This is Your Brain on Language
Building an intelligent language-learning strategy
Back to our regular programming. Following a tragic accident involving a mug of hot glycine chamomile tea and my last laptop, I had to take a few weeks hiatus while waiting for a new one with a QWERTY keyboard to arrive from abroad. Now that I’m all set up again, expect regular articles as planned!
If you’re still here after my warning in my first post, you must be determined to put in the sweat & blood needed to actually get that next language in your pocket & open new doors to you. Congrats, Anon! Most never even start. Still, even if this is going to require time & serious effort, you want to work smarter not harder. There are many ways to go about learning languages & most of them are good enough. But we are here because we want to do this as efficiently as possible.
This will be a long post and we’re going to get a little bit into the weeds of neurology, psychology, metaphysics, socio-linguistics and other fun stuff to hack how you operate at a very basic level. You need to get your strategy right from the start - so set some time aside, read this slowly and go over it several times. “Uhhh Tern wtf, metaphysics and socio-linguistics? Come on bro I just want to move to a sunny tropical country that isn’t completely degenerate and meet exotic QTs.” Unfortunately, Anon, you’re an eternally recurring ghost trapped inside a decaying pile of meat on a rock hurtling through an endless vacuum, and this matrix you’re built into determines your nature. You can’t escape it because everywhere you go, there you are. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. On the upside, one of the side benefits of learning a language is you will develop a much deeper, explicit understanding of how you relate to the world & other people, and give you fine-tuned control over how you program yourself to navigate that.
To give you a brief overview up-front, this post will explain:
How your brain uses language in relating to the world
The most effective ways to absorb a new language
Different components of language & how to self-diagnose your proficiency in them
How to steadily increase proficiency as efficiently as possible
Moving from simple to complex understanding
In short, this post will cover the strategy you will use to master your next language. The next posts will give you concrete, actionable tools & techniques to execute that strategy.
The Memorization Trap
Let’s start with what language learning isn’t: it’s not purely rote memorization & recall. This is where 90% of approaches fail from the start. Maybe you’ve taken some language classes before at school, think back to how you probably ‘learned’ there: memorizing lots of grammar charts, conjugation tables, vocabulary lists, then being evaluated on how well you regurgitate them. Good luck applying that to the real world.
You will obviously need to memorize material. Lots of it, even, and I’ll dedicate a lot of space here giving you the tools to do that as effectively as possible. But this memorization itself must not be the focus. There’s a difference between merely recalling a piece of information and mobilizing it quickly, effectively and fluidly in interactions with other people. There’s also a further problem with the rote memorization approach: when you memorize, especially vocabulary, typically you’re learning corresponding translations between your native language and your target language. This is good enough, even necessary, when starting out, but eventually you’ll hit a wall as you move from an intermediate to an advanced level: you’ll find yourself constantly needing to translate in your head rather than thinking in your target language directly. This is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in your path to mastery, and you’ll do yourself a huge favor if you start working to bypass it from the start.
Burning in Your Neural Networks
This brings us to a critical question. What is language & how do we use it? And what does learning a new one actually entail? You, like me and everyone else, are trapped inside your mind & forever isolated from the outside world, grasping to understand it through proxy but never truly in it. Your senses are the interface between you and the world, bringing in data from outside for your brain to parse, organize, make sense of, respond to, and store. You do this on a subconscious level, and language adds a conscious layer on top of that for you to interface with. You have words to describe objects & events in the world around you, as well as grammar to describe interactions with those objects, how they interact, & where they interact in space and time.
When you talk about something, your brain needs to search through your networks of neurons for the location of the object you are describing (which you know on a pre-language level), then go find words you have stored to describe it, select the correct one, carry out whatever grammatical operations are needed to place it, then express it. When you are understanding someone else, the same process takes place in reverse.
