On Language Learning
While there is no magic secret to learning a foreign language, most polyglots have found methods that work effectively for them and which they can reliably go back to whenever they start a new language project. I think I probably know "language" better than I know anything else, and it's something I've been drawn to (visually, acoustically, aesthetically, scientifically) from a very young age, and as a result, I've dedicated a large portion of my life to it, particularly with regards to the subject of foreign language acquisition. One very sweet Polish woman even once suggested that this was my God-given "superpower."
While a lot of this success is the mere result of a very specific convalescence of interests and hobbies of mine, these patterns, over time, have crystalised into something of a language learning methodology. This page serves as a documentation of just that—my method. It is by no means the best or the right way to learn a language; it's just how I have done things. This method has worked really well for me, and in the event that you're curious if it could work for you too, I've decided to write it all down here for reference. The method can essentially be broken down into four simple phases: research, blitz, immerse, and practice.
TLDR;
Research a language's phonology and grammar to get a big picture idea of how it works. Use traditional study methods while your motivation is high to get your first 2000 words and the basic grammar down. Pivot to immersion and comprehensible input. Practice by putting yourself in situations where you can have similar conversations with different people.
1. Research
To be honest, I don't think my methodology differs much from the advice you often hear from other, more public language learners, perhaps with the exception of this first phase only. Though less commonplace, the research portion of language learning for me is inevitably always my first step, and I find it to be absolutely crucial. I don't learn well without having my bearings, and so before I dive into a language I like to contextualize myself by getting a good big picture understanding of both its phonology and its grammar.
Phonology
Particulary in the case of phonology (the sounds and nitty-gritty details surrounding the pronunciation of the language), having at least a bit of technical knowledge of phonetics and, at the bare minimum, familiarity with IPA, I find to be prerequisite. I would argue that if you see yourself as the type who wants to learn many languages over your lifetime, becoming familiar with the IPA will turn out to be an invaluable tool for you. Very luckily for us, the linguistics corner of Wikipedia is thorough, well-edited, and deep. And so a bit of control-shift-clicking as one spelunks down different rabbit holes can be an effective primer for a lot of linguistic topics. Learning how to interpret IPA accurately is a great way to get started if it is unfamiliar to you.
While I think it's true that some people have naturally better ears for foreign sounds than others, and that this plays an obvious role in developing good listening skills and pronunciation, I think that we can do our ears and mouths a big favour by learning what unfamiliar sounds to look out for in a foreign language before we start immersing. Our brains constantly make small corrections for gaps or errors in the linguistic information we process in our first language, but these exact same mechanisms which make communication so much more fluid in our mother tongues can actually be detrimental to our acquiring a new one.
For instance, for someone whose first language is Polish or Chinese or Norwegian (or even a native speaker with a speech impediment), when speaking English they may pronounce the first sounds of the words "ship," "should," "she," etc. in a way that is slightly different from how a native English speaker would pronounce it. But our brains can recognize that even if marginally different from what we are used to, these foreign but familiar sounds maps to the same "sh" sound we ourselves produce, preventing communication from breaking down.
But examining the same phenomenon from the the inverse perspective, if a language distinguishes /ɕ/ and /ʂ/ as meaningfully different (as in Chinese or Polish or Norwegian), but your mother tongue's natural instinct is to interpret both as allophones of an English /ʃ/ (the English "sh" sound), knowing beforehand that such a distinction exists, and knowing how they are different from each other and from the sounds in your native language gives you a massive headstart in both your listening ability and pronunciation. The deeper you get into linguistics, the more you realize that comprehension is largely to do with anticipation and guesswork, and so this research phase is really about providing you with a broad sketch of a language (however crude) so that you can begin to fill in the details and perfect them later down the line, much the same way a painter sets up his painting with broad and general blocks of colour.
