Benno Lang

How to learn a language

As someone who's very interested in languages and language learning, people often ask me for tips on how to learn a language. The secret is simple:

Put in the work, learn daily, and don't stop learning.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk! ;) Beyond that, this article is an attempt to distill what I've learnt and what I hope will be helpful for people wanting to or starting to learn a language.

Why do you want to learn a language?

I'm assuming that you've already chosen the language that you want to learn or have begun learning. Sometimes people ask "what language should I learn?", which is not a question that this article aims to answer. But there are usually a few common reasons for learning a language.

Many people learn languages for travel. For instance, you get a much better experience as a Spanish-speaking tourist in Spain, and much of the Americas. Others learn because knowing the language improves their relationships with family, friends, or their significant other. It's also beneficial to learn the language(s) spoken in the country or region where you live, or want to live. By learning a language you can have access to interesting content in its original (or possibly only) language, such as literature, movies, and music. It's somewhat common for people to learn languages for religious or ideological purposes. For example, to better understand the Bible people might learn Biblical Greek and Hebrew, and likewise Classical Arabic for the Quran. It was common for people in communist countries to learn Russian, and people interested in mutual understanding to foster peace often turn to Esperanto. Many people learn another language because it helps them to get a higher paying job, and some people learn because they're interested in the culture of its speakers, or to get in touch with their own cultural heritage. Some or many of these reasons may apply to you, and it's good to keep your reasons in mind as you go through your learning.

If none of those reasons particular stand out and you just want to try learning something, you might like to start with Esperanto, as it's the easiest language for English speakers to learn, and will enable you to talk to people from all kinds of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

How long does it take to learn a language?

If you've decided that you want to learn a language, you might be tempted by the titles of various books and websites such as "French in 30 days". Don't be fooled. Language learning is a rewarding activity, but it takes a lot of time and effort. How much time? The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State provides estimates on how long it takes English speakers to learn languages (to "professional working proficiency"), grouped by difficulty, ranging from 600-750 hours for languages similar to English, such as French and Dutch, to 2200 hours for "super-hard" languages including Japanese and Arabic.

A common way to look at the progress made in language learning is through the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR), which divides learners into basic, independent, and proficient users, represented by the letters A, B, and C, each divided into two levels, so that a learner at A1 level can use basic words and expressions, whereas a C2 learner is effectively comfortable with any material in the language, and is a fluent speaker. So before answering "how long?", the question for the new learner is, how far do you want to take your learning? For example, the Goethe-Institut (for German) suggests 80-200 hours to achieve A1 level, right up to 1000 hours for C2. On the whole, though, it's better to think of language learning as an ongoing process rather than an activity with a fixed endpoint. After all, people don't generally know every word and expression even in a language they speak natively.

Things to be aware of

There are a few things to take into account that will determine how successful you will be as a language learner. The first is obviously the amount of time that you can put in - as seen above, you'll need a lot of it. If you can only manage an hour once a week, it's going to take more than a year to reach even a beginner level. Ideally you'll want to try and spend 30 minutes every day; more on days when you can afford the time. Setting a bare minimum goal of 1 minute a day is a good habit to form, as once you get started you'll likely spend much longer. Lowering the hurdle is an important step, especially if you are likely to avoid doing anything at all if you don't have an hour to spare. What you want to avoid is the idea that you don't need habits, and can do all your learning in sporadic cram sessions. Learning requires repetition, and if you leave it too long between learning sessions, you can easily forget a lot of what you've learnt, so you need to keep at it very regularly.

People who have never tried learning another language sometimes have the mistaken idea that every language is basically the same, and that you just have to learn the relevant words in the other language. This might seem plausible at the very beginning: if you know "cat" in English, then you just have to remember "chat" in French. But it's important to know that, very often, a word in one language doesn't have an exact match in the other language. Perhaps the meanings are slightly different, or it has to be expressed as a phrase, or there are different meanings associated with the word that end up as two or more different words in the other language - the English word "run" is a good example, having more than 100 different meanings, depending on context. And of course, different languages express the same concept in different ways. "I'm X years old" in English is "(Yo) tengo X años" (I have X years) in Spanish. Occasionally you'll see learners demand a way to express it in the same way as English, to their own detriment. The key thing to remember is that you should expect things to be different, and be open to new ways of expressing familiar sentiments.

There are basically two ways of approaching language learning. One is analytical, wherein the learner closely examines each sentence and tries to get a firm grip on exactly what function each word performs. The other way is intuitive, going with the flow, getting familiar with forms, repeating and experimenting with them. The former method is more often favoured by adults, whereas children learn using the latter approach, at least until they have grammar lessons at school. You will probably need a mixture of both, but try not to get too bogged down in the analytical approach. In a lot of cases, even native speakers can't explain why things are the way they are when it comes to certain grammatical constructions, idioms, and so on. It's usually easier to just memorise them and not really worry about why.

