How to learn a language with a chronic illness

Hello and welcome back to a very special, and somewhat belated, New Year post all about how to learn a language with a chronic illness. 

This is a companion blog post to Episode 4 of the Rest Room podcast. If you’d prefer to listen to the audio version, you can find The Rest Room on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud and Spotify. I’d love it if you would consider subscribing there!

Meet Episode 4’s guest 

Today I’m joined by one of my best friends in the world, Colin Gorrie. Or should I say Dr. Colin Gorrie.

Colin is a linguist and lifelong language learner. These days he works on bringing knowledge of language and linguistics to a wider audience online. 

Colin also lives with EDS and experiences a lot of brain fog and fatigue, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down and have a chat about some of the challenges of language learning when your brain doesn’t really retain information in the way that you’d like.

If you follow me on social media, you may know that about a month ago I started learning Yiddish. II honestly don’t think it would be happening or going as well as it is if Colin hadn’t spent hours blowing my mind with how the way we often approach language learning…is not…great.

And that’s exactly what we’ll be discussing:

• How people currently learn languages
• Whether there is a better way (spoiler alert, there is!)
• Figuring out our motivations for language learning and how to get started
• Getting the most bang for your language learning (and energy) buck,
• Ways to take some of the pressure off and make language learning fun
• How to think about pacing and retention of information when it comes to language acquisition 

Next episode/blog post we’ll be covering how to read more when living with chronic illness, so these two things should go hand in hand to help you think about your own approach to cognitively challenging tasks, as well as hopefully sharing some new tips and ways of thinking about these things! 

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What are the most common ways that people learn languages now, and what are some of the main challenges with those methods? 

Most people will probably be introduced to language learning in one of two ways.

1. Formal classes in school.
2. Apps, such as Duolingo and Memrise

The overall success rate of these methods is unfortunately not extremely high. Not a lot of people say, “I took French in school for five years. And now I speak French really well. And I am totally comfortable doing anything I want in French.” This is not the norm.

Similarly, you don’t get a lot of stories of someone doing flashcards or gamified exercises on an app for five minutes a day, and after a year of doing this, they are living their lives in that language. These kinds of things don’t generally happen.

This is the “state of the art” that most people are introduced to, if they’re not really hardcore about language learning.

The main issue with these approaches is that if you sit down and calculate all of the minutes in a week that you’re exposed to speech or writing in the language you’re studying, you end up with a pretty low number. Even if you’re in a class for an hour a day, you don’t necessarily get a lot of exposure.

When I was in university, I took a great Russian class where I learned a lot. But in order to get those results, we met for class every school day for a whole year. In any other discipline, if you’re studying something for an hour a day for a year, you’re going to get to a high level. 

But at the end, I was not nearly as high as I might have hoped. This wasn’t a problem with the teachers, who were excellent. It was because the amount of Russian that we actually got in that hour was maybe five minutes a day. Schlepping out to a class for an hour a day to spend five minutes in the language is not really an efficient use of time.

And this problem extends to apps as well: your exposure to material in the language is extremely limited. Maybe it’s a spoiler alert, but I don’t think either of these is a great approach.

So, what do you think is a better way to approach language learning?

The main issue is just the number of minutes every day or every week that we’re spending in the language: reading, listening, living in the language. It’s simply not large enough. 

Whether it’s time spent taking in the spoken language or the written language, we need to do more of it. We need to start living more and more of our lives in the language that we’re studying.

These apps, however, are not really optimising around teaching you the language. They’re optimising around keeping you in the app and keeping you coming back. 

They do a really good job of that. They have gamified things and they’ve made the design beautiful, so that you come back. Sometimes you even get notifications from owls that are disappointed in you if you don’t login to the app. They’ve really mastered that aspect of habit formation.

What isn’t so advanced is attaching that sticky habit-forming quality to the kind of thing that we really need for learning languages. 

And basically, that thing is input: getting input that you can, more or less, understand. Even if it’s a little bit beyond your level in the language that you’re studying, it’s going to help you.

I find this mind-blowing, because I had only ever been through formal language instruction. I got an A in GCSE French, and when I moved to France and could barely ask where the loo was. But when I lived there, I got to a pretty high level of French just by engaging with and talking to people in French.

