how i learn languages

My friends know me for many things. I'm the guy who goes to concerts and takes photos. I'm the guy who cooks incredible meals. I'm the guy who constantly is shitposting on his story. I'm the guy who drives a French car from 1987. And I'm the guy who speaks tons of languages.

How do I do it? What tools do I recommend? What challenges do I come across? The goal of this writeup is to explain how I learn languages and how you can do the same.

This writeup has a massive information dump about languages that takes up almost half of the article. It is background information on the how languages you come across may differ from the language you currently speak. It is helpful if you want to be prepared for some linguistic challenges you may face, but it can be skipped without affecting the main goal of this article. If you would like to forgo reading it, skip to the learning a foreign alphabet section.

The first step to learning a language is, shockingly enough, picking one. This may seem like an easy question, but when you get down to it, it can be quite the opposite. Why do you want to learn this language? Is it a heritage language? Are you learning it for fun? To challenge yourself? Are you crushing hard on someone who speaks that language?

Not all languages are created equal. Based on what languages you already know, your target language may be super easy or super difficult to pick up.

There is a lot of information in this section. It will likely be overwhelming. It is not meant to dissuade you from learning a language, but instead to prepare you for the fact that languages are all different. If you do not care about to learn the differences in languages you may come across, you can skip this section.

Languages are divided into what are called language families. There are hundreds of these in the world, some connected to each other, and most disconnected. Let's take a look at these following words:

See how similar they all are? That's because all these languages come from the Germanic family. They share a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. How about these words?

Similar again! Those are all languages from the Romance family. Latin is their common ancestor. I bet you noticed that they also seem similar to the Germanic words. That's because Romance and Germanic languages both come from the Indo-European family. Now let's have a look at these words:

Uhh... What? They're all totally different from each other! That's because they each come from separate language families. When you learn a language in a family you already know, you're going to be able to pick up on grammar and vocabulary much easier, since chances are they're going to be derived from a common ancestor. When you learn a language from a seperate family, you need to learn an entire new set of rules and vocabulary to get by.

Did you notice the funny squiggles on the Mandarin word? Those indicate what's called tone. In Mandarin, and in hundreds of other languages around the world, the meaning of a word changes depending on the pitch of your voice when pronouncing it. If you say a word in a high pitch, it will mean something completely different than if you say it in a low pitch. Some languages, like Mandarin, take this a step further. You have a rising tone, a falling tone, and a middle tone. Vietnamese adds to that a creaky tone (where you make your voice creaky) and a glottal tone (where you stop your throat mid-vowel).

Fun fact: Despite so badly wanting to learn Viet, tones are the sole reason I have failed to do so for years and years and years.

The way languages form their words also changes. Let's take the English word walk as an example. If you were to conjugate that verb you'd get the following:

Pretty much the same. Only the He/She form is different. Now what if we were to try the same for French?

The verb changes depending on who is performing the action. Let's take this a step further. Some languages also will conjugate the noun depending on the part of speech. Take the Armenian word for "shoe" (goshik) as an example:

What the hell is all that? What does any of that mean? Instead of saying something like "using the shoe" or "from the shoe", you would change the noun to goshikov or goshikoum respectively. Instead of using seperate words to convey meaning like movement or location, they are built in to prefixes and suffixes. The effort is the same, but the structure is different.

Languages exist on a sort of spectrum. On one side, you have isolating languages. These languages tend to avoid using prefixes and suffixes, relying instead on additional words.In the middle, you have fusional languages. These use limited suffixes with individual meanings. Then you have agglutanative languages. These languages rely heavily on prefixes and suffixes, and like to tack things together to form words.

Let's build out a complex word in Turkish, a highly-agglutinating language.

See how as the English example needs more and more words as the concept grows more and more complex, the Turkish example just adds on suffixes. They end up meaning the exact same thing, but it just gets constructed in different ways. Now let's build out a complex word in Mandarin, a highly-isolating language.

I know, I know, looks really different from the Turkish example. Instead of tacking shit on (agglutinating), Mandarin conveys meaning using lots of smaller words (isolating).

English lies much more towards the Isolative side of languages. We tend to use smaller words instead of tacking prefixes and suffixes together to make words. We have some fusional characteristics too. What is a fusional characteristic though? Let's go back to our French verb example.

I've highlighted the part I want to point out. See how the ending of the verb changes? Let's put this verb into the future tense and compare it with English.

You can see how in the fusional French, the verb ending changes completely to convey the future tense. In the isolating English, we instead tack on another word to convey the future tense. Let's take an example of how an agglutinating language does things. In English, we can say "I walk" for when one habitually walks, or "I am walking" for when one is currently walking. Turkish, however, does things a bit differently.

In Turkish the endings stay the same (mostly, Turkish vowels are weird) but another suffix is tacked on to convey they are actively doing something. In English, we instead add another word to convey this. Just for fun, let's make a long Turkish verb.

When put together, the word yürüyebiliyormuşsunuz means "it seems like you all are able to walk". Very different than how one would say it in English.

When it comes down to it though, they still mean the same thing. They just look different. This will be a common thing you realize in your journey to learning a new language. You will come across many challenges and many different ways to express concepts, but in the end, you're going to be saying the same thing. You can drive a Honda or a Ferrari, either way you're still driving a car. You can speak English or Greek, either way you're still expressing things.

Those are just a set of some of the issues I deem more important to know. There's still many more ways a language can be weird or different. (See: ergative languages, triconsonal root systems, word-order, vowel harmony, the absurdly fucked up phonemic inventory of the Ubykh and Abkhaz languages)

Thank you for bearing with me through that spiel. Now for the part we all came here to read: the methods I use to learn languages.

Not every language uses the Latin alphabet, found in English and many other European languages. There are hundreds of writing systems in the world, and only about 36% of the world's population use an alphabet with letters like the English alphabet. So what should you do if your target language uses a different alphabet? Luckily, I have a trick for you.

Write in a language you're comfortable in using your target language's script.

What do I mean by this? Let's use the Russian as an example. Say 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.

Ай кан рид Рошин!

Ay kan rid Roshin!

Okay, you can start to see what I'm getting at here. It ends up looking a bit weird but it works. Let's do one more example:

This is a good strategy for learning alphabets.

Тис из а гуд стратеджи фор лернинг алфабетс

Tis iz a gud stratedji for lerning alfabets

See what I mean?

Armenian is such a cool-looking language

Արմինիան իզ սըչ ա կուլ-լըկինգ լանգուաջ

Arminian iz such a kool-luking langooaj

As you can tell, the conversion is not going to be 1:1. Still though, by writing a new script in a language you are already comfortable in, you will quickly become comfortable with using that script. In turn, your target language is going to become much easier to learn and you can attain higher levels of fluency much quicker.

Plus, it's fun to write in foreign scripts to hide stuff from your friends and coworkers.

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

Textbooks are great. I like them a lot, but they are very hit-or-miss. Sometimes you'll find an absolute gem of a textbook that will take you from 0 to 100 in the course of the book. Other times you will find books so confusing and convoluted that you'd need a master's in linguistics to decipher the first chapter. If you can find a good textbook, great! If not, don't worry, there's so many more resources you can use.

In this day and age, there are tons of apps one can use to learn a language. You cannot fully learn a language using only an app. 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!". No. That won't work.

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.

There are several effective ways to immerse yourself in a language. You can consume the media, engage yourself in conversation, or fully immerse your day-to-day life. Here I will go through a few of the different methods I've tried, what has worked for me, and how.

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.

— gabe chantayan