Some good news is that while a language has many, many words, the majority of everyday speech uses relatively few of them. Typically figures such as the following are given: by knowing the most common 1,000 words, you can understand 80% of the language. With the most common 2,000 words, 90%. With 3,000 words, 95%. Obviously the figures are estimates and are different for each language, and what exactly constitutes a word for the purpose of counting must be considered. But think, by learning just 3 words a day, within a year you could be able to recognise 80% of the words used (though obviously it depends on the type of document or discussion you're reading or listening to).

Getting started

There are two opposing views on how best to progress when learning a language. Linguist Stephen Krashen theorised that learning happens through "comprehensible input"; that is, language input such as reading and listening, which is at a relatively comfortable level such that the user can understand most of it or work it out from context. Polyglots such as Steve Kaufmann follow this school of thought and thus encourage lots of reading and listening in the language; Steve runs the website LingQ which provides reading material for this purpose. On the other hand, Benny "the Irish Polyglot" Lewis, who runs the website Fluent in 3 months and has written a book with the same name, recommends "speaking from day one". That is, finding native speakers who can guide you along through conversation. Obviously there's room for these two approaches and others. Personally I prefer the reading approach because it's easy to grab a book and get started, and to find an easier or harder one if it's not at the right level. In my experience, finding a good conversation partner can be a real pain, as you may not share interests, they might not speak your language well or be able to teach well, and you have to schedule times, which can be difficult for busy people with kids, for example. If you can't organise follow-up conversations with the same person or people, you end up meeting new people and going over the same questions again ("where are you from?", "what do you do?", etc.) which isn't particularly helpful (unless that level is your only goal).

The first thing you'll need is some learning material. You can use a book, an app, a website, or join a class. Don't spend too much time worrying about what the best book or app is - trying to find the best or most efficient method usually ends up being counterproductive. Just try a few and see which ones you like best. Examples of popular apps include Duolingo, Lingodeer, Memrise, Busuu, Babbel, Rosetta Stone. Many libraries have textbooks and audio materials available, and some provide access to certain electronic learning tools for free - e.g. many libraries in the US provide access to Mango Languages. For tutoring, individual online lessons can be organised through websites such as italki.

Spaced repetition

Many learners find spaced repetition helpful. "What's that?", you might be wondering. When you learn new information, such as a new word or grammar pattern, your brain has two options: retain it or forget it. The way this normally happens is that the longer you go between learning and recalling that information, the more likely you are to forget it, but with each recall that happens close to the point of forgetting, the likelihood of forgetting over time is less. You can look up the theory of spaced repetition if you want to know more. For practical purposes, all you need to know is this: store new information (letters or characters, words, phrases, grammar structures etc.) in a Spaced Repetition System such as Anki and use it daily in repeated short bursts (e.g. 5 minutes at each meal time). It's basically a digital form of flash cards that will test you often on the things you find hard to remember, and less often on things which are comparatively easy, meaning that eventually you'll remember everything you put into it. You'll want to include as much information as possible (within reason) with each card, for example:

  1. A sound recording of the word, especially if the language isn't phonetic, or you're just getting used to hearing and pronouncing its sounds. A lot of recordings are available from Wiktionary and Forvo.
  2. Grammatical gender. In German, for example, it's best to put the relevant definite article with the noun, e.g. "der Mann" (masculine) vs. "die Frau" (feminine) vs. "das Buch" (neuter).
  3. Context/collocations, e.g. instead of just putting a verb like "lyssnar" (Swedish infinitive for 'listen'), you'll want to include an object and a preposition if one is needed, such as "lyssna på musik" ('to listen to music').

Some people (e.g. Gabriel Wyner in the book "Fluent Forever") recommend avoiding translations and instead using pictures to associate concepts. So instead of having a card that asks for the French word for "cat" (answer: chat), having a picture of a cat. I don't use this method, as I don't like it for three reasons:

  1. I find that finding appropriate pictures can waste a lot of time
  2. I don't like copyright infringement by just grabbing images from e.g. Google Images
  3. For many important words, such as almost any word that's not a concrete noun or simple adjective, there are no easy-to-find picures that can represent them obviously and unambiguously.

I do agree that if you can avoid translations without too much drama, then it's better to do so. What I try to do when I use translations is to make it clear which meanings of the English word are appropriate in the other language, and vice versa.

