Learning languages as a personal journey of discovery

Learning a language should be pleasant, not some external or self-imposed torture. The good news is that you are still in control of how you go about learning a language, whether you are moving to another country soon or simply concocted an imaginary intellectual date with an author of the 18th century in Italian. Maybe it’s only about communicating more effectively in meetings or on your next trip to South America.

In this article, instead of throwing around a myriad of perfect tips and a longer-than-life list of tools or videos, I’ll take another perspective. I’ll go into how making language learning a personal journey of discovery may help you. Sure, you’ll also find some of the habits that helped me and others, because they do serve a purpose, but above all, you’ll find a personal challenge of growth.

As a storytelling enthusiast, the cosmos wants me to tell you a story first, that of Johnny the sausage dog. You’ll have to read until the end to know how he fares, though. Johnny is a fine piece of existence. He is light brownish, delicately oblong and ill-tempered. He speaks English with a calm British accent and reads the paper every now and then, especially after he goes for his morning walk. He received his dogtorate (no misspelling, sorry) in fine arts and then decided to conquer the world with his talent. He had learned Latin at Oxford, as well as Middle German in Cambridge. Unfortunately for Johnny the sausage dog, when visiting Italy, Germany and the Basque country, he was paw-slapped in the nose many a time for his “ridiculous accent” in modern Italian, German and Euskera. We’ll come back to Johnny.

Following a TechCruch Japan article from 2017, the world estimate of language learners was about 1.2 billion, yet we know that many of those attempts eventually hit a wall. When you check Google Trends for the US and the UK using the search string “learn a new language”, you notice that the start of the year is powerful with wishes, which eventually die off in the summer and resurface as the winter knocks on the door. In some places, it’s not about the summer or the winter: it’s simply hard to keep going. It’s natural that we cannot check everything on out interminable lists of ambitions, so it is actually ok if you did not manage to learn that chunk of fine Spanish, cool Greek or interesting Turkish in the past.

I also failed with some of my own target languages. Chinese was a full failure, Hebrew simply did not get past a basic understanding, and Dutch never really took off. I learned my other eight languages until reaching something I would call “the personal apex” when I was 25, but then I never learned a new one; I simply tried to keep the ones I had and found peace with myself. It wasn’t about the number, and one of my languages (Russian) kept losing grounds in my head; it was more about what they were doing there. Why had I learned them in the first place? To read books in the original version, to listen to music and understand the lyrics, and to speak to others in their own language. I never did it to please anyone nor to impress people (that is one thing that makes no sense, regardless of the activity).

That was pretty much it. I never did it for a job – although it may sound surprising, a job or a business venture never arrived because of languages in my life. That should never be the point. The essential goal relates much more to your own imagined personal journey in life. Where do languages fit your own dreams? If your target (here is a true story from a student of mine) is to flee a country where freedom practically doesn’t exist and women are not respected and mastering a language is one big chunk of your ticket to freedom, then it is part of that personal journey, and you will find one of the many ways to structure your learning, as long as you focus on the goal, no exceptions, night and day.

It’s not the side dish that will satisfy you at the favorite restaurant, unless you picked the wrong venue and have to settle for the side dish in frustration. If you’re luckier than my student and, say, you’re obsessed with visiting vineyards and fine wineries in the South of France and cannot sleep without thinking about how Reblochon and other cheeses are married to those wines you love, then yes, it surely makes sense to enrich your life with French. But don’t be that other student of mine who came into my French class one day and told me: “I’m here because my parents sent me, and I hate this language”. Yet it wasn’t her fault either. What if she had had fun learning Japanese? Who knows, or taking piano lessons, learning the much more complex language of music? At least give it a go and decide whether you’re up for it. If you have pressure from your parents or someone else, show them an alternative. I won’t learn Chinese because I simply don’t like it, but I am really happy starting out now with Icelandic.

Before getting into some of the healthy and happy habits that might help boost your consistency when learning a language, allow me to bring in a personal example. I started learning German when I was 15 due to pure curiosity. I wanted to understand what Nena was saying in her 99 Luftballons. Sure, I could have downloaded the lyrics and mumbled something to keep that routine going. Except I grew even more curious and started obsessing with other songs, then with documentaries about World War 2, Schiller’s An die Freude (the Ode to Joy), Goethe’s Werther and a couple of movies that I wished to understand in their original version. Yet that’s not the interesting part. What moved me was someone bullying me when I tried to mutter something in German for the first time. I tried saying something about the weather, and a friend from the German school made fun of me. But she went further: “you’ll never speak German properly, just stop making a fool of yourself”. One cannot gratify those who block us, as they become potential thieves of opportunities. And the latter does make a difference in life, especially when you do not depend on others to have opportunities. It’s not about revenge either, but simply about treading through your own life sentry without doing so for the purpose of mimicking others. When I had a book published in German in my hands and defended my PhD in German, life was already smiling back.

