Why learn a language?

Why learn it and what it means to know it

Why learn a language? Today any phone translates in seconds. And yet, in the European Union, almost half of adults can't hold a conversation in any language other than their own. Is it really worth it, and how do you learn one? In the next few minutes, you'll see what it does to your brain, how it learns and how it forgets, and you'll walk away with a plan to start speaking it today.

By the way, this is my house in MindHaOS, and in this Languages room I practice with a tutor, review my cards and follow my curriculum. Let's get started.

And why bother, if machines already translate? Because learning a language changes your brain, not just your vocabulary. In Sweden, military recruits who studied a language intensively for three months saw their hippocampus grow, the brain's memory center. And in a study in Toronto, people who spoke two languages began showing symptoms of dementia about four years later.

What's more, a machine translates words, but it can't hold a conversation for you: speaking it yourself lets you get the jokes, connect with people without a screen in between, and see the world through another language.

Knowing a language isn't knowing a list of words: it's four skills. Understanding when you listen, understanding when you read, speaking and writing. And we almost always understand far more than we can say.

To measure it, the Council of Europe published the Common European Framework of Reference in 2001, and today it's used all over the world: six levels, from A1, where you can introduce yourself and order a coffee, to C2, where you understand practically everything. Check off here what you can already do and see what level you're at.

And how long does it take? The United States Foreign Service Institute, which trains its diplomats, estimates that someone who speaks English needs about six hundred hours of class to work in Spanish or French, and about two thousand two hundred for Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Arabic.

What matters most is how far it is from your own: if they share words, sounds or writing, you move much faster. That's why a neighboring language feels easy, and one with a different alphabet is much harder at first.

A brief history of learning languages

In the year 196 before the common era, in Egypt, the same decree was carved in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and ancient Greek. That stone, the Rosetta Stone, turned up in 1799, and thanks to the Greek, Jean-François Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs in 1822.

In 1658, the Czech educator John Amos Comenius published the Orbis Pictus, one of the first illustrated books for teaching children: every Latin word sat next to a drawing. He already knew that a picture is remembered better than a translation.

In 1878, in Providence, in the United States, Maximilian Berlitz opened a school with a new rule: no translating in class. Everything is said in the language you're learning, from day one.

And in 1887, the eye doctor Ludwik Zamenhof published Esperanto, a language invented so that everyone could understand each other, with a grammar without exceptions. It didn't replace any language, but it still has speakers all over the planet today.

How your brain learns and how it forgets

One of the most influential ideas was put forward by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the nineteen-eighties: we acquire a language when we understand messages a little above our level. If you understand almost everything and something is new, you learn; if you understand nothing, all you hear is noise.

So here's a trick: these same guides are available in sixteen languages, on our MindHaOS channels. Watch one you've already seen in your language, now in the one you're learning: since you already know what it's about, you'll understand almost all of it, just a little above your level.

But what you learn slips away. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables and measured how much he forgot: most of it went in the first few hours, and after that the forgetting slowed down. It's the forgetting curve.

The good news is that every review flattens it: after each one, the memory lasts longer. Try it here: add reviews and watch how, spaced further and further apart, they keep a word in your memory.

And reviewing isn't rereading. In 2006, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke compared students who reread a text with others who tested themselves: a week later, the ones who had tested themselves remembered more. Trying to remember is what makes it stick.

The words that pay off the most

Not all words are worth the same. In English, for example, the thousand most frequent words make up about eight out of every ten words in an ordinary text. Slide here to how many words you know and see how much of a text you'd recognize.

And learn them in phrases, not on their own. “Could you pass the salt?” gives you vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation all at once, and you can already use it tomorrow at the table.

To review without wasting time, there's spaced repetition. In 1972, the German journalist Sebastian Leitner came up with a set of boxes for flashcards: if you get a card right, it moves to the next box and you review it later; if you get it wrong, it goes back. Try it here with a card.

I do it in my Languages room in MindHaOS: the cards on the table tell me which ones are due today, and the app sorts them into their boxes on its own.

And start with what you're going to use. If it's for travel: greetings, food, transportation and directions; if it's for work: introducing yourself, meetings and emails. A curriculum by levels tells you what comes next.

Speak from day one

Listening isn't enough to speak. The linguist Merrill Swain studied students at French immersion schools in Canada: they understood it very well, but when they spoke they kept making mistakes, because they hardly ever produced it. When you speak, you find out what you still can't say.

One exercise that works is shadowing: play a short audio clip and repeat it at the same time, copying the rhythm and intonation, like an echo. Then record yourself and compare. Your mouth learns the sounds your ear already knows.

And make lots of mistakes. Every mistake someone corrects is a lesson made to measure for you. Whoever waits to speak perfectly never speaks at all.

And what if you're not a kid anymore? In 2018, a study of almost seven hundred thousand people found that the ability to learn grammar stays high until around age seventeen and then declines little by little. What's hardest as an adult is sounding like a native, not speaking well: that you can achieve at any age.

If you have no one to talk to, practice anyway: describe out loud what you're doing, talk with a tutor or with someone who's learning your language. What matters is opening your mouth every single day.

Your plan to get started

Give it a why, a level and a date: “learning Spanish” isn't the same as “reaching B1 to travel in December.” With that, you know which topics to cover and how many hours you need.

And consistency beats marathons: twenty minutes a day adds up to more than a hundred and twenty hours a year. Work out here how many hours your routine adds up to and how long it would take you to get there.

A twenty-minute routine could look like this: five to listen to something you almost understand, five to review your cards, five to speak or shadow, and five to read or write a little.

Think of it like this plant: a little water every day makes it grow, and a whole bucket on Sunday won't save it. A language works the same way.

In short: listen to things you almost understand, review with spacing and by testing yourself, learn the most common words first, in phrases, and speak from day one, a little every day.

If you want to put it into practice the way I do, the Languages room in MindHaOS has chats with a tutor who corrects you, a curriculum by levels with your cards, and spaced review that tells you what's due today. The link is in the description, along with this interactive guide. See you in the next one.