Language-learning and learning in general
Disclaimer: this is just what works for me
Hi,
I’ve been meaning to start actually using my Substack, and am in Romania and can’t sleep, so here we are.
To kick things off, I thought I would share a few thoughts on how I go about learning things. Languages are what people tend to be the most curious about, so I’ll focus on that.
Anyone can learn a foreign language
I truly believe this.
Many continental Europeans speak excellent English as a second language but fail in their attempts to learn a third one. Did they suddenly get bad at language-learning? No, their circumstances were just different. With this third language, such people often suddenly find themselves in the position of most anglophones trying to learn a second one: they’d like to, but no-one’s making them. I’ve never met someone with a true long-term pragmatic necessity to learn a language who didn’t eventually pick it up. If your environment isn’t pushing you to acquire your target language (certainly Berlin doesn’t re: German) then you’ll need to push yourself, but that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to monolingual life.
If you want to prove me wrong, go ahead and spend hundreds of hours giving a foreign language your undivided attention. Track and document those hours; don’t rely on a vague sense that you’ve been doing a lot. If you, as a native English speaker, spend (let’s say) 600 precisely accounted hours studying a Germanic or Romance language, concentrating fully throughout this time, using methods that are not completely ridiculous, and you are still unable to hold a conversation, then and only then will I believe you can’t do it.
Boredom is a sign that something is wrong
The first question I ask myself when I’m bored: is this currently too hard for me or too easy? The second: would movement help? For reasons mysterious to me (it’s not mysterious, it’s ADHD) I can only listen properly to audio in any language when simultaneously doing something with my body. Even when I watch things online, I play Tetris on the side. As a child, I felt a hurt and frustration I couldn’t explain at the time when teachers scolded me for doodling in class. Now I know why: I was doodling in order to pay attention, and when I was made to stop, I took nothing in.
We’re taught as children that boredom is a mark of bad character, to be overcome through morally berating oneself. Then, as adults, we have perniciously easy access to countless mainlineable solutions. Neither of these reflexes – call yourself a bad person for being bored or reach for your dopamine-brick – invites curiosity as to what is causing the boredom.
If I’m bored, it’s because I’m not learning effectively. I don’t scold myself. Rather, I take boredom as a signal that my current methods need adjustment. If I’d missed the boredom signal, I’d have continued wasting my time doing things that don’t work. So thank God for boredom.
I don’t know if talent exists but I also don’t care
I only care about factors that change how I would act. If talent were an important factor in language-learning, my response would be to spend as much time as it takes me, personally, to achieve my goals. If talent were unimportant, my response would still be to spend as much time as it takes me, personally, to achieve my goals. It’s therefore a waste of time wondering if I’m talented.
There are certain qualities you can’t instantly change about yourself that impact your ability to learn languages: memory, concentration, perceptiveness, pattern-spotting, tolerance for ambiguity (you will start catching the gist much sooner if you don’t have an existential crisis at the first unfamiliar word), confidence (the number one reason people switch to English isn’t your pronunciation; it’s that you don’t seem comfortable in the language).
But all these traits can be cultivated. Language-learning is a good way to do just that. I feel mentally sharper on all fronts when I’ve been keeping my languages up.
It doesn’t really matter what you do
I’ve experimented with many different approaches to language-learning. I do not find a substantial difference in results. At this point, once I know how similar or different a language is to other languages I already speak, I can reliably predict where I’ll be after a given amount of time – whichever methods I end up using. So I just do whatever I’ll enjoy. For me, that’s usually reading.
Switch to native-speaker media ASAP
Even before you can understand media intended for native speakers, it’s good to have it in the mix. Learning German, I started listening to Spiegel podcasts while I was still learning basic vocabulary. I understood hardly anything, but it helped me get used to the rhythm and intonation of everyday speech, and because the words I was studying were common, they were bound to pop up now and then amidst the gibberish. It made me happy when they did, like recognising a friend in a crowd, which motivated me to keep powering through those word lists.
I still can’t fool native speakers for longer than a sentence or two, but my accent in German is relatively light. I think that’s because I was listening to real German from the get-go. My Italian accent is heavier because I mostly learned from reading, though I’m finding it improves the more I speak. Italians are such infectiously good conversationalists that you really can’t help mimicking them.
