How I Learn Languages

People know me for many things. I'm the guy who goes to concerts and takes sick photos, I'm the guy who cooks all those amazing meals, I'm the guy who looks like the second coming of Jesus Christ, and I'm the guy who somehow knows every language in the world. (Spoiler: I don't)

Within the language claim there lies a bit of truth—I have studied over 30 languages, and of those I can converse in five. There's gotta be some method to the madness, right? That's what I aim to cover in this article. How am I able to study so many languages?

Just a heads up, this article contains a huge infodump on the differences between languages and how the languages you know can influence how you learn your target language. If you don't care about this preamble and just want to get to the part where I tell you how I learn languages, skip to the learning a foreign alphabet section.

Picking a language

The first step to learning a language is deciding which language you want to learn. I know, anticlimactic. Why do you wanna learn this language? Is it the language your family speaks but you were never taught? Have you fallen in love with someone who speaks this language? Are you trying to obtain working proficiency, or are you just insane like me and like learning for the fun of it?

While it may seem like a nothingburger of a question, it ends up being one that will determine your learning experience. I learned Russian in an academic setting, Armenian in bits and pieces from my family, and French in a very colloquial setting. My range of vocabulary between those three seldom overlaps, because I had three different reasons for learning the three of them.

Differences between languages

Language families

Not all languages are created equal. Some are created similarly though. Languages are divided into what are called language families. The world has thousands of them. Some of them are connected to each other, and some are not. Take a look at the following words:

See how these all look kinda similar? Thats because all of these languages are members of the Germanic language family. They all derived and diverged from a common ancestor, called Proto-Germanic.

Now let's take a look at these words:

Again, see the similarities? These are all Romance languages, deriving and diverging from their more-well-known common ancestor, Latin.

The Germanic and Romance languages seem similar because they themselves derive from an even older ancestor, one called Proto-Indo-European. Other languages that come from Proto-Indo-European are Russian (noch'), Greek (nýchta), Kurdish (nixte), Albanian (natë), Irish (anocht) and many more.

I'm gonna give you one more example. Can you guess how these are related?

Sorry, trick question. All these languages come from seperate language families. Their core vocabularies all derive from different words. Learning a language that is not related to one you already know may present a challenge when it comes to vocabulary. When an English speaker learns French, they'll already be familiar with many of the words. When an English speaker tries to learn Mandarin, they're pretty much starting at square one.

A major oversimplification of how language families work. Here is a chart detailing Indo-European better.

Conjugating verbs

In many languages, depending on the tense (past, present, future), or who is performing the action (I, you, he/she, they), the verb conjugates. It's a fancy way of saying the verb changes.

Let's take the English verb to walk.

See how they' all pretty much the same? We only conjugate the verb for the he/she form of the verb. Whereas in a language like French...

The word marcher changes a lot more depending on who is performing the action. Words will also change depending on the tense, for example in English we have:

In the past tense we conjugate the verb with -ed and in the future tense we add "will" to the word.

The pattern is different in French. Each form of the verb gets its own individual conjugation. Languages that do this, that have complex individual conjugations are called fusional languages, whereas English with their more stable forms are called isolating languages. Turkish, an agglutinative language, handles things a bit differently. Instead of using seperate endings for each form of the verb, it tacks on (agglutinates) different suffixes to mean different things.

Keeping with the example for walking, let's take a loot at how an agglutinating language would handle it.

With the word yürümek, we remove the suffix meaning "to be" (-mek) and replace it with a suffix corresponding to the person partaking in the action.

For this tense instead of verb-ending, we tack on a new suffix, yor, making verb-yor-ending.

Conjugating... nouns???

Some languages conjugate nouns. The actual name for this is "declining" the noun. Like verb conjugations, depending on the part of speech, nouns will take on different forms.

In good 'ol English, nouns don't conjugate.

God that's simple, isn't it? In my native Armenian, things work a little differently.

For the word goshik, we tack on a different suffix depending on what exactly the shoe is doing in the sentence. Instead of using different helper words like in English (such as using, from, in, ect), the word gets suffixes tacked on. Armenian is relatively simple, it has seven noun cases. Hungarian has 18 noun cases, replacing even more English preopositions, whereas Tsez (a language in the Caucasus region of Russia) has a whopping 64 noun cases.

