What Language Learning Teaches You About Life

After years of teaching Russian, I've realized that learning a language teaches you quite a lot that has nothing to do with language.

Lesson 1: You Have to Be Willing to Look Stupid

One of the strangest things about learning a language as an adult is suddenly losing the ability to sound intelligent.

A successful engineer can't order coffee. A doctor can't tell a simple story. Someone perfectly articulate in English needs three minutes to explain what they did yesterday.

For some people, this is genuinely difficult. They construct every sentence in their head before speaking. They avoid saying things they aren't sure about. They want to wait until their Russian is good enough before they start using it.

But you can't become good enough to speak without first speaking badly.

The students who progress fastest usually accept this. They make mistakes and get over it. They get corrected, and then they try again.

Learning a language forces you to become a beginner again, and being willing to be bad at something when you’re just starting is a surprisingly useful skill.

Lesson 2: Progress Happens Before You Can See It

You learn a word. Then you forget it. Then you review it. You encounter it again. You wonder how come you can’t remember what it means yet again. Months later, it comes out naturally in a conversation.

A lot of language acquisition works this way.

That's why students can spend weeks feeling as though they're making no progress and then suddenly realize they understand a conversation that would have been impossible six months earlier.

There wasn't one moment when they got better. The progress was accumulating the entire time.

This is frustrating because we want effort and reward to happen close together. Language learning doesn't work like that. You can do everything correctly and still have very little immediate evidence that it's working.

You have to keep going anyway.

Lesson 3: Consistency Beats Intensity

I've seen students become extremely motivated, study for hours every day, buy five different textbooks, download six different apps and quit.

The students who succeed are often much less dramatic about it.

They have a lesson, say, every Tuesday. They review vocabulary with their coffee. They listen to Russian while driving. They read a little bit of something before bed on their phone.

Russian simply has a place in their life.

And I think that's one of the most useful things language learning teaches you about goals in general.

You don't get good at something because you wanted it badly enough. You get good because you did it badly, then slightly less badly, over and over again for a long time, and then it starts working.

People start learning Russian because they want to speak Russian.

But along the way, they also learn how to tolerate being a beginner, how to continue before they can see results, and how to make consistency into a habit.

Language learning can teach you many things about life, just like it taught me. If you let it :)