Once I can even vaguely follow normal media in the target language, I stop consuming anything else – no learner podcasts, no textbooks. I like to get the real deal so that I won’t be shell-shocked when I encounter native speakers in the wild. Even when I look up grammar, I do it through the language; reading about the rules in the language helps me think more fluently when I’m actually applying them.
No organic* language is intrinsically easier or harder
Rather, the factors are: a) level of difference from languages you already speak and b) availability of resources and opportunities to practise.
This is why many people mistakenly believe that Italian is orders of magnitude easier than French. It’s not! On the receptive end, both languages have a relatively transparent phonetic system, i.e. you can accurately tell how to pronounce most words once you’ve learned the rules. (English could never.) On the productive end, French spelling is harder – there are more conceivable ways to transcribe a given sound – but on the other hand, Italian still requires you to learn the imperfect subjunctive for everyday conversations, while French has largely dropped it. For an English native speaker, there’s somewhat more lexical overlap with French than Italian; someone who’s never studied either language will have an easier time getting the gist of a French newspaper article than an Italian one.
The real reason people think Italian is much easier to learn is that they usually studied French first. (I am discounting the opinions of people who only speak one of them and native speakers of either; it’s obvious why the first group don’t have enough information to comment, and native speakers have no real idea what it’s like to learn their own language non-natively.) They underestimate how much their French is helping their Italian, and conclude that Italian is a walk in the park.
Cultural attitudes to mistakes also come into it. You’re more aware of your errors in French for the simple reason that people tell you. Not all French people correct you, and not all Italians let it slide, but it is statistically likelier that when you make a mistake, a French person will point it out. (Source: entirely my anecdotal experience. Take it or leave it!)
*Constructed languages are theoretically easier because they have fewer grammatical exceptions, idioms etc., but Esperanto (for instance) is heavily biased in favour of Europeans.
How the autism comes into it
When I was about to take my seat on a flight to Romania (where I am now typing this), the man in the middle pointed to the aisle and window ones on either side of him. I had no idea what he was trying to communicate. 'Welche?' he said, and then I understood: which seat is yours? German and body language are both second languages to me, but apparently my German is better.
This happens to me in English all the time. In a loud, crowded space, someone nudges me and points to the bar; only once they've yelled it into my ear three times do I understand that they're offering to buy me a drink. They do a weird mime, flourishing their hands out from their waist — and eventually it emerges that my trench belt was falling out and they, for some reason, believed that gesturing towards imaginary loops on their non-existent coat would convey this to me. It doesn't! Use your words!
Certain aspects of language-learning will always be harder for me. Faces and hands help me very little in parsing what's being said. (‘And yet she loves Italian!’ I hear you say.) I need to understand a higher percentage of the words to grasp the message, not only because I can't fill in very well with body language, but because I am instinctively punctilious and will want to unpack anything that hasn't immediately sunk in. But these factors only hinder me from speaking badly; later, they help me speak well. Simple exchanges are less immediately accessible, but the need to dissect and attention to detail enable deeper conversations in the long run.
My monomaniacal focus on the verbal elements of communication brings me endless joy in life. I'll accept the occasional cost of embarrassment over seats.
Why do I do it?
I’m very unhappy if there’s nothing I’m actively trying to learn/improve. Actually, I need a whole slate of things – languages, music, art, some kind of sport. (‘Sport’ in the German sense of ‘structured/organised physical exercise’; I am not one of life’s team players.) So I have no idea how to respond when people tell me they want to learn a language but can’t make themselves do it. Why are they asking me? I am literally medically diagnosed as uncommonly bad at making myself do things. Willpower is a last resort that I only use sparingly, because I have maybe twenty minutes of it available to me per day and eight of those go on my dental routine. (Doing all my dentistry through German has been very good for my teeth. I don’t want to be scolded in German of all languages, so it makes me that bit more meticulous.)
The only reason I ever manage to be productive is that I am intense. ‘Raves until 7am without needing stimulants’ intense. ‘Wins nearly every spin class’ intense. ‘Deliberately chooses the time slots with the stiffest competition so these victories will be all the sweeter’ intense. (My brother once texted me: ‘I am obsessed with you unexpectedly becoming the [G]oliath of this spin class’. I replied: ‘Why is this unexpected/Is this not exactly the sort of insane I am’. ‘[H]onestly fair my apologies’, he conceded.)
So I have no idea what to do for people who aren’t me. (A surprising proportion of the world’s population is not.) But that’s how I go about learning things, should it interest you.
– N.