On the Critical Path

There is a myth about language learning in the United States, one that’s fascinated me for years. “You can’t become fluent,” is something I used to hear all the time. As a young and impressionable school kid, I believed it. And still I listened to the sounds of my Haitian and Vietnamese peers, eavesdropped on couples in tiny Korean restaurants, disheartened that I would never partake in such wonderful and melodic conversations.

By the time I reached high school, however, I learned that this myth had an equally powerful sibling, one perhaps even more diffuse among my fellow monolingual peers. I’m talking about the idea of merit-based fluency, the notion that receiving good grades or having a college minor—that the awards themselves—implied a mastery over a given foreign language. Between the ages of 13 and 22, I studied Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and French in academic settings and, unsurprisingly, I am not (and never was) remotely competent in those languages. But I stubbornly insisted that I would someday be fluent in something.

In the summer of 2020, during the height of the pandemic, I decided to study Italian. I was working night shifts at a satellite location of McLean Hospital, tucked away in a windy residential neighborhood just off Brattle Street. There, between patient check-ins and staff notes, when residents were fast asleep and the night had long descended upon our unit, I sat in the small staff office reviewing grammar and vocab flashcards I had made the previous afternoon. At home, I watched videos of polyglots discussing language learning techniques and I read articles, written by linguists like Stephen Krashen, on second language acquisition and a theory called “Comprehensible Input.” Krashen’s idea is that an adult learner can gain fluency over repeated exposure to input that is difficult but understandable (~90-95% comprehension). I was educating myself more and more, and testing these theories in real time, adjusting my strategies based on trial and error. And above all, I was consistent in my efforts.

In the hope that you, too, will decide to learn a new language, the following is a summary of how I developed fluency in Italian and some advice on how you can do the same, in whichever language, while still working your busy job!

My Process

It goes without saying that learning is a personal journey, and therefore techniques will vary by the individual. But if there is one thing I discovered in the past 3 years of studying Italian, it’s that consistency is the key factor. Without it, whatever your method, you will take much longer to achieve your goals and inadvertently demotivate yourself.

At the outset, we should gain familiarity with the alphabet or script of our target language. Although this doesn’t truly apply to romance and Germanic languages, it does with others like Russian (Cyrillic) and Korean (hangul).

There are four categories with which we can conceptualize and organize our language learning:  listening and reading (input) and speaking and writing (output). These skills will all develop unevenly, so it’s important to keep up with any that have lagged behind. But, with that said, my advice is to focus on listening comprehension as it’s the one skill that most contributes to the others and also the most accessible; you can easily throw in a pair of headphones while washing dishes or tune into a podcast while on the commute to work. Listening can be done actively or passively, so don’t fret if you’re not always able to follow along. The important thing is remaining in touch with the sounds and rhythm of the language. Language learning is about finding little pockets of time to engage in one’s routine.

Curiously, this is all contrary to the methods we were taught in school, where writing and reading were the privileged pair, and drilling vocab about Aunt Susie’s pet zebra Jose’ was the difference between a passing and failing grade.

Personally, I don’t love using language apps, but in the beginning stages most people find them useful. I used Duolingo for several months as a fun way to acquire some basic vocab and internalize grammar rules in the present tense. Whenever I encountered a new word or grammar structure, I created a flashcard in Anki (a flashcard software based on spaced-repetition, available on PC and most mobile devices). I then proceeded to review these self-made cards every day, which can take anywhere from five to twenty minutes, depending on your preferred settings. To this day, I still try my best to review my flashcards on a daily basis.

Once you have a few hundred words under your belt, you’ll want to use your newfound language skills. Here’s where speaking (output) with native speakers becomes crucial. In October of 2020 I signed up for informal language tutoring on italki, a paid platform with thousands of teachers–both professional and informal–ranging from $6/hour to $20/hour. I began chatting with native speakers several days per week, often before work, receiving corrections on my accent, new vocab terms, and, most importantly, I developed a concrete relationship with the language through my time spent with my new friends! To further develop my speaking, I would practice conversing with myself in Italian on car rides to work or to the grocery store. Though strange at first, this is a great way to familiarize yourself with unknown grammar structures and new words.

Around the same time, I started listening regularly to a podcast made for Italian learners, conducted fully in Italian. This was a boon to my listening comprehension, as it provided interesting content at a reasonable pace. The host introduced interesting expressions and colloquialisms I hadn’t yet encountered in my studies. I did this for four or five months until switching over to a podcast made for Italian natives interested in medieval history hosted by the popular Italian historian, Alessandro Barbero. Together, these two podcasts propelled me to new heights. I was achieving levels of competency in under a year that hadn’t been remotely possible in my nearly ten years of classroom Spanish. Between listening every day and adding unfamiliar words to my Anki deck, I was soon able to converse on a number of topics with my language tutors. I felt fully locked into the cycle: rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. This has been my simple language learning recipe for a little more than three years now.

Final Thoughts

• There is no perfect app. Choose two resources at the beginning stage and only use those. Avoid searching for “better” apps, as this will distract from learning and overwhelm you with indecision. I’ve been there too many times before!
• DO listen to YouTube polyglots (Luca Lampariello, Lindie Botes, Stephen Kauffman, Stephen Krashen) for inspiration, but DON’T do only that expecting you’ll learn some magical trick. Consistency is the magical trick. Sticking to the same interesting thing for a few months then moving on to the next interesting thing will pay great dividends.
• In March of 2021, I hit a point of inertia with my studies. I was fairly tired of learning about medieval history. I began to log everything I did into a time-tracking app called Toggle. From March 2021 to March 2022, I logged 600 hours of study, the bulk of which was due to my podcast obsession and chatting with Italian friends on Skype in 60-minute sessions every few days. Logging what you do isn’t for everyone, but it can be extremely motivating to see how far you’ve come over a given timeframe.
• Take a look at the CEFR scale. You can see it as another way of loosely tracking progress, but don’t overthink it.
• Ask me questions, because I would love to chat with you about it!