Your Language Learning Roadmap

Tips and tricks from an obsessive language learner

Pretty much everybody has some experience learning a second language. It seems to be compulsory in high schools throughout the U.S. In non English-speaking countries, many people are force-fed English until they either hate it and feel like a failure or become so good at it that their grammar is better than ours and they accidentally lapse into it during their talking heads on Love is Blind Sweden. But you are (probably) not a northern European coming to laugh this post off and correct my grammar. You’re probably a monolingual English speaker who took three years of a second language in high school and have attempted to go back to it a few times with the aim of becoming conversational so you can talk to the nice Colombian family who just moved to your neighborhood/have bragging rights that you learned a language and attempt to impress people with it. I am familiar with both of these desires and have spent about 15 years learning various languages, one to fluency (Spanish), and several others to a fairly comfortable understanding. It does not have to take you 15 years to feel comfortable in a language, however (though becoming fluent at all is still a great outcome!), and I must say that with the dozens of lessons I have learned within the last decade and a half, my language learning process has become much more concise and much more effective. So, here I am sharing it with you so that you can become more impressive and also connect with humanity and whatnot.

Before the formal steps, a quick note on the most annoying topic ever: motivation (so sorry). If you haven’t osmotically absorbed the message of the book “Atomic Habits” yet, look for a synopsis or have AI give you a summary. Or, just read this sentence: DO NOT COUNT ON INITIAL EXCITEMENT TO FUEL YOUR JOURNEY LONGTERM. After a week or so, the glittering image of you speaking your target language will whither and die, and you will begin to have this dialogue with yourself:

“Why am I doing this again? I speak the global lingua franca (English ofc), I have food in my house when I am hungry, access to medication when I am sick, and a job that I get money from. I also have a high-maintenance dog whom I must care for, how could I be so irresponsible? Learning this language will take up so much time and mental energy and I already have everything I need in my life. Also, I’ll never be able to actually speak it. What a silly idea I had.”

And then in a few months:

“Why didn’t I keep learning that language? I told myself that it was the right thing to do, and then I did not believe me :( I had this dream of being able to go to France and not be made fun of. What did I do instead? Eat food? Take medicine? Oh how bad I am.”

And so on.

While you should absolutely foster hope and excitement, recruit part of yourself to be a scientist. The next time you start up your language learning journey (aka today), tell yourself that while you may end up being fluent in the future, your main goal is to run a cold, objective experiment about whether you can do something for 30 days. Then, when the lazy-pessimistic side of yourself comes around, you can defend your language learning self by emphasizing that this is but a small, low-cost project and it has no right to come and undermine it. You are a scientist, see, and this time you are going to go through with it for the pursuit of knowledge. Then, once you get your 30 day win, you’ll get some positive reinforcement and proof that you can defeat the lazy-pessimistic self.

And on we go:

1. Use a pre-made tool. Anything made for beginners that has structure. This could be a textbook or an A1 (complete beginner level) language course on YouTube. I wouldn’t recommend only using a textbook, as hearing how the language sounds is essential. This could also be an app, like Duolingo or Busuu. Some people get the shivers from these apps. Don’t. Apps like these almost always give you sentences or phrases, which are the BEST way to learn a language, as everything is in context and you don’t have to bottom-up everything (aka, attempt to build sentences with single words, which usually ends up being an incorrect literal translation). Also, apps gamify the language learning experience. While this may feel kind of gross, the bright colors, reinforcing sounds, streak keeper, and short duration of each lesson are easy hoops for your lazy-pessimistic self to jump through. Sitting down with a textbook and studying might be a bit harder for it, but if that’s your thing, go for it. If you do end up choosing a textbook or an A1 YouTube course, you will thank yourself if you start memorizing phrases and dialogues. You can get away without doing this on apps, as they are fairly repetitive and make you interact with these sentences and phrases many times. Memorizing sounds intense and you don’t absolutely have to if you know that’s going to put your 30-day learning experiment in jeopardy, but you get out what you put in. If you complete just one Duolingo lesson a day for month (or longer), that’s still an amazing outcome and very worth it. I did about 1-2 Duolingo lessons a day in German for several years, which gave me a wonderful base to continue from.

2. Sentence mine. After you’ve used your tool for a while, let’s say three or so months, start finding real live sentences in your target language from out in the world (the internet) and memorize them. You may be thinking, “Wait, shouldn’t I get really solid on my grammar first? Shouldn’t I know the names of all fruits, vegetables, and zoo animals like my high school textbook taught?” No you should not. If you want to notice a significant difference in your comprehension and production, you should be finding high-frequency sentences that people use daily. As a note, I am not anti-studying grammar. In fact, I find it one of the more pleasurable activities in life. I just think you should do it in the context of real sentences with maybe a bit of scaffolding. If your target language is Spanish and you’re not used to conjugating verbs, for example, you may want to look up a visual to help you with this if you ever feel disoriented. Maybe something like this -ar verb conjugation paradigm:

