How to REALLY learn a language in 2024 (a linguist explains)

by now you've had a month to try your New Year's resolution of learning a language you've watched all the YouTube videos you've probably purchased an app or a course and you've had four weeks or five how's it going now that the honeymoon's worn off are you ready to learn how to really do it so here's the deal maybe it's your New Year's resolution maybe it's something you've always wanted to do maybe it's something you've started on a whim and you're getting serious about it whatever your reasons learning a language is a wonderful experience with tremendous

benefits not just opening new cultures Cuisines ways of thinking and experiences but also providing benefits in terms of mental health and well-being and combating mental aging and decline but there's an overwhelming and bewildering flood of choices for a new learner and it's only gotten more overwhelming especially with the addition of AI powered apps what's best textbooks teachers apps AI when should you study how often my goal in this video is to use my experience as an academic linguist and a recreational lingu file and language learner to demystify language learning if you're just starting out this

video is for you but it's also for those of you who maybe have some study or even a few languages under your belt you can always refine your skills and get more efficient and effective this video might not make you fluent in three months but it will give you a better understanding of how to get to your goals in a realistic amount of time without spending your wheels and going in circles and making no progress I'm Dr Taylor Jones I've got a PhD in linguistics and I speak a handful of languages this is language Jones

real quick this video is about how to think strategically about language learning and how to execute a straty to achieve your goals it's not going to tell you which app on the market is best or why the answer is never an AI tutor whose ads feature grammatical errors in English in this video I'm going to discuss setting and managing achievable goals the subdomains of language learning learning science memory analyzing language and developing a program that meets your goals in a finite amount of time before you set new goals anyone should be able to communicate effectively

in a target language especially the most common ones you are statistically likely to be interested in in about a year you should be able to shock natives with your amazing skills in a few months and a few years of study should put you at the level of an educated confident speaker but almost everyone you talk to will aim for fluency and everyone will Define fluency differently stick around to the end and I'll discuss language learning for neurod Divergent folks too before I forget please take a moment to like And subscribe if you haven't already a

lot of us Dive Right In without any clear goals in mind and that's fine but it's worth recognizing that what we're doing is aiming at nothing if you aim at nothing you're certain to hit it dabbling just to get a feel for a language and see if you like it want to study it more seriously is totally fine it's like skimming a book but let's say you've decided you want to learn I don't know Vietnamese an important question to ask yourself before you start is why is it just to enjoy music movies and other media

to read books at home to go visit in country and successfully navigate booking a hotel or ordering a meal or planning tourist outings and so on to study in a university to teach in a university for those of you learning a language right now can you say what your goals are go ahead and leave me a comment and tell me what they are then at the end of this video maybe reflect on whether what you're currently doing is aligned with them knowing what your goals are will allow you to tailor your study to how you

intend to use the target language and get the most bang for your buck right up front you can re-evaluate and adjust later but if your goal is to listen to pop music and you choose a course that's focused on teaching you how to make small talk in order in a restaurant you're setting yourself up for a struggle once you know your goals just set a three or six-month goal and then revisit you can then determine what linguistic subdomains you need to focus on I'm planning a trip to a place where I can speak Persian I've

dabbled in Persian off and on out of general interest but now I want to speak it notice I didn't say I want to read it I didn't say I want to write calligraphy or read poetry maybe I will later but right now I want to be able to speak politely to strangers order food and make small talk this means I need to focus on listening comprehension of spoken Persian how it's actually spoken not formally I'll link a video at the end about the difference and I need to focus on being able to actually generate my

own sentences for Persian there's an added layer since communicating directly is not communicating effectively and I will need to learn T politeness formulations that are largely routine often metaphorical and always dramatic I hope your hand doesn't hurt may your head if I spend my time analyzing the grammar of formal written Persian and focusing on reading the Persian script like with this book I will not reach my goal in the couple of months I've given myself even if I study Persian every day this is a great textbook it's just not the right approach for me I'll

discuss selecting a course in just a few moments whatever you decide once you decide you still have to actually learn and there's so much misinformation out there about learning my favorite genre is someone who's neurod Divergent lecturing viewers about how their approach is the best when it works for them and only them bonus points if they describe it as dominating or crushing their target language sure dedicating 8 hours a day to a Fugue state of likely autistic hyperfocus will absolutely provide you with results just like someone else is clearly providing you with room and board

but don't recommend that to others like it's a realistic approach and you just cracked the code on language learning a combination of neurod Divergent Sant hood and a life of leisure is not exactly an actionable recommend a for most people engaging though it is to watch so how do we actually learn it's not by rereading and highlighting a textbook or mindlessly going over flashcards or doing a single two-minute lesson on Bird app once every 3 days if we remember to do so the learning part has two components language learning specific and general domain learning and

