All You Need To Know About Language Learning

...you can learn from talking to a 4-year-old on a playground

Once, when I was in my 30s, I was hanging off a monkey bar on a children’s playground when a boy of about 4 approached me.

“Watcha doing?” he asked.

I said “grrrrmphhhh….”

“Are you trying to climb up there?"

“….Noooo…" I didn’t feel like chatting because holding onto that bar took all my energy.

"Are you trying to see how long you can hang there?"

"..Nnnoooo...." I grunted... I was there on a serious business and this child was a nuisance.

"Are you….?" At this point, I fell off the bar and he lost interest in me and went climbing somewhere… I was just relieved he didn’t keep asking me to draw him or sheep or something.

I wouldn’t be able to explain to this boy what I was doing even if I tried. I was hanging off the bar because I was hoping that eventually — maybe months, maybe years later — it would make me strong enough to do a real grown-up pullup.

If you tell a 4-year-old that you’re doing something extremely difficult and not that enjoyable in pursuit of a long-term goal somewhere in the distant future, he would think you’re nuts.

But that interaction (as interactions with 4-year-olds tend to do) taught me the three most important rules of language learning.

Rule #1: Make it relevant to your life

Can you imagine a 4-year-old being like “I am balancing on this curb because I want to be a professional curb walker when I grow up?”

Four-year-olds don’t care about long-term goals. They live in the now and they want immediate gains.

Well, maybe except for this four-year-old:

This four-year-old never climbed a slide or walked on a curb without first making a five-year plan on how to improve her sliding / curb walking technique. She’s trying to grow out of it now.

I say adults are not different from kids. Sure you might have a long-term goal of reading Les Miserables in original but it will be a very tough and unproductive journey if you don’t start making French somehow relevant to your life now.

When should you start using the language? The answer is right away. By ‘right away’ I don’t mean when you finish your beginner course or as soon as you get off the plane in the country where it is spoken or as soon as you finish the first two units of Duolingo.

I mean ideally within the first 2.5 hours after you start learning it. Ok, three.

If you learn three new words, go on to build a sentence. Hopefully, these will be useful words and not a list of nouns that teach you about “culture” (e.g. words for moccassin, deerskin, beaver is what my Ojibwe textbook 20 years ago taught me for the first 120 pages…. ).

Build a sentence and say it out loud to yourself in a mirror. (You can say it to someone else if you’re brave, but no pressure. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice making a fool of yourself later on.)

Write a short love letter to yourself / your dog / your grandma even if it contains only 1.5 sentences and 4 words.

If you’re learning the writing system first, learn how to write your name or your kids’ names ASAP. Even before you learn all the letters.

You will feel happy inside. In scientific terms, you will feel a rush of dopamine that will give you the motivation to keep going. Speaking of happy…

Rule #2: Make it enjoyable

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re not enjoying the process you’re not doing it right.

Enjoyment is essential to the learning process. If you’re bored or annoyed — well guess what? your brain is not very engaged in what you’re doing and probably won’t cooperate.

I’ve found this YouTube channel called Easy Portuguese that has been my happy place for the last couple of weeks. It’s part of a bigger non-profit called Easy Languages that has similar channels (or playlists, if there is not enough content for a channel) for lots of other languages including Hebrew, Spanish, Palestinian Arabic (which I’m bookmarking for later… ) and even lesser known languages like Kurdish, Kazakh, and Miskito (a language spoken in Nicaragua.)

Easy Portuguese (and maybe others) also has a website with a paid membership option where you can do exercises to practice vocabulary you’ve learned from the videos and even have conversation practice on Zoom… I haven’t tried any of these but they sound amazing.

Easy Languages’ motto is “learn the language from the streets”, the idea being that the hosts walk around the city interviewing people about a particular topic (e.g. their favorite food, clothing, dreams, etc.) and in the process help you learn the vocabulary from all these topics.

It’s a brilliant idea because this way you’re hearing the language in its natural habitat… rather than the “standard” version of the language spoken by some made-up “cultural” character. Also, it makes you aware that the way people speak varies immensely — skateboarders don’t talk the same as businessmen, teenage girls don’t talk the same as older people, and kids don’t talk the same as their moms… and you’re getting a taste of this exciting variety right from the start.

It also just restores your faith in humanity when you see all these people around the world talking about their dreams and their pets and their favorite ice cream flavors instead of shouting angry things into social media….

If I weren’t already learning Portuguese, I would want to start learning it after seeing this just because these videos are a pure joy to watch and the hosts are so cute you wanna hug them.

I also love it when people teach me how to say “What’s up” instead of “Hello how are you” in a beginner video:

From their 50 most common words video

Or when they make toilet jokes…

If subtle toilet jokes are not your thing that’s ok just find something that makes you happy. We all like different things.

“Enjoyment” if you like, is just a shorthand for “connecting to something in your innermost being that is uniquely you,” If you find that thing — everything will click into place.

Enjoyment doesn’t mean it won’t be hard. It just means you’ll be able to weather the hard because you’re having so much fun. Which brings me to Rule #3…..

Rule #3: “Make effort the reward itself”

This is where my four-year-old friend and I would disagree. He was wrong in claiming that I was wasting my time hanging on that bar. As I was hanging there, I was steadily going further and further out of my comfort zone…. and getting stronger and stronger as a result.

Also, even though I was suffering, I was enjoying the effort because I knew it was bringing me closer to my goal.

That’s what Andrew Huberman talks about in his episode about leveraging dopamine to optimize effort and learning outcomes (I’ve been binge-listening to Huberman Lab).

The best way to leverage dopamine dynamics for learning, he says, is through building intrinsic motivation, rather than relying on external rewards. Too many external rewards (think likes, dings, gems) can interfere with your ability to develop intrinsic motivation.

But the best part is that dopamine release (e.g. the happy feeling you get when you’ve achieved a goal even a tiny one) can be greatly influenced by your mindset. If you’re pessimistic about your learning outcomes (e.g. “I’ll never learn this language / be able to do a pull-up”) your brain is less likely to notice the little milestones you achieve along the way.

But if you adopt a growth mindset (e.g. “I’m not there yet but I know will get there”), you’re essentially telling your brain to celebrate every little achievement with a tiny dopamine rush.

Even better, he says — adopting a growth mindset will eventually lead you to enjoy the effort and “make effort the reward itself.”

This is what we want because learning a language means constantly getting out of your comfort zone, and so it’s in your best interests to train yourself to fall in love with getting out of your comfort zone.

How would you gradually increase your discomfort tolerance level if you’re watching a video like the ones above or another one that you love very much?

You could start by watching it while reading the English subtitles. Then you can watch the same video while looking only at the Portuguese subtitles. Then you can watch it without looking at subtitles at all to see if you can parse what’s being said without reading.

And then you can try just listening to the same video (or a new one if you’re brave) without looking at the screen and so without the visual cues.

You can play around with getting further and further out of your comfort zone, reaching a point where it’s pretty hard but you’re still making some progress (but not to a point where you don’t understand anything and just wanna give up).

Eventually, you will pull yourself up above that bar¹, but by the time you get there you will have learned to enjoy the effort itself, and that’s a skill for life.

1. I know I will. Even if it’ll take another 20 years 🙄