Your experience with French is an extremely common one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people who have said similar things:

• “I’ve studied, I’ve done very well in classes, And I don’t speak the language.”
• “I still have this knot in my stomach when it comes to interacting with someone who’s a native speaker of the language.”
• “I can’t do anything I want in the language, even though I have a paper that says I did really well at studying this language.”

There’s a disconnect there. There’s a difference between a high mark in some language course, and actually speaking the language. It’s almost like they’re completely different skills.

And there’s some evidence that that is the case: 

(i) whatever it is you acquire when you learn to speak a language, and 

(ii) the knowledge about the language that you get in a classroom setting are different things. 

Some people, most notably Stephen Krashen, have gone so far as to say that they’re entirely unrelated skills, which is why you don’t see a lot of transfer between classroom knowledge about, say, grammar, and actual sort of ability to produce and comprehend the language.

I hate grammar. I am a professional writer, but I don’t know grammar rules in English. It turns out this is very common for people in the UK who went to school in the 90s. 

So when I go to a language class and they start talking about anything using grammatical terms, like “pluperfect” or “subjunctive” or even basic things around verbs, I just shut down.

We often have this “no pain, no gain” attitude, where, if unless something’s hard, it probably won’t work. 

And I think in language learning, this is exactly the opposite approach to what we should have. 

If something is unpleasant for you, you’re not likely to do it. And any technique that you don’t do, or that that you don’t stick with, is not going to work, however good it might be in the abstract. 

We have to factor that into the way we decide whether to use a technique.

Why is language learning so much more emotional than we think?

So much of what I talk about in terms of language learning skills are actually shifts in how we think about language learning. 

One is getting rid of that “No pain, no gain” attitude. But beyond that, there’s also this all-or-nothing attitude towards language learning, like there’s only one valid goal for learning a language, which is to be able to sound exactly like a native speaker and be able to respond at the drop of a hat when someone asks you for directions on the street. 

Or, in other words, to be able to sound like you were born and raised in whatever place where the language you’re studying is spoken.

I think that that’s a very limiting way of viewing language learning. There are so many different goals that you could strive for. And it can be different for every language that you learn. 

In one case, you may be learning a language because it’s a heritage language for you, and you want to reconnect with a language that your family has spoken in earlier generations.

That’s what I’m doing with Yiddish!

Exactly. If that’s your motivation, it may give you different goals than if you’re learning a language because you really admire the literature written in that language, and you want to be able to access these texts in their original forms. 

And you’d have still other goals if you were really interested in a particular historical period, and you wanted to understand how people wrote at that time. 

In that case, the language may even have no living native speakers, as is the case with Latin, and then you’d use different techniques. 

Different things are going to work better for that than for a language that you are learning so you can talk with your friends. 

All of these reasons are possible motivations for learning a language and it’s good to be clear on what yours are, because you can have any one that you want. You measure your success based on that goal. And you choose different techniques based on that goal. It really feeds into everything.

So, like with a lot of things, knowing your reason for doing it and having kinder expectations on yourself for whatever practice that you’re doing is really helpful. 

What are some “kind to yourself” ways of setting language goals?

There’s a temptation to set goals using some objective metric: for example, I want to be able to pass a test by a certain date, I want to be able to accomplish something (say, know 250 vocab words) by a particular date. 

The problem with this approach is that not everything is in your hands. And so you may, for reasons out of your control, not be able to pass a language exam at a specific date. I don’t count that as a failure.

It’s much more helpful to say, I want to read an hour in Thai, Japanese, whatever the case may be, every week. That’s something that is in your hands. You can prioritize it, carve out a spot for it, even 10 minutes a day, and make a habit of it. 

That’s the kind of goal that is going to work with language learning, because so much of language learning is a matter of habit. 

Can you pick up the habits that will make this language a part of your life? And can you keep them up?

What are some examples of good habits for beginners to language learning to start trying to incorporate into their day-to-day life?

This is going to depend on two things. 

One is the language that you’re studying. Certain languages have different levels of availability of different kinds of resources.

I have a lot of friends who learned a lot of Japanese by watching anime and reading manga just because they loved it. They could pick it up via the culture. 