This is pretty abstract, so I’ll use a simple but concrete example to show how the process works and why memorizing translations is bad. You want to describe a fist-sized red fruit that grows on a tree - your brain travels down the appropriate path of neurons and finds that fruit, then seeks out where the word ‘apple’ is stored, then retrieves it to be expressed as needed. This is the simplest & fastest pathway available - a single-step search between object and word, the ideal scenario. When you learn translations, you are adding another step to this operation: your brain must identify the object, then go find the word apple, then go find the corresponding word in your target language, then return it & express it.
When you do this for every word in a fast-paced & dynamic real-world conversation containing thousands and thousands of words, it takes a lot of additional time & energy. You will have a hard time keeping up with the conversation, and your mental focus will burn out much more quickly. Your native language’s word for the object becomes the focus, rather than the object itself, and this creates a bottleneck in your neural search algorithm.
Instead, what we want to do is learn new content in your target language not in reference to your native language, but in reference to the world itself. This way, your brain’s search time is reduced back to 1 step rather than 2 and the energy needed to retrive a given piece of information is cut in half.
As you become more and more used to a language, recall becomes easier - the more frequently your brain travels down a particular path of neurons to get information, the easier it becomes to return down that same path again. Your subconscious brain develops an intuitive map of frequently-used neural pathways, like shortcuts on a computer or the way you learn to navigate a new physical environment instinctively after several days. Once you have those neural paths really burned in, you will naturally find it easier to switch between languages and translate among them on the fly. If you go to a natively bilingual or polyglot country, in daily life people will mash words and phrases from multiple languages together in a single statement & everyone is totally comfortable with it. This is the ultimate goal, but it’s only possible when each word is anchored to the object itself. The links between words in different languages will only be secondary to the main object link (this is also why translating between two languages is much much harder than simply speaking each language individually).
How does it make you FEEL?
So how do to do this? You need to literally reprogram your brain at a very low level in the most efficient way possible. As I mentioned before, your only interface with the world is through your senses. The more you stimulate your senses, the more actively your brain is engaged in multiple sub-routines & the easier recall will be because you’re burning in those neural pathways from multiple access points at once. As you are learning your new language you must maximize how it makes you FEEL in every way possible.
You have three representational systems that you use to receive, understand & reproduce data coming in from the external world: the visual system, the aural (audio) system, and the kinesthetic/experiential system. While everyone has and uses all three, each person has one that is dominant over the others. With a little introspection, you can determine what your dominant representational system is. One cue to determine this is looking at what everyday expressions you use - would you most frequently say “I see what you mean,” or “I hear you,” or something more like “I get it” or “I feel you”? Another way is to examine how you typically learn and remember things in daily life. I, for example, can’t remember the names of subway lines to save my life, but I always remember the colors of each line - I am visual-dominant. Someone who remembers lines by the experience of taking them or being in a certain station and walking through the entrance might be more kinesthetic-dominant.
Returning to the topic of language, you are going to employ all three systems in your learning as much as possible. Using the above example, let’s say you are learning French. Rather than learning that the word for apple is ‘pomme’, you’re going to learn the word ‘pomme’ in conjunction with an image of an apple (visual system), audio of someone saying the word (aural system), and physically writing it down (kinesthetic) - with the English word ‘apple’ nowhere in sight (I’ll be showing you concretely how to do all this). Whenever possible, you also want max reinforcement in your dominant representational system… at the very least, you must be conscious of that system as you go about things. I know that I am visually-dominant, and when I am recalling a new word I will often picture in my head how that word looks written down. Others I know who are more aural or kinesthetic will do the same, but hearing or the word or imagining writing it out. This is very similar to verbal cues for proper technique in weightlifting, and sounds minor but is surprisingly effective.
