Hi Quartz members,
Three hundred. That’s how many days in a row I had been doing Duolingo to learn Korean, the language that is my boyfriend’s mother tongue and in which I couldn’t say more than “hello” and “thank you.”
On that 300th Duolingo day, I was taking a placement test for a Zoom-based Korean class. In almost a year on the app I had learned how to sound out written hangul and had picked up what I thought was a decent amount of vocabulary and grammar. I figured it would at least get me into a more advanced beginning level, if not intermediate.
I was wrong. I bombed. My tongue stumbled around the unfamiliar sounds, my eyes boring into the screen to make the words unravel themselves. The teacher gently suggested that I enroll in the two most basic courses simultaneously to get my pronunciation and comprehension up to speed.
Now, 10 weeks later and with those courses complete, I feel I’ve advanced more than I did in almost a year on the app.
Yes, learning a new language as an adult can be difficult—that’s the bad news. But anyone can learn a language, no matter their age. It just takes the right kind of learning.
What it takes to learn a language
There are two ways to learn a language. You can learn about a language—grammar, linguistic rules, what you’d say in particular contexts, cultural frameworks. Though this is the focus of a lot of classroom-based language instruction, this kind of learning is “necessary but not sufficient,” says Richard Donato, a professor who specializes in second language learning at the University of Pittsburgh.
The second way is learning through a language. “It is very important to have occasions to interact in that language in meaningful ways and for a real purpose,” Donato says. You get this naturally if you live in a place where your new language is the lingua franca, but if you don’t have the luxury of immersion, it’s preferable to have these meaningful interactions with someone he calls a sympathetic interlocutor who can speak slowly or suggest vocabulary.
What exceptional language learners have in common
Do you have friends who are conversational in, like, 10 languages? Goodness knows I do, and there’s no better way to make you feel inadequate about your limited linguistic abilities.
That attitude in itself might be inhibiting your language acquisition, Donato notes. Attitudes towards language learning have evolved since you might have taken it in school; teachers now encourage students to embrace a multilingual identity. Students leave these courses able to articulate what they’re able to do in a language (say, ask for directions, introduce themselves), not what they can’t, which gives them an identity of being a competent language learner that makes them more open to continue their study in the future.
But people who speak multiple languages do have something in common, Donato says: They have developed strategies to start building a framework, a conceptual system when they start to learn a new language. They’re better at listening comprehension and have a good idea for what to pay attention to as they build that new framework. “The more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn a language,” Donato says.
The apps
Millions of people every year turn to apps like Duolingo, Babbel, Mango, and Rosetta Stone to help them learn a new language. It’s not hard to understand why—they’re affordable and they fit easily into someone’s lifestyle.
There’s no denying that these programs can help people form habits, which plays a role in language learning, and can facilitate rote memorization for learning things like numbers. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they are limited. In a 2019 article in the New York Times, journalist Eric Ravenscraft recounted what 500 days(!) of Duolingo had (and hadn’t) taught him: “For as useful as learning a new writing system or understanding basic phrases can be, it’s only a small part of fluency in a language.” And though he admits fluency can be difficult to pin down (the European Framework of Reference for Languages assess range, accuracy, fluency, interaction, and coherence), it’s pretty clear that the apps simply don’t give you the practice of complex conversations or even speaking directly with another person. I can attest to this—when I took my Korean placement test, I realized I had very little practice speaking the words myself.
Duolingo, for its part, doesn’t promise “fluency”—in a blog post, the company promises that, with dedication, the app can help learners reach a B2 level of proficiency. “A 2020 study found that learners in Duolingo’s Spanish and French courses performed as well on reading and listening tests as students who took four semesters of university classes—and in about half the time,” the blog post reads.
In her article about the limitations of Duolingo, The Cut writer Katie Heaney cited people who quibbled with the app’s lack of explanation for incorrect answers and irrelevant vocabulary. Again, no one is claiming they’re useless, just limited.
My friend Matt Kostakis, a middle school Spanish teacher in New York City and one of those people who is at least conversational in eight languages, says he recommends that his students use apps to increase exposure in a fun and engaging way (as opposed to using them to learn a new language from scratch). He uses them himself to keep up with languages like Arabic and Turkish that he doesn’t get the chance to use every day.
Tips for learning a language
- Know what you want to know. Why do you want to learn this language? What are your goals? The way you practice and the kind of learning you focus on will vary depending on your goal. If you want to be able to order at a restaurant, a textbook or app-based lessons might do the trick. But if you, say, want to be able to have complex and in-depth conversations with your would-be in-laws, you might need a more extensive course that explains the grammatical concepts.
- Provide yourself ample opportunities to have meaningful and purposeful interactions in the language. If immersion isn’t possible, at least do it regularly—you can’t learn a language a few hours a week.
- Find people with whom you can use the language. Take a cooking class in your target language, join a meetup group, or spend time with a fluent friend.
Have a great weekend,
—Alex Ossola, membership editor (will order 파전 at a Korean restaurant soon)
One 😅 Thing
People always ask Donato what the hardest language is. But he rejects the question. “It’s all relative to what you speak,” he says. “If you’re a Mandarin speaker, maybe it’s not that hard for you to learn Cantonese. Thai is not that hard to learn for Japanese speakers. For a Dutch speaker, English is pretty easy.”
For native English speakers, the US State Department has come up with a sort of hierarchy based on the number of classroom hours needed for most people to reach “professional working proficiency.” While languages like Italian, Spanish, and French are listed as Category I (most similar to English), Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean make up the Category IV “super hard” languages for native English speakers. Looks like I’ll be taking Korean classes for a good while yet.