Now that we’ve seen languages as a personal journey, let’s see a couple of ideas that can help you achieve more consistency. Remember, it’s more about consistency, like sports, than it is about artificial and forced motivation. Some of these hacks come from the experience of some of my friends and my own, some of which are members of the International Hyperpolyglot Association (HYPIA).

1. It shouldn’t be about speed

Let us go back to the TechCrunch article. One of the ideas I liked comes about when the author sees learning a language like losing weight. You can’t just lose weight overnight in a healthy way and keep the balance going. In my case, I have been in both situations. When I was 15, I spoke two languages and some years after that, I was about 40 pounds’ overweight after coming back from the US, with all the high-school bullying and idiocy that comes in that cruel age. Both processes, i.e. learning languages and losing weight happened in the form of finding fun in activities that would lead to that. It wasn’t doing these things for the sake of themselves, but more about practicing new sports that would strengthen the body and the mind, while having fun understanding music in other languages. It’s a lot cooler to sing along in Portuguese when you actually understand what Vinicius de Moraes or Tom Jobim are saying. It’s that same feeling when you’re listening to Compay Segundo and Lorenzo Hierrezuelo in Spanish, imagining the scenery in Cuba in the 1940s, before the country was desolated and some of my ancestors were kicked out for their religious beliefs. So, it’s about experiencing the language at your own pace.

2. It’s not about perfection

Learning languages cannot be about torturing ourselves and aiming for that lovely inexistent perfection: “I will speak more once I speak well”. Languages are very much about imperfection; they live on it, and this implies a very powerful issue: they are alive and they change all the time. Let me tell you a story on this one. James Murray, a beardy savant from Scotland, knew much, very much about languages. His life-project became the first Oxford English Dictionary, a titanic process that even his eleven kids helped him with [1]. Better yet, even an American convict sitting in a sanatorium helped him out, until he could come up with all the formal definitions and origins of words in the English language. Something curious is that even after publishing it, he grew a bit frustrated for leaving out words, but he couldn’t help it. The language would always be ahead of him, not to speak of all the load of expressions that would reshape it with future generations. Even James Murray could not aspire to know perfection in that same language whose authority he became. Languages and perfection are impossible.

Now, when it comes to learning, the more mistakes you make along the way, the better it is for the process. But you must use those mistakes to your benefit, not simply ignore them when you know the correct way. If a native speaker helps you pronounce a word in a way that sounds closer to the benchmark you’ve chosen, practice it all you can, don’t just say “ok, thanks”, because our fish memories will take care of deleting any reminiscence. So make those mistakes without any fear, but use them once you know why they are a mistake. To be fair, there is a load of responsibility on language teachers or friends on how learners are corrected. If they do this with a martial attitude, lifting their spirits up in the hope that they are better that those who learn, they will deal language-learning a massive blow. Discouraging people from learning a language is as evil as it gets. So watch out for those hot-shots and avoid them. They do not deserve to meddle in your process. This is why I am so skeptical of language exams. They’re money-making machines, not instruments that help people learn languages. It’s a gate keeper business and an inevitable product of signaling. But let us leave the 1984-type of exams outside of this discussion.

3. Protect the vaults, no matter how many you have

I call the languages in my head “the vaults”. I literally imagine chambers of the mind where cultural artifacts of those countries and my personal experiences come together. We learn, we retain, we experience and we archive things in our brain in a special place, asking them to come forward when we need them. We do not need to actually live in that country of choice to start learning. It’s as if the Formula 1 driver says he has to train once he’s a pro. But these vaults have to be protected. Don’t be like me. I learned Russian for some time and abandoned it for a very long time. With the current situation, I find it even harder to go back to the language in the same genuine way I did in my early 20s. So protecting the vaults actually means practicing the language somehow. Consider this example from one HYPIA’s members, Matias Barnat, who is also a Sports journalist and systems analyst. Matías says the following:

“My first habit is to watch/listen multimedia and read articles in different languages from different sources, in order to maintain my languages as fresh as possible. At least half an hour a day, I watch TV shows in the languages I speak and/or in the languages I'm learning, I listen to podcasts and music, a lot of chats with friends online, and reading articles. And doing this while connecting with my passion: it really helps. For me, as a sports journalist, I read articles in languages like Greek, Turkish or Hebrew about basketball players and teams which forces me to learn more words in those languages while I'm doing something I love. So, connecting your passions with the languages you study is fundamental”.

Remember, protect those vaults. Fill them up with life and memories through healthy habits.

