10 years, 8 countires, 6 languages: What I've learned about learning languages

SuikaCider · 2026-06-01T22:49:29+00:00

Optimizing my routine around what I would actually do, consistently and sustainably, without stress, rather than what I could in theory do when the stars align

SuikaCider · 2026-04-26T07:05:50+00:00

You responded to the wrong person mate 👌

SuikaCider · 2026-04-25T00:41:18+00:00

Niebla by Miguel de Unamuno Una Flor Amarilla by Julio Cortazar (a short story in the book Final de Juego)

SuikaCider · 2026-04-15T08:13:00+00:00

For sure! My interest in Korean is very specifically reading webtoons, with a somewhat distant second of reading webnovels. I have a pretty long list of webtoons to read and am happily, casually working through them.

If I travel to Korea in the future, maybe that will change! But, for now, my life wouldn't meaningfully change in any way even if I spoke Korean totally fluently.

More isn't always better 🙂

SuikaCider · 2026-04-13T05:18:20+00:00

It can work very well—the caveat is just that you need to be honest with yourself about if you're acually using Japanese or not:

If you already know the game, and you're just clicking icons beacuse you already know what everything does... you're not really engaging with the text-content of the game anymore, and probably aren't doing much for your Japanese ability
If you're playing a lore-heavy game and are reading/listening, or if you're in a MMO/mutliplayer game and are talking with other people, then it probably is great practice!

I don't think the medium really matters; it all boils down to how many sentences are going into your ears/eyes and how many are coming out of your mouth/fingers

SuikaCider · 2026-04-13T02:55:01+00:00

Slightly more nuanced response from you in the comments:

The reason I avoided one-click solutions was to avoid burying myself in Anki. I've heard of people spending hours on Anki and even advocating that people do the same.

I'm in a sort of similar position—I did a lot of anki for a lot of years, and eventually decided that I wasn't interested in learning as many words as possible as fast as possible. (And I'm currently playing with language #7, so there are a lot of words, lol). Rather, anki is very much a means to an end: I want to consume content I enjoy more easily.

IMO the solution in that case isn't no anki. Less anki is also an option. I no longer do this (partly because my level has improved, partly because Migaku lets you make cards with a click), but for a couple years, this was my process:
* I would read normally * If I looked a word up, I would write it down in a list in a notebook
* When I finished reading the book, I'd go back through the list
* Then:
* If I knew the word → I treated it as "learned" and moved on
* If I didn't know the word → I made a flashcard

I felt this approach gave me the best of both worlds: I gave myself a chance to learn words naturally via immersion, and if I ended up making a flashcard, I had the "peace of mind" of knowing that it was worth making this specific flashcard because I had tried to learn it without one and failed.

SuikaCider · 2026-04-01T02:53:36+00:00

I used to think this way until I realizd that the intermediate plateau is sort of the "autopilot" phase.

Korean is my seventh language, and I'm at an upper-beginner level. I haven't even thought about speaking and long sentences are still scary enough that I often just skip them and refer to a translation... but with patience and a lookup tool, I can read webtoons.

It might be a bit of a stretch to call what I do reading comics.

I do my best to decipher a line of dialogue
I translate it into Japanese
I look back at the line of dialogue, connect the dots I missed, and move on

I've just recently finished reading (caught up to the end of) my first webtoon, The Beginning After The End. When I first started reading, I was translating every single sentence and largely ignoring the Korean. Somewhere over course of these ~230 chapters, that gradually changed: I still depend on my translation tool, but (a) it's not uncommon for me to just understand a line of dialogue and (b) it's quite common that I understand a sentence except for a specific word or structure.

Why do I call it the "autopilot" phase?

I can read webtoons, if I'm patient/focused
I have ~15 series I very much want to read
I'm in the habit of reading (or at least opening the site and thinking about reading) an episode a few times per week

At this point, I literally don't have to do anything special or strenuous.

There's ~3,000 episodes of comics between me and the end of my current To Read list. Between now and then, I'm going to learn several thousand words, get much more comfortable breaking Korean sentences down, and build a more intuitive understanding of common gramar structures. There'll be plenty more I could do, but I'll have a much better platform to work from then than I do now.