Not all languages are strictly isolating, fusional, or agglutinative. Like nearly all things in life, it's a spectrum. There exist languages that simplify conjugating more than English, and there are languages that make Turkish suffixing look like absolute child's play.

Tones

Did you notice those squiggly lines on the Mandarin from earlier? Those represent something called tones. If you don't remember, here's a quick example.

Those may all look like the same word, but they're all pronounced differently and all mean differnet things. Depending on which accent the letter has, the word may be pronounced with your voice low at the start of the word and high at the end, high at the start and low at the end, all high, all low, or a kind of down-up-down. Like vowels and consonants, in tonal languages how you say a word also determines meaning.

Vietnamese takes this a step further with six tones.

Fun fact: tones are the reason I ultimately gave up on learning Vietnamese and Mandarin. For a guy who often hangs out with musicians and who used to play the base, it's really funny that I'm tone-deaf.

Ect.

This is just a small sample of some of the differences you may encounter on your journey. Trust me, for how much I yapped, it really is a small sample. (See: ergative languages, triconsonal root systems, word-order, vowel harmony, the absurdly fucked up phonemic inventory of the Ubykh and Abkhaz languages)

Enough yapping though. Let's get on to the part you came here to read.

Learning a foreign alphabet

Not every language uses the Latin alphabet, found across the world in English and Spanish, all the way to Indonesian and Igbo. There are hundreds of writing systems across the world, and only 36% of the world's population use an alphabet that is like the one English uses. So what should you do if your target language uses a different alphabet?

Write in a language that you're comfortable with using your target language's alphabet.

What do I mean by this? Let's use the Russian as an example. Say that I've never touched Russian before, I know nothing of the script or how to use it. The Russian script is essential for learning Russian, as Russian has sounds that can't be replicated using a Latin script. What I will do is I will take an English sentence...

I can read Russian!

...and write it using the Russian alphabet.

See what I'm getting at here? Let me give you another example.

It's not going to be 1-to-1, but it'll help you get comfortable and geared up to learn. Plus, it's fun to write in foreign scripts to hide stuff from your friends and coworkers.

Textbooks

Textbooks are the classic way to learn a language. Some dude (or a cohort of dudes)writes a giant book detailing all the grammar and vocabulary information one would need to gain a foothold in the language and distributes it.

They can be great! They can also be utter dogshit! Sometimes you'll find an absolute gem of a textbook that will take your skills 0-100, while other times you may find a book that requires a PhD in linguistics to begin to decipher. If you can find a good textbook, great! If not, don't worry, there's so many more resources you can use.

What apps do I use?

In this day and age, there are tons of apps one can use to learn a language. It's tempting. It's easy. "Oh, but I just have to open it and do a lesson a day, before I know it I will be fluent!". Unfortunately, that won't work.

You cannot fully learn a language using only an app.

Apps are great for giving you a starting point. They get you hooked and get you excited to learn your target language. They're easy to maintain, and many incentivize you to keep using every day. Apps will not get you all the way. You must supplement apps with other resources.

Duolingo

Duolingo is one of the worst ways to learn a language. I know, this is coming from the guy who brags about his Duolingo streak on the front page of his website. But it really is shit.

Duolingo is a good resource for vocabulary, and really only for their major languages. That's about it.

It is well documented that for some of their less popular languages (see Arabic, Ukrainian, Yiddish), their lessons are often plain wrong. The first thing that an Arabic speaker will say when you tell them you're learning Arabic on Duolingo is to stop. That' because most of the information you "learn" on Duolingo's Arabic course is incorrect.

Duolingo is infamous for their "cool and wacky" sentences.

Yeah, they're funny and you remember atleast the English translation of them. But if my boss asks me "Вы уже закончили оформление документов на Q2?", I can't reply that my bird rides a bicycle.

Duolingo makes learning a game. It's great for user retention, because more users having fun means more ad money rolling in. They are to their users what Ronald Reagan's presidential administration was to poor communities in the 80s—crack dealers. If users get addicted to the app, it means line go up and Duolingo' shareholders get richer. Learning a language is hard, so Duolingo dumbs it all down.

Remember anything from that one language class you took in High School? Same deal with Duolingo. What used to be a noble goal of crowd-sourced language learning has become a soulless shell of "here are the exact same ten sentences we've been showing you for the past month, put the words in the correct order". When it comes time for you to use what you've supposedly learned, you falter.

Don't even get me started on their text-to-speech. Barely passable at best, and wholly unusable at worst.

