Why I Failed at Language Learning for Decades

I had no clue how to acquire real skills.

I was good at learning isolated parts of a language. However, I couldn’t put together any useful skills.

A brief history of what I did:

My first exposure to another language was when I took two years of university German with high grades. After that, I could somewhat read German materials with the help of a dictionary. Later in my career, I was able to exchange e-mails in German with colleagues and customers in Europe. I had to rely heavily on dictionaries and online translation programs to do this.

As I realized I liked German, I also started self-learning ancient Greek. I unofficially audited a first year Greek class when in college. I worked on and off at Greek for somewhere around 25 to 30 years after that. I never much got beyond the stage of slowly and painfully translating sentences word by word.

Over a period of about 25 to 30 years, I never did see much improvement in my language skills in spite of significant amounts of effort. I did what I had learned to do in formal classes. I researched and followed the advice of experienced Greek teachers and other language teachers. I simply failed to acquire any good skills.

I had assumed that if I put in enough time and effort that skills would naturally start to develop. They didn’t. With what I now know about prolific learning and good principles and bad anti-principles of learning, it’s obvious why I didn’t have much success in hindsight.

My time and efforts were not focused on things that were enjoyable and effective.

The methods I was using and the approach I was taking were only somewhat enjoyable and not very effective. For many years, I’d have a pattern of starting out with great enthusiasm only to slowly burn out over weeks and months of effort. What I was doing was effective if what I wanted to do was get good grades in classes. It was NOT effective for acquiring skills.

For about 25 years, my language learning looked something like this. I would start out with great enthusiasm. I’d work and study hard and make progress memorizing things that I needed to know. Then, I’d slowly start to lose enthusiasm and burn out. My attention span would drop. I’d start to think of other things I’d rather be doing. I’d force myself to keep at it. When some disruption in life occurred, I’d stop studying for a few day or a week. I’d then find I just couldn’t bring myself to get back at it.

Months later, I’d decide I really wanted to get back at it so I’d start again. I’d review things that I’d now started to forget. Tables of paradigms, conjugations, and word lists would come back fairly quickly to me. Usually within a few weeks or so I’d be back close to where I had left off. I’d then repeat the cycle and slowly burn out again.

My methods and approach failed in two serious ways. They were not enjoyable. They were not effective. Usually within a month or so of starting (and restarting), my attention span and enjoyment would start to drop. This meant what I was doing was not sustainable. I had to force myself to keep going. This was not something that inherently made me want to keep coming back day after day. Secondly, the methods were not producing any reasonable level of skills. I was doing exactly what I’d been taught to do in language learning. However, I was seeing few if any actual skills resulting in spite of day by day success in the details of what I was working on. In spite of hundreds of hours of time put in over the years, I had little to show for it.

Why was it not effective?

In hindsight, this is now obvious to me. At the time, I didn’t know any better. In a nutshell, I was spending almost all of my time thinking in English about the language I was trying to learn. I was never letting my brain be exposed to the natural sounds, rhythms, and patterns of native users. I was making language learning an exercise in rote memorization of tables of words and logical parsing exercises. I was always dissecting a sentence in the language and thinking about each word in English and how it fit into various grammar tables. I was spending most of my time reading English textbooks and reference books talking about languages. I spent very little time with the new language itself in a way native users would use it.

I simply didn’t realize that I needed to actually practice the skills I wanted to acquire. I wanted to learn to read ancient Greek but I never practiced reading ancient Greek. I spent all my time worrying about how to accurate parse and identify the form of each word in a sentence. I’d send an hour looking individually at each word in a sentence, looking up exact meanings in a lexicon, making sure I knew each grammatical definition perfectly, and then slowly piecing together the meaning of the sentence. In hindsight, I was practicing thinking about individual words in an ancient Greek sentence in English. I didn’t know I needed to practice reading.

Why was it not enjoyable?

Ultimately it was because I was never seeing any real progress. Day by day I would be learning new things and feeling an increased mastery over various verb forms and tables. I’d remember more words on vocabulary lists. I was making progress. But over weeks and months, it simply became boring and unsatisfying. My reading skills were not growing or progressing. I knew more and more details about Greek that I read in grammar books and other references. However, I couldn’t look at a typical Greek sentence and make much sense out of it. Over the course of about 25 years or so, I did slowly get better. But, I couldn’t sit down and just enjoy using the language. It was constantly the same repetitive exercise of slowly working my way word by word through a sentence. I saw some improvement, but I was not close to being able to actually enjoy reading a simple passage in ancient Greek let alone enjoying reading a book.

Greek had become an exercise in memorization for me. It was not a language to be enjoyed. It was a series of never ending facts to memorize. Each time I’d restart my studies, I had an optimistic enthusiasm that with enough effort, that reading skills would eventually emerge. They never did. I attributed that to needing more time and effort. It never occurred to me that my methods and approach were at fault and that I would never acquire reading skills the way I was going.

Breaking the Cycle of Failure

About 25 years or so after first starting to learn ancient Greek, I took a serious look at my progress. With much effort, I could work my way through a few sentences in an evening. I did the math and realized I’d be lucky to finish a single book in my lifetime. I was about read to finally give up. I did one last internet search on learning Greek. I found many of the same sites I’d be seeing for years along with a few new ones. I went back through that material and saw I was doing pretty much everything that was recommended. I came to the conclusion that only people who had hours per day to dedicate to working on Greek would ever be able to read it. I started to question whether or not it was worth the effort for me to do this.

