Learning languages

When I was younger, my attitude towards learning foreign languages was that it wasn’t very important, and English would serve me just fine. As an adult, I regret this, and for the last few years I’ve tried to make amends by doing a little bit of foreign language practice every day. What I hadn’t appreciated back then was how happy you can make people, and how they will open up to you, if you can speak even a little bit of their native tongue, even if they also speak English. This opens many doors, and I mean this not in just a business/practical sense, but in the sense of just being able to enjoy more things out there in life.

The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was to stop worrying about being any good at it. It’s easy, especially if you’re a traditional academic “achiever,” to fall into the mindset that if you can’t be great at something, it’s not worth doing at all. I’m guilty of this at times, and I’ve really tried to shed this way of thinking as I’ve grown up. When you’re a kid in school it’s easy to think of learning in terms of getting good grades, making the team, passing the audition, and in general as a kind of scored competition. But as an adult, you can forget about that and learn for inherent value and enjoyment.

For a while now I’ve been studying Czech. I picked it up for fun because my then-girlfriend, now-wife’s father is Czech. It wasn’t necessary, as he speaks English well and has lived in the US for many years, but I have enjoyed it and now just keep it up for its own sake. Anyone I’ve tried speaking Czech with has been friendly and welcoming, perhaps because few foreigners try to learn it. At this point I’ve at least seen most of the grammatical rules, and I mainly need to build up vocabulary and usage patterns and practice listening comprehension (reading/writing is not too bad, but native speakers chattering at full tilt are hard to keep up with).

I’ve recently started mixing in Korean practice. I’m ethnically Korean, though I was born in the US. My parents are immigrants and spoke Korean at home, so I have some Korean listening comprehension, but I rarely needed to speak it, and almost never needed to read or write it. In particular, I had few peers with whom I had to speak it; most of the time it came up was with elders, where I was expected to be polite and reserved. I’m sure I still could have been better about those moments, or about genuinely trying with my immediate family instead of just using English, but the upshot was that I just didn’t learn it properly.

A few years ago I did the Spanish tree on Duolingo, although my retention hasn’t been great as I didn’t keep up with it afterwards. (I think Duolingo is a wonderful tool to get started with a language, but you must continue with other resources thereafter.) And way back in the day, I took French for several years in high school. I’d still like to return to either of these someday, especially Spanish.

Immersion would be the fastest learning accelerant, but most people don’t have that option. From the comfort of my English-speaking home, the things I’ve found to be most effective are:

• Flash cards with spaced repetition: flash cards are just plain effective, the best way I’ve found to commit words to memory. I mainly use Anki and make my own flash cards.
• Physically writing things down: maybe this is just me, but I’ve found that writing out words on pen and paper instead of always typing them is useful.
• Tutors: on the Internet you can find private tutors in pretty much any language at reasonable rates at websites like italki. I do an hour of Czech lessons every week with a teacher I found there. I do recommend learning the very basics on your own first, so that you don’t pay to learn things you could have taught yourself.
• Use multiple sources: Don’t try to learn the language from one app, one teacher, or one book. It’s helpful to see the same concept explained two different ways, and sometimes one resource will have an explanation that clicks for you in a way that another does not.