Learning a Language the Lazy Way

ian
Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
learning, languages, self-improvement

I've lived in South Korea for quite some time, and during my stay here I've become reasonably fluent in the language. People often ask how long it took to become fluent and if I have any tips for their language learning aspirations. This post is about what I've learned from a decade-plus fascination with language learning.

Anki, SuperMemo, Memrise, etc.

Starting off, way too many years ago, I heard there were all these great tools that would help you remember ANYTHING. The promise isn't exactly wrong, but there's something you should know about me: I'm pretty lazy 😉

Memorizing things in particular takes a lot of effort, at least for me. I very much dislike things that are boring or tedious, and this was definitely that. Even so, I want to be careful to point out that this strategy MIGHT work for you if you follow a few rules.

1. Only put stuff in there that you really do want to remember. Don't put EVERYTHING (easy words etc.) in there.

2. Make your own decks, unless you're studying for something like JLPT which has a very clear list. I mostly used Anki with decks built by others. That was a mistake because there were often low quality cards, things I didn't really care about, and so on, which made it feel even more like a chore.

3. Use it as a supplement for other tools to remember what you learned. You will NOT learn a language by just doing Anki reviews. You need to have to have a reliable way of learning what you want to remember in the first place.

Classes

Classes are hit or miss. While I was in the US, I took clasess over a span of 3 years.

I had a few 1:1 and 1:2 tutor sessions over a summer on a weekly basis. This taught me how to read and write, and most of how to pronounce things. But it wasn't very effective beyond that (neither was a professional and it was a bit rough).

After that, I took classes at a local Korean culture center. It was great fun and I did learn some things. Mostly I had my pronunciation fine tuned by native speakers. But to be honest, I didn't really learn a lot of useful phrases, and the vocabulary were just words.

This was mostly a function of the class, not the instructor. The classes were cheap, highly social, and motivation was generally low. The cultural background, history, and etiquette were the most important things I learned from these classes.

Formal classes and me don't go well together, so I didn't pursue those at all. Also remember, this is about how to learn a language the lazy way!

Aside: graded readers

Quick break from being lazy for a moment; graded readers are awesome. If your language of interest has them, particularly if you can get audio to go along with a bilingual book, DO IT. I learned a very respectable amount of German in a very short time thanks to Brian Smith's German readers. Unfortunately, I have never been able to find such good material for Korean.

Immersion

When I arrived in Korea, I learned very quickly that I didn't know anything beyond how to read and say a very few basic phrases. I didn't even learn how to order a cappuccino or lunch to go until my first week here! Immersion is hard to beat.

But just being somewhere is not very effective unless you are very much out and about and able to engage with native speakers. Immersion isn't just going to a country and chilling for 20 years with a bunch of expats. (I know people who did this and they still only speak English.)

Choose your local friends carefully if you are serious about using them to learn a language. If they can speak English (or some other language you prefer) comfortably, you will both quickly revert to that. Which means you both need to be pretty patient and committed to figuring out how to communicate. Eating, drinking, and taking trips together with locals that can barely speak your language is the fastest way to learn the local culture, slang, and a reasonably effective way to learn your target language.

Media

I used to not put too much faith in the whole "watch movies to learn a language" thing. I still mostly don't, but my views have evolved a bit over time. Part of my belief came from realizing that most movies (that an adult learner) wants to watch use vocabulary and phrases that are at the wrong level. It didn't really help that in my target language, I really had ZERO interest in the popular shows ("dramas"). You NEED to enjoy what you're consuming!

However... kids shows are gold. If you want to learn Korean, go binge watch Pororo. Seriously. It's silly, super basic, every day vocabulary at a pre-school level. You'll learn idioms, nuance (the characters over exaggerate their expressions, since it's a kids show), and a whole lot more.

