It's Not About Learning a Language, it's About Charizard

I am a big fan of languages. This is very well known to anyone who has been in earshot of me for any duration longer than 50 seconds (could be less, depending on how many beers I've worked through).

I'm very grateful that my hyper-fixation is languages. It's a topic everyone on earth can relate to to some degree. Everyone starts out with one, maybe two or three depending on the region. And - to varying degrees of success - everyone has had made some attempt to a new one. Sometimes by choice, sometimes forced upon them by a school system or parental figure.

Having spent many years old my admittedly short life learning languages (I'm only 25 at time of writing and started learning languages at age 13), I often get asked what the best way to learn a language is. Naturally, as with any task that takes a long time to get anywhere near to making visible progress in, the answer is rather boring: study grammar, use spaced-repetition systems to memorize vocab, maybe watch some comprehensible input videos like Stephen Krashen talk told us to .

My answer usually follows this structure:

A drowning man won't learn how to swim. You have to be able to get some intuitive sense of the structure of a language. If you speak Dutch, you'll be able to spot the subject, object and primary verb in a German sentence quite intuitively; even if you've never had a single German class in your life.

If you cannot determine whether a Spanish verb is in the past tense, future tense or present tense, then consuming Spanish content won't teach you these things either0. Sure, studying conjugation tables might not be of much use in a face-to-face conversation where flow outranks grammatical correctness, but knowing comes before feeling with these things.

You'll most likely run into the frustration at this point that you keep having to pause to think of the right way to conjugate words. Especially on languages like Russian or Finnish. If - given enough time - you do still manage to find the correct way to conjugate them, it's time to raise your intuitive limit (the parts of the language that at this point have become so simple and intuitive that it no longer requires pauses) up to the comprehensible limit. One does this by consuming comprehensible content and exposing oneself to the language as used by native speakers in a native context0.

Dutch people are the best non-native English speakers in the world . As a non-native English speaker, I can tell you first hand that the way I learned English (admittedly as a child) was entirely accidental. I was playing Pokémon Diamond on my Nintendo DS. Pokémon was not released in Dutch, so all the Dutch kids like me had to play it in English; often getting lost and confused in menus and instructions that were skipped over because there was nothing nothing interesting about all that. The only interesting parts were the Pokémon battles, and seeing what the coolest Pokémon was that one could catch. And one of them stood above all the rest: Charizard. Charizard, however, does not appear in Pokémon Diamond.

I found out about this because, by God, did my 9 year old self attempt to translate every single piece of dialogue in that game. Let it also be that way for you, when you wish to learn a language. Don't set the language itself as the destination. The language is only a road. The destination is Charizard.