Best Friend

When it comes to language learning, time is your friend. It’s there every step of the way, and you are going to be spending a lot of it to get anywhere. And so don’t sweat it. Enjoy the ride. It will take time, and that’s okay. Just keep spending time with the language and you will advance.

Worst Enemy

Time is also your worst enemy. The unmovable wall you will come up against is usually time. You don’t have enough of it, and you need it to progress your language. Life is busy, you have multiple demands, and you can only spend so much of your time on a language. The thing most holding you back is almost always time. And, if you happen to be learning more than one language, it gets worse! You have to divide your time between them.

Try to make peace with this. You can only control this so much. Make a commitment as to how much time you’ll spend, and keep that. Don’t feel bad for not doing more, and don’t let yourself spend less (unless emergencies arise!)

Resources

I’ve written before about how I think one of the best ways to keep yourself accountable is to count hours. I stand by that. Time is perhaps the main resource you are going to invest in a language. It’s not the only resources though. But, assuming you go and get some at-least-decent language learning materials, time is going to be the biggest determiner to your progress. What are good resources? Well, if you’ve read anything I’ve posted on this site in the last decade, you’ll know that I think you want communicative, comprehensible materials that are in the target language and understandable at your level. That’s really the ideal. But perhaps that’s not always possible. Whatever you do have, you can still make it work. Just focus on what part of the materials is in the language, and make it understandable one way or another.

Measure

So, you can measure your language learning just by minutes/hours. I think that’s a good way to do it. But another way to think about it is with a bit more refinement.

How many words in the target language are you being exposed to (per minute, if you like)?

I don’t think you should actually try to calculate this, but this helps tie together the question of resources and time. If you pick up a traditional grammar textbook and it’s 10 words of Latin to 200 words of English explanation, then the signal-to-noise ration is 1:20, and so then multiply by the time it takes you to work through each section, you can derive a kind of “words of Latin per minute of study”. Ideally we want this to be high.

So, what if you were just reading or listening to a stream of in-language communication? Let’s say you’re listening to native speaker Spanish at 140wpms, or reading German at 200wpm. That’s pretty good for an L2. Again, we need to consider two factors. Firstly, is there English (or other L1) ‘wrapping’. I.e. what if you listen to a learner podcast and it’s got lots of English explanation. This dilutes the signal-to-noise ratio for you. Secondly, how much are you comprehending.

See, it might sound good at first to listen to French radio, because you’ll get a stream of spoken French, but if you’re only understanding 5%, this isn’t much better than a traditional style textbook! And somewhat demoralising.

So, really, we can think in terms of this kind of equation:

Minutes spent learning x words per minute of target language x percentage of words understood.

That’s our rate of comprehensible input. Again, I’m not saying you should try to calculate this! It’s a theoretical equation to make clear how different choices affect our language learning. And why we are trying to make better choices.

As for resources, to the extent you are able you want to choose written, audio, or audio-visual inputs that are primarily in the target language, and that for your current ability have a high percentage of comprehensibility (95% ideally). But of course, if your language is ancient Greek or Latin, your options are not endless here. There’s more and more great content, but there’s never enough, and finding the right things at your level can be difficult. So, it may just be the case that you have to settle for ‘less ideal’ resources, and because the WPM of Target Language x Percentage Understood is lower than you’d like, you have to spend more time to make more of those words comprehensible, and so spend more time to get the same amount of input.

But, in the end, this is the game. This is how it’s played. Pick your best resources, set yourself up as well as possible, and then just keep at it, keep investing the time, and the language will come. Slowly, quickly, but over time you’ll improve.