What learning 12 languages in 12 months taught me

Friends with Words is a newsletter about language, culture, and identity, created by a Russian-born, Israel-based essayist, linguist, former world traveler, and single mom.

If you’re disillusioned by the current state of humanity, but still secretly hope that curiosity can fix the world or at least make it a less horrible place, this space is for you. Welcome.

If you have been here for a while, you know that last year I completed a somewhat insane challenge to learn 12 languages in 12 months. It taught me that most of what we think we know about language learning is backwards. The biggest breakthroughs came not from studying harder or longer, but from embracing failure, creating artificial urgency, and treating the whole thing like a game. I originally wrote about these insights for Glossika's blog last month, but I wanted to share them here, too, since they capture so much of what that intense year revealed about how we actually acquire languages.

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What learning 12 languages in 12 months taught me

A little over a year ago I set out on a challenge to learn 12 languages in 12 months. I’m a linguist by training, but I realize that even for a linguist it’s a little bit of a crazy challenge. The thing is that I love learning languages and I find that I do it better and enjoy it more when I’m spurred by a tight deadline.

A journey without a blueprint

Originally, I thought I’d stick with the more familiar languages to make it more doable but I discovered that I needed diversity to keep my mind going and excited, so I ended up studying languages as distinct as Finnish, Thai, Arabic, and Yaqui (an endangered Uto-Aztecan language), to name a few.

I didn’t have a clear strategy when I started. But over time, some patterns emerged.

1. Immersion was inconsistent across languages:
   With languages that don’t have very complicated grammar, like Thai, I was able to jump straight into listening, right after learning to produce and recognize the five tones. With Finnish, on the other hand, I needed an in-depth overview of the grammar before jumping into native content.

2. Maintaining all the languages also turned out to be impossible:
   At first, I tried to keep reading/listening in the previous languages after I jumped into a new one, but that quickly became unsustainable, so I had to say goodbye to each previous language before embarking on a new one.

My original motivation was to share my passion for linguistic diversity with the readers of my newsletter, but I also learned more about the language learning process than I could ever imagine.

Here are the main takeaways from my year of languages.

Mindset is everything

I have found over and over again that mindset is everything. If you approach your learning journey with the growth mindset (i.e. “I don’t know it yet but I will know it”) things will flow. In scientific terms (according to HubermanLab and others), consciously cultivating a growth mindset lets you leverage dopamine dynamics and helps you make the effort the reward itself.

The best way to cultivate a growth mindset, I’ve found is by having a goal that is motivating enough and through practice. When you set little achievable goals over and over again, your mind learns to get excited just from seeing the challenge because it knows it will achieve it.

Create an environment of need

Our brains and bodies have evolved to conserve energy and will not make unnecessary efforts unless in an environment of pressing need. A baby acquires her first language because she needs to communicate with the world. That’s true for adults too. If you end up in a place where no one speaks your language, you will have no choice but to learn the local language to get around.

Granted, not everyone can move to a remote village in Southern France to learn French, but you can always create little immersion bubbles throughout your learning process. Whenever possible, I tried using learning materials that didn’t babble at me in English and didn’t make life easy for me by offering translations but left me to figure things out from the context.

Set the right goal

It helps to always have a goal, no matter where you are in your learning journey. But this goal can’t be “learn Italian by the end of the year.” Fluency is a vague concept that makes for a very frustrating goal. You can have “finish the Polish textbook by March” or “listen to all A2 sentences on Glossika in Portuguese” as your goal but an ideal goal would have something to do with language use. For example “learn enough Thai to place my order in Thai next time I go to that Thai restaurant” or “understand one episode of Peppa Pig in Finnish” by the end of the month.

Make it enjoyable

Watching learner videos and listening to boring scripted beginner dialogues just didn’t do it for me. I preferred to go straight for the material that was way above my level but interesting. When you’re watching your favorite series in your target language and on the 5th listen you can suddenly understand what the main character is saying, it is very rewarding.

Of course, going way above your level is not going to cut it either. You have to understand what’s going on even if you don’t understand everything, and even if you have to strain to understand it. But if you have zero knowledge of Thai, just sitting there and listening to Thai and not understanding anything will not make your brain magically soak Thai.