I'll address memorization as well there are arguments about how we actually learn languages since the 1970s or so the older grammar translation method has been on the outs but it's still inarguably quite effective for some you'll hear Arguments for shadowing which is just repeating out loud after native speaker as much as possible you'll hear Arguments for just getting a high volume of comprehensible input where you can get the gist of what's going on and there's only one new thing you'll hear Arguments for sitting down and dominating French for eight hours a day with targeted speaking

practice followed by detailed self-criticism for every day for two months the truth is that the jury still out and different approaches work for different people what we do know is that there are certain things that definitely work it's clear for instance that a large volume of of things you're interested in in your target language help with passive memorization and confidence in the language it's clear that hearing a lot of your target language helps with pronunciation even in the absence of targeted pronunciation practice but also if you want to produce the language Say by speaking then

it's also clear that the kind of learning that is active work rather than passive mindless activity really works this means not just looking at your word list over and over again I'm talking to me in college studying Mandarin but instead walking away back to a blank sheet of paper and writing down all the words then comparing seeing what you forgot or got wrong correcting and doing it again this means taking sentences you hear or learn and either adding to them or swapping out words in the same sentence frame this means attempting to generate sentences especially

if your goal is involve speaking that use what you've learned or that identify gaps in your knowledge and then filling in those gaps and attempting to use the new words or structures as much as possible so for instance I try to describe the world around me or my thoughts or a story or whatever and my target language when I'm away from my study materials on a walk or on the subway that is attempting to actively generate your target language identifying your gaps and weaknesses and then filling those with targeted practice that enables successful memorization some

people benefit from pneumonics I hate them and I hate that I benefit from them because they really do work they're like deadlifting one thing that's known to work is skipping the prefrontal cortex and activating your amydala and hippocampus you do this by tapping into Sensations like smell fear and more generally arousal sexual or otherwise sex violence fear and physicality help lock in new words and Concepts I've sometimes joked about naughty neonics on my live streams I remember words like nazq nearby tanho alone and shalvar trousers with obviously pureal associations is it dumb yes is it

potentially offensive absolutely does it work 100% for those wondering the trousers thing is a strained pun relating to a character and Foundation whose No Nonsense attitude General capability and inventiveness ability to defend herself and Grace Joneses features make her a Sci-Fi Crush I'm talking Sor Harden and you can figure out the association on your own time paradoxically a lot of evidence also points toward language learning happening best when we're not stressed self-critical or cognitively taxed this is the principle behind Michel Tomas whole shtick which is deeply ironic since he learned four languages while literally surviving

the Holocaust breaking out of concentration camps and fighting in the French Resistance and later hunting Nazis so clearly not being stressed as a bonus but not a total deal breaker leave me a comment if you want me to talk a little bit more about Michel doma's insane life story and how it affects his language learning method by the way lastly and I'll recap in just a moment memory is a process of forgetting and being reminded so don't beat yourself up for forgetting a word just savor it and make some connections whether sense emotional pneumonic or

otherwise it's better to review vocabulary after a day or two than to come back to it a bunch in the same sitting so I'll learn vocab in one short sitting test myself on it later sometimes just mentally walking around like I said before revisit later in the day then go back and review it trying to generate everything I've learned first the next day I might hit the same vocab in 3 days after that 5 days after that you can Outsource this with spaced repetition software but the learning still needs to be active you make a

flash card with a missing piece and you generate the missing piece on your own before you look at the back of the card you hear me before you look at the back of the card that's also for college me some resources do this for you dualingo does if you're doing at least a skill a day 5 to 10 a day is better but that could take up to to an hour one lesson within a skill per day you're not seeing enough material or reviewing frequently enough to retain anything up to this point I haven't said

which program is best by the way that's because you'll need to figure out what meets your goals and your personal preferences for some doing an hour of dualingo a day is a breeze and the organization of the course and spacing of the material is taken care of for you for some that's excruciating torture and they'd rather eat glass and for some dualingo doesn't even have the language you're interested in I've recommended dualingo tentatively Rosetta Stone I talkie and lingo pie in the past but the key is to find find something that you enjoy and can