If these ideas are all largely very fresh and new to you, then in order to compare and contrast your target language with your mother tongue, the first step is actually to familiarize yourself with the phonology of your own particular dialect of your first language. While in some ways we are natural experts of our mother tongues as native speakers, a deep technical knowledge of all the ways your mouth naturally manouevers to make the sounds you've been making without any thought since you started speaking will set you up well to start comparing, contrasting, and adjusting those reflexes and aligning them with the ideal of your target language. A Google search like "wikiepdia canadian english phonology" (replaced with the correct geolocation for you) will set you up with where to start.
Grammar
The research stage for grammar is analogous to that of the phonology stage, though the prep work for it is far more amorphous. What linguistic terminology you need to be familiar going to differ a lot language to language. For getting a broad picture of the grammar, I recommend just pulling up "[Target-Language-Name] Grammar" on Wikipedia, and reading the whole page, top to bottom. There is likely going to be a lot of jargon you don't understand, but I think you can be somewhat selective with what you decide to dig into. If something strikes you as particularly important, but the jargon is making it totally impenetrable, allow yourself to do a mini-deep dive, but I wouldn't stress too much about totally getting it. Again, we are merely trying to get a big picture of the language. Getting a sense for how the various parts of speech interact, how verbs or nouns transform in different contexts, etc. etc. makes your inevitable grammar study that will come later a whole lot easier. Inevitably, as we study grammar more in detail later, I find along the way we often make certain assumptions about how our target language's grammar works, only to find some of those assumptions to be wrong later on. We then need to correct any falsely internalized information we may have assumed early on to move forward, and these stops and starts can be frustrating and disorienting. I think this is inevitable in language learning, but a big skim of something like the language grammar page on Wikipedia before you dive into your studies can really help ameliorate some of these mini pitfalls. As you move through grammar textbooks or real native content, you will be able to more easily recognize what is simply a word you don't know and what is actually an unfamiliar grammar point. This is a really crucial skill to have when you start immersing.
2. Blitz
Now that we have gotten our bearings, we can move on to the blitzing phase. As I mentioned before, comprehension is largely about anticipation. The blitz phase takes advantage of the relatively high level of motivation and excitement we feel when we first start a new language, and channels it into traditional study methods like vocab drilling and grammar study as much as we can to prepare for the most important stage, immersion.
My general language learning philosophy can be basically summarised as this: The goal of language study is to get away from study materials as fast as possible. While spirits are high, now is the time to hit the books as hard as you can. When studying vocabulary, I usually shoot for around 2000 of the language's most commonly used words, and my tool of choice has long been Anki (if you haven't heard of Anki, it's a very popular spaced-repetition flashcard app that is really popular in the language learning and med-school community. A quick search on Google or YouTube will pull up lots and lots of helpful information and tutorials). For grammar, some people like textbooks, but in my experience, for any language, there is almost always an excellent online grammar guide available for absolutely free. I will usually sift through one or two of those, recording sentences in notebooks and making memos as I go along.
Contrary to popular belief, I think our ability to consciously study a foreign language as adults in some ways actually makes us much more effective learners of languages than babies (we can start speaking and making sentences on day one! Babies typically take upwards of a year to even get one word out). And so this traditional learning method (notebooks, flashcards, textbooks), the way you likely learned a foreign language at school, has a lot of merits, and so I I like to take this step very seriously. But it's important to stress that this stage should be temporary. There's a reason schools all teach with these methods, but there is also a reason they hardly produce fluent speakers of foreign languages. For adult learners, traditional study methods are powerful and useful, but only so that we can hit the ground running. We want to break out of it as fast as we can. In my mind, time spent on your traditional language learning method should peak only maybe three or four months into starting your studies, and continue for at most a year or two. After that, we need to mostly start pivoting to the final stage. Babies start learning their first language from zero. They don't get textbooks or vocab lists, and so it's an awfully slow start. They are forced to rely entirely on this final step. The result is a very slow road to sentence-making and comprehension, but it's also a road that guarantees true fluency.