You get better at it the more you do it

I am lucky enough to always have been pretty quick at figuring out and internalizing grammatical patterns. But I found that no matter your starting point, you can still get better at it the more you do it. With Finnish (my first language for this particular challenge), it took me weeks before I felt confident reading, but by the time I was learning Kurmanji Kurdish (my tenth language), I felt confident jumping straight into reading after just a day or two with the language.

Learn about how you learn best

No one learning method and no one tool is gonna work for everyone. It can be very frustrating to embark on a program developed by someone and touted by your friends only to find out that it doesn’t work for you. The thing is, just like we have different bodies, we also have different brains. What works for one person will not work for another.

Some people learn best in the morning, some in the afternoon. Some people jump straight into speaking, others prefer to read and acquire extensive vocabulary first. Some people need explicit grammar instruction, other people can’t stand it and would just rather learn by doing, reading, listening, and internalizing grammar intuitively. Learning how you learn best is just as important as learning itself.

Memorizing word lists doesn’t work

Memorizing random vocabulary items doesn’t work. Our brain is designed to make connections between things and is really bad at remembering random pieces of information. Sentence memorization is better because it lets you remember words in context, and even then what you really need is repetition. Unlike individual words, sentences, repeated at strategic intervals (spaced repetition), stayed in my memory, making it easy to form new sentences based on the ones I already knew.

Hardwon knowledge is retained better

At the beginning, I would write down words in pretty notebooks and organize conjugation tables in visually compelling ways, hoping that the process of writing would help me remember them better. But the opposite happened. The minute I’d write something down, it seemed that my brain would decide, “Ok because it’s on a piece of paper now, we don’t need to make an effort to remember it.”

I’ve found that information that your brain worked hard for is retained better than information that has been spoonfed to you.

For instance, when you read or listen to something, it is tempting to look up every unfamiliar word. However, I found that when I resisted that temptation and let my brain figure things out from the context, it retained that information better.

Learning scientists call this phenomenon “desirable difficulty”, the idea being that intentionally making things more difficult makes your brain work harder and improves long-term learning outcomes.

More hours doesn’t equal better learning

In addition to being a language-learning enthusiast, I happen to be a working single parent, meaning I didn’t have unlimited hours to devote to language-learning pursuits. But what I’ve found out this year is that you don’t need many hours. In fact, many hours can be counterproductive. Consistency and intensity are important. But the most I could ever do in one session is 2 hours, and the ultimate most I could do in a day is 3-4 hours. After that, my brain would be too exhausted and any additional learning would be counterproductive. That applies not only to active studying but also to listening to Glossika sentences, and watching content in my target language because while the latter is mostly fun times it’s still mentally taxing.

Treat it as a game, embrace imperfection

Most of the obstacles in language learning are psychological. We’re afraid to form a sentence in a new language because we don’t want to embarrass ourselves. To overcome these, I found that it’s best to approach learning as a game, and embrace imperfection.

Not just that. Embracing imperfection is important at all stages: when you’re just starting out, but also - and especially - further on, when you’re not a beginner anymore and when you think you should be able to speak better. Just let yourself make mistakes, wherever you are in your learning journey, and celebrate your own child-like audacity in getting out there and trying no matter what.

It's ok to learn a language and let it go

I’m not going to maintain all the languages I’ve learned this year. I’m ok with that. Maintaining the language is a lot of work, and I don’t have time in my day to maintain 12 new languages. So apart from a few favorites (perhaps, Thai, Arabic, and Yiddish) the rest of them will probably slowly fade away. Does it mean I just wasted hours of my life? I don’t think so. I love the thrill of learning a new language, and I will always enjoy this journey even if I know it’s not forever.

Besides, learning a language gives you so much more than the language itself. You learn how to learn better, you learn not to be afraid of making mistakes, and you learn not to take yourself too seriously. Not just that: every new language shows us a different way of viewing the world, teaching us that nothing is set in stone and that every assumption we have about how the world works can be questioned.

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P.S. If any of these insights sparked questions you'd like me to explore further, let me know in the comments!

P.P.S. Glossika is a really fine language learning app, and I have a special link that gets you a 30 day free trial instead of their usual 7 days.¹

1. The link takes you to what looks like a 7-day trial page, but you’ll get 30 days free. Promise.