You’re seeing this now with a lot of people learning Korean: there’s a lot of K-drama and K-pop. And I don’t really have that same level of modern media in Yiddish available to me to provide input.

As you say, with Japanese, there’s a lot of anime, there’s a lot of manga that you can read. There’s not as much manga in Yiddish. Maybe there’s some, but not like what’s available in Japanese. It’s also going to depend on the level that you have attained in the language so far. If you’re a beginner, you’re going to want to do different things than if you’re very advanced.

One good way to start is to look at what you already do in your first language every day, or every week. These are the things that are part of your life. You do them not because you have to, but because you want to.

For example, I love listening to history podcasts. This is something that is just part of my life that I don’t think about doing. I don’t have to schedule it in. It’s just natural. And so I try to find versions that I can do in the language I’m learning. So, since I’m learning Spanish, I can try to find Spanish history podcasts.

Now, if you’re a beginner in Spanish, then history podcasts are probably not within reach. So there, you want to modulate your expectations. 

For people who are beginners at a language, you’re going to want to look more at things like graded readers, which are books that have a controlled vocabulary appropriate for different levels of the language. There are ones for beginners, intermediates, upper intermediates, advanced, etc.

There are also bilingual texts. These are texts written in two languages: the one you know and the one you’re learning. 

These a really, really useful way to learn a language. And the best part is, you can make your own: if you can find a book that you love in your first language and find the translation into the second language, if it’s a reasonably good translation, you can read them side by side. And sometimes they’re even published side by side for learners.

This is a really great way of getting into a language because you have a great context for the story. If it’s something that you love, or you’ve read before, you’ll know it off by heart, or you’ll know at least the outline of the story. 

So you’re going to have more support as you encounter new words, new grammar, that sort of thing. These are ways of helping yourself get into material in your second language.

When you reach a more advanced level, you don’t need this much support. But it still helps to listen to, watch, or read things that you already know a lot about. So if some new piece of vocabulary comes up, you can probably guess what it is from context, because you know so well what they’re talking about.

Giving yourself as much help as possible will allow you to listen to things intended for native speakers of that language. You can listen to the news, you can listen to podcasts, you can watch interviews on YouTube, you can watch people play video games, whatever it is you want to do.

Absolutely! So, for example, I listen to simple Yiddish songs when I’m washing my face, and I’ve found a YouTube series called “15 Minute Yiddish” which is for total beginners. Singing and watching stuff on YouTube doesn’t feel like formal learning. I also follow some Yiddish Instagram accounts, so when I’m just scrolling through my feed, it’s a great way to get some small bursts of input throughout the day.

It’s all about picking material you’re interested in that’s appropriate for your level, and finding the material that’s available in your language. 

This is, unfortunately, where not every language has the same kind of material available. So you may have to make some compromises, for example reading things that you’re not especially interested in, if it’s the only thing available. But ideally, it would be something that you were very interested in.

I want to link that into the wider conversation of issues that people with chronic illness face when trying to learn a language. 

Language learning can be really overwhelming, even if you don’t have a chronic illness. 

Some of the things that came up (when I asked on Instagram stories what issues people faced) were around brain fog, memory and retention. 

Are there some tools and techniques that can make it easier for people to study in a way that feels more accessible?

My perspective is: the same techniques that are going to help anyone else are just so much more important when you’re dealing with chronic illness, because your resources may be more limited. 

You may be facing fatigue, your energy resources may be limited, and you may experience brain fog. 

This makes me focus on how important it is to use effective techniques. Because if you only have so much time during a day that you can spend on doing intellectually demanding activities, like reading in a second language, you want to use the most effective techniques. And so this is where tactics can really come into play.

Something that I remember happening to me after my first Yiddish alphabet class was feeling overwhelmed, because the classes were quite long for me. 

I remember calling you afterwards, being really panicked about “how am I going to remember these things?” And you said to me, “what else have you been doing today?” 

Thinking about how we pace every aspect of our day is going to be really important because if we’re already overdoing it, and then we’re trying to add in conscious learning, we’re not giving ourselves the best chance. 

