I Thought These Languages Would Be Easy. I Was Wrong

The US Foreign Service Institute sorts languages into five categories based on how long they take English speakers to learn. Spanish and French sit at the easy end, while Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and Arabic land in the hardest group at around 88 weeks. I've spoken languages from almost every category over the years, from Persian and Ukrainian to Turkish and Mandarin. Some felt as hard as the list says, and some didn't. Which category is your target language in?

I'm on the border of Portugal and Spain, and yesterday at lunch I spoke five or six languages with people from Scandinavia, Germany, France, and even a Chinese family who live here. That kind of variety makes me very happy. Not everyone has the same appetite for new things, and that's okay. But if you want to learn languages, you need that curiosity, that desire to try something different. What first made you curious about another language?

People often tell me to learn 10 words a day and nail them down until I can use them. That has never worked for me. I read and listen a lot, look words up, and simply accept that I'll forget most of them at first. Over time, meeting the same words in different contexts is what makes them stick. Do you try hard to memorize new words, or do you let them come to you?

When I start a language like Persian or Arabic, at first it's just noise. I can't even tell where one word ends and the next begins. So I listen first, every morning, while I make breakfast or do my exercises. I listen to a short story two or three times, move on to the next one, and come back to it later. Do you start a new language with listening or reading?

Portuguese should be easy for me. I speak Spanish, and the vocabulary, grammar and word order are almost the same. But when I go to speak Portuguese, Spanish keeps getting in the way. I had the same experience moving from Japanese to Korean, and with Persian words hiding in Arabic. Have you ever found a "similar" language harder than you expected?

What makes language learning content easy? It's not about knowing 97% of the words. That's the goal, not where you start. What helps me most is repetition, short sentences, clear audio, and above all, content I'm genuinely interested in. What kind of content made a new language finally click for you?

Many learners are told to focus on the 1,000 most common words and stop there. I've never done that. In Arabic I now have over 35,000 known words at LingQ, and while I can't use most of them yet, they let me follow podcasts on history and politics and discuss difficult subjects with my tutor. A big vocabulary is my potential in the language. Do you stick to common words, or do you push yourself to learn the rare ones?

Some of my best language learning material came from a random book I pulled off my library shelf. A history of Portugal, a book about Prague, a Swedish novel. A little Portuguese here, a little Czech there, a little Swedish, and it all adds up, like snow that slowly covers the ground. You don’t always need two free hours to make progress. What’s the most useful thing you’ve found by accident while learning a language?

Someone told me they can speak their second language but cannot understand what people say back to them. I know this one well, because my wife can hold a social conversation in French and Spanish while missing most of what she hears. The fix is not more speaking practice, it is a much wider base of listening and reading. Comprehension is what lets you talk about more than a handful of familiar subjects. Which side are you on right now, speaking or understanding?

I meet a lot of people who tell me, almost with pride, that they understand a language well but can't speak it. Usually two things are going on. Their comprehension isn't as broad as they believe, because they only follow the familiar topics they hear again and again. And they have made "I can't speak" part of their identity, so every meeting they sit through in silence confirms it. Which language do you understand far better than you speak?