I'm a language nerd. I like to learn about languages, and I like to learn to use languages. The only thing that I've found to be harder than learning languages is deciding which language to learn.

Here I'll outline which languages I've studied and which languages I want to study, how I decide on languages to study, and how I go about studying them.

Languages I have studied or wanted to study

I've studied a TON of languages, as long as you define "study" very loosely. It won't make any sense for me to just list every language that I've skimmed a textbook on, so I'll deliniate by time studied. Let's categorize by dedicated study and casual study. I'll list languages in order of competence.

Dedicated study

I'll define languages with dedicated study as those that I have spent at least 6 months studying. Along side the languages, I'll include an estimate of how much time I've spent studying the language.

Mandarin + Chinese
5 years
Japanese
4 years
Russian
3 years
Finnish
6 months

Mandarin (I'll refer to both spoken Mandarin and written Chinese with just Mandarin from now on) has been my most studied language and the one of most interest to me by far. I started studying it in 2013, when I first started university. I was tinkering with it in 2012 out of curiosity, just to gauge my interest, before I decided on taking courses on it in uni. As it happens, those Mandarin classes were the only part of uni that I enjoyed. I got along well with a rigorous university-level program of language study, and I had a lot of fun taking on a tonal language. I fell in love with the language as a whole pretty dang quick. Not to mention my 3rd year instructor, 草老師... I cried when I left his class at the end of the year. After uni (I dropped out lmao), I studied it on my own a bit, then let it alone for a couple years, then remembered how much I love it and found my own ways to study it. Nowadays, those "study" methods are generally just watching youtube videos and reading books. So liberating!

I took Japanese through my time in high school, though I first started learning it when I was 11 or so. I had a little beginner's course that my brother didn't want anymore, and I was obsessed with everything about it. Learning the kana, memorizing new phrases, talking about it incessantly to anyone who would listen, so on. Unfortunately, while taking it in high school, my interest in it really faded somewhere along the way. I was simultaneously studying Russian, and that grabbed me so much more at the time. It is what it is. Anyway, high school language classes are not known for their effectiveness; I could hardly speak any Japanese after graduating high school, and dredging it out of my memory banks at all 7 years later is tough.

I loved studying Russian. I've never taken a Russian course at all, but I found pretty decent competency with it at one point. Everything I learned came from one small novel-shaped textbook. Something about the hellish grammar intrigued me—nouns decline into 6 cases and have one of 3 only somewhat predictable grammatical genders, adjectives decline to agree with the gender and plurality of each noun, and verb conjugation has its own exciting problems. It's lovely really. Maybe I'm a masochist. I think about going back to study this one on occasion, just not often enough to actually go and do it. Maybe some day.

Finnish is my current obsession. Or, I would like it to be, but now I have adult obligations and personal relationships taking up all my sweet time. I've been interested in the language since probably 2010 or so, starting with my inclination toward the Finnish metal scene. I don't listen to metal anymore, but I have found other things about the language that attract me. I think the sound of it is very unique, and its grammar is beautiful to put together, like it was designed with intent. I'm excited to learn more of this one... when I have time.

Casual study

My casual study languages are the ones that I've tooled with on Duolingo or something similar for about 2 weeks to a month, maybe more, maybe less. Generally, I started playing with them to see if I'd be interested, and ultimately found that I wasn't enamoured. I won't estimate time studied for these, I'll just share how I studied them.

Polish
Duolingo
Italian
Duolingo
Icelandic
Online course
Vietnamese
Textbooks
Welsh
Textbooks
Arabic (MSA)
Wikibooks lmao
French
Wikibooks

Not much to say about these. I enjoyed messing with them for a while, never took them too seriously, and ultimately never developed a study habit or strong interest in them. Some of these I've put on file in the back of my brain for maybe studying some day... but we'll get to that later on here.

Later on here

Deciding on a language to study is a perpetual question that haunts me. Do I study a big "useful" language that I might need to use some day, or do I study a small "unuseful" language that I have a weird inclination towards? I guess the answer is whatever you decide for yourself, but in my opinion, if you study a language because its useful and not because you want to, you're not gonna go far.

Aside from the languages listed up there, there are so many languages I want to and have wanted to study. Even just a passing interest. I'll list as many as I can think of here, in a loose order of interest.

A lot of languages.

While the order is loose, the decision to put Amharic first is very intentional. I love the way Amharic sounds, the small taste of its grammar I've gotten, and the really cool fact that it's related to Arabic and Hebrew. It's a language that should absolutely at least be on my casual study list, but I haven't had the time to learn much of any of it. The only thing that I'm not enthused about with the language is the script, the Fidel. It's just not aesthetically appealing to me. Which super doesn't matter, but like, I grew up being fascinated by cyphers and various language scripts. Its greatest interest-redeeming factor to me is that it's one of few abugidas in the world, and I freaking love abugidas.

How I study languages

I've tried to study languages a lot of different ways. Let's start by having a little chat about Duolingo.