So from a pacing perspective, think about the other things that you’re doing in the day. Think about what time of day you learn best, because some of the methods will require different types of energy. And as you once said to me, 10 minutes every day (or whatever you can, whenever you can) is better than 6 hours once a month. 

If your method is something you enjoy, say if you want to watch a K-drama, you might be able to do that while you’re relaxing, and it’s not going to feel like such a cognitive load.

Right. I think that the best way to think of it is not to think of language learning as something that’s separate from your everyday life, but something we incorporate into our everyday life, as much as possible.

The example I always give is that I take singing lessons, but I take them in Spanish. I can do that because my Spanish is at a level where I can understand the instructions being given, and it doesn’t impede the lesson. 

So every week, I spend an hour learning to sing, and an hour a week doing Spanish conversation practice. I spend an hour on each, but it’s the same hour. That’s efficiency!

This is what I mean when I recommend weaving language learning into daily life. 

So the things I do to pace for that lesson are things I’m already doing because it’s just part of my day. It’s not a separate thing, as much as possible. 

Granted, at certain levels, you may have to actually do activities you wouldn’t normally do, just to get past a particular plateau in your second language. But ideally, you’d use the same tools for pacing language learning as you use for pacing the rest of your life.

What are your favourite methods that could be accessible for a lot of people to use as and when they would be suitable?

So one fun method that I really like is learning grammar in chunks instead of by memorizing charts. Some people like grammar – I am actually one of these people: as a linguist, I have to. 

Natasha edit: “eww”

It’s fairly clear that memorizing gigantic tables of verb endings, different forms of nouns, and things like that, is not the most effective way of learning. 

What I recommend instead is learning sentences or larger units of the language, like proverbs or song lyrics. These will all have these grammatical points embedded in them.

Think of it this way: every song’s lyrics are going to be written to be memorable. 

This is the lyricist’s job. They’re trying to make their songs catchy. So they have features in them that help them stick in the mind. One of those features is rhyme: things are easier to remember when they rhyme. 

Another is meter. So when things have a kind of rhythm, they become easier to remember. Songwriters write lyrics that are designed to be remembered. 

Now, each song may also have a couple new words in it. It may also showcase a point of the language’s grammar. You can use these things as shortcuts for remembering particular parts of the language. Every song you learn might have two or three new things in it that you don’t know.  

You’re not going to forget these lyrics because they get burned into your brain. And they’re so great for learning grammatical points.

For example, take irregular verbs in a language like French. Irregular verbs are often the most common verbs in the language, so they’re going to come up a lot. It shouldn’t be too hard to collect all the different forms in snippets of song lyrics or sayings or lines from movies that you remember. And then you don’t have to remember anything in a chart! 

Like how “voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” is the most famous French sentence?

Right, and if you know that lyric, you’re never going to forget that particular form of the conjugation of vouloir. 

These are the little helpful things that you can use as you’re trying to produce these forms in the language. It’s as if your mind is going to say, “wait a second, I have a sentence stored that’s a little bit like this.” And then you can essentially just look it up in your memory.

Are there some tools that people can use to bring certain aspects of their language learning into their memory more to make it easier for them to remember things?

Merely writing things down, or highlighting, even if I never look at them again, seems to be a kind of “memory hack”.

Another thing is frequency. Although frequency is not of unlimited importance in learning a particular thing in a language, the more you encounter a particular phrase, the more it tends to stick out in your mind. That can help to cement it.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re learning English here, and you’re reading a book about a topic you’re really interested in, say, trains. 

You may come across a word you don’t know: conductor. 

Reading a book about trains, you can imagine you’ll see conductor over and over again. After you see it four or five times, used in different situations, it clicks, and you learn it just from the context. That experience of figuring it out after a period of struggle can be a great way to signal to your mind that something is worth remembering.

Is it harder now to stay in the struggle phase, because we just Google everything?

The problem with just Googling it immediately is that it slows you down. And you don’t want to be looking up every other word when you’re reading. 

It’s just not fun, and you’re not likely to stick to it. It does also short-circuit that struggle phase: you may remember the word, but you probably won’t after looking it up once. Now, if you’ve gone over to Google to look it up six times, that is its own kind of struggle!

