How To Learn Another Language: Getting S**T Done
The first week of January is the perfect time to reassess your life goals. If you've noticed a "learn Italian" task on your Someday/Maybe list, perhaps you can make it happen within the next twelve months. It's a brave goal, but how do you put your good intentions into action and actually learn another language in 2019?
What are You Ready to Sacrifice?
Allow me to lead you down the slippery path of deadly logic.
Language learning is a skill that is acquired through pattern recognition. To achieve pattern recognition, one must process a large amount of skill-related information. This information is obtained by staying on task for long enough. Hence, the more time you devote to language learning, the more fluent you become.
So, if you are serious about your language learning goal, you should be fully aware of all the outcomes.
Outcome #1: You have to sacrifice your time
I suspect that your schedule is already filled to the top (mainly because any vacuum in life tends to fill itself, whether you want it or not). This means that you will have to make some tradeoffs and cut off unimportant stuff.
The next question you want to ask yourself is how much time you need to devote to become proficient in a language you want to learn in a year. Any ideas?
How much time do you need to learn a language?
In a study conducted by the US Foreign Service Institute, scientists linked similarities across languages to the time necessary to acquire them. And, fair enough, languages that are structurally (and historically) similar to English, such as Dutch, Spanish, and French, require less time to learn than languages branching on the other side of the globe, like Japanese or Mandarin.
Better still, these pragmatic guys from FSI came up with a perfectly calculated language learning timetable that gives you the exact answer to the above question.
Language learning comes down to getting those hours.
This whole thing is true for native English speakers, of course. If this is not your scenario, do not despair. To discover what languages will be easiest for you to learn, just look across your native language branch.
But let’s stick to the table and pull out the best-case scenario: Spanish. It translates into 600 hours you have to devote to studying in order to learn this language in 2019. There are a number of ways you can distribute those hours throughout the year.
How many hours a day are you ready to put into learning?
I bet you’ve heard that you can learn any language in three months. There is a pool of people who did it and even more who challenged it and wrote a comprehensive self-report à la “How hard is this”. You can do it too.
But let’s do some math first.
Option #1: Learn Spanish in a year - With uncanny calculations are done, you get 50 hours a month. It will hit you with 1h40m of language exposure a day (with no breaks).
Option #2: Learn Spanish in six months - You’ve got my point: you compress the timeframe, and you get a heavier daily load. In this case, it’s going to be no more, no less than 3h20m of Spanish a day;
Option #3: Learn Spanish in three months- Here, you'll probably have to leave your job and devote yourself to language learning for 6 hours and 40 minutes per day. Alternatively, you can continue working and wait for an upcoming burnout.
To give you some perspective, FSI also provided their estimates for how many weeks it will take to learn a language. In the case of Spanish, it all comes down to 24 weeks (or six months), which means that three hours a day is required.
Outcome #2: you have to dedicate 3.5 hours a day.
Do you still want to learn another language in 2019?
Ok, before you close this tab in horror of textbooks, exercises, and long vocabulary lists, let me tell you what these 3.5 hours actually are.
What do you do during your "Language Time"?
It's exposure that counts.
As long as you're paying attention, every minute spent reading, speaking, writing, thinking, or listening to your target language gives you exposure time. And with language, you don't need anything else. As American linguist Nick Ellis puts it in one of his articles:
"Language learning is implicit learning."
Nick Ellis
The whole "learning" process is not a matter of the explicit study of vocabulary words or grammar rules. It is a matter of collecting enough statistical data about language use.
Only by possessing a sufficient amount of language samples, the brain is able to make generalizations about this linguistic system. When patterns of the language are recognized, the memory optimizes itself so that it takes less time to retrieve it. Let's look at the English plural formation rule, for example.
You know that "cat" is singular whereas "cats" is plural. "House" is singular, and"houses" is plural. "Team" is singular, "teams" is plural. Let's say that one word takes up 1kB of your memory. Then you have two options:
You store these six words as individual words: 6kB;
You store only three words and a rule: 4kB.
If you increase the sample to 100 words, the difference will become more prominent, taking up 100kB instead of 51kB. This applies to verb conjugations, adjective formation, tense structures, and a whole pool of other rules and structures that comprise the grammar of the language.
That makes sense, right? Unfortunately, for your brain, the default storing option is the first one. It considers every new word as a unique token unless it already fits a certain rule or helps to derive another rule.
So what's the plan?
Flood your brain with enough language data to process, by listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, reading stories, blogs, and books - all in your target language. Just keep in mind that you still need to ensure that the input is comprehensible enough for your brain to process it.
That's what you're going to do for 3.5 hours a day if you want to learn another language in 2019.
How to Find Time for Language Learning?
If the teacup is full nothing more can be added.
—Zen Master from the Teacup story
We function within the 24-hour system. You can't add another 3.5 hours to make a day longer. But you can cut something else to achieve your language learning goals.
For example, you can choose not to see your friends for a couple of months or reassess your sleeping pattern to wake up at midnight and watch French Netflix for three hours before going back to bed.
I'm just kidding; please don't do that. But my point is:
Outcome #3: You Will Have to Change Your Routine
You need to reassess how you spend your time and redefine your default options. I bet you'll find those 3.5 hours during your commute, while waiting in a bank, at Starbucks, in a grocery store, while cooking at home, or while surfing the web.
What are your default options, by the way?
For the "headset plugged in" option - music or language podcasts? For your default "time-killer" option - Facebook or Memrise? And for the "language setting" option on your laptop - English or your target language?
You don't want to make a conscious decision every time you plug in your headphones and go for a 40-minute commute. Reasoning doesn't work when you're tired. At that point, you may not even remember your goal to learn another language in 2019.
Instead, you have to build a habit..
How to create a language learning habit?
The term "language learning habit" is a bit deceiving. You don’t just want to get used to learning a language; you want to get used to living your life in that language. Therefore, when it comes to habits, you need a whole set of them:
The habit of learning a language
The habit of speaking it
The habit of perceiving it around you
What successful polyglots actually did was reset their default options for each of these habits, leaving no other choice but to use the language they were learning.
Here's how you can replicate it yourself:
Identify every automatic behavior you have in situations where you could possibly learn or use the language.
Reset your default options by adding opportunities for learning (download podcasts, start a Memrise course, or change language settings on Netflix).
Avoid temptation by removing any distractions (unsubscribe from Spotify, turn off notifications from Facebook, and set a specific time to check it).
Having a habit tracker at your disposal can also help. It provides a quick shot of tranquility to your craving for fun stuff.
20% of actions that bring 80% of the results
You know about Pareto's Law (the 80/20 rule), but do you know what is behind that 20% that brings you 80% of the results?
There is you preparing the ground.
It can be tempting to jump right in after making a resolution to learn another language in 2019 when you're full of motivation. However, that's a mistake. Spend this extra energy making sure you can keep up with your goals when you're tired, unmotivated, and discouraged with the initial results.
Make sure to compensate for the lack of:
Time - explore your daily habits and find ways to rewire them
Knowledge - learn about the most effective language learning strategies;
Resources - choose in advance what you will listen to, read, and learn in your target language during your online immersion.
Take your time. It'll save you much more in the long run.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ― Abraham Lincoln