But the representational systems link an object or piece of information to physical sense inputs alone. Higher than these are feelings and emotions, and you’re going to do everything you can to spike those as you learn because emotional associations are proven to massively improve recall. This is where you need to get creative, and it’s probably easiest to do so visually (unless that’s my visual-dominant bias speaking). The images I choose to associate with new words are as evocative as possible: they include sex, good cuisine, great art, timeless stories or myths, personal experience…maybe something that evokes a fond memory or a place from childhood. At the very least, choose an unusual, memorable, or caricatural image for your association. In the above example, the picture of the apple I used is actually a horrible choice. Better would be something like an over-the-top gross looking apple in a witch’s hand, an apple in a rustic kitchen setting that remind’s me of my grandma’s cooking growing up, apples at a local folk festival in a city that I really enjoyed visiting, an erotic Eve holding out an apple…you get the idea. As long as the image makes you FEEL something, the word or concept you attach to it will be retained much better (meta reference: why do you think I chose unusual or evocative titles for each sub-section of this article?).
Unfortunately, this tactic works best for everyday objects in the physical world. You can even get away with doing this for more common verbs (and vary the people in the image to prompt conjugations), but when you move into more abstract or intellectual language, it becomes more difficult. The good news? Your main focus for now as a beginner is going to be on learning what you need for everyday life. Higher-level stuff will come as you approach intermediate and advanced levels, and your learning tactics will change as well. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.
Leveling Up
This is a good time to discuss levels & progression. You can’t progress efficiently if you don’t know what progress looks like & aren’t able to effectively judge where you’re at and what comes next.
There are a lot of complicated models & theories around this in linguistics, and I’ve never found any of them useful for me in planning my learning. I use a very simple four-block model: two kinds of interaction (comprehension & production) x two kinds of media (written & oral), which gives us written comprehension, listening comprehension, written expression & spoken expression. For simplicity’s sake I’ll refer to these as ‘language domains,’ and you need to master each of the four domains to effectively master a language. You’ll find that some of them come easier to you than others, and your progress in each will be uneven. It’s up to you to identify which ones are lagging behind the others & temporary focus your efforts on the weaker domains until you bring them all up to a good level.
What’s a level? I like the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to model this. It breaks language proficiency in to three main groups, A, B and C (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), and each group is further broken down into a lower and upper level (1 & 2). You can find a formal chart here that describes the characteristics of each individual level, A1 through C2. Apply these levels to each of the four language domains described above to get a clear idea of where you are, and look at the characteristics of the next levels to understand where you need to go - then tailor your efforts to focus on what you must do to get there!
A final concept to understand here is register. Language is by definition a social activity, and the type of language you use in a given social situation is always different: you won’t speak the same way with friends and family as you would with strangers, at work, or in formal writing/speaking. Register describes these different contextual uses of language. We can roughly break register down into formal, professional, polite/public, and informal/personal. Registers aren’t really linked to language levels & you don’t progress in registers, but you do need to be aware of them for true mastery - this will typically come down to using knowing when to use different vocabulary or expressions, or in some languages different conjugations & grammar.
Keep Moving or Die
Now that we have functional models of how your brain interacts with language and what different levels of proficiency look like, how do we move through those levels as efficiently as possible? This is honestly where the vast majority of language learners slip up at one point or another, and you probably will too - you need to be extremely vigilant here. It is extraordinarily easy to do a little review every day and be satisfied that you’re putting the work in, but after weeks and months realize that you’ve gone nowhere. This is what most people do until they get frustrated or lose interest and give up. Then they’ll tell you that they aren’t cut out for it, or that you need to have a certain gift to learn a new language as an adult & you’re so lucky bro it’s just natural for you. Unless you’re actively progressing, you’re just treading water & maintaining your current level at best. As with everything else in life, keep moving or die. And unless you’re actively testing your limits and making yourself uncomfortable, you’re not moving forward. Weightlifting is honestly a great analogy for language learning and I’ve found that progress comes similarly in both: progressive overload with massive gains over time through putting in the work in small daily increments.
Quick note, I’m writing here under the assumption that you are starting a new language as a beginner. Progressing becomes more difficult the more advanced you get (sounds like the gym again), and I’ll probably dedicate an entire post later on to pushing through the intermediate and advanced levels. Being a beginner is the most fun because you learn a ton very easily much faster, you really feel how much you are advancing and it’s deeply satisfying. But just because it’s easier doesn’t make it any less important to approach it correctly - actually, I’d argue just the opposite. Since you’re going to be absorbing a lot of content relatively quickly, it’s important to do so with a solid foundation from the start, otherwise you’re going to have a lot of bad habits to undo and relearn later on.