The show is also EXTREMELY dialog-heavy. So find shows like that, watch all 200 or whatever episodes, and you'll be able to move on to something slightly more advanced. For Korean learners, I'd recommend Titipo next. I can only describe this show as a modern Korean version of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Subtitles? I personally don't like them, because they quickly grab my attention, and I'm watching the subs rather than listening intently. This is a bit of a hot take, but I would highly recommend giving it a try. Exception: native language subtitles aren't as problematic. I don't use them often, but it CAN be useful for improving your reading speed or stopping to look up a word.

Speaking of stopping, try with all your might to not stop the show. This is the lazy method, remember? It's also how literally every native speaker learns. Yes, it's slower, but your learning will be much stronger. As you work through binge watching kids shows, you'll learn which shows you can understand. After a few hundred episodes of at least 2 or 3 kids shows, you'll have a solid base understanding to work with, and it won't feel like you had to work very hard for it. Zero memorization ideally.

From here, try to stick with shows that you understand like 80% of the plot of every episode. I'm talking about an intuitive feeling by the way, not necessarily even recognizing that percent of the words. You certainly don't need to know every word to understand the general meaning of a phrase. See the "optimal learning failure rate"; some scientists put this at 85%, but I don't think it needs to be that high for word recognition.

We gloss over words that we can't quite define in our native languages all the time, without impairing our ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. Look things up after you hear them a few times and want to clarify your understanding.

Books I have personally had limited success with. Writing is a bit more formal, especially in Korean. But comics... oh boy! Fortunately, I LOVE Japanese Manga. And all the popular series are translated into Korean. So I'd read the manga on my e-Reader and then watch the show. This was an absolutely fantastic pairing which took me way too many years to discover, and regrettably probably only works for a few languages.

If you are looking for Korean media, you can find comics at Ridi Books. They have pretty good apps, and I use it on my Boox e-Reader tablet (highly recommend). For streaming animated series', I use Laftel, but as far as I know it's quite difficult to use outside Korea (payments in particular are a problem). I think Netflix is also an option, but Laftel certainly has a larger content library.

Music is, in my opinion, interesting purely for enjoyment. I don't think you learn a language from listening to music, since "musical language" is so different from how anyone talks. Often even the pronunciation is different. I can sing Dragostea din Tei perfectly from memory, but could hardly tell you the meaning of a dozen words in Romanian (fun aside: O-Zone is from Moldova, but their popular songs are in Romanian!). Songs lack context to enable learning.

Grammar

Grammar isn't on the curriculum in the school of lazy language learning. Learn how to spell. Learn the basic sentence structures, but treat it like pattern recognition.

You'll be surprised how much of conversational language use follows a very limited subset of a language. Just focus on that, like the kids shows do. You'll gradually pick up other rules over time.

Fortunately, while Korean grammar isn't always easy per se, the forms used in conversation are generally very simple and formulaic. Unfortuanetly this advice can't apply equally to all languages. For example, German is complicated by gendered nouns, and Estonian is complicated by over a dozen cases. But even there, just start with simple pattern recognition of what's most common. The kids shows and friends will guide you.

Math

Huh, what's this heading doing here? Well, part of communicating is learning to count. You should do that. This is some of the only "proper" study you'll have to do. But you really just need to learn how to count.

On a more philosophical note, I'm an engineer, and I love thinking in formulas, rules, and patterns. A lot of the way that language is taught formally attempts to put it in a box like this. You study grammatical rules, forms, suffixes, and so on. But the number of people who ACTUALLY learn languages this way is a rounding error.

You will find more inconsistencies in any language than you can shake a stick at. That's part of what makes learning human languages hard. Computer languages are, by contrast, easy. They have to adhere to rigid rules, and after you've learned a few (much easier than it may sound), you can often pick up a new one in a weekend. This approach will only hurt you though with human languages.

As Jack Sparrow infamously said, it's more like "guidelines" than actual rules. Loosen up and enjoy!

Other resources

My friend Andrew put together a list of useful resources he's found for Korean self-study. Check it out on his blog.