| The hardest part about learning a new language is maintaining motivation. Learning a new language isn’t a hobby you can just add to your life like knitting or cooking. It’s more like an ambitious diet and exercise program, except the payoff is even less motivating. If you look good, everyone sees. If you can speak Japanese, nobody cares but other people you talk to whose English is worse than your Japanese. Like exercise, if you invest anything less than four hours a week, you won’t make meaningful gains, and it’s often months before you get anywhere. It’s a slog. The trick (if you can call it that) is to find something you really want to do, badly, that you NEED your L2 to do. For Japanese learners, maybe maybe wanting to watch anime is enough. For English learners, maybe it’s watching American TV and movies. For Americans learning an L2, immersion is the pretty much the only viable approach. Immersion is just a hack to motivate yourself by making your life almost unbearably difficult, with learning to speak your L2 the only way out. Looking back on six years living in China and learning Chinese while working (borderline fluent in some topics but woefully inadequate in others), if I could do it over again I would: 1. Spend a few months getting the fundamentals down: learn pronunciation, drill it with a patient native speaker, go hard at 10+ hours a week book studying. (I did this) 2. Move somewhere to either work or study only in your L2, and where there’s barely any English speakers. Live there for a year or more. (I didn’t do this; I lived in a large city and had mostly English speaking friends and my work was in English) There’s no way to fluency without spending hundreds of hours talking with people in your L2: ~500 hours for Spanish, ~1500 for Chinese or Arabic. |