Be Like Babby
You can understand the most efficient initial approach with two simple metaphors. The first is the meat and bone approach. To greatly simplify, you can break language down into content (meat) and structure (bone). At any given point in your learning, you will focus on building either the meat or the bone to a desired level. Once that’s done, you shift to focus on the bringing the other up. Do not concentrate on both at once. This will often come quite naturally as you hit walls in your ability to express yourself and find your current limits. A concrete example: as a beginner, you can’t say anything at all. Your first steps are simply to learn a ton of very basic everyday words (meat) like pronouns, greetings, please & thank you, and the names of common things in daily life. After a bit you want to start building basic phrases, so you need to learn some structural basics (bone) - how to form a sentence, and a few verb conjugations in the present tense, maybe 1st & 2nd person singular (I and you). Once you can do that you probably want to learn a bunch of common verbs and further vocab to make coherent simple sentences (meat). Eventually you’ll get frustrated with how little you can express and learn further conjugations, or maybe the past tense (bone). And so on and so on. The point here is to iterate back and forth between meat and bone, doing so naturally as you reach your limits in one and require more of the other advance overall.
A word about grammar. This is one of the biggest blocking points people encounter because quite honestly grammar is boring as hell. Traditional language teaching focuses on grammar by bludgeoning you with endless conjugation tables & forcing you to memorize dry, abstract rules until you completely abandon the language altogether. This is, in a word, completely retarded. I am not anti-grammar. Grammar is important if you want to understand how a language actually works. I would even say that before you start learning a new language, you should have a solid grasp of all the boring abstract grammar you were taught in grade school & forgot. You absolutely need understand the differences between nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and so on; word case (subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, vocative, etc.); what the different tenses are and what they mean; grammatical person; participles and how they are used. If there is demand, I can write up a quick and dirty overview of all this - leave a comment and let me know. These grammatical concepts are important because they will help you understand how a language is really functioning and troubleshoot weird anomalies you encounter & don’t understand. But. Going out and simply memorizing all of these different elements of your target language is a fool’s errand that will simply bore you to death and get you not one step closer to language mastery.
This is part of why I advocate the meat and bone approach. You will slowly absorb bits & pieces of grammar as needed in order to keep progressing, but at no point are you just sitting down and trying to memorize rules. When you do learn grammar, you should always learn it in-context through interaction with real language. Instead of studying conjugation tables, you should study sentences with words that you know and observe how verb conjugation changes depending on person & number. You should absolutely flood yourself with exposure to this, then practice correctly producing it yourself until it becomes second nature. If you start to frequently encounter certain structures or patterns that you can’t puzzle out, that’s when you go pick up a grammar book as a troubleshooting aid and look up the particular thing that’s confusing you. The goal is to build intuitive & automatic pattern recognition rather than memorizing tables that your brain will have to find & search through. If you think about it, this is exactly how children learn language - by the time you learned any grammar at all, you were already speaking your native language fluently through immersion & pattern recognition. This is the way, & modelling your adult learning around how children learn language will get you very far. Be like babby.
Funnel Cloud
After meat and bone, the second metaphor to describe how you structure your initial learning is the funnel approach. If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the Pareto Principle: 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. This is true all throughout life and language is no different: 20% of the words in a language are the 80% most frequently-used in daily life. If you focus on learning the most common words, you will boost your effective operational level in a short period of time and often be perceived by natives as having a much higher level than you actually do. From there you can focus on learning more obscure content in specific domains that interest you and slowly fill up the funnel.
There are two ways to do this. One is to find a word frequency list specific to your language, filter out the top 20-30% most frequent and build out your vocabulary learning around that. A number of online resources offer these kinds of lists, and I’ll provide links to some in the next post. The limitation here is that often these lists contain a lot of noise, stuff like conjunctions or filler that can barely be considered real words. These are also language-specific, which can be a double-edged sword: you will get some words that may be more important to your language than they are to others, but if you’re learning more obscure languages you might have a hard time finding this kind of list.
