Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
When I arrived at my first class, I was a bit lost even thought I had 1 year of "experience". I did progress quite fast the two first years though because I had a bit of vocabulary under my belt, but I had to re-learn all the grammar/declinaison rules.
My advice to you would be: if you can afford, take classes for the language you want to learn, at least for the first year.
Also forget about the quick learning tools like Duolingo and such. It makes you feel like you're learning, but from my experience, not much is being retained.
I'm now switching to learning Russian and taking classes for 1 or 2 years.
The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.
Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
> I spent 2 years in Latin America
That is not very accessible to most people.
Tons of people work remote from Mexico and Spain.
Getting to A2 is what Duolingo and similar are great for.
After that you need to grind the hours. When you have limited time, the best ways are swapping things you already do with something in the target language. Switch your audio track on Netflix, make a separate TikTok account where you only follow people in the target language, at some point, switch your phone so that you have to talk to Siri in your target language, and then finally, sign up with a teacher (online or in person) for speaking practice at least once a week. The social pressure of trying to communicate with a real person and not being able to will make your brain take the rest of the exposure seriously enough to start rewiring what needs to be rewired.
The only thing this not taught me was speaking with people.
We just got back from a trip to visit that side of the family and it was a really gratifying trip -- the first time I'd felt totally confident wandering off on my own without some trusted family or friend to interpret for me. I'm definitely not fluent, but with some patience on the other side of the conversation I can get by.
That said, I find it all fun. I think that's the key. If I were doing this all for some abstract eventual benefit like my brain health at 60-something, I would never make progress. As it is, I find the process of learning new vocabulary quite fun (grammar less so, but there is only so much to learn) and there are clear benefits to having effectively a secret family language when in the US, and being able to navigate conversations with in-laws, church friends, and so on.
Language learning is, to me, effectively a cheap hobby that is also marginally useful somewhat often.
But since that's not really data, I'll offer that I'm adjacent to a workplace where people come and go from around the world. Some may stay a few years, some may stay longer. Several adults have learned this massively obscure and quite hostile language (Finnish) while staying here even though they mostly get along with their work in English. I'd say there's no hard constraints stopping most people.
And it's not like you can exactly fail a language. If you give up, you might stagnate at whatever level you've reached. Maybe you'll even forget some things. But you always have the opportunity to learn more and practice. Recall practice doesn't even require any equipment or opportunity other than a quiet moment: Just form some sentences in your mind. See if you can express an idea. Maybe check and look up some hints afterwards. I find that's a good way to start a snowball rolling and recall is the most important tool for pushing the brain.
Approach it differently as a salaried adult. You can pay for better tuition on your own schedule.
But you can find time. I listen to Michel Thomas or other courses while I’m walking to work. Put on headphones and ignore other people, they aren’t listening to you anyway. Other things like flash cards you can do any time you’ve got 10-15 mins.
* memorizing vocabulary and practicing pronunciation with Anki
* private lessons
* grammar book with exercises
* podcasts
* news
* some books.
Worked very well. Had a good starting point when I arrived in Germany, and the immersion then helped a lot (but I stopped using Anki due to laziness). I found this page very useful: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
But I really don't think there's any mental hurdle to learning a language at any age. In fact, I think it is EASIER to learn a language as an adult (as opposed to child) because you understand language in general, and so many other concepts.
There are two reasons that adults have trouble learning a language:
1. time. Adults have endless responsibilities, which make it difficult to dedicate the time required to learn.
2. Lack of humility. Not being able to communicate in even the most basic of terms can be humiliating, if you lack humility - as most adults do. You need to be able to completely put aside your pride, and just be eager to make mistakes endlessly.
There's a lot of language schools here - both to learn Spanish and English - and I've met so many people who are "trying" to learn a language and refuse to practice out of fear of making a mistake. At no point have I ever felt even the slightest bit self-conscious about my Spanish, and I simply just try to communicate as fluidly as I am able, even while knowing I am making mistakes. When I learn I've been making some mistake for sometimes years, I simply laugh.
Similarly, there's plenty of locals (and people around the world) who have learned English to a reasonably high degree. So it is clearly possible. Though, even amongst them it often find that there's a genuine hesitancy to talk to me, a native English speaker. Their motivation was simply for a higher paying job, and evidently they swallow their pride for $ and pain.
I can recommend https://languagetransfer.org as an excellent resource, if your target language is covered.
And also just to focus on the basics. I recommend people don't even worry about verb conjugation when starting. Just speak in infinitive exclusively.
I eat bread. Tomorrow/yesterday he eat bread.
People will understand 99% of the time. Just focus on getting vocabulary, confidence and fluidity. Add verb tenses in due course. Again, it takes humility to speak in completely broken sentences, like a little child. But that's the only way.
One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.
Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.
And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).
I'm sure there's specific contexts in which proficiency is important, but I think aiming for fluency - literally being able to communicate fluidly, without humming and hawing, - should be the goal for most people. You can do that with a very poor degree of grammar. Moreover, this probably gets you to proficiency faster anyway.
The failure is something that comes with the territory. It's possible to find balance and teachers and material and methods that have lots of reward and not that much failure, but learning generally means doing things badly and then figuring out how to do things better.
I hope you find a way. Music is a great joy.
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.
You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.
The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.
My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.
If you have a genuine need for a language, you'll need to worry about success. If you just want to learn, there's nothing stopping you other than time and effort and saying no.
Learning sign language was lots of fun in VRC with actual people. I'm actually going to visit a friend I made doing this, in his country, this weekend.
Persistent learning and repetition is key but the main way I improved was by letting go of the fear of sounding stupid and talking without shame.
Of course time constraints can be worse (or better)
- unwilling to move to a different country
- unmotivated to spend time chatting with people about random things in a foreign language
Learning a language can help with both of those things, but neither is really necessary.
1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.
The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.
Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.
2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.
3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.
I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.
Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.
If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.