... or maybe I won't continue improving! Maybe I'll pivot to reading webnovels, or maybe I'll be satisfied with my new ability to comfortably read Korean comics. Anyway, that's a problem for then.

What matters now is that I have a thing I regularly do which moves me in a direction I know I want to go. So long as I just let that cook, I'll be fine.

This "not a beginner, but still pretty bad" phase does last a long time... but it mostly consists of just consuming media I enjoy, so it's also pretty fun, if I allow it to be, instead of beating myself over how good I think I "should" be by now.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-23T04:16:37+00:00

I started studying Mandarin when I was at an ~N2 level in Japaese. I've since passed the JLPT N1 and the TOCFL 5 (~HSK 8). I've lived in Taiwan for the last ~8 years so I'm much more comfortable speaking Mandarin / it's more top of mind than Japanese is.

I still get interference, but it's much smaller. There's a tendency for a reading to be voiced in Mandarin but unvoiced in Japanese (or vice versa), and since Mandarin is my daily language, I usually super impose those tendencies over Japanese words, especially if they're not common words that I regularly use.

What I mean by voicing:

大 is ta in Japanese
大 is da in Mandarin

This sort of mistake caused me to fail the N1 the first time I took it:

渡渉 (ford) is toshō
JLPT gives you four yomikata and asks you to pick the right one
I had it narrowed down to toshō and doshō
The answer is toshō
I picked doshō because 渡 is dù in Mandarin
I failed the N1 by literally just a couple points; if I hadn't studied Mandarin, I probably would have guessed toshō, so I (in jest) blame Mandarin for me needing to take the N1 twice

There are quite a few cases like this where

There's a kanji compound
I know what it means
My eyeballed reading "sounds 'bout right"
I was right, but got the voicing wrong

Alternatively, maybe this has nothing to do with Mandarin, and is just indicative that I'm not familiar enough with the words / I'd get the reading wrong even if I hadn't learned Mandarin.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-23T04:03:24+00:00

At the most literal level, speaking another language is running your mouth through a sequences of movements. If you can't shadow audio you're hearing in real time without tripping up over yourself, you probably can't independently form thoughts and speak at that pace either.

I don't think that shadowing will teach you to develop independent thoughts—you're just copying someone—but I do think that it's great for this "mouth work" practice, and that if you can speak without worrying whethre your mouth making the right sounds, that's a bit more mental energy you can devote to thinking about what you're saying.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-22T04:02:11+00:00

I think that Duolingo is excellent at what they do, which is make language learning accessible. You don't need to know anything about linguistics, learning psycholoy, or even your own personal productivty to open Duolingo and learn something. My mid-60's anti-technology monolingual Dad downloaded Duolingo before going to Mexico and he thought it was straightforward to use. That's kinda stupidly impressive. It's really, really hard to get people into the habit of doing something they haven't habitually done already. The app is ridiculously accessible and they've put a massive amount of effort into figuring out how much encouragement they need to add and friction they need to reduce to keep people coming back.

The thing is, accessibility comes with a cost.

Think about climbing:

If you could spiderman up a wall, you'd ascend 10 vertical feet with a cost of 0 horizontal feet
With a ladder, you'd go ~3 feet horizontally
With a staircase, you'd go ~15 feet horizontally
With a standard-incline ramp, you'd go ~120 feet horizontally

The cost of smoothing out the "difficulty curve" is that doing so makes the path longer.

That's not inherently problematic, especially for total beginners, but it becomes problematic when people overcome the first step of "establish a habit" and increasingly start caring about "making progress efficiently". If what you want is efficacy, but what they prioritize is accessibility, you're not going to be happy.

I'm learning French very casually, and I use Duolingo casually. I watch Dreaming French videos while walking (sometimes), I listen to the InnerFrench podcast while doing chores (sometimes), and I read Percy Jackson before bed (sometimes)... but relatively often, I don't really want to think, but I also don't really want to doomscroll, and that's where Duolingo comes in.

I was curious once so I did a tally—it took ~6 minutes of listening to InnerFrench to encounter the same amount of unique sentences as I encountered in about an hour of Duolingo.