One thing I find hard is that, in Yiddish, there are some words that come from Loshn Koydesh (the Hebrew words in Yiddish) that don’t have vowels when they’re written. So you just have to know how to pronounce that word. And if you don’t already know the word, you need to go to the dictionary just to know how to say what you’re reading.

I have the same experience in Mandarin. Except it’s not just a few words: it’s every one. That’s hard mode, right there.

So what do you do in that case?

A helpful way to learn when the writing system is unpredictable is to memorize the vocabulary first by sound, and then learn the way to write it later.

Attaching a written form to a thing that you already have a representation of in your mind is a lot easier than learning it all at once. 

For words with unpredictable spellings, you have to learn three things: (i) the pronunciation, (ii) the meaning, and (iii) the writing.

All of these links are arbitrary. So learn a link between two of them, say the pronunciation and the meaning first, and then learn the association between those two things and the written form. That’s my technique for Mandarin and it works pretty well.

Something we haven’t spoken about yet is actually speaking a language. 

You might get very “booksmart” at a language and be able to reproduce a lot of the grammar rules, but the process of being confident enough to say the words, especially to a native speaker, can be mortifying. 

Now is quite a difficult time for people because we’re all stuck at home and you’re not necessarily going to be in an immersive environment. And if you have chronic illness, you may have been limited like that before. 

What are some ways for people to get over that initial hump of feeling confident enough to speak and to practise their speaking?

You can use the magic of the internet! 

There are lots of places where you can find conversation partners (where you do a language swap) and tutors online. 

You can also try and immerse yourself in the internet version of whatever that language community is, if it’s a big enough community and a welcoming one.

Regarding the psychological side of speaking, I’d recommend that you not hold yourself to a higher standard than you do for your first language. 

In our first languages we make so-called “grammar mistakes” all the time. Just listen to the podcast version of this post!

We often start sentences and don’t finish them, we stumble over our words. It’s not like writing. 

Speech is much more dynamic and much more fluid. We go down paths, we back out, we change the topic midstream, and we correct ourselves. These are normal things, and we don’t take them as a reflection on our skill in our first language.

So allow yourself some room to manoeuvre in your second language. And also know that a lot of the time, no one really cares whether you have a perfect accent or are using perfect diction. They want to communicate with you, and they’re willing to meet you halfway. So go out and talk to people, if that’s what you want to do.

Now, speaking is not everyone’s goal in learning a second language. I know there are some languages that I want to just learn so I can have access to more literature. But if you want to be conversational in a language, actually starting to have conversations is a good strategy! 

Practice in speaking is probably not the decisive factor in learning languages, but it can help with automaticity.

What is automaticity? 

Say you need to order something in a restaurant. “Okay, wait, what’s the word for 12? How polite would it be if I said this vs that?” These are things you could get eventually. But when you’re placing your order at a restaurant, you want to be able to get it quickly. That is what I mean by automaticity, and you can develop automaticity when you practice spoken output.

Something that you said to me before as well is that making mistakes in another language in front of a native speaker will mean that you’ll never make that mistake again.

It’s true! Embarrassment is one of the best ways to remember anything. I once heard a quotation which I’ve never been able to source that said something like “embarrassment is the only feeling that is as strong today as the day you first felt it.”

I can still remember very vividly embarrassing moments from when I was six years old. I was at the park and going up to someone I thought was my mom. And it wasn’t her – it was someone else with the same hairstyle, or so it looked from the back. I was mortified. Even as I bring this up, I’m starting to blush, because this is a feeling that sticks with you.

And it sticks with you for a reason. It’s trying to teach you something. It’s showing you that you’ve gone off the path that you’re supposed to stay on, socially speaking. 

So when we feel embarrassment, our minds put up this huge red flag saying, “don’t do that again!” When learning something, especially a second language, “don’t do that again!” is very useful information to have. Unfortunately, it’s rather unpleasant in the moment, but you definitely remember.

I remember where I was when I made my first big faux pas in Paris. I literally remember where I was standing and who I was talking to. It was really hot, and I said, “je suis chaud”. And people said, “You can’t say that”. I said, “Why? It’s really hot. I’m hot.” And they said, “You just said, ‘I’m horny’”. 

