Learning a New Language
A quasi-successful attempt to create a framework
As some of you may know, English is not my native language. I can safely say I never studied it at school, even though there were occasional lessons, then never touched it until I turned 24. Last year, I passed IELTS without preparation and scored 8.0 which maps approximately to the edge between C1 and C2 levels. If not for my negligence of the written assignment’s required structure, I would have scored even higher.
How I started learning English is a completely different story, the only fact I’m letting slip is that it started with a video game (namely Fallout 2). Now, if you’re a parent and reading this post, please keep in mind that your kids may get useful skills out of their gaming hours: English is not the only thing I learned while traveling fictional worlds. But let’s get back to our sheep.
During my school days, I learned French (though sadly I wasn’t goal-oriented then so I don’t know it) and over the course of my adult life, I’ve dug into several languages, just out of curiosity, without serious intention to speak those. The longest exposure so far I’ve had to: Chinese, Serbian, Japanese, and Hebrew. There were a couple of attempts to look into German and Polish, and I read a bit about a dozen less popular languages, but those were not actual studies so let it slide.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about generalizing my experience and creating a method for anybody to pick up a language in the shortest time possible. I cannot say I’ve come up with any finalized structure, but only because I decided to abandon that pursuit. The simplest (and also the hardest) way to learn a language is to get to reading books as quickly as possible and then leverage that ability to reach proficiency. Nothing else is as efficient as that. I write this with certainty since I’ve interviewed many people who have mastered several (up to eight!) languages, and not a single one of them has spent much time on language schools or boring grammar exercises (although they’ve done a lot of chatting with native speakers both in spoken and written forms). I’ve also conversed on the topic with several teachers of English, and while some of them were reluctant about the idea, most supported it wholeheartedly.
I maintain that reading is the cornerstone of learning a language, mostly because of the two factors. First, text is structured stricter than everyday speech which lets you infer all the rules without tediously learning them. Second, when you read you can go at your own pace, reiterate on parts that are hard, and skim across those that are easy. Finally, reading may be intrinsically interesting because of the plot in a book you’ve picked—and trust me, you’ll need every scrap of motivation you can muster.
Alas, there’s no complete framework but there are still pieces of advice I can offer to those of you who haven’t yet gotten to the reading stage of your language acquisition quest. The main tip is to find the minimum viable set of syntactic structures you are comfortable with and proceed from there. You don’t have to cover a whole grammar textbook, just find some anchors—basic fragments you can easily orient yourself around. Learn parts of speech: it’s better if you know how to distinguish verbs, nouns, and adjectives from each other. Then grasp a couple of prepositions and a handful of numerals. And there you are, parsing simple texts with the help of a dictionary!
When you start picking words to memorize, don’t go for the common strategy that is present in textbooks and language schools. They try to widen your vocabulary upfront because no one expects you to read dozens of books. Instead of learning shopping words, crime scene words, or hospital words, aim for the most frequent words and the most useful service words. That is, go for higher abstraction. Here’s the list of the 1000 most frequent English words from Wiktionary. Basically, the word for “thing” is more practical than the word for “apple” and the word for “find” is more applicable than the word for “investigate.”
Replace your bilingual dictionary with a common one as soon as possible. The ones for English are, for example, Merriam-Webster or Cambridge. When you look up direct translations of a word, your brain doesn’t internalize the meaning but instead turns that word into a hollow label pointing to your native language word. When you read an explanation of a word, you connect it much more strongly to your internal graph of words and their respective meanings.
A follow-up to that is you’d better never use tap-on-the-word translation. Tapping on words is so simple it doesn’t make you suffer, and so your brain doesn’t get enough incentive to memorize anything. It’s always easier to tap again rather than store and retrieve new information. That’s why it’s best for you to use paper books or readers without a touch screen. Another point for paper books is that you can often buy used copies for pennies and then pass them along to other students (I assume you get into a community of learners by then).
If you don’t understand something specific in the book you’re reading or just want to talk to someone, you can always turn to ChatGPT for help. It definitely works better for some languages (popular ones) than others. It’s a cool assistant from the future you can employ. As of the moment I write this, you can even use it for free!
My last tip for you is to cut the time you spend in Duolingo in favor of reading books. Language apps may be addictive but they have little practical value because most exercises exist in a very limited context of one or two sentences. Real language is a vast landscape, and you should learn to navigate it from day one.
If you like or endorse my advice, you may want to support my project, Architect of Thought. It’s tangentially related to many aspects of education, including language learning. It’s under development at the moment and it will benefit greatly from your support.
For history, I'm pinning gobborg's post that was written in response to this post of mine. It shares a great perspective on learning languages, and I encourage you to read it!
https://www.archox.net/Real/projects/writing/phillang.html
Generally good advice, and I mostly agree with you.
I'll add:
Reading books is good because you can choose your medium. You needn't even start with novels- comics, short stories, et cetera will do. Nonetheless, reading is good. I advocate consuming any and all media in the target language. You don't need to understand it 100%. Start with a children's picture book.
Throughout your daily life, try to think of how you would narrate in the target language what you're doing. This is a great opportunity to build some vocabulary- when you encounter that you don't know a word, look it up. I recommend also writing it down. I've kept a pocket-sized notebook where I noted direct translations of words, and when I had a spare minute here and there, I would flip through the notebook and review it. Phil's advice to use a dictionary of the target language is also very good because it forces your brain to use (and add more) target language nodes.
When we learn a second language, it's natural to start by direct translation, one:one mappings of words, but this is only sustainable for so long. We're using heuristics, cheats. However, the more languages you know, the more nodes exist in your mind to map, and this facilitates continued language acquisition.
I also find it helpful, when making notes such as in the aforementioned notebook, to write the translations in my nonnative language, bypassing the native language heuristic, but still using heuristics. This reinforces the neural network of languages. Take for example, "a ball," as in the object, the noun, the round thing that is used in sports and as a toy. When learning target languages, it is more effective to map the new word to the object instead of the translation, the same way as you map the word to the object in your native language. You're then achieving a many:one mapping.
I find it helpful to think back to how I acquired my first language: when I consumed media then, I didn't know every word, but context allowed me to pick up a lot of meaning. If I really didn't know, I inquired. When I learned my 6th language at 17, I struggled a bit at first because I was trying to directly map everything. Once I decided to pretend like I was learning language for the first time and lacked heuristics, things were easier.
Lastly: mistakes make memories.