Next, where should you get your sentences from? Luckily the internet has all the sentences you will ever need. But, there are smart ways to go about this. An easy one, one that lets you tailor your sentences to your needs and interests, is AI. Ask ChatGPT or any other LLM of your choice to make you sentences. If you’re a beginner, you might say: “Make me 25 beginner phrases/sentences in Spanish that people use every day and give me the translations in English below each one.” This is where your language base that you built comes in; you should have a pretty good idea of what’s what. However, there will still be hard things. Unless you understand exactly which word is doing what, ask your LLM to “parse and gloss” the sentences as well as giving you the English translations. “Parsing and glossing” in linguistics means defining each meaningful word/word chunk. Here’s a parsed and glossed sentence that I had ChatGPT make for me in Russian:

18. Я хочу чашку кофе.
    *Ya khochu chashku kofe.
    “I want a cup of coffee.”
    Gloss:

• Я – "I" (nominative pronoun)

• хочу – "want" (first-person singular present of "хотеть")

• чашку – "cup" (accusative singular of "чашка")

• кофе – "coffee" (noun)

*If your target language uses a different writing system, ask your LLM to provide you with the Roman orthographical equivalent.

If you don’t know what “accusative” means, you can go ahead and ask your LLM to define it and give you some examples, or you can just focus on getting the sentences down and come back to these things later. Really try to make this process as barrier-free as you can while still understanding enough that you don’t become too frustrated.

You can also sentence mine from YouTube videos (especially the Easy Languages YT channel, like Easy French, Easy Spanish, or many more) or kids’ TV shows like Peppa Pig or The Magic School Bus. The Magic School Bus is probably my favorite for when you’re more of an intermediate speaker, because the educational episode themes provide you with a well-rounded vocabulary (science, music, history). I wouldn’t recommend starting with more grown-up content like Money Heist (European Spanish) or Dark (German). The dialogues are fast and complex and will probably lead to frustration and burnout. To best sentence mine, I recommend the Chrome plug-in Language Reactor. Language Reactor provides machine translations to the spoken language in your video. It is important to have translations that match up with what the people are actually saying instead of relying on the human translations, which can stray further from the dubbed audio in your target language (basically, human translations and foreign language dubbings are not written by the same people, and while they both capture the general meaning, they may use completely different structures or words that won’t line up well). You can also use a site like Lingopie, which gives you episodes with nicely matching subtitles, though I haven’t tried this myself. I like to keep my sentences in one big Google doc that I can continuously add to.

So, now you have all of your sentences. How should you go about memorizing them? You can be a normal person and use a flashcards app like Anki or Quizlet, or you can make hard copy flashcards. If you want to be quite dedicated, you can write your sentences out like I described in my French February post. If you want to be extremely intense, you can do what I am currently doing, which is recording yourself saying the English translation, waiting 10 seconds to let yourself guess the target language translation, and repeating this once or twice for reps. I usually make my recordings about 20 sentences long, which is around the time of my average commute or dog walk. I recommend doing this if you are already familiar with how your language sounds and you have decent pronunciation. You can also find websites that say your target language sentences out loud with native pronunciation.

3. Start talking to people when you can have at least a basic conversation. You can use an app like Tandem, which is a language exchange service that connects you with people all over the world. You do have to pay a little money to be selective, like only matching with your own gender, but once you establish a connection with someone you can ditch the app and just use Zoom or Whatsap with them. Since this is a language exchange and not a teaching service, you don’t have to pay to talk to people, though you should share your English with them too. Another fun option is Lingoda. Lingoda provides structured small-group language classes in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. All but Italian go from beginner to upper intermediate level courses (Italian just has beginner classes so far). You can just take classes willy-nilly, or you can participate in the Sprint, a two-month period with classes every other day or so. If you complete all necessary classes, you get half your money back. I did this in Spanish in the fall of 2023 and had a very positive experience. I’ll make a blog post soon about how to get the most out of your Sprint experience. There are many other online ways to talk to people (italki is the last one I’ll plug), and I recommend you go and explore.

4. Refine. If you would like to reach for the stars, I recommend reading books, like Harry Potter or YA novels, in your target language. When you come across a word or sentence you don’t know, or, even if you know it but wouldn’t have been able to say it in exactly that way, stick it on a flashcard and memorize it. See if you can push your target language into your inner monologue. When you’re thinking your normal thoughts and don’t know how to say something, ask a LLM and (guess what) stick it on a flashcard. Go find a bunch of “A day in my life” vlogs on YouTube in your target language and go follow them on Instagram. Every new word gets you closer.

5. Return. You will probably take one or several or many breaks from your target language. This is natural. Come back to it and start working again whenever you feel ready. Also, you do not have to stop doing any of these things when you have moved on to the next level. I still use all of these methods no matter how advanced my languages are.

Good luck!

(For those who are interested/offended, I’ll be writing a short post soon about my mixed relationship with the comprehensible input approach, one of the leading language learning techniques these days.)