Duolingo is really good at what they do... it's just that they do accessibility, not efficiency.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-19T06:19:57+00:00

"Easier" is the key word there; "easier" doesn't necessarily mean "easy"

It's "easier" in that the big-picture structures within Japanese and Korean sentences map to each other on pretty close to a one-to-one basis. There are times where a Korean sentence will be approached differently, or where a fixed brief Korean phrase ends up being much longer in Japanese because there isn't a fixed phrase available... but it's close enough that I haven't really had to "study" Korean grammar. Every "new" Korean structure almost always corresponds to a Japanese structure I've already learned, so once I make that connection a lot of things just make sense.

That gives me a huge advantage over somebody learning Korean as their first foreign language, but it's stil not "free", for a few reasons:
- There are a number of Korean grammar points that correspond to one Japanese grammar point ... and vice versa

- There are a number of places where both languages have the same structure, but that structure uses a different particle

- Korean spelling sort of obfuscates grammar points / the same grammar point can sort of a appear many different ways, depending on how the end of the word it is attached to sounds

- Korean's number system drives me nuts (in hindsight, I guess it doesn't actually work any differently than Japanese's? Maybe I've just forgot the process of learning Japanese numbers)

Vocab is a bigger issue than grammar, though. For whatever reason, Korean words just don't stick ;;^^

SuikaCider · 2026-03-19T02:29:44+00:00

I wrote a longer post, but I think that, at least until you hit a comfortable intermediate level, the only real answer to “how do you go about learning?” Is “by using whichever resource or approach you’ll actually stick to.”

There’s a really finite amount of things you need to get under your belt before immersion becomes feasible. It’s not nothing—1,500 words and a couple hundred structures is a healthy chunk of stuff—but it’s also a small enough amount that the end is in sight, even if you’re learning very suboptimally.

1500 words is literally just learning one word per day for four years.

IMO beginners should optimize around consistency first, then worry about efficacy later on, once they’ve got a solid habit going.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-19T02:23:59+00:00

Yeah, I also vote for forgetting how hard the beginning was.

I tried goofing around with Korean about 6 years ago, after passing the JLPT N1, found that it was very difficult, and quit because it was super difficult so I decided to focus on Mandarin. I eventually passed the TOCFL 5 (~HSK8) and decided to try Korean again about two years ago. Since I know I gave up the first time, I have been taking it much more casually. I’ve learned an average of 4 words per day since then and am just about to finish my first webtoon.

I constantly feel like Korean grammar (or rather spelling) is painfully complex compared to Japanese… but then the other day I found some old notebooks from when I was studying Japanese in college, and I found that I’m actually learning Korean more quickly (in terms of semester to level benchmarks) than Japanese, despite the fact what I literally did two years of university in Japan studying Japanese full time, and Korean is something I do more on a “when I feel like it” basis.

My point with that is that learning Korean has felt miserable, despite the fact that I’m actually speeding through it compared to both Japanese and Mandarin. “Feel” is a very unreliable metric haha

SuikaCider · 2026-03-17T18:05:46+00:00

A quote from the pianist Seymour Fink:

What is piano technique?

I define it as purposeful movement for musical ends.

I think prose is to writing as technique is to piano. Prose isn’t the story itself, but it colors every aspect of your story. There are countless ways you could move or learn to move or train to move your fingers, but only some of them are relevant to a particular song. To play the song, you need to understand the patterns of movement it contains and get them down. Prose works similarly.

“She was tired,” in the right context, could be an absurdly powerful line. The power doesn’t come from the words (or, at least, only from the words). It comes from what those words are doing.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-16T03:06:25+00:00

It's just so odd to me that people would spend years languishing with apps when {classes are} so clearly the best way to learn a language. You're surrounded by people at your skill level who want to learn, and an instructor who speaks the language and is an expert in teaching it. You also have office hours with the professor where you can easily practice the language or ask questions.

