Start Learning a Language in 2021 and Discover a New World

You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.

This is a Czech proverb I love. I couldn't agree with it more. I'm proud to say I'm living 6 lives at the moment. I hope I get to live a lot more in the future.

Too many people see language learning as a boring or hard task. It's neither. It's fun and easy. Yes, you read right. Learning a language is easy, if you have fun with it.

I've studied about 15 languages. I've given up on more than half to be where I am today. The main difference between the ones I gave up and the ones I didn't? I had tons of fun while studying the latter. Actually, scratch that. I didn't have fun "studying". It barely even felt like studying. Every moment I spent connecting with the language felt right, even when I barely understood them.

Why?

Because I didn't learn the language. I learned to live a new life. I expanded my personality by mixing it with a new culture. My mind traveled to the country, even when my body was stuck in a different place.

My world grew.

I remember my first encounter with the Korean language, 12 years ago. All I knew about the country was that it was divided and close to Japan. I met two Koreans during a volunteer workcamp in France. When it finished, 3 weeks later, I was hooked. I began learning the language and dug into its culture. Two years later, for my first trip to Asia, I traveled to South Korea, even though I had been learning Japanese for years.

Korean and my other languages have never left my side. I care for each of my languages as I would for my children. I make sure they grow. I interact with them daily. I give them space so I don't burnout. I keep discovering more about them. I keep having fun with them.

How can you create this for the language you learn?

There's no perfect recipe that works for everybody. Your life, your style. You'll have to experiment to find the perfect balance for yourself. All I can tell you is what worked for me. Adapt those to fit your life.

Associate your hobby with the language

If you love tennis, learn to talk and read about it. If you enjoy poems, study them in their original language. If you like the country's music, study lyrics. If you love cooking, do recipes in their original language.

If you love TV shows, watch a whole lot of them. You can even use the Language Learning With Netflix extension to have subtitles in two languages.

It'll be hard at first, but as long as you're on a topic you enjoy, you'll be able to continue.

Find a community

Whether you find a community of native speakers or learners doesn't matter. You just need to be surrounded by the language as often as possible. Create friendships with people through apps like HelloTalk or meet people in your area through Meetup.

The goal is to have the language come to you even when you're not sitting down to study it. Let the language become part of your life so it can evolve and be reborn as a second life.

Learn something in the language

There will come a time when you will have a good handle of the basics. That's when you should use the language to learn something new. It could be another language or it could be something completely unrelated, like origami.

That's when the language will spread its wings and become a true part of you. It'll be hard at first but you'll notice a burst of confidence within weeks. The language won't just be homework. It'll just be "something you do".

Start a language before we even reach 2021. Or after the new year comes. It doesn't really matter. What matters is for you to live the beauty of another language. It'll change your life. I can promise it.

It transformed my life and the life of all the other foreign language speakers I've ever met.

Discover how wide the world can be and start your second life.