3. Immerse
That method, which I've hinted at a few times, is immersion. I will make this section brief because I have very little more to contribute to this part of the discourse around langauge learning because the strength of this method is well-known and well documented among online polyglots. In the words of the famous Stephen Krashen, I'll just leave it to say, at the end of the day "we don't learn languages, we acquire them." Despite all of what I said in the previous section, we truly learn languages not be sitting down with flashcards, or filling out blanks in workbooks, or memorizing conjugation tables. We don't even really learn languages by speaking them. By far the most effective way to learn a language is to listen to it and understand it. If you don't really understand what I mean by this, try searching your target language name with "comprehensible input beginner from zero" on YouTube and watching some of what comes up. You will find that even without any knowledge of the language, with enough context and visual aid, there are indeed ways to make sense of what is otherwise gibberish into something comprehensible. Live in this stuff. Breathe it. Fill your phone up with podcasts. Start a YouTube account for foreign language immersion. Because although we have one more section, this is ultimately the final step of language learning. The goal of language learning is to be able to throw away those textbooks and flashcards as soon as possible and to just be able to engage with friends, social media posts, podcasts, music, books, movies, TV shows—the whole lot of it—the way natives do. To just live in the language and soak it up that way a native speaker eventually does.
When you finish your blitz stage, and start dedicating all of your time to immersion, you are going to quickly find that even after all that work, there is plenty you don't know. But once you put the traditional tools away, your language learning can switch to being entirely on an as-needs basis. At this stage, you should be able to recognize in some block of text what is a new grammar pattern, what is a new declension of a noun you don't understand, what is a compound word, etc. And because of that, you can search as you go, and exposure to these blindspots will eventually make this new knowledge internalized. At first, this is going to feel very time-consuming, and when you're being thorough, it will be. But just know over time, the gaps do start to close, and it will get easier and easier. Before you know it, listening to your target language is going to feel as natural as listening to your mother tongue.
4. Practice
Often when people ask me for just one piece of language advice, I tell them to worry less about speaking and more about listening. If you listen a lot, the rest will generally follow. However, when you inevitably do speak, and when you inevitably do want to practice, there is one other piece of advice I often like to leave with people (and it ties back to a theme we've touched on a few times here already).
Conversation in foreign languages often get muddled and cut short for two very basic reasons: 1. you can't find the right words in time, and 2. you can't process what you're hearing in time. This is normal of course! Things take time. When people ask me how to get better at having conversations in a foreign language, I like to give the advice that they should find ways to have the same conversation multiple times.
As I've said, comprehension is largely about predictability. And so, what better way to anticipate what someone is going to say to you than to basically have had the same conversation multiple times before? Seasoned language learners are often really good at talking about where we are from, how long we've studied our target language, what our hobbies are, our names, our backgrounds, precisely because we have these conversations all the time. But venturing outside the realm of the self-introduction, we can do this on a smaller scale and reap similar benefits.
Ask someone about a grammar point you are learning, or a food, or a how a holiday is celebrated, or about a piece of history. If you have a non-personal question you think you could ask multiple people, do just that! The first time through, the conversation might get clunky quick as you struggle to keep up, or as your interlocutor finds herself needing to explain words or concepts. But while each iteration of your conversation will inevitably be different, have the same conversation with five different people, and you'll notice patterns emerge.
I did this all the time with Japanese and Korean, and I found it really helped. Sometimes I would be able to get out of the question-asking seat and test out relaying some of what I'd learned from a previous conversation but with someone new—I could try to structure my explanations similarly to what I heard, use similar words and phrases, and then ask for confirmation to check my comprehension. As one would expect, with each conversation, every aspect of it gets easier, and your reference points for different grammar patterns and vocab solidify more and more deeply and securely with every repetition. I think it's a great way to practice speaking.
Conclusion
This basically sums up my method for learning a new language. Keep in mind that these steps do not need to be done in a perfectly linear fashion. Think of it as a linear stream of study themes, and feel free to start start an Anki deck the same day you begin your research, or to start immersing while you do your prep. These are all loose guidelines of course. That being said, if you decide to try out this methodology, I hope you are able to enjoy some success from it! Learning another language is one of the most rewarding experiences—one which I hope everyone at some point in their lives as the pleasure of enjoying. For now, I will leave things here, though I may come back to this page and edit it as I see fit. Godspeed and good luck!