I would recommend the following approach:

1) If the language has a new alphabet, abjad or syllabary (such as Korean, Arabic, Russian or Kana in Japanese), start by making a deck containing just the letters or characters. On the question side, put the letter/character, and on the answer side, put the sound it makes - you can put a transcription, phonetic approximation, or use the International Phonetic Alphabet if you know it. E.g. in Russian: я → ya. If you can find sound recordings, make sure to include them. For most languages this is a relatively straightforward process and you might only need 20-30 characters, and then you can move on to learning words.

For Chinese characters (such as in Mandarin, Cantonese and Kanji in Japanese), you'll need to do more work. Learning them (hanzi, kanji) is basically an unending process, which is closer to learning the entire vocabulary of a language than to learning an alphabet. So the approach is a bit different.

For Japanese my advice is to learn hiragana first, and then start on kanji. You can start on katakana either straight after learning hiragana, or you can leave it for a while, as long as you don't put off starting to learn kanji. Katakana represent exactly the same sounds as hiragana, so there's no immediate need to learn them for the purposes of understanding the sounds of Japanese. In learning kanji, because each kanji can have several readings (i.e. pronunciations), including on-yomi (Chinese-derived reading) and kun-yomi (native Japanese reading), it's usually best to learn each kanji along with at least one word for each reading of that kanji, with a pronunciation guide for the whole word in hiragana. For example, for the character 大 "big", you'd want to include words such as 大仏 (だいぶつ: a giant Buddha statue, such as the famous one in Kamakura), 大切 (たいせつ: important), and 大きい (おお・きい: big).

For Chinese languages it's basically the same process, although instead of using hiragana, you'll include use pinyin or (as in Taiwan) bopomofo. Thankfully, most characters only have one pronunciation, but you'll need to pay close attention to the tones, and hence sound recordings are particularly important.

2) At the start, use two decks: one which has the language you're learning as the question, and the English translation as the answer, and another that goes the other way. The first deck helps with recognition, which is useful for passive knowledge. The second is for active knowledge. Always practice on the passive deck first, then the active. Use simple words with direct translations. E.g. in Korean: 한국 → Korea. If you're struggling to remember words using simple correlations, you can use mnemonics. For example, the kanji for the word "rest" (休) is made up of two parts: a person and a tree. So you can think of a person leaning against a tree as they have a rest. If you love potatoes (like me), you can imagine a cart of delicious potatoes when you hear "Kartoffel", German for potato.

3) For languages that have verb conjugation, start by learning the infinitive or dictionary form. E.g. in Italian: mangiare → eat. In Spanish: comer → eat. In Japanese (before learning kanji): たべる → eat. Then add a card for each conjugation, specifying the infinitive verb and whatever surrounding information is necessary. E.g.

Io ___ (mangiare) → mangio
これを ___ (たべる) ください → たべて
Ayer yo ___ (comer) → comí

Note that these cards don't have any English, although you can add a hint if you really can't remember what mangiare, comer or たべる means. They also don't specify grammatical terms such as first person, present tense, and so on, as while these are useful for talking about the language, they're not particularly useful when it comes to using it. N.B. the meanings are I eat; please eat this; Yesterday I ate. The subject would usually be left out of the Italian and Spanish sentences, but it's included on the cards as it's necessary information to determine which conjugation is being requested.

4) The same applies for other kinds of inflection, such as for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. E.g. in German:

mit ___ (ich) → mir

This means "with me" and is in the dative case, but as with verbs, I think it's better to present real uses instead of asking for the dative case of "ich".

5) Once you've learnt enough basic vocabulary, you can use sentences instead of translations. You can use dictionary-style definitions, e.g. in Esperanto:
besto kun 8 kruroj, kiu manĝas muŝojn → araneo (an animal with 8 legs that eats flies → spider).

You can also use example sentences with a missing word (it has to be obvious enough from context):
Iri per aŭto estas pli ___ ol per marŝado → rapide (it's ___ to go by car than by walking → faster).

How do you find the material to put together your flashcards? Start with the textbook/app/course that you're using to learn the language, and then branch out into reading and writing, listening and speaking. These are the four core skills that every learner needs to work on, although you don't need to work on all of them at once. I'd start out with reading and listening.

