Since I’ve been writing about languages for a while, I thought it was time I outline my language learning method, and some reasons why I think this has been successful for me.
For background, I am fluent in Spanish (with a B2 certification from the Instituto Cervantes, and I’ve used it to tutor monolingual Spanish students in a local high school) and am conversational in French (see this post). I previously learned tourist Hebrew when I lived in Israel for the summer. Because of my family, I can also understand and speak some Telugu, though my comprehension decreases the more someone speaks “pure”, rather than English influenced Telugu.
There are some general goal-setting techniques that are useful for language learning – in particular, SMART goals are helpful in defining scope (both time, and end result). Also, being disciplined and simply putting the time in for any method is instrumental in finding success. Following an imperfectly method perfectly is better than imperfectly (infrequently) following a perfect method.
With that being said, here are some things I do to find success in my language learning endeavors. I call it a three-prong approach, but they really all feed each other, so it’s more like a cycle or web.
Prong 1 – Anki
I swear by Anki. It’s the most useful software I’ve found for learning languages, and I urge you to try it. The way I use Anki is to make anything I want to learn (a word, a phrase, a grammar rule) into a card.
Anki is a flashcared app that used spaced repetition. When shown a card, you rate how difficult it was to recall it. If it was more difficult, the app shows it to more frequently, and vice versa. The intervals between the card showing up on your daily review gets longer and longer the better you learn the card, to the point where you may see some cards only once every two years. At that point, you basically know the card. On the flip side, it shows you cards that you’re struggling with more often. This is more efficient than normal flashcards, because you’re reviewing cards that you have the most trouble with most often, rather than wasting time with cards you know well.
In particular, I follow Gabriel Wyner’s approach and try to limit my use of English in my flashcards. His blog, as well as his book Fluent Forever, are great explanations of the method I follow (as I learned them from him). I have been cheating lately with the no-English rule – I have resorted to putting full phrases in English and Telugu because it’s far quicker, and I have a limited time to learn a lot of phrases. However, for my French challenge, I practiced French conjugations all in French.
The general approach of his method is that you start with learning the pronunciation of a language. Once you have that down, you focus on the most common common vocab words. I follow his list of 625 words that are fairly easy to represent visually. They include words like “kick” or “boat”. Here’s an example of a card I made for the French word for boat:
The list of 625 words is a great starting point, though it doesn’t work as well for certain languages that are used in cultures vastly different from ours. Wyner used his method on mostly languages spoken in Europe, of the 8 languages he speaks (English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, Hungarian, and Japanese), only one (Japanese) is widely spoken outside Europe. I’m finding the word list to be less useful in learning Telugu, my family’s heritage language. It’s a Dravidian language spoken in South India, and since it’s so different than English both culturally and linguistically, many words on his list do not translate well into Telugu. However, the general approach of learning 500-700 of the most common words in a language is still valuable.
After you work through the list of 625 words (or whatever list of most common words you’re using), he recommends using the same no English approach to learn grammar. The way you do this can be tricky, and might be more straightforward for certain concepts. The way I used it was to read the section of the grammar book I was learning to make sure I understood it. Once I understand vaguely what was happening, I looked at the sample sentences and converted some of them into flashcards. Below is an example Anki card I made to practice the French conditional tense.
Of course, you don’t have to work through a grammar book cover to cover. What I like to do is explore some media or content in the language that I’m interested in. When I come across a grammar concept that is unfamiliar in that content, I try to find it in my grammar book and learn it. I’ll cover native content in a second, but the general gist of the Anki prong of this approach is that you should find a way to Anki-ify anything you want to remember in a foreign language.
Here are some resources for Anki:
FluentForever.com: Using Anki Online
Prong 2 – Content/Interest
This one is the fun one. While looking for words and phrases to learn in Anki, I first find native material (books, blogs, YouTube channels, TV) that I find interesting. For Spanish, it was Spanish music and learning about Latin American history. For French, it was French rap/music and French philosophers.* For Telugu, it’s family and Telugu movies, which I find cheesy but fascinating. Once I’ve found that, I start consuming content in the language. I do this even before I can understand it – I still have subtitles on French and Telugu movies.
The point of consuming content in the language is two-fold. One, is that when you get to a higher level, you can start focusing on vocabulary and constructs that will help you understand the content you’re interested in. Secondly, is that it keeps you interested in the culture and helps remind you that language isn’t a formula in math or a chemistry equation – it’s a tool used by living, breathing people to communicate with each other. By immersing yourself in the culture, you start to learn about it and get yourself on a path to eventually participating in that culture. Plus – it keeps it interesting for you.
For French, I really liked French-Canadian Artist Karim Ouellet (Some songs: L’Amour, La mer à boire, and Karim et le loup), French rap duo Bigflo et Oli (Salope [about a prostitute], Dommage) and OrelSan. For Telugu, I’ve been watching a few YouTube channels made by younger Telugu people. Because they’re younger, it’s more relatable for someone who grew up in the west. Some channels I like are Chai Bisket, VIVA and Mahathalli.