do a little of ideally 20 minutes minimum every day if that's Asim Miller pimsler more power to you most of the Chinese I know in reverse order is from a specialist degree in East St in studies at the University of Toronto from doing Rosetta Stone while working at one of their kiosks and the overwhelming majority is from Reading grammars like EFA Link in the description and hanging out at pretty angel nail salon and spa shout out to n with that thick fanf accent one word at a time on YouTube recently crunched the numbers and demonstrated

that you can get shocking far in 3 months of just watching a single easy German video a day on YouTube for 100 days if you're learning German that is the keys to pick a course that meets your goals so for my Persian goals that's the rootage colloquial Persian and an an deck of my own making with their audio and not the root fary shittin ass course and definitely not thaxton's Grammar of Persian and probably not Rosetta Stone but I could make an argument for it especially if their format appeals to you and you want to

speak more formally for Italian I'd probably just speedrun dual lingo and watch TV on lingo Pai for anything I want to speak I definitely use it talkie or some similar platform unless I had friends I could practice the language with in real life and who didn't mind that but really take a moment to evaluate your options and consider whatever you learn while doing so part of getting a taste of the language the final thing to keep in mind is that languages are simultaneously huge and finite I recreationally read grammars of languages and they're all a

few hundred pages and cover everything you could possibly want to know about the grammar of a language literally any possible sentence structure you could ever imagine or ever be confronted with and it all F in one book get yourself the right vocabulary for your goals and a consistent study method that works for you and your golden lastly I promis I'd mention a few things for the neurod Divergent among us this is obviously not going to be a one-size fits all solution if you have a diagnosis or even a self- diagnosis play to your strengths don't

set yourself up for failure if you have ADHD don't make impossible plans and imagine hyperfocus will get you there the process of actually memorizing things is tedious in a way that can be physically painful for ADHD folks so you have to build in a dopamine hit while you're doing it and a consistent habit maybe it's 4 p.m. study with coffee and a cookie and you ensure you get at least one new word in even if you're just reviewing that day have a loved one drive the bus in terms of sitting you down to actually study

just get that dopamine if you're more on the autism side of things recognize that your hyperfocus will allow you to blast through memorizing a tremendous amount of language or in the case of academic linguists a lot of declarative knowledge about language but you're going to need to put in more effort to really understand the unspoken social cues when someone says your Chinese is good paradoxically that means your Chinese is not good if it were they wouldn't be commenting on it at all when a farsy speaker responds to a generic compliment with offering you their belongings

it is not a real offer there's a social script they're following and expect you to follow too we sometimes forget that there's more to language Than Just Words so to recap if you want to make fast progress here's what I would do I'd set a realistic goal that won't burn me out for a realistic time frame with breaks built in for instance I want to be able to know the basics in chaten Persian in two months as I mentioned this is doable for me because I've already studied some I already know how to read but

I'm also working in transliteration to make it easier for myself I'm working through a 17 chapter textbook at the rate of two chapters per week I'm doing this by setting aside at least 20 minutes a day for study and review I'm interleaving old and new material I'm actively trying to generate language whether by answering exercises or attempting to come up with my own with the exception of my live streams I'm not studying for more than 20 minutes at a time but if I can squeeze in a few 20- minute chunks at different times in the

day I will I'll be adding ey talkie lessons once I have a foundation and I'll explicitly tell my tutor my goals what resources I'm using and what is giving me difficulty I've also given myself a challenge speak in toneles and I have accountability a weekly live stream in a community that knows my goal and is supporting me to meet it if I feel like trying out a different approach listening to Chai and conversation for instance listening to Persian music playing farsy language podcasts in the background these are in addition to my main course of study

and I do not count them as anything other than icing on the cake so to speak I'm going to see this textbook through completely before moving on but that's because I've determined it's a great resource for me and my needs and my personality in this moment and if I totally fail at communicating in two months I've still learned a ton of the language and that challenge will let me know where to refocus my energy if I want to continue if you have the time and the energy you can set outrageous goals Lord knows I know

that I've been doing it on my channel but whatever you do don't make your goal I want to be fluent in French and go to France someday make it I want to reach B2 and go to Paris next summer so I can visit the Eiffel Tower and get a croissant at the specific buong I saw on Instagram thank you to all my patrons you can become a patron at patreon.com language Jones you can also support the Channel with super thanks right here on YouTube or super chat in my live streams if you like this video

YouTube is very confident you'll probably enjoy this one as well until next time happy learning