Mango Languages

I absolutely love Mango Languages. With support for over 80 languages and actual, practical lessions, it is a much better resource than Duolingo for learning a language. The only caveat is that it's a paid app, but if you have a library card, chances are your library has partnered with them to provide it for free. (Thank you Orange County, Florida. I may hate you but you help me learn).

Mango's main downside is that it is MUCH more rigid than Duolingo when it comes to sentences. The way Mango lessons work is they introduce you to a realistic conversation between two speakers, then have you learn the sentences they speak and the words that they comprise of. Mango is great at explaining a sentence's grammar and syntax—the whys and hows that they are formed.

My main gripe with Mango is that in regards to retention, it is in essence a glorified flashcard app. The "reviews" they have you do are just entering a definition for a word or sentence. The science behind it checks out, they built it in a way that is incredible for memory retention, but it is just that—memory retention. You aren't creating new sentences on your own.

Anki

Anki is the be-all end-all of flashcard apps. Truly an absolute beast of a learning resource, Anki's usage isn't limited soley to languages. You can use it for anything—it' a flashcard app.

They have implemented a specific learning algorithm that is proven to be one of the most efficient ways to learn and retain new information. The exact science of how it works is honestly beyond me, but I have found that I retain information I've learned and studied with Anki much better than information I've learned from other sources.

The main downside with Anki is that there is zero pre-loaded informatiom. You have to either create the flashcards yourself or download them from outside sources.

In a previous version of the article, I recommended Mochi over Anki. After trying out Anki again, I must admit I was wrong in my original recommendation. Yes, Anki looks clunky, but by God is it much faster and more powerful. I've been using Anki daily for months and there are still features I am learning exist. Anki's learning algorithm is, in the end, much better and more fine-tuned than Mochi's.

How do I immerse myself in a language?

Immersion is the best way to learn a language, but unfortunately it is also the most challenging. Here are some ways I have immersed myself, what has worked, and how.

Media

Consuming media has two main benefits: You get to learn how people sound when they speak, and you get to learn what words people actually use when they speak. I break down media down in to three distinct categories: music, formal media, and informal media.

Music

I love music. Music is very important part of who I am and what makes me, me. I have over 300 playlists on Spotify, I own an iPod with over 150GB of music on it, most women I've ever dated I've bonded over with music. Listening to music is also a great way to improve your language skills.

Music introduces you to the sounds of a language. Listening to podcasts or news all the time to to learn how a language is spoken can get tedious, but music is fun, music is groovy! Music is something that you can throw on in the background while you work or read or cook or whatever. Music is low-stakes.

Listening to pronuncuation in music helps you replicate those sounds more easily. It's similar to how babies learn language—listening to and replicating sounds spoken to them. How we coo "mama, mama" to babies to get them to repeat, paying attention to sounds in music helps you do the same. It is honest to god how I managed to finally master the Greek "γ" and the Arabic "ق".

Formal Media

What is formal media? I consider it to be scripted or professional media. Think TV shows, movies, news, YouTube video essays, books, ect. These tend to use a more standard, formal, and professional version of the language. Formal media is great for when you want to be able to communicate in a likewise formal, professional context. Using formal media to learn topics (i.e. watching programming videos in Hatian Creole) will enable you to communicate at a much higher and more complex level.

Reading books, recipes, or Wikipedia articles in your target language and translating them to a language you are comfortable with is an amazing way to learn new vocabulary and adjust yourself to your target language&aops;s grammar. It is my perferred way to learn new vocabulary.

The main drawback of this method is that you don't learn how people communicate between themselves on a colloquial, day-to-day basis. This is where informal media comes in.

Informal Media

Informal media is the other side of the coin, the casual and unscripted. Think TikToks, Twitch Streams, and YouTube Let's Plays. (Do people still make Let's Plays?)

Consuming informal media is great, because here is where you get your slang, your colloqualisms, and your day-to-day speech. This is the language you will hear walking along the street, the language you will talk to your friends in, the language you will talk to your lover in. While formal media (especially the higher forms such as news broadcasts) can get boring, informal media often doesn't. Informal media is whatever the speakers of your target language find fun, what they get enjoyment out of.

An added benefit of consuming informal media is you learn the culture as well. Yes, navigating all the slang and colloquialisms will get challenging, but you can interact with the speakers of your target language on such a deeper level, it is impossible to become fluent without atleast some consumption of informal media.

