I have a longstanding and keen interest in language. Since my Freshman year of high school, I have been more or less continually engaged in the study of one or more foreign languages at any given moment. I took Japanese for four years in high school, and during college I took three years of Russian and two years of Ancient Greek. At this point in my life, though, I have been studying languages independently for nearly as long as I studied them in school.
The independent study of languages poses many challenges that do not confront the formal student. Problems of curriculum, methods, and pace that are mostly answered by the teacher in an academic context must be resolved independently by the self-directed student. In my years of self-study I have of necessity devoted a great deal of time and thought to the questions facing the self-directed student, so I thought I would share some insights from my personal journey. But before discussing my suggestions regarding self-directed language study, I want to address some commonly held misconceptions about learning a foreign language, as I sometimes see them promoted even by the well-intentioned.
Language Myths
I often hear people talk about languages that are “harder” to learn than other languages. On its surface, this idea might seem to have a certain validity. It is true, for instance, that the U.S. Department of State groups languages into four categories by difficulty. Languages like Arabic and Mandarin are placed in the most difficult category, while languages like Spanish and Dutch fall into the least difficult category. But these difficulty groupings would not necessarily apply for a native speaker of Russian, who might find Ukrainian (a language closely related to Russian which is placed in the second most difficult group) easier to learn than Dutch. In other words, the State Department’s difficulty rankings can only be interpreted meaningfully with reference to a native speaker of English. I would argue that any meaningful statement about the difficulty of a given language must be made with reference to the languages already mastered by the prospective student. One can perhaps safely say “Ukrainian is a very difficult language to learn for native speakers of English.” But statements about absolute difficulty, on the other hand, are dubious at best. Each language has a unique distribution of complexities across its forms, grammar, lexicon, orthography, and pronunciation. Superficial comparison of two languages in terms of the relative distributions of these complexities will in the end merely amount to comparing apples to oranges, and it is difficult to imagine a meaningful model for comparing the “absolute” difficulty of two languages in a more rigorous way. If I had to hazard a guess, I would posit that, to the extent that every fully-fledged language must be able to communicate ideas about the same seemingly infinitely complex world of objects and ideas in which we live, and to the extent that any language must run on the same basic hardware (i.e. the human brain), all fully-fledged spoken languages are likely similar in absolute difficulty.
Another common myth about the study of language is that it is nearly impossible for adults to learn languages. I am not going to tell you that language learning is an easy undertaking. On the contrary, if you aim to achieve fluency in a target language, the task can sometimes seem daunting if not overwhelming. But the fact that language learning requires a great deal of effort and time does not render the study of languages impossible or meaningless. Adults often self-deprecatingly contrast the seemingly miraculous ability of children to acquire their first language with their own supposed inability to learn new languages. Discussions about the nature and duration of the so-called “critical period” for language acquisition during childhood are liable to generate strong disagreements, but putting such questions aside, I think comparison between child and adult language learning is fundamentally unfair on a certain level. The circumstances in which children learn language bear very little resemblance to those in which adults learn. Children learn in an environment of intense immersion, and the drive to fulfill immediate needs is a key motivation for learning. Adult language learners, on the other hand, typically have sufficient mastery of one language to meet their daily needs and may not be constantly surrounded by speakers of their target language. Moreover, children have the advantage that adults tend to speak to them slowly and repetitively in a way which facilitates language acquisition (child-directed speech or CDS), whereas this manner of speech could be considered insultingly patronizing if it were directed at an adult second language learner. My point here is not to disparage the genuinely amazing linguistic virtuosity of children — it is merely to point out that children and adults face very different challenges.
People who want to downplay the ability of adults to learn new languages often resort to another defeatist attitude — ascribing the ability to learn languages in adulthood to exceedingly rare innate ability. Some lucky few adults, the thinking goes, were born with special genes that allow them to perform this mysterious feat, which is impossible for the majority of adults. There may be some grain of truth in this argument to the extent that there is genuinely some variance among humans in memory and the performance of other cognitive tasks involved in language learning. But the idea that this variance renders the average person incapable of language learning in adulthood is ridiculous. If you sat down at a piano for the first time and failed to exquisitely render the first movement of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, you wouldn’t categorically declare, “I cannot learn to play the piano.” The world of languages may have its Mozarts, but it also has plenty of adults who have succeeded through consistent effort in acquiring new languages. In short, language learning, like almost anything truly worth doing, requires practice. And you shouldn’t be discouraged if your initial efforts don’t provide you with immediate facility in your target language.