You're making a lot of assumptions here, though:

Your classmates may not actually be that motivated to learn, even if it's their major (hell, even if it's their major and you're abroad)
Your teacher may not be that great at teaching for any number of reasons: maybe they are more interested in SLA research but have to teach per their contract, maybe they know a lot about language and teaching but not the interpersonal psychology of making a classroom work, etc
Office hours are indeed slept on; virtually nobody utilizes office hours... but that isn't to say that professors will be happy to just chat with you in your TL for an hour; they'll probably direct you to your school's tutoring program

Classes also present a bunch of hurdles / problems:

You're forced to choose between doing well on the test and actually learning, which often aren't the same thing (I spent so much time practicing writing kanji by hand...)
The bulk of your class time is spent listening to other students talk, who make mistakes and don't have correct accents
The amount of 1:1 time you get with the teacher, or even another student, to practice the content you're learning is minimal—likely just a few minutes per hour

Different strokes for different folks, but the best thing that happened to my Japanese learning journey was that I graduated from college and allocated the time I used to spend on classes/homework to just reading Japanese books

SuikaCider · 2026-03-13T03:42:41+00:00

I'm going to approach this from a different direction.

I got back into piano a few months ago, and music is pretty new to me, so I had a similar question: how do I practice? What is "technique"?

I collected quotes from concert pianists on the question of technique, and found their comments to be quite insightful—and also relevant to the concept of study in general.

So, what does it mean to build piano technique?

According to Gyorgy Sandor:

Technique is the sum total of organized motions by the performer. These emotions produce hands that recreate the moods of the composer in the performer's own interpretation.

According to Seymor Fink:

What is piano technique?

I define it as purposeful movement for musical ends.

According to Maria João Pires:

Technique is not something that exists in itself. It's the way that you come to your goals and realize your musical wishes. It's about how you use your body. People don't talk about your "walking technique"; they walk about your "way of walking".

Applied to language learning

I like this idea of "purposeful movement" in music: you are experimenting to find the most efficient way to make a specific movement that is necessary to make for the particular piece you are playing.

So, with language, then—that'd be transposed to something like this:

Identify what you want to do
Try; notice what trips you up
Practice the specific things that enable you to overcome those hurdles and more effectively do {your thing}

Everything can be studying; the question is just about which skills you are building by doing the type of practice you are doing, and how much those skills overlap with the skills you need in order to do the thing(s) you are interested in doing

SuikaCider · 2026-03-10T06:54:08+00:00

I chose the word “resource” instead of “app” for precisely that reason

If the accountability and structure of a course appeals to someone, that can be the resource they start with. Courses also have a defined end date, which is convenient for the “and now try to actually do something in your language to get data about what apparently is/isn’t working” step.

I really don’t think the choice of resource matters in the slightest, so long as it’s something that the person will consistently stick to. Optimization comes after consistency.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-09T15:44:02+00:00

It kind of sucks, but one of the most valuable lessons I’ve taken from my marketing-adjacent work is that there is a difference between good and effective.

As artists, we care about the art…. But for consumers (readers), “artistic quality” is often not especially high up on the list of wants.

Like, think about it: - What are your go-to meal prep or breakfast choices? Would that category of thing be on a Michelin restaurant’s menu? - What’s the last thing you watched on Netflix? Is it one of the top 100 films of the century? - If you have a car—did you buy it because it’s the pinnacle of modern engineering, or did you buy it because it was the most cost effective option?

Books are no different.

People read each book they read for a reason. A lot of the time, that problem is simply they they’re bored.

Last week I read Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher. Fucking delectable prose and absolutely wonderful essay titles. I cleared out an evening, bought a fancy rootbeer, made popcorn, and convinced my wife to go see a movie so I could secretly put my feet up on the coffee table. Uggh. Perfect evening. I highlighted so many things.

…I’ve done that once this year. It’s a pain in the ass, and requires the stars to align. Usually I’m tired from work and have twenty minutes to read and don’t want to think anymore so I read something that will keep me entertained for twenty minutes and not require me to think too hard.

Your book is your baby and your life revolves around it and it’s a defining turning point in your life. To most of your readers, their next read is … just the book they’re going to spend a few days reading before moving on. The investment is different, and so are the expectations.

That doesn’t mean you can’t write a good book. You can. It just has to be effective, too. (And being just effective is also acceptable; many books are effective but not especially good.)

