10 years, 8 countires, 6 languages: What I've learned about learning languages
Edit: I submitted the post three times, it being deleted each time, before I found that one of the links was shortened and Reddit doesn’t like that. I fixed it, quickly added the title back, resubmitted, then realized I’d made two major typos in my frustration. The title should read: 10 years, 8 languages, 6 countries. Hi! Five years ago I shared a document detailing how I learned Japanese, and while that was well received, it was also 66k words long. I've since learned that more is not better: saying more with less is better. And that's hard! "Less is only more when you know what more is, and make a conscious decision to step back from that." — Jacob Collier So, this time around, I decided to try to condense those 66k words + an addtional five years of learning into just a few thousand words. (Edit: 4k words. Will try to condense more later.) So, here are the most important lessons I've learned: 1. Think in ideas, not words 2. "A mediocre workout done religiously outperforms a perfect workout never done" 3. Going abroad is a force multiplier: if you're not making progress at home, you won't magically begin improving just because you uproot your life 4. You'll overestimate how much you need to know to begin doing cool things in a language and underestimate the gap between that point and fluency 5. You will learn as well as you need to learn to do what your lifestyle demands of you, no better or worse; if you’re stuck, light a fire somewhere 6. Achieving fluency means you know one more language; you'll be the same person you are now, for better and worse, plus one language 7. "There's only two sorts of problems: 51/49 problems and 100/0 problems," and most things in life (and language learning) are 51/49 problems. 8. Some things are best learned with less hours and more days; other things are best learned with more hours and less days; a lot of learning boils down to figuring out which things are which 9. Your brain will figure a lot of shit out by itself, if you let it 10. Knowledge is a spectrum, not a binary; this is at the root of many (most?) early learning hurdles