Learning languages

I was learning the Chinese language since three years ago, but, due to my slow progress, thought to pick up another in order to see if my slowness in learning was specific to Chinese or just a general feature of my mind’s limits. Contrary to its reputation, I did not find the Chinese language difficult -just filled with new vocabulary.

On January 20 of this year, I began on a (in Olly Richards’s words) grand tour of the romance languages, starting with Italian, because Italy is the first major country in Western Europe with a right-wing populist government as well as the most church-attending major Western European country. The fact the country has a respectable post-medieval history and the one whose economic history is most similar to that of Japan further added to my decision. I thought of learning Japanese, due to Japan’s large and relatively well-educated population with low knowledge of English, but was put off by the language’s widely accepted difficulty, enormously difficult writing system, and lack of transfer to other languages.

I started by (this is how I learn Mandarin, except, due to the lack of phonetic information in the characters and abundance of videos with character subtitles, I do it for Chinese videos) opening the Adventures of Pinnochio and copying it into Google Translate sentence by sentence, checking the definition of each word I did not know. However, there were so many unknown words in the book, I could not remember anything but the most common of them (subito, testa, legno, etc.) After ten chapters of scrutinizing the Italian text, I could not even so much as say “Hello, my name is…”.

I thus started learning Italian on Duolingo (I first tried it to learn Mandarin, but had long abandoned in favor of subtitled videos), which I found overly repetitive and with too small a number of words introduced to per day -basically the opposite of throwing oneself into the deep end of the swimming pool by starting on an actual Italian language book. The experience improved with the free trial of Super Duolingo, and the content was at least relevant to actually speaking the language as a tourist, but the core complaints remained.

Overall, if one desires to start learning a language, I suggest starting on Duolingo at the rate of at least three lily pads per day (contra to its advertising, fifteen minutes a day cannot teach you a language), summing up to about five or so units, before starting on language learning with native level longform comprehensible input. As a simple rule, if you know a majority of the words you see in the input you wish to comprehend, don’t bother with Duolingo.