Oh jeez Duolingo

I feel lukewarm about Duolingo. If you try to find reviews of the service, you'll probably find a lot of strong opinions on either side. And while I agree with some concerns about its efficacy, I don't think it's useless. It's great for getting a taste of a language, if you think you want to study it, because it jumps you straight into saying real sentences, such as "I am a fish." It focuses a lot on drilling vocabulary, which is only as useful as the sentences you practice using that vocabulary. Additionally, language depending, Duolingo offers a lot of lessons on different topics.

Unfortunately, that's... about it. It won't help you practice speaking the language unless you take it upon yourself to practice speaking the sentences it asks of you. The gamified nature only made me feel like I had an obligation to Duolingo to do a certain amount every day—which they want, of course, but it's definitely not what I want.

This isn't a terribly original critique of the platform, but I wanted to be clear that I use it sometimes, just not the way they expect me to, probably. For sure, if you want to get serious about studying a language, you'll need to suppliment it with something else, such as...

Language classes

I looooooooove language classes so much. They push me to learn more, keep me focused and on track, and of course having a native speaker to practice with makes all the difference in the world. They're just hard to find and/or exorbitantly expensive. The only language classes I've taken have been through my high school and through my university. I would kill to be able to take just a language class at a university and nothing else, but that's not how they work. As for finding classes run outside of educational institutions, what you get depends heavily on where you look. I sure don't know where to (though I probably should, because library school).

One-on-one lessons with a speaker over, I dunno, italki, are presumably just fine. Personally, I enjoy the classroom environment, where you're struggling together with other learners. It's not so isolating and it makes it more fun. Plus I have a superiority complex. Ha ha not really. Okay but kind of.

Language classes generally rely on a textbook, which is just a thing you can buy anywhere. Which brings me to...

Textbooks

I have gotten a lot of mileage out of language textbooks. They can do all the work, as long as you put back in what you get out of them. They can't tell you how a language sounds ("ah" as in "bought," huh? wow, lots to unpack here), unless it includes audio CDs or whatever format. The inclusion of IPA symbols is lovely when textbooks think to, but it never tells the whole story.

I'll include programs like Pimsleur in this category, because they're essentially textless textbooks. If you aren't familiar, they're just recordings of some instructor guiding you through the grammar interspersed with native speakers saying phrases for you to repeat. It's fun for getting you to start speaking, but dang it moves slow.

In the past, I've followed textbooks to let them teach me the language the way they want to. Nowadays I jump around where I please—a textbook doesn't know how you learn, it just knows how to build a general curriculum for anyone. Use it the way you want to use it. Skipping entire lessons/chapters won't be as big of a miss as it sounds, and you can always go back and skim if you want.

Wikibooks

Probably don't use wikibooks. The philosophy behind it is that it's free textbooks for anyone by anyone. I used to use it to get some basics of the language, but the courses are never developed and there's only ever a few lessons. A lot of times critical information is missing. It's good for a primer and that's about it.

Exposure, and your imagination is the limit

There are no rules for how to learn a language. Want to know the secret? Why every revolutionary new language-learning method that comes out says "we studied how babies learn language?" Because the secret is that there is no secret. Children learn the language they're surrounded with because they have to in order to communicate. You can literally just do this too, by surrounding yourself with materials in the target language and engage with them as much as you can, even as a complete beginner. You just need to remember that it won't happen in a week, or a month, or even a year.

Where am I getting this from? Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb (which may be available for download on libgen, although I cannot confirm this, and I certainly have not ever done this, nor would I ever encourage one to do this) (do it). If you have even the slightest interest in learning a language, I won't let you get away without reading this book; it will change your whole outlook on studying one, and make you so much stronger for it.

Lomb's philosophy, at least my takeaway from it, can be reduced down to a few principles: take in target-language media early and often, expand from any little bits you can recognize, and take everything in context. Looking up words in the dictionary isn't helpful if you're trying to truly learn, and I've found this to be true. What you want to know is what a word does in the context you found it. I've tried to implement these principles into my Mandarin study, and I've learned SO FREAKING MUCH vocabulary this way, most of it without touching a dictionary. It makes you feel incredibly powerful.

ok JM wrap it up lets go

Where do I go from here? I know I'm going to keep on "studying" Mandarin the way I have been, because it's fun and rewarding.

I'm very much a beginner in Finnish, but I want to put this philosophy into practice for it too. I want some easy books in Finnish and some videos to watch. I have a textbook that I'm going through at the same time. I'd also very much enjoy having a monolingual Finnish dictionary... sanakirja.org will do for now.

Learning some Amharic would be fun, but it's probably a ways off for me yet. At least not until I finish school. I want to focus on Finnish until I have a solid foundation for it.

As a final note, let me say: I have 0 intentions of being a polyglot. I don't want to be on one of those obnoxious youtube thumbnails. I do this to entertain myself, and maybe make myself some neat connections through it. I just want to learn the languages that I want to learn.

And how about for you, dear reader? Is there any language you're studying or want to study? If so, please do read Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb. It's helped me immensely. If you do read the book, or just in general if you're working on a language, tell me about it! I wanna hear.