What’s the best language learning advice? After studying over 14 languages, here’s my best language learning advice to share with you in one simple article.

The Best Language Learning Advice You’ll Ever Need to Know

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I always feel kinda awkward when someone asks what languages I speak. I’ve never studied languages for some overly boastful reason. Never for the number. I’ve never cared how fast, how well, or how easy I’ve done it. Yet, I know from my work teaching people how to learn languages that there’s some sort of mythical wonder that comes when you do say a number. When I do reply “Well, I’ve studied 14 to some sort of decent level at one point, but lots more at lower levels, and I don’t speak them all now, not to the same level.”.

All people often take from that is “14! Woah!”.

But 14 (or 24, 34, 44) is a possible number of languages to study and still feel content with the results.

So I want to write this article to lay out very clearly how this has happened for me, and how it can happen for you too.

You’re likely reading this with a language or two beyond your native one(s) already studied to some sort of level. Maybe more.

So I’m aiming to make this a jumping point, something to help you advance to the next level you’re after, when you already have some of the groundwork done and dusted.

1) Use Language Knowledge You Already Have

How many times have you come across a resource that claims the best way to learn is full immersion? So from track one on the audio course, there’s nothing but French coming through your headphones. Even the instructions of what to do for each exercise.

This isn’t always the best way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-immersion. But, and I’ll say it, I am anti-‘this-is-the-best-and-only-way’, which is often what immersion is held up as.

Personally, I love taking advantage of language knowledge gained from other language studies I’ve done. And, I love to use English, my native language, when needed too.

Yes, even when you learn your first additional language beyond your native one, you still have a whole other language to rely on – your own!

Think of it this way: all the language knowledge you already have is a tool that can help you learn your next one.

Not using that tool would be like having a can opener in your kitchen drawer, but insisting on using only your hands to try and get at your beans – and no, there’s no ring pull on this metaphorical tin!

Use the tools you have available. This especially includes your existing language knowledge.

2) Pick ‘Door-Opener’ Languages

What do I mean by ‘door-opener’ languages? Quite simply, a language that opens doors to other languages.

Think how French or Spanish make learning Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan et al a lot easier.

Think of how Russian is a language that you’ll suddenly start hearing when you read some words aloud from Czech, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and co.

Use your understanding of language families (and, let’s be honest, often basic geography and history) to determine which languages will open doors for you.

What if you’re learning a language that’s kinda out there on its own – think language isolates like Basque, languages in their own lanes like Albanian or languages that have small language families and appear to be unlike anything else like Japanese or Korean?

This is totally fine! And these languages can still open doors for you to others, and have doors opened by other languages to them.

For example, my basic knowledge of Chinese characters from learning Mandarin Chinese really helped when approaching Japanese kanji for the first time (I say first time, it still helps now!).

And the process of learning Japanese hiragana and katakana helped years later when I was able to apply similar techniques to learn Korean hangul.

Everything is connected. Even when it’s not obvious, it’s always fun to find what few connections do exist.

Personally, this feeling of unlocking new (to me!) pathways and connections is one of my favourite things about learning languages altogether. I adore this great big map of language that I’m forever building in my head.

3) Tune In to What Works for You

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: we do not all learn languages best in one magical way.

It’s all to easy to be lured in with a catchy marketing slogan and a feels-too-good-to-be-true promise on the front page of a website.

But from now on, I want you to approach these sorts of claims with an open curiosity. Not a scepticism as such – that’s an unfun way to go through life. But more so reading and observing from a distance, leaving your own emotions at the door and attempting to critically analyse and understand the claims you see before you.

The most powerful source of knowledge to help you do this?

It’s you.

You don’t need to wade through mountains of academic texts to discover it. You don’t need to assume ‘terrible resource until proven good’.

You just need to trust yourself.

Which, let’s be honest, is sometimes easier said that done.

So, let’s take an example from my own language learning to demonstrate how this works.

I know that for me, audio only resources don’t hold my attention long enough.

I wish they did. Wouldn’t it be great to listen and simply learn a language that way? I’d love that!

But, I know from years of experience of language learning that for me, it’s not the most effective method.

Equally, I know that lots of people love and have great success with tools like Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, and other great audio courses.