Reading

In my view, reading is of crucial importance in language learning. When reading, you can go as slowly as you like, and look back and forward through each sentence to work out what's going on, and you can always look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary. This can be a lot harder with spoken language, even when you have a means of controlling the speed of the audio. In books there's a lot of surrounding context, unlike in the example sentences provided to you in textbooks or apps. This means that, if a book is at about your level, you can often immediately know or guess at what words mean from context, without needing to look them up explicitly. This is a great feeling, and is exactly how you read books as a child. Even native-speaking adults mostly pick up new vocabulary through reading. Another good thing is that the sentences in books are never contrived to present a certain grammatical feature or to wedge in a certain piece of vocabulary. That is, you engage with real language by reading books, not with the simplified version of the language presented in learning materials. However, reading does present some challenges, e.g. for languages with spelling systems that don't seem to match the spoken language well (English, French, Irish), languages with abjads and no vowels marked (Arabic, Hebrew), languages with inconsistent stress patterns which aren't marked (English, Russian), and languages which use Chinese characters (Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese).

There are effectively two ways to approach reading, which tie in with the analytical and intuitive approaches already mentioned. The first is extensive reading, which as you might have guessed means covering a lot of material, and absorbing whatever parts of it your brain decides are relevant. The goal is reading for pleasure, so that the actual content of the stories etc. is what matters, and the reader is free to skim over difficult words and constructions in order to keep moving, as long as they have the gist of the story. The second is intensive reading, which means looking at each sentence, including down to grammatical and word choices, to get to a deep understanding. I would recommend extensive reading for pleasure, as when you enjoy an activity, you'll keep doing it, as it doesn't feel like work.

What should you read? Things that you find interesting. If you like stories, there are plenty to choose from. You might like to read a translation of something you're familiar with so it's easier to follow the story. Lots of people jump straight to Harry Potter, which mightn't be the best choice, as you'll need to look up or skim over lots of words. I think it's a lot of fun reading kids books, although not everyone is happy to swallow their pride and start at that level. If you can find a website that provides texts written for beginners in your language, then I'd recommend starting there. It's even more useful if the website provides an audio recording which you can listen to as you read. A good example in Esperanto is uea.facila.

If you like cooking, you might be interested in recipe books. Or you might like reading about history or politics or art. If you choose more difficult books, you will probably have to stick more to the intensive reading style, as there will be lots of unfamiliar words and you'll likely need to understand many of them to even get the basic idea of the text. You can also look online to find material that you're interested in, be it news, gardening, travel guides, or motorbike maintenance.

Listening

Possibly the most important skill in language learning is listening. Many learners find that after they've learnt some basic grammar rules and core vocabulary, they can express a lot of what they want to say in relation to their immediate surroundings and day to day life in a simple manner. This is especially true for rehearsed dialogue, e.g. a script that the learner has written for talking about a particular topic, or responding to basic questions such as "where do you live?". But when put into a situation with a native speaker they may struggle to have even the basics of a conversation. This can be due to a variety of factors such as raw speed, unfamiliar vocabulary, complex grammatical forms, and huge variance in dialectal differences, especially with regard to pronunciation. A lot of learners question the value of Duolingo's nonsense phrases such as "the horse has eaten the holy potato" and instead expect to be taught what they consider to be useful phrases such as "where is the toilet?" but never consider how well they might need to know the language to understand a reponse such as "the men's is down the passage, right next to the statue of the ibis. The lock's a bit stuck so you'll need to jiggle the key and lift the door as you push it open. And make sure you don't take too long, because the light turns off automatically after 5 minutes". Perhaps that particular scenario is unlikely, but the general principle is that language is more situational and contextual than it is memorising a set of key phrases (even though there are indeed some set phrases that all learners will need). From that perspective, being given novel phrases is good for getting you used to not holding on too tightly to your expectations of what someone might say to you. And funny or unusual things tend to stick more easily in your memory.

Many people find that music is a great tool for helping with language learning. If you find songs you like, you'll listen to them over and over, and it's possible for people to remember the syllables of words in songs even when they don't know the language in question. It follows that with a language you are learning, you'll easily remember large chunks of natural text from songs as they'll get stuck in your head without much effort. The only advice I would give in terms of lyrics is, at least at the beginning, to stick to lyrics with clear meanings (e.g. "we all live in a yellow submarine") rather than poetic, ambiguous lyrics (e.g. "she eyes me like a pisces when I am weak"). And it's probably better to listen to clearly pronounced rock and pop than super-fast rap or distorted metal.

Movies and TV shows also provide natural (though sometimes, as with anime, unnatural) dialogue. Always listen to the dialogue in the language you're trying to learn. Depending on what you're comfortable with, you might want subtitles in your native language (better for easily understanding the story) or in the language you're learning (better for being able to catch words you didn't quite hear, and identifying new vocabulary). You might like to watch once with subtitles in English to ensure you understand the story, and then again with subtitles in the original language to better accommodate language learning. Another option is to have both subtitles visible, which is possible by using the Chrome plugin "Language Learning with Netflix". If you can't find original material in the language you're trying to learn, there might be an audio dub of something that was originally in another language. For example, you can watch Star Trek: Discovery with audio in German, Spanish, French, or Italian, instead of the original English.