I need to make a distinction between how you consume content for motivation and cultural acclimation purposes, and how you consume content to learn. If you’re just trying to learn more about the culture, or gain familiarity with the music or TV of that country, then it’s perfectly fine to consume the material passively. This means putting on French music in the car, watching a Spanish TV show with subtitles.
However, you won’t necessarily learn a lot of vocabulary or grammar by passively consuming material. If you want to consume content to learn, you need to be actively listening and reading the material. This means, using context clues to tease out meaning and looking up words or constructs that are unfamiliar (and put them in your Anki deck). There’s nothing wrong with watching a Bollywood movie with English subs to learn more about Indian culture, but you’re not going to learn as much from that movie as if you went scene by scene writing down new vocabulary.
*You may have noticed a pattern here. I’m a big fan of music, because it’s fun and enjoyable even if you don’t understand the language.
Prong 3: Speaking and Using
If you add words to your Anki deck and actively consume native material, but never actually use the language, you will never learn to speak it. Let me repeat, you must use (speak in) the language to learn it. There is no way to get around this.
Speaking a foreign language is sometimes uncomfortable. It’s hard. You won’t be able to express yourself as well as you do in your native language (at least not immediately). You might know how to say a phrase perfectly when practicing, but you get nervous while speaking to someone and butcher it. People might try to switch to English (usually because they want to make you feel comfortable, not because they don’t want you to not use their language) instead of speaking your target language, and might not switch back. Speaking in a foreign language can be hard.
For all of those reasons, a lot of people don’t gain fluency in a language because they don’t use it enough. You may think that you’re not ready, or not good enough, or if you just study a little bit more you’ll be “at the point” where you can speak. None of this is true. If you know one word in your target language – you’re ready. If you can produce a sound that a native speaker would understand (maybe it’s not pronounced perfectly), then you’re good enough. You don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be scared of talking to someone in a new language. All you need to do is make the effort.
I read this article years ago when I was first interested in learning foreign languages, and it’s the thing that has stuck with me since then. Language in the real world is not like taking a test, where there is a “right” and “wrong” way to say things. Language is about communication, and 80% of communication is non-verbal anyway. You can absolutely butcher a sentence or phrase in a language, but people will often be able to understand you. Think about all the people you’ve encountered who speak broken English either at home or abroad. They may not be experts in English, and may fail an English test, but they’re actively using and speaking the language to connect with people (English speakers) they wouldn’t connect with otherwise.
I believe this is the biggest thing that has helped me speak the languages I know. I am very insistent on practicing Spanish or French with people. Even when people switch back to English, I politely ask to continue speaking in the language (most of the time, people will). You need to be able to push the edge of your comfort zone to become comfortable in a language, and being uncomfortable pretty often (by using it) is a great way to do that. Of course, there are times where it’s hard to keep speaking in a foreign language, and I don’t want to make it sound like I do this 100% of the time. But I think attempting to do it as much as possible is the key to success.
You really don’t need much of your target language to start using it. When I was in Amritsar, India a few months ago, we had a taxi driver that barely spoke English. Leaving from the airport, I was trying to explain to him that we wanted to go to the hotel first, then eat, and then go to the Wagah border, then to the Golden Temple. The only Hindi I knew was “ke bad” (after), “ab” (now), and “khana” (food). So I explained to him “ab…hotel. khana. hotel ke bad, Wagah. Wagah ke bad, Golden Temple” [now…hotel. Food. After hotel, Wagah. After Wagah, Golden temple]. With a grand total of 3 phrases in Hindi, I was able to explain our entire day’s itinerary to him.
That wasn’t the most fluid or graceful way to say that, but it got the point across and that’s all that matters in the early stages of language learning. It’s incredibly motivating to be able to say words in a language that’s not English, and have someone understand it. Especially when that person wouldn’t have understood you otherwise.
It also has the added benefit of helping you know what areas to focus on. In this case, I know I need to learn how to say “to eat”, as in “go to the hotel to eat.” It provides built in structure to focus you’re learning, and it’s just fun. When you find those areas that you can work on, you can then consult your grammar book or dictionary and put it into Anki.
Bringing it all together
My language learning approach is probably better described as a guerrilla approach. I use various methods (Anki, native material, grammar books, vocabulary lists, speaking) in conjunction to keep things varied enough to be interesting, and diverse enough to cover the shortcomings of any individual method. A more concise way of looking at it might be: learn some stuff, put it in Anki, use it, and repeat. In that way, it’s more of a feedback loop, rather than a three pronged approach.
At the end of the day, there are many methods will get you to fluency. I like my method, because it makes sense to me and works for me. As long as your method is getting you progress, then it’s a good method. At the end of the day, as long as the method gets you to use the language pretty frequently, and learn new things pretty frequently, and is helping you progress, then it’s a good method.
Let me know what you think about this, and what methods or techniques you’ve used before.