So when I go on their website and see the headline ‘Get Conversational Quickly with Pimsleur’, even now, I feel a tinge of excitement that this time, this time could be THE time.

So I have to check back in with myself. Remind myself of my past experiences with primarily audio courses, and remember that just because it’s a great resource, that doesn’t mean it has to be my great resource.

4) Forget Deadlines…Most of the Time

We just had the Pimsleur example there that used the word ‘quickly’.

This taps into one of our greatest desires when learning a language – to do so quickly. The other one, if you’re curious, is ‘easy’. We want to learn a language, and we want it to happen quickly and easily.

Why is this?

I have a theory that there’s a few reasons that contribute to this.

One, we are adults.

Adults know how to do stuff. We spent our childhood learning, and being a beginner, and sucking at stuff and having adults cover for and fix our mistakes.

But now we’re adults, we’re supposed to be fully formed (or so we think!), have all the knowledge and know all the things.

And for the most part of our adult lives, we do.

We often pick jobs that play to our strengths and if they don’t, we pick them up quickly until we’re teaching the newbie in the office how things work around here.

We often pick hobbies that we enjoy and already possess some level of skill at doing.

We tend to cook meals within our comfort zone, from our repertoire of meals we’ve prepared numerous times before, and so have mastered to some sort of personal perfection.

Taking a holiday? A meal out? A trip to the cinema? Of course, we go somewhere that feels at least vaguely familiar to us, we pick a meal we know, or we watch a film we think we’re likely to enjoy.

As adults, in our everyday lives, we unknowingly position ourselves as experts, safe in our bubble of comfortable and safe options.

It’s quite rare for us to opt to be a beginner, because (as we’ll see in the next point) being a beginner disempowers us.

Two, instant gratification era.

Why bother chopping veg, cooking the rice, and preparing a homemade korma yourself when you can get an Indian takeaway? Better yet, when you can get it delivered via an app on your phone?

Why bother waiting for your next day off to head to the shops and finally buy your new laptop when you can order it for same day delivery on Amazon?

Little by little, things have gotten quicker and easier in almost all areas of modern life.

We are truly living in the era of instant gratification. As Ariana Grande sings as she swings her massive ponytail, ‘I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it’.

So when anything (language learning included) takes a little bit longer to see results, it’s all too easy to feel deflated and give up.

The answer we think we need to solve this? Well, naturally we should learn quickly and easily and get it over and done with. 7 days, 6 weeks, 5 months. Almost instant gratification.

Three, it’s what we’re sold & told.

And again, no one’s fault here.

Marketers think we want results quickly and easily so they tell us it will happen quickly and easily with their product.

They are marketers. This is their job. It’s not their fault.

They are simply promoting their product in a way they think will resonate with potential customers.

Sure, there’s ways that language learning products can be marketed more ethically, however, while there’s demand for quick & easy, quick and easy are the words that’ll grace the front covers of language learning books in your local bookshop.

What does this all mean?

Overall then, the reality is that although tight deadlines can sometimes be a motivator, they can often lead to feeling disappointed with ourselves too when the results aren’t quite what we’d ambitiously hoped. Not your fault.

When you want a speedy gain with a language, and if you know that deadlines do motivate you, then by all means go ahead and set a deadline with a goal that hits the fine line between realistic and ambitious!

However, most of the time, for long term and sustainable language success, it’s a matter of slow and steady wins the race. We can learn a lot from the tortoises of the world.

5) Embrace Your Current Level, Always

We talked a little bit already about how it can be really difficult to be a beginner as an adult when the world expects us to know all the things by now.

I highly encourage you – perhaps more so than any other advice in this whole article – to sign up for something new to you. Actively put yourself in the position of beginner.

Join a Zumba class, register for a pottery course, sign up for the next thing you see on Eventbrite or on the community board in your local library or coffee shop.

Part of what has helped me to learn languages endlessly is the fact that I’ve grown to love being a beginner. I embrace being bad at something.

In the words of Jake The Dog from Adventure Time, sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.

The more comfortable we can get with not being an expert and being outside of our comfort zone, the (genuinely!) quicker and easier it will be to continue learning a language.

Plus, there’s actually lots of benefits to be found at every level in a language.

For example, when you’re a newbie in Italian but you have some solid Spanish under your belt, people might mistake you for a Spanish native speaker on your trip to Italy when there’s some inevitable influence creeps into your Italian – what a confidence boost for your Spanish!

