If You Are Serious About Learning a Language, Forget What School Taught You

School can be great for many things. It could even be awesome for learning languages but that’s, unfortunately, not the case. We’ve all experienced it. We spend almost a decade learning a language in class only to forget it soon after we’re done.

Even though we know classes didn’t teach us well how to learn languages, most people who try to do so on their own later repeat the same errors.

Those people often soon give up learning a new language, thinking they’re “not cut out for it”. They’re wrong. The problem isn’t them. It’s the system they’re trying to use.

Even though I never learned well my languages in school, I’ve become a polyglot speaking 6 languages within a decade after I left school. This was all thanks to my efforts to get away from the failing systems school used.

If you’re really serious about learning a language, you’ll need to unlearn these. And it all starts with knowing what you should unlearn.

There’s a Fixed Path to Follow

Teachers teach hundreds, if not thousands, of students in their careers. Obviously, they don’t have the time to set a personalized path for each of them. That’s why the education system relies on textbooks.

Teachers go through textbooks from page one onwards. They teach you to go from the first chapter to the second, to the third, and so forth. It makes sense after all. Who would put the toughest part to learn first? The goal is to ease students into the content and build on it as they progress.

But that’s not how languages should be learned.

Even though we can talk to other native speakers of our language as adults, we didn’t grow our language skills the same way. If you didn’t have a TV at home as you grew up, the word “video” entered your vocabulary base later. If your parents loved to read, words like “book” and “page” probably entered earlier.

There’s no good vocabulary to learn first. There’s only vocabulary you need or don’t. You also don’t have to learn the present perfect tense before the future tense. Whatever you choose to learn first should come first.

Classes didn’t let you learn what you wanted but now that you’re learning on your own, you have the freedom to prioritize whatever you want.

You Need Long Sessions

When I grew up in France, classes were all one hour long. When I’d get back home, my parents told me to study for 2 or 3 hours. Before tests, I often studied 4 hours in a row the night before.

We were taught we needed to spend a long time studying to remember. Even though it was all wrong.

I’ve studied Korean for hours on end from time to time but most of my efforts have been divided into tiny tasks. I study my Anki deck here. I read a text on my app 좋은 생각 there. I study a grammar pattern here. I practice my writing there. Nowadays, the only times I spend more than 20–30 minutes in a row on Korean are when I do a mock test of the TOPIK exam.

That may be the best discovery I had through learning languages on my own. Despite spending our lives thinking we need to put in long hours to learn anything, all we needed to do was to divide them into regular tiny chunks.

You Can Only Learn While Studying

Ah, let me retract what I just said. This one is the best discovery I had when it comes to learning languages.

In school, we either studied at our desks in the class or at the one we had at home. We were taught there’s no other way to learn something. We sit down, do boring exercises, rote learn a few rules, and stop entirely learning the moment we get up.

What a waste!

Learning can be divided into 2 categories. Active and passive learning.

• Active learning — That’s when your focus is on studying. You are making a conscious effort to learn the content.
• Passive learning — That part is about acquiring the content without conscious effort.

Languages are probably among the easiest topics to find ways to learn passively. You can listen to a podcast or watch a movie in the language. You can play again a video game you’ve already played but this time in your target language. Your imagination is the limit here.

Sure, you can’t learn a language by relying completely on passive learning, but it’s the combination that makes learning not only easier, but a lot more fun. Active study sessions become easier thanks to passive learning. Then active learning gives you more tools to recognize patterns whenever you’re learning passively.

The language comes alive. And it becomes addicting.

You Should Learn to Perfection

I’m quite good at taking tests. My method to pass tests usually works wonders. It even helped me pass the most difficult Japanese proficiency test.

I can’t, however, insist enough on how much I hate them for what they do to our society. They force us to aim for perfection. And perfection is the enemy of progress.

Even worse, aiming for perfection is the best way to give up on learning a new language.

There are so many things to learn in a new language it can easily feel overwhelming. If you’re struggling to remember the subjunctive conjugation for the first group in Spanish or different words related to the environment in Korean, you could give up if you aim for perfection.

If, on the contrary, you aim for “good-ish”, you can make a lot of progress.

There are many words I’ve learned and used in Japanese only to forget them again a few months later. Had I felt bad and decided to review them until I knew them perfectly, I probably wouldn’t be anywhere near fluency in the language.

Have fun and accept your mistakes. They are here to teach you. Not to make you feel like a loser.

There’s a precise and fixed goal

When you look at the beginning of any textbook chapter, they tell you what you should know by the end of it. Each teacher has a list of points they must teach students of each level. You can’t finish middle school without knowing the Pythagorean Theorem.

Language learning doesn’t follow such rules.

When you start learning a language, you should have an important reason to do so. You should know where you’re headed as well. But these need to change over time.

I began Chinese as a challenge to an ex-girlfriend and now enjoy watching movies in the language. I began Korean to talk to people and now am passionate about reading the language and listening to its underground music. I began Japanese to discover the culture but now want to reach a level most Japanese people won’t ever reach (the Kanji Kentei Level 1).

Fix your goal and make it measurable first. Then let it evolve with you. The more you discover about the language and the culture, the more your goal will evolve.

Final Thought

School was useful to lay some foundations for our lives, but it was an awful teacher of languages. It taught us bad habits and made us believe languages were hard to learn.

They aren’t.

Languages are fun. Languages are easy to learn if you’re curious. Languages live in your life even outside of study sessions. Languages love mistakes.

Learning a language is an amazing journey.

Let go of what school taught you and you’ll soon become as addicted as I am.

Enjoy!

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