4. Get some outer constraints in the process

You’re probably familiar with the marshmallow experiment. If not, here’s a mini summary. Experimenters gave a group of kids a marshmallow but promised them another one if they waited some time without eating the first one. Some gave in and took a bite, others waited. It’s a matter of self-control. Better yet, to use the psychological jargon related to the original study, it’s about “ego depletion”. Roy Baumeister, an American (social) psychologist who has advanced this topic for decades, concludes that the “self’s capacity for active volition is limited” [2]. In other words, our will to resist to temptation may well be like a muscle. We cannot abuse it, otherwise we’ll harm it and end up worse. So, instead of suffering in front of the chocolate cookies, you don’t buy them and act as if they did not exist. There are many types of outer constraints that help us reduce those temptations. This is what I often teach about in my behavioral economics class, where other experiments that point to the same topic are usually discussed. If someone gives you the deadline, it will be better. Don’t put all the weight on yourself. Now, back to language learning. Having classes with a language teacher gives you structure; his or her having to wait for you in a formal class may help you get a rhythm going, but be very careful, as we will see in the next point, we cannot expect the session to learn the language for you.

5. It’s like sports

As in sports, language learning success is about who does the work. As the pedagogy expert, S. Ahrens writes, you don’t hire a coach at the gym to take the weights off you. Ahrens takes a powerful quote from T. Doyle, who says that “the one who does the work does the learning”. And it makes sense in sports: the one who does practice them will be the strong and healthy one. Juvenal, the Roman poet, reminds us of this in his maxim: "a healthy mind in a healthy body", which makes more sense when you think about a healthy learning process. This aligns with that awful statement I would unleash on my students back in summer language school: the class, the desk and the markers are not going to learn the language for you, so heating up your chair with zero fun and a heavy bill will not do the trick! (to be fair, I would say it in a friendly way). Think about it: meetings don’t solve problems; they’re a simple instrument, an arrangement of people where discussions happen, but they are not the solution itself. By merely showing up, you’ve done part of the job, but not all of it. As you do the job, just like in sports, remember to lift your chin up and actually enjoy the moment.

6. Identify the villains

As in the lovely art of storytelling, there’s the good guy and the bad guy. Language learning has both. Your good habits are your heroes, but the villains are out there to smack and weaken them, if you allow them to. Skipping and ignoring your good habits, that’s a villain. Procrastinating, that is a master villain; hating the language as a proxy for laziness, sergeant villain. Ignoring corrections or valuable improvements because “I already know”, this is a silent villain that will come back to bite you in the future, and it will take a good bite if you nurture him; taking formal courses and assuming that the learning process only happens there, evil, very evil villain. Unfortunately, a big part of your learning actually happens outside of that very formal class. It’s when you genuinely read a text, play a song and try to repeat it that the mind turns into a learning sponge and absorbs it all. But of course, in some cases, you will need the class to give you structure and explain how things work.

7. Try to live the language as a flow of melodies

There is a lot of focus on the written form. I remember, when I was in college and taught languages in the afternoons and evenings, that many of my students came from the famous academies, whether it was the Alliance Française or Goethe Institut. They could write great letters, yet they could barely speak. They didn’t want to speak at all. That puzzled me and reminds today me of that obsession with “cramming”, or reading and writing over and over again to try to remember things [3]. It may help some, but the question is whether it is sustainable intellectually, i.e. will you retain and process that information so that it serves some noble purpose beyond an exam? I noticed that some blockage does not allow students to make the most of the experience in these institutes, because they are actually very good, their teachers are normally very good, but it may be that other variables come in and hamper the process. One would say, yes, it’s stress (my job, something in the family, falling sick), but the point is that you can express all that in the language, telling the story of why you’re stressed, no matter what level you are in. Languages are a reflection of everyday life, not just of some magical and unreachable moment.

If you are interested in more tips, you can see my interview with HYPIA here. But remember, you craft your own habits and many of those tips that you receive from others do not necessarily fit you. This is perfectly ok. It’s how diversity and originality work. Let’s go back to Johnny now.

Johnny the sausage dog made the aftermath of bullying his true ally. Instead of succumbing to sadness, he smiled and accepted the challenge. “I will learn five new words every time someone makes fun of me (or my sausage dog nature)”. And that he did, until he found a system to record his newly learned words, regardless of how he would pronounce them, in a digital notebook. He would pull them out each night, practice them in sentences where he would mock the other dogs, until he was ready to write in Italian, sing in Germany and swear in Euskera. At a certain point, Johnny forgot about the other dogs. But one night, he has forced to remember them. As he approached the WoofWoofAstoria upon an invitation to give a speech at the Royal Terrier’s Society, he marveled at the two fellows that had insulted him years before. They were pulling out his bags and smiling furtively. A moment of silence ensued. “Worry not, my friends, I would not be here if it were not for you”, he said.

If you are moving into the realm of learning languages, opening your mind to alternate worlds will help you. Recall the fine Seneca, “there was never great genius without a mix of insanity”. Better yet, since we’re talking about other languages, here is the original quote in Latin: “nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit".

Post Scriptum: tell me about your language learning experience on Twitter @ProfErickB

References

[1] For an account on Murray, see Potter, B. (2018). James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, 1879. You may also be interested in the wonderful 2019 movie starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, “The Professor and the Madman”.

[2] Baumeister et al. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (5), 1252-1265.

[3] Doyle, T. & Zakrajsek, T. (2013). The new Science of Learning: how to learn in harmony with your brain. Stylus Publishing.