And as you learn more and become intermediate in Arabic, you have more vocab to help work around those tricky words you don’t know (and don’t actually need because, hey you, you can work around them!)

Rather than dwell on how fluent we wish we were, we need to learn to embrace our current level, always.

6) Find (& Create) Anchors

The more languages you learn, the more fall out the other side of your brain, right? The old ones just don’t have the space anymore. So it’s literally in one ear and out the other. Except it’s not.

I don’t speak, use, and remember the 14 languages I’ve learnt to conversational level or higher over the years. I mean, I have other things to do too!

Despite this, it doesn’t take long to ‘reactivate’ them and bring them back to front of mind.

This is one of the biggest things I’ve notice hold people back from learning multiple languages – they think that it will be a waste of time if they don’t get to a certain level (often undefined by them, the most common I hear of for this is B2).

I genuinely, confidently say that in my two decades plus of language learning being a part of my life, it has never been a waste of time.

Yes, even when considering languages I don’t speak well instantly now.

Yes, even when considering languages for which I currently have unbalanced skills.

And especially yes, when considering school lessons with a class full of people who’d rather be smoking behind the bike sheds, applying mascara, or climbing out of windows.

(I should point out here that my language department at school was on the ground floor. And yes, people did climb out of the windows. On multiple occasions.)

The thing that’s always helped bring me back to a language, no matter how long it’s been, is anchors. Having something that connects me to that language, something I enjoy that feels like a secret wink or a nod between me and that language.

Sometimes it’s something obvious to you from the beginning, like the Japanese copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I picked up in Japan before I’d really started learning the language.

Sometimes it is the reason for starting a language in the first place, like Shakira for me with Spanish. I now add Bad Bunny to my list of Spanish anchors.

And sometimes it’s a little unintentional, like my late-to-the-party discovery of the film Metropolis that got me thinking about German again years after I’d been learning it.

Whatever it is, and however it comes about, my point here is that when you can find and create anchors, something that draws you back to a language through passion, curiosity, or sheer delight, then you’re onto something good.

7) Let Yourself Forget

That feeling of in one of ear out the other we discussed in the last section? Never has it been more prominent in language learning than with vocabulary.

It starts in school.

A list of 20 words to learn for next week’s French vocab test. 10 words on the test.

You have to learn all 20 for the best odds of scoring highly.

But your homework diary entry, meticulously copied off of the board, simply reads: ‘learn vocab list’.

There’s nothing there about how to learn the vocab list, just to learn it.

So you look, say, cover, write, check – just like primary school taught you. The only way you know how.

And each time, they just don’t seem to stick. Gradually a few seep in, and you always get the same two or three, but overall? Nope, not happening.

And so we bring this frantic, stressed-out-before-we’ve-even-begun approach to our adult language learning too.

We still haven’t learnt how to learn, but what we do know for certain (or what we think we know for certain) is that we must not, under any circumstances forget.

Once a word goes in, it must stay in. Cork your ears, shove some tissue up your nose, keep your mouth shut, don’t let the newly acquired word escape.

Well, I have some good news.

Forgetting is allowed. It is a valuable part of learning anything. We should all let ourselves forget.

I recently picked up the book How We Learn by Benedict Carey, and chapter 2 is all about forgetting – in fact it’s called ‘The Power of Forgetting’.

TLDR; forgetting is a good and useful part of the process of learning. It felt god to finally have my suspicions on this confirmed!

The chapter delves into lots of research and studies, but I’ll sum it up with some words from the final paragraph of the chapter:

Using memory changes memory – and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information AND by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.

8) Learn How to Learn

I’ve always been curious about learning. Curious to know more about how it works, why some methods work for some people and others work better for others.

Language learning has been no different for me.

And honestly? Learning how to learn languages has helped me endlessly when it comes to actually learning them.

The more you know about something, the more you can understand the foundations of how it works, the better you’re able to approach that thing.

And hey, if that description has you thinking “Hmm…but I can’t learn to drive without getting in the car!”, then you’d be right.

You don’t learn how to learn languages solo, without actually keeping up with your French lessons.

Simultaneously learning languages and learning how to learn them is the best way to approach this.