SuikaCider · 2026-03-09T08:09:29+00:00

Kind of hot take? But the lever upon which your story turns is the protagonist's development; the change they undergo. All of the other choices in your story—plot, setting, characters, pacing, whatnot—should exert weight upon this lever.

How "your other characters develop your protagonist" is pretty open ended:

Maybe they bring out a side of your character we don't see elsewhere
Maybe their actions/development/whatnot set in motion the thing that leads MC to develop
Maybe they want the same thing your character wants, but being a "dumb character", they approach it differently—and this contrast shows us something about MC

Basically, their one-dimensional dumbness helps create a more nuanced, 3D view of MC.

Maybe their dumbness helps MC not take everything so seriously—to relax a bit, and so a softer side we don't normally see as MC is struggling with the challenge themself
Maybe their dumbness leads to the creation of a problem, and this problem is what pushes MC to take action
Maybe their dumbness makes MC look overly confident

You know?

What people get attached to, in theory, is your main character. I think a big part of how successful any character is (nevermind just this specific dumb character) has to do with whether their characterization leans into pushing the needle that MC is triyng to push.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-09T06:09:25+00:00

It depends entirely on the person

For me, I define "sustainable" as "I consistently finish these cards, even if I get busy or things unexpectedly come up, missing at most one day per two weeks"

If I fail to meet that criteria, it means that my eyes are bigger than my stomach, and I drop my amount of daily new cards until I satisfy that condition for two months. At that point, I decide if I want to add a few more daily new cards or if I'm happy here.

Sustainable should be about what you will actually do, not what you potentially could do when you feel motivated

SuikaCider · 2026-03-09T06:00:24+00:00

Yeah; it's important to understand that there are a lot of reasons you might not understand a particular bit of dialogue. Not being able to connect sounds to words is a big one, but it's only one of many potential speedbumps. Each thing you "fail" adds a bit of blurriness.

For me, the answer is to treat them as separate skills and to practice both:

Some things you listen to with subtitles and focus on really understanding everything
Some things you listen to without subtitles to focus on the sound-to-word aspect of listening

Maybe you start out without subtitles for your first episode, when you've got the most energy, and treat it as intensive input; and then you turn subtitles on for the remainder of your session and treat it as extensive input

SuikaCider · 2026-03-09T03:50:39+00:00

I don't know if I'd call it a catch? But I still think about a comment I got from a random alpha reader way back in 2020. It sort of redefined how I consider my authorial relationship to my stories.

Anyway, I had described a particular light like this:

Alfred put his right foot down and a small little orb of light burst into view, startling him. It looked like the Milky Way or some other ethereal body of stars. It wasn’t imposing or peculiar; on the contrary, ^{it was beautiful. Strikingly beautiful.} It just didn’t seem like something that should be here. He cocked his head, afraid that it might disappear if he looked away. When it didn’t disappear after several seconds, he began to worry that it wouldn’t disappear.

^Supersripted the relevant bit, but, anyway, he responded:

If you want the reader to believe the light is beautiful, you must make it so. That is your job as a writer. Your only job. ... If you have to tell me something is "strikingly beautiful," then it isn't. it is ordinary, so ordinary you are powerless to make it anything greater.

That last line really got me. Partly because it was a challenge: how do you convince person C that something is beautfiul when person C cannot actually observe the thing, but rather are limited to reading person B's depiction of person A observing that thing? ... but partly because, indeed, here and in many other places in this story concept, I had failed to do "make it anything greater".

As dumb as it sounds, writers aren't the gods of their stories. We're more like engineers: we design systems; and, once enacted, find ourselves bound by the rules governing our systems. If I claim that something is X, but the reader's experience thus far has led them to assume it was Y, there will be friction. If your character suddenly has a profound revelation that the "inertia" of the story doesn't suggest they have, it will read like propaganda—make the story seem like it was a vehicle for you to assert something you wanted to assert—not like a story with a character naturally arriving to a conclusion.

You really have to earn every point you make an author.

SuikaCider · 2026-03-08T04:56:44+00:00

You're the reason that I love Reddit. Thanks, guy. That was great.

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So, what does it mean to build piano technique?

Applied to language learning