embrace the feeling of being ordered about by yourself, the easier this will be.
There is, however, a BIG secret.
If you focus on mastering small, contained sections of information before adding to them, this builds quicker than trying to amass larger parts over longer periods of time. Read that again too, please.
You WILL forget at first, but the second time you re-memorise it will be faster. And the whole process strengthens and speeds up in your head after you do it enough, and faster than you might think.
Take a small bit of text, say it aloud ten to twenty times, before adding a small piece to it, and then say the whole thing out loud ten to twenty times.
Still not sticking? Say it aloud fifty times before adding more. Do it again tomorrow.
The absolutely terrific news about this is that it really doesn’t take very long to say something out loud fifty, or one hundred, or even two hundred times. The focus is important though, and it will probably be harder for you to stay focussed on something boring than it will be to find the less than five minutes this excercise actually takes.
Here is an example spelt out:
You will need to be able to say the numbers in the language you are learning. Rather than reading and trying to memorise 1-20, start with 1-5.
Get a bit of paper and a pencil or pen you like, find someone on youtube who will say the numbers with the words on the screen, and go through 1-5, saying the numbers out loud, and write them down (while pausing and unpausing the video) on the paper one by one while saying them.
Then, repeat them in order out loud over and over again. Pause the video and repeat out loud as many times with your notes in front of you as you like. I promise, the person in the video will not notice or mind how many times you do this, which is great news for everyone.
If you’re struggling even with this, start with just the first number and repeat it aloud five to ten times on its own before moving on to the next one. Then say one and two in the language out loud, and repeat both twenty times.
Once you can confidently say one through five out loud, walk around the room doing this8. Then start learning 5-10, and repeat those aloud. Intermittently go back and repeat 1-5 before going back to 5-10.
Then learn how the number system works, such that you know all the bigger numbers and can count to one hundred. Then count to one hundred five or ten times in a row. Bored yet? Keep at it, because all of this will hammer 1-9 home pretty good pretty fast.
This system can be adapted for all required memorisation that will follow.
I recommend starting with any of the following:
Counting from one to a hundred
The days of the week
Months of the year
The words ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, and ‘tomorrow’
Then move on to the verb ‘to be’ and memorise all the forms of that.
I am, you are, he/she/it is, and so forth. Keep walking in circles around the room to make your body work with your brain.
After you can do that inside and out, and have been doing it for a few weeks, then you can add some other verbs.
I’d recommend the modal verbs, as the ones that express need or possibility are called:
Would like to
Can
Must
Should
Could
May
Might
And so on.
Recognition of the written form
More memorisation.
What noise does each letter make? Does that sound change if it’s in a different context? For example, Italian and Polish both turn ‘c’ into a ‘ch’ sound if it’s followed by an ‘i’.
Why? Who cares. Accept and move on.
Accepting and moving on are enormously powerful language learning skills.
This is the soldiering part of language learning.
“But why are there different genders, and why is this word changing in a way it doesn’t in my language when used to ask for something or if I’m a man or a woman?”
Repeat after me: Who cares? I do what I’m told to.
Living Language
The final, most beautiful, and certainly most important part of all this is that you need to start using the language as much and often as possible. This is because if you don’t get a feel for how language is actually used in real life, you will be drawing Dürer’s Rhinocervs [sic] all the time, and real people will correct and balance your understanding of everyday useage all by themselves.
Additionally, there is the issue of cultural useage. Many languages use phrases that you would never hear in your own if translated perfectly.
When has an English waitor ever come up to you and said ‘tell me’. This happens all the time in France and Italy, for example. (Dites-moi, and dimmi, respectively).
This is what tends to stump people, the disconnect between academic exercise, and reality.
Here is where a class, or a community centre, or some kind of meetup will be invaluable.
OR
You can find someone beautiful of the bits-between-legs-variety that you prefer who speaks mostly the language you are learning, and you can talk to them, in the best case scenario in a state of semi or complete undress. This is in all honesty probably the fastest method.
OR
Probably the loveliest way to learn a language is to just go to a place where the language is the Common Tongue and relentlessly use it, at whatever level of badness your competence is, and keep soldiering away at it in restaurants and shops and by the sea, if applicable9.
Go for a week here and there. Go for several months. Take day trips. WHATEVER you can pull off.
It’s incredibly how fast you can progress once you have some basics down, learning nothing more than a few words per day, which you then use, because those words are going to be the words that you need to communicate at that moment, and will naturally arrive in the order of greatest importance into your life.
Now go forth and be patient with yourself as you find out how long you can stretch out being bad at speaking a new language while actually speaking it.
I promise it won’t be that long.
So much of official, course-based language learning is essentially just hand-holding and spoon-feeding, which – like gym classes and all manner of other things – can be helpful if you like or need external motivation. There is no shame in this whatsoever. However, you still have to actually do the work. Showing up is not enough.
We all know or have met that guy who has ‘played guitar’ for 15 years but miraculously still cannot lead a sing-along of Yellow Submarine.
Try to allow yourself to stop fixating on trying to understand the grammar.
It doesn’t matter whether you learn how to identify the subject or the object or know what the gender is or what case is occurring as long as you know that in this kind of situation, or with this or that word, this thing happens. Understanding is for philologists and linguists, not people wanting to order dinner in Italy or Japan. Kids don’t know any of this stuff, and they manage just fine.
Note that the process of listening to and repeating sounds until they reach that minimum threshold of good enough is already your ‘listening’ component covered.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-English novelist who wasn’t even fluent in English until his mid twenties. He is now regarded as one of the greatest writers the English language has ever seen.
N.B. Some people, for any one of a variety of perfectly understandable reasons, are uncomfortable with these sorts of mistakes, or even in speaking to strangers publicly. I have some thoughts on this as well, but it deserves a whole article, as it’s not strictly a language learning issue, but a personal development challenge. I may suffer with this less than some, but if that is so, it is only because I endured years of punishment which I brought upon myself when I was younger. It’s still not easy. Somehow I manage to get over my embarrassment or fear anyways, and however you get there doesn’t matter, as long as you get there. I understand that this may be the very cornerstone of the whole project of learning languages. I will think about what might be helpful for someone with this obstacle to try.
An ex-girlfriend once got me to touch her tongue to learn how to make a particular ‘r’ sound. This helped a lot. In fact, people you are attracted to who speak their language and not much of yours can be the best way to get motivated to learn a language.
Solvitur Ambulando, or ‘it is solved by walking’, as the Romans used to say.
To be honest, I have been all over the world, but have spent most of my time aiming at places Near The Sea, which I suppose the title of this publication should make little secret of. It’s always best and safest to be Near The Sea, if you ask me.