I then happened to hit a link to a forum populated by independent language learners. I was surprised to see many individuals for whom using multiple languages was simply considered normal. This opened an entire world of independent language learning to me. I realized that this was the equivalent of a widespread learning laboratory of various individuals trying different things and sharing how those worked for them. There were many successful language learners who shared much material (in the form of videos, articles, blog posts, and forum posts) about language learning. I spent months wading through this material from dozens of people. In the short term, it gave me many ideas about what to try for improving my language learning capabilities. In the long run, it led me to the entire idea of prolific learning and the principles and anti-principles which affect how we learn.

To make a long story short, over the course of about 2 to 3 years, I slowly figured out how to use new methods and approaches to ancient Greek. I started to see progress. My reading skills slowly improved and I could actually read ancient Greek. This of course was like progressing in a skill like learning to ride a bicycle. You start off trying not to fall and then slowly progress to remaining upright to being able ride short distances and then (if you work at it) acquiring advanced skills. Anyone who can ride around the block without falling over can be said to ride a bicycle as can someone who competes in the Tour De France. When I say I can read ancient Greek, it is with this type of continuum in mind. There are some genres and authors I can enjoyably read with a high degree of comprehension; there are some I need to use parallel texts and occasional reference materials to understand. But I am now consistently improving. At this point, I’ve read the Greek New Testament a number of times and am on my third time through the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint). I’ve started through Xenophon’s The Anabasis. As weeks and months go by, I simply can comprehend more and more sentences and words with a higher degree of understanding. I’m starting to put together a list of classics I want to read.

After a time, I decided to try this approach on a living language from scratch. I started learning Spanish and immediately started seeing satisfying progress. When I was in college, I had taken 2 years of German. I’d gotten good grades, but never acquired much in the way of skills. The most I could do with German was exchange e-mails in German with colleagues and customers in Europe. I was relying much on online dictionaries and online translation programs for this. Within perhaps 3 to 4 months of starting to learn Spanish, my Spanish skills were far ahead of where my German skills ever were. In the 3 or so years since I started (which has been a time of much transition and change of employment and moving), I’ve started to make Spanish an enjoyable regular part of my life. I do some amount of specific study (which for now is focused on transcribing audio into written text) and typically 1 to 2 hours per day of some combination of reading and watching Spanish shows on Netflix.

Moving Forward

In the process of figuring out how to better learn ancient Greek and Spanish, I started to understand more about learning. It was in this language work I started to realize that much of what I thought I knew about learning was incorrect. Over the course of perhaps 5 years or so, the idea of prolific learning and the principles which empower it started to become clearer to me. This year, my new language challenge is learning Hebrew. I’m taking everything I now know about prolific learning and using that as a basis for what I do. I’m also using the experience I gained from ancient Greek and Spanish. I am making sure that I enjoy what I am doing and that it is effective. I’m already adapting what I do to keep things fun. Whenever I find myself getting bored or tense, I immediately do something about it. I keep track of my progress in a subjective way. As of now, I pick up the first chapter of Genesis and see how much of it I can just enjoy reading and comprehending to some degree. I put on the audio of Genesis and see how much I can understand as I listen. I go back and listen to older Assimil lessons and just see how comfortably I can or cannot understand them. In the upcoming months, I will do something similar. I’ll try to read or listen to new materials and see how much I can catch. I’ll read or listen to older materials and see how much is comfortably familiar. This time around, I am making listening to audio a much more important part of what I am doing.

I already had my first unexpected “wow this is cool” moment in Hebrew last week. I’ve been watching various TV series and movies in Spanish on Netflix. I was searching for new things to watch, started watching the preview for a series, and realized it was playing in its original Hebrew audio. I also realized that I was catching some words here and there.

I’m starting to lay out my long term language learning plans but I’ll see how things go. Mandarin Chinese is next on my list. Looking far down the line, I might work on German again or pick something else. There are many Hmong speakers where I now live. It might be an interesting learning experiment to figure out how best to acquire some rudimentary conversation skills for the local farmer’s market in the absence of much in the way of Hmong language materials. I spent some time in the past learning sign language (ASL) so if I start to have contacts with the Deaf community again, I’ll probably start working on that again. At this point, I’m just enjoying the journey with Greek, Spanish, and Hebrew. I’ll continue to make progress and continue integrating those into my life in enjoyable and satisfying ways. As those become more solid, I’ll figure out what to do next.

Overcoming this failure eventually lead me to good principles of learning

Common lore would have it that it shouldn’t have been possible for me to be on the road to being a successful language learner. Someone in their 50s is usually not considered a good candidate for successful language learning. With few skills to show for over 20 years of on and off efforts, it was clear I was not a prime candidate for language learning success. Common sense would dictate something was wrong with me as I was probably either too lazy and inconsistent or I lacked the necessary language learning talent. The majority of advice I read from formal language instructors and education experts kept me heading down the same road. It was when I started to question that entire system (from which only a small percentage of students gain much in the way of actual lifelong language skills), that I started to see what was not working. It wasn’t a matter of trying harder. It was a matter of figuring out what did work for me.

I now attribute much of my failure and lack of progress to approaching language learning the wrong way. It was through this that I started to see that what I learned here applied to learning just about anything. In the long run, I do regret I spent so many years wasting my time and effort. However, this failure did lead me to a much greater understanding of what principles underlie efficient learning.