There's of course a lot of content on YouTube and similar streaming services, including videos aimed at language learners, which present vocab and grammar. Once you've gotten past the beginner stage, or even before then, you might like watching interesting vloggers, or searching for videos that match your interests, or watching TED-style presentations. Easy Languages have videos in a variety of languages, such as Easy Spanish, which tend to involve street interviews with the general public on a range of topics.

Video games are another option, which depending on the game may involve reading, listening, or both - and possibly writing and speaking, too.

Finally there are lots of podcasts, which again can be either about the language you're learning (such as Coffee Break Chinese), or in the language (Easy German, SBS Japanese). There are of course podcasts about language learning itself (Actual Fluency Podcast, Language Mastery Show), which won't help with your listening (unless you're learning English) but may give you more ideas and tips.

Writing

Writing is like speaking without the pressure. You have all the time in the world to look up words and grammar references, and to construct a sentence exactly how you think it should be structured. Typically writing forces you to investigate new vocabulary, whereas in speaking you might either try to explain what you're talking about or find a way to avoid talking about it. Writing can also be a great way of finding gaps and errors in your knowledge, as people are far more likely to offer corrections for written work than to interrupt someone speaking to offer advice. Polite people are, in any case. One tool for getting your writing corrected is the website/app HiNative (its predecessor lang-8.com no longer accepts new users). Another is the app HelloTalk. You can engage in text conversations using Tandem. Some people find writing a diary to be very helpful, although personally it would probably be pretty monotonous. It would also help to find a tutor.

Speaking

While it is useful to build your vocabulary and grammar knowledge by reading, listening, and writing, for most people, the aim of learning a language is to be able to speak it. And the only way to learn to speak a language is by actually speaking it. In the same vein, when it comes to bikes, you can learn all about pedals, tyres, gears and so on, and all of that knowledge is useful, but in order to ride a bike you actually have to sit on the seat and start pedalling. Both activities likely take a few tries before you feel comfortable doing them. There are two main means which people use to practise speaking:

  1. Monologues. This can include talking to yourself or to a pet, or annoying friends and family by talking to them in a language they don't understand. You do get some benefit out of all of these. But a better option is to record yourself speaking unscripted. You can then review the video yourself, or upload it for others to see and possibly review, with the following considerations:
    • is your pronunciation good?
    • do you make consistent grammatical errors, or struggle to use certain parts of the grammar naturally (e.g. verb conjugation)?
    • which words do you struggle to recall?
  2. Conversations. This is the most natural use of language, although at the start your speaking will likely be anything but natural. The good news is that:
    • speaking forces your brain to remember vocab, and fast
    • people are generally happy that you know anything about their language at all
    • the worst that can happen is that you don't get your point across

In big cities, there are usually conversation groups for major languages that meet regularly. And there are many community groups for native speakers and people who share a culture. Certainly if there are people where you live who speak the language you're trying to learn, go and talk to them! But if there aren't, or you're often at home, the internet is the greatest resource. There are many different websites and apps for language exchange, finding tutoring, and so on. As an example, two sites specific to Esperanto are the following:

A more general example is Duolingo Events, which are run by volunteers associated with Duolingo to help people learn through conversation and games.

Finding time

A key question is, how do you find time for all this reading and listening, writing and speaking? One of the best ways, where possible, is to incorporate the language into your daily life. Do you watch TV series or movies? Watch them in the language you're trying to learn. Do you travel on public transport? Use that time for apps, books and podcasts. If you drive, you can use that time to listen to audio courses and podcasts. The same thing applies for household chores, e.g. you can watch a movie while doing the dishes, or listen to a podcast while cleaning the house. You can watch or read the news in the language you're learning.

Other options

You can try setting your phone, computer, and various websites you use to display everything in the language you're learning. (This is definitely not recommended at the beginning!)

You can stick labels everywhere - either on things, or in the places where they get stored. E.g. your fridge might have the Turkish word "buzdolabı" on it, and "sebzeler" inside where you store your vegetables.

Conclusion

In summary, I want to say that language learning - while it may seem daunting, and perhaps even impossible - is definitely something you can do. The key things to remember are:

One last piece of advice is that you don't have to use any particular method. If you aren't enjoying what you're doing, there are plenty of other methods and resources out there. If you don't like reading, you can spend more time in conversation. Don't forget your original motivation, and remember that no matter what the hypothetical perfect method may be, the method that works is the one you actually use. The only way to really fail is to stop trying.

All the best with whichever language(s) you're learning! You can do it!