Four years into learning a second language to fluency, I am forced to admit this is probably the hardest thing I have ever done, intellectually.
This claim probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone else who found themselves with good reason to learn another language as a fully-formed, employed adult. It is probably made a little easier in my case by the fact that I studied multiple languages back in high school. But I hated the process even then, and that was with Romance languages which have English in their direct lineage. It may come as a surprise to younger readers, who grew up in a world where they were already half-immersed in English thanks to the Internet, and likely don’t understand just how vital those 10-20 years of early immersion were to their current level of skill, whatever it is. That is a much different experience to someone who had never even heard a word of their L2 until the fine age of 25.
I understood when I signed up for the process that this would be a lifelong journey for me. A language is an abyss. There are so many wonderful books, cultural experiences, and unique experiences behind this gate. When I jump into an abyss, I don’t bring a rescue line. I bring a wingsuit.
What I perhaps underrated, was just how little crossover my usual tools for learning would actually matter. In virtually every other academic subject, I can find an inner core of logic that, once understood, makes the rest of the journey much easier. This is especially true in STEM, and it is a large part of why I gravitated towards math and physics as a child. It is much more powerful to remember how to figure something out than to remember the thing itself.
To the extent any such core exists in any natural language, we call it ‘grammar’. But even grammar is ultimately not only completely arbitrary, but suffuse with exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions to the rule. The only useful heuristic I’ve found for herding that litter of cats is to remember that most exceptions appear in the most used parts of a language. You’re likely to run into weird forms for words like “he”, “she”, “to be”, “to have”, and a lot less likely for uncommon, high-information-density words like “to change a tire” or “birdwatching”. These exceptions appear mostly because they make the language easier or more aesthetically pleasing for its native speakers. Think of every time you have coined a neologism, formed an incomplete sweet nothing packed with emotion. Everyone is doing that, all the time, and it flattens the difficulty curve more than you might expect from the “just memorize the top 1000 words” crowd.
I have always maintained that, from a raw economic point of view, learning most languages in most situations is an enormous waste of time and possibly money. You can’t even reliably convert money for time in this domain; the best thing you can do is hire a 1-on-1 tutor, and true that can accelerate certain areas of your learning by 2 or 3 times. But, inevitably, you run up against the brick wall, that it is just going to take thousands of hours before you can really say anything interesting at all. There is no getting around memorizing the many thousands of bits of information that, for all your brain cares, are arbitrary, and will only be reinforced by constant usage. (Anki helps.)
Worse: Those thousands of hours come at an ever increasing cost. As your life matures - as your career takes off, as you start making Real Money with your Real Skills, as you start to acquire friends and life partners and children and deadlines to file your taxes and dentist’s appointments - the opportunity cost for spending an extra hour on Assyrian or Swahili looks worse and worse. All this before we factor in diminishing returns, which are slow in those first thousand hours, but very real.
Or before we factor in the relentless march of technology, ever widening the gyre of things we can do without thinking. Unlike almost everything else in the modern world, language learning simply cannot be automated out of your head. If your goal is to be able to personally communicate at the level of a native, you cannot simply delegate that grind to that whispering earring real-time translator. The earring will be silent in all of the situations it matters most, because you need the ability to speak and understand in real time. Until you reach that point, the best things learning another language will unlock for you are inaccessible. It is unbelievably helpful for a Chinese PhD student in microbiology to be able to plug their notes into Gemini Pro and get a smooth, easy to read English translation for their colleges. It is much less helpful if that same PhD student wants to ask the blonde girl in his dance class out for a drink.
So. What is there to do? How do you square believing all of this with the drive to continue anyway? I think the only way forward is to look at it as something of a holy mission.
You climb mountains because there are mountains to be climbed.
You learn the language because there is a language to be learned.
Anna heidän nauraa, jos on nauraakseen. Get to it.