When discussing practice or effort in language learning, we must be careful, however. Significant effort is undoubtedly required to learn a second language, but not all effort is good effort, and the selection of methods is particularly important to the self-directed adult language learner. Perhaps the true origin of the idea that adults cannot effectively learn languages lies precisely in the false but commonplace assumption that in language study all effort is good effort. There seems to be an implicit belief among many second language learners that if you are putting in a great amount of effort, you are bound to get results. But just as spinning your wheels when your car is stuck in a snow drift gets you nowhere, studying language in the wrong way can expend energy without yielding meaningful progress. And just as doing weight training exercises without the proper form or care can result in injury, some language study habits can be positively detrimental. Practicing incorrect forms can leave you with broken facility in your target language. Unlearning improper grammatical constructions and learning the natural constructions to replace them is significantly more work than learning the proper forms the first go round. If your intention is to approach natural usage in a new language amidst the many cares and distractions of adult life, then you must be very intentional in your approach to avoid falling into inefficient or bad habits of language learning.
How should we study language?
Faced with the fact that we are not babies in an immersive language learning environment, that we have concerns and commitments which consume a great deal of our lives we might otherwise spend learning, and that we may even have less native ability than those miraculous polyglots who seem to soak up language like sponges, what approaches can we employ to enhance and optimize our study of language when we do manage to fit it in? Here are a few principles that I have found to be most effective over the course of my years of independent study.
Study for short periods frequently.
I would not be surprised if many would-be language learners, like high school students, tend to err on the side of studying infrequently and oversaturating. Numerous scientific studies in cognitive and educational psychology have demonstrated that spreading multiple study session out across time is a far more effective technique for long-term retention than cramming everything into a single study session. The effectiveness and efficiency of studying for shorter periods more frequently is a must for any adult learner with only limited time to devote to language study, and the results thus generated will help you stay motivated. Spaced repetition—where study intervals are determined based on prior recall performance—is particularly effective, and there are many free resources that incorporate spaced repetition algorithms. For example, I use Anki for spaced repetition flashcards.
Study words in context rather than in isolation.
Frequency of study is important, but content is just as critical if not more so. Even learners who utilize spaced repetition often fall into a trap when it comes to what they study. One of the most common approaches to learning vocabulary is the creation of flashcards. Flashcards can be a useful tool if used properly, but many who utilize them create one-to-one correspondence flashcards, associating one word in the target language with one word in their native language. Learning words without learning the way in which they are properly used is an inefficient use of time, and it will likely lead to erroneous or unnatural speech in the target language. When I learn a new word, I try to learn it in a simple example sentence — either from the source where I encountered it, from the dictionary, or from an online source like tatoeba. In this way you learn not only the word, but an example of proper usage. The choice of example sentence affords another opportunity to economize — I find that the best examples are those that provide contextual clues regarding the meaning of the word. For instance, if you wanted to learn the English word “impecunious,” you would want to learn an example like “The impecunious family couldn’t afford to buy a house” rather than “Tim was impecunious.” It may seem counter-intuitive at first to embed the target word in a sentence with a bunch of other words which must also be memorized, but the advantages of semantic encoding more than offset the apparent added weight. Choosing meaningful examples will give your brain a little more to hang the memory on and can help you learn words commonly associated with your target word.
Study grammar closely.
There seems to be a common misconception that students can internalize the grammar of a language by osmosis if they ignore the formal study of grammar in favor of other activities such as speaking, reading, or listening. Ignoring the formal study of grammar is a good way to spin your wheels without traction and learn bad habits that you will need to unlearn later. Not giving grammar its due weight in the study of a language is a prescription for broken facility in the target language. Read without fully understanding the grammar, and your reading will at best provide only scraps of the meaning available in the text. Speak without fully understanding the grammar, and your speech will be broken. Grammar is the scaffolding in the building you are trying to construct. Without it, your construction will be shaky at best.
Once you have built up a sufficient base vocabulary in the target language, read, read, read.
Conversation practice with native speakers is a great help when you can get it, but when you can’t, you can always turn to text. Written language actually offers a distinct advantage overs spoken language in one key aspect: it is not ephemeral. When reading, you can take your time. You can pour over the language. You can contemplate the grammatical constructions and look up the meaning of the words. If there is one thing I have noticed in my years of tutoring students in the United States, it is that reading makes a tremendous difference in the development of the capacity for cogent expression of thoughts in both writing and speech. Read attentively, and you will learn the rhythms and contours of expression in your target language. Read regularly, and you will grow your vocabulary in a natural way. Reading will be painful at first, even if you have built up a solid basic vocabulary. Looking up words in a dictionary is a labor intensive and time consuming process. But in the end, your efforts will pay off in a major way.
Go all in
My last piece of advice is simple, and it applies to every aspect of language learning: go all in. If you do not devote your entire attention to the task of learning the language when you are studying, if you ignore the grammar, if you skip words or guess their meaning based on context, you will not end up saving any efforts. These habits will merely undermine the foundations of the structure you are trying to build in your brain. The approaches I outlined above may provide more efficient approaches to learning a language, but in the end there is no getting around the fact that learning is a labor and time intensive process. It will likely take years to achieve advanced proficiency. But if you set your mind to it, it is possible. And in my opinion it is well worth the effort.