The other approach is starting with universal core vocabulary. Simply by the nature of the world, certain words and concepts are going to be critical to daily life in any language you learn. This is a more generalist approach, not language-specific, but you can be pretty sure vocab in this category will be important. I have a universal core list that I’ve built myself & will provide to you. If at all possible, I suggest you use both approaches at once.
Chunking Down, Chunking Up
We almost have a complete language learning model now - there’s just one last piece left to complete the picture. So far we’ve looked at how your brain engages with individual pieces of information, but in the real world language is a complex fabric of many pieces of information interacting with each other simultaneously. Moreover, a high level of proficiency means that you need to parse & understand each individual piece of data as well as the relationships between them in real time, then reproduce the same in a way that others can understand.
The average person can grasp 5-6 words in a single ‘act of attention,’ assuming they have an adult level of understanding and are using their native language. For you this is going to be reduced to probably around 3-4 until you reach higher levels (B2+). This is why having real conversation is so difficult when first starting out: your parsing of incoming information is much slower than the rate at which the other person is presenting it due to the additional time needed for you to complete the brain search algorithm described above. You lag behind what is being said and are still working to understand their words and follow the flow of their thoughts from three sentences back while they continue moving ahead.
You need to get your parsing speed up, and the way to do this is by further burning in your neural search pathways for faster recall and improving your intuitive pattern recognition. The technique we’ll use to train your parsing capacity is called chunking. This is most effective for building listening comprehension, although there’s a related approach for reading comprehension that we’ll look at in a later post.
First you take an entire ‘piece of communication’ from authentic content by a native speaker - it’s important to train yourself on real data as much as possible, rather than relying on simplified material to make life easier for beginners. This piece of communication will typically be a statement several sentences long, like a full response that someone might give in a conversation. A verbal paragraph, if you will. First you listen to the entire communication as a whole & understand what you can. Then you begin to break that communication down into more easily-parsed chunks: listen to a couple of sentences together, then each individual sentence separately, then listen to fragments of each individual sentence, then groups of several words from each fragment - continuing down into smaller and smaller chunks until you reach a size that your parsing rate is able to keep up with. It’s at this point that you’ll go look up any unknown words, expressions, or grammatical structures as needed.
After you’ve listened to the entire communication broken down into parse-able chunks & understand all of the content individually, you begin to chunk back up. Reassemble the now-understood chunks and listen to the longer sentence fragments, then the individual sentences, and finally the entire communication once again. As you are chunking back up you should also be repeating each chunk yourself aloud - I can’t over-emphasize the importance of speaking aloud as you study, it builds muscle memory in your tongue and adds a physical stimulus component to the phrases in your head (similar to including sensory input when learning words). Be sure that you actually understand what you are saying and why. By the time you return to the original communication, you’ll find that you can follow & understand the full statement much more easily than you could at the start. Repeat the full communication several times to really solidify your grasp of it, then move on to the next piece of communication.
Dissecting & reassembling authentic conversations this way is absolutely key to your ability to move from learning individual parts of language like grammar & vocab to actually communicating effectively - which is the entire purpose of language to begin with. In the next posts I will recommend some pre-made solutions to study by chunking as well as several tools to let you reproduce the process with whatever content you find yourself.
Looking Ahead
Whew! This was a lot to take in, and some of it was a bit dense & esoteric. If you’ve gotten this far, good on you. While it’s necessary to have a good grasp of this stuff to plan your approach, the rest of this Substack will be much more practical and fun. Over the next few posts we’ll look at the tools that I have found most useful to execute on the strategy laid out above, how to configure them, how to start building a library of content for study, and how to schedule your study sessions for max effectiveness.
I am visually dominant as well, very detailed post; amazing.
Great post! Native spanish speaker here. Made my way to learn english and looking to dominate both french and german.