Memes are another great form of informal media. Find some Instagram shitposting pages in your target language (for some reason Romanian has a lot of these) and have fun!

Kindles

I bought a Kindle a few years ago when it went on sale for $40. I thought it would be a great investment as I no longer had to buy books and I could just load whatever PDFs I could find on the thing. I read half of American Psycho on it before buying a physical copy of American Psycho and shoving the Kindle in my drawer for the next three years.

I had forgotten about it until recently when I saw a video on jailbreaking Kindles. I remembered I was the (admittedly not-so-proud) owner of a Kindle, and decided to try it our for myself.

An hour later and here I was...

Pictured above is how I am currently using my Kindle to suppliment my studies. At the time of writing, I am reading a French translation of The Idiot by Elif Batuman (great book by the way). I have a French-English dictionary (from Wiktionary) downloaded onto my device. Any words I don't know I select with my finger, and up pops the dictionary with a translation of the word. As a result of jailbreaking my Kindle (thank you, the Kindle Modding Wiki) and installing and using KOReader, I have access to Google Translate for the longer and more complex unknowns.

I will say, this method has proved difficult. There are lots of times I've tried it and almost given up. I read to enjoy what I am reading, and I typically read at about 400 words per minute. It is utterly JARRING to have to slow down and translate words on pages, but it is something I know that in the long run, will bolster my ability to understand French tenfold. It helps a lot picking up a book you've already read, so you know where the book is going and can rely on more than just context clues to infer what is going on in the story when your language skills are falling behind.

Engaging in conversation

You've learned enough of your target language's vocabulary, grammar, and syntax to be able to decipher sentences and create your own. Great job! Now it's time to use your skills. There are two ways you can engage in conversation: in-person and online.

In-person is the single best way you can go here. You will be forced to actually speak and pronounce the words, as well as honing in on your listening and comprehension skills. I'm not gonna lie, it's hard, but the difficulty is very much worth it. You get to truly express yourself and you have someone with you, in real life, to aide in your pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

If you don't have speakers of your target language around you, don't fret! You can use social media like Twitter, Reddit, or Discord to find people to talk to. For years I had let my Armenian slip to the point where I couldn't speak it anymore. I found a bunch of Armenians on Twitter and spoke to them in Armenian, and by the end I was speaking the best Armenian I had ever spoken in my life!

The only downside to apps is you're not actually speaking or listening. You could voice call someone or join a Discord voice chat, but it isn't really the same as being with someone face-to-face.

One of the biggest things deterring people from engaging in conversation is that they are scared to mess up. So what? Who gives a shit? Oh no, you used the wrong conjugation of a verb or you took too long trying to think of the right translation. AAAAAGH!!! THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!11!1!!

It's not that serious. Hell, even in my native English I mess up often. Nobody cares. If a foreign language speaker were to mess up while speaking English to you, would you chastize them? No, you wouldn't, and they wouldn't chastize you if you made a mistake when speaking their language. Don't be scared, just go for it.

Fully immersing your day-to-day life

This is the most extreme way to immerse yourself. Do everything in your target language. Set your phone to your target language, your car, your computer, your console. Want to read something? Wikipedia in your target language. Write in your diary in your target language. Whatever you would do that would normally be in English, do it in your target language.

This does come with one caveat. It is hard. Like, really hard. Like, you're six years old and you're thrown in to the deep end of the pool to learn how to swim. You will get stuck. You will get frustrated. You will get better at your target language. Forcing yourself into situations where you can't cheap out and use a language you're comfortable with will greatly increase your ability to comprehend your target language.

As a personal example: my phone, my car, and my laptop are all in French. I write in my diary in French, and I have played some video games in French. French is now my second-strongest language. It was absolutely infuriating to get to this point, but I am so glad that I took these steps. Otherwise, I would've gotten lazy and not practiced. When forced to practice, you will practice.

Conclusion

Learning a language is not an easy task. If you want to actually learn and use it, you will need to put in lots and lots of work over a long period of time. You will get frustrated. You will get burnt out. You will get better. You will succeed. It's not easy, but it is worth it. I cannot tell you the amount of amazing culture I have been exposed to, all the great people I have met, and all the great things I have experienced just by learning a new language. I hope that this writeup helps in your journey to becoming fluent in your next language.

Thank you for sticking with me through this, and have a great day.

—Gabriel Chantayan