I was maybe 19, and I thought, “Oh God!” because you have to say “j’ai chaud”, literally “I have hot”, which, to an English speaker, makes no sense. I wouldn’t have known that because I was just translating in my head. And I’ve never forgotten that.

It is hard to put yourself out there. But as you said, most of the time, people are just so impressed that you’re learning another language, especially if you’re a native English speaker. People are shocked.

The expectations are very low.

It’s usually such a respectful thing that you’re learning someone else’s language and you want to understand their culture more. And all of the things that come with learning that language, so people are often really excited and want to help you. Just like if you know someone that isn’t a native English speaker and they make the odd mistake, you might just offhandedly correct them if that is something that is part of your relationship that has been agreed to happen and you barely think about it, you know? 

I think a lot of this stuff comes down to mindset and feeling confident enough. For me, with Yiddish, it was taking the pressure off of that made the difference. 

We’re making it fun: you’re learning with me and Sebastian’s learning with us. So, you’re a linguist, Sebastian’s a native German speaker, Lucy, who is also learning with us, reads Hebrew, I’ve got my grandma telling me rude phrases. 

What we’re doing is taking really small steps every day and having conversations about it and figuring out why we want to learn and what we want to do with it, instead of saying we have to sit down and work through this textbook.

We’re adding in basic sentences that we know into our daily conversation too – stuff like “how are you” and the responses. It’s just total beginners stuff, but it’s helping us with that automaticity. When I started (and then quit) learning German, I had taped some big cards to the cupboards in the kitchen that said things like “how was your day?” and “can I help?” Next to the TV, I had “press play/pause please”. By having them somewhere I could easily see, I repeated them frequently, and now even months later, I remember how to say them. 

One of the great things about Yiddish is a lot of the stuff is out of copyright – so there’s this huge repository of online books that you can access for free. We’re going to find a kids’ book and just read it together on Zoom because working with things that are made for children is great because they already are graded readers, in a sense. They’re nature’s greatest graded readers.

One potential issue with using children’s literature for second language learning is you do sometimes get vocabulary that is not going to help you in everyday life. I remember, as a child, there was a great emphasis on barnyard animals in the books I read. This hasn’t been very applicable to my daily life, but that said, it’s great fun.

You do love owls.

I do love owls.

We talk about owls a lot.

I suppose it is applicable then!

We’re using this as reading practice and just getting confident with the language, it’s quite fun, especially because we’re doing it as a group with low pressure.

We’re doing the two things we have to do:

1. Spending the time consuming content in the language 
2. Enjoying it.

If you can do those two things, learning the language will be a matter of time.

Very soon, we’ll be fabulous Yiddish speakers.

Exactly.

What will make me very sad is you already have a better Yiddish accent than I do, not that it matters. 

I told my Yiddish teacher how sad I was that I can’t do a good Yiddish accent. My grandma has a very interesting cockney Yiddish accent, and then there’s the New York Yiddish accent which is the most famous one, and I felt sad about my accent. 

He said to me, “Your Yiddish accent is your authentic Yiddish accent, and that’s all that matters.” 

That was really nice because then I wasn’t feeling like I was doing it wrong. Whatever language you’re learning, there will be sounds that you don’t make in your native language, so trying to replicate sounds presents problems. I can’t roll my r’s, for example. Being aware that you don’t have to have a “perfect accent” and that you don’t even have to learn to speak. You don’t have to learn to read. There’s no “have to” with language learning.

There’s a great quote by the Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb, who was one of the first simultaneous interpreters ever. She said: “We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.”

In learning a language, you’re participating in this great tradition that’s been handed down from generation to generation. Languages are things that have been handed down from one generation to another for thousands of years so join in! Learn a few! That’s exactly how it’s always been done.

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A huge thank you to Colin Gorrie for sharing his insights into language learning. If this approach sounds interesting to you, Colin is running a course called Meta-Skills for Language Learning that incorporates a lot of these ideas. 

It’s a four week live online course starting on January 16, where you will explore mindsets, strategies, and tactics for learning languages effectively. It’s very interactive, and very focused on helping you come up with a roadmap for your next year of language learning.

You can get 10% off using this link.

Artwork for this episode: Daniela Tokashiki.

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