Language learning methods that actually work #1: The binge

Today’s news was about the stock market crash of Duolingo, and I was talking about how this is one of the few positive things about “AI”: It accelerates the enshittification cycle so much that it may end up killing stuff that is detrimental to society in the first place. Speaking as a linguist who has read the literature on second language acquisition and understands 4 languages, I’ve always maintained that Duolingo is a trap; it will keep you spinning on wheels and feeling as if you’re learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours on it and fully gold a tree and you’ll get nowhere. You would have progressed way more if you had spent the same amount of effort with any other method of language learning, including old-fashioned pen-and-paper grammar drills from textbooks. And the grammar drills suck, too. It’s just that Duolingo sucks ass.

Which brings us to the topic of which methods are actually good. And a commenter gave me the perfect answer: Warrior Cats.

It's the "Aliens Guy" meme. A man with a funny conspiratorial smile is making an emphatic gesture with both hands while on the History Channel. Originally he's talking about the impact of extraterrestrial aliens in history. Here he's been captioned to say: "Warrior Cats".

Either pain or gain

Reminds me of how the first book i ever read in English (by my own choice) was one of the warrior cats books. I was absolutely obsessed with those books as a teenager and I had read through all those that had been translated to German, and I was impatient enough to continue reading that I convinced my parents to order me the next one in English. I used a dictionary to look up some words that I didn’t know, but mostly I just tried to get the meaning of things I didn’t understand based on context. I was already kind of ahead of my classmates in English class when I did that (because I occasionally watched English fandubbed anime on Youtube) but ever since that I was ahead of my classmates to the point where I got bad grades because I was just too bored to participate in class, all because of stories about cats (and anime).

This is a textbook example (no pun intended) of one of the language acquisition methods that's most experimentally proven, supported by clear and bountiful evidence from multiple studies over years: “comprehensive and compelling input through free voluntary reading”, which is academese for “you got super into some series and binged it volume after volume, not caring about the fact that, technically speaking, you didn’t know the language yet.” This is how our brains acquire language; not by abstractly analysing how the grammar works, but by using the language as a tool for something you're after. This case with Warrior Cats is entirely parallel to case studies by S.D. Krashen, and you see it all the time outside of research, too. I myself got my English without even trying, by playing a large amount of SNES RPGs; I didn’t want to “learn English”, I wanted to play Chrono Trigger because it looked rad. I never had English “classes” of any kind, I just had cool imaginary adventures involving katanas and wizards, in which I had to figure out how to get to the next dungeon somehow. Then at 17 I found out, to my own bafflement, that I was able to read my college-level comp-sci textbooks in the original. This is typical.

Notice how this goes against the common sense that you should learn “useful” or “pratical” “real-life situations” like asking for directions, talking to a cashier etc. The main problem with that approach is quantity; you can only learn a language after engaging your full attention on what's technically termed a fuckton of input. Laboriously studying how to ask where's the pharmacy, hour after dreary hour, makes that impossible, and sets up students for failure.

One comment I got:

I moved to Denmark in 2024 and have been learning the language. I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances in various stages of learning it, to varying degrees of success. It’s been my running theory that Duolingo is the most antithetical to success tool you can use. It uses up effort and time for almost no result, while making you feel like you should be better because you’re now “level whatever”.

Immersion and trying and failing are so fucking good for learning, it’s insane. I’ve definitely been too hard on myself in the past comparing myself to people who have learned by living somewhere and how much better/faster they’ve learned.

This is true; and, perversely, repetitive exercise-based study makes you believe that you must be getting somewhere, because it's so mind-numblingly boring. You did the work, right? You're suffering, therefore you must be levelling up. Then after 3 years of doing French grammar drills in high school, or French vocabulary drills on Duolingo, you still can’t even ask for directions or read Le Petit Prince, and you figure it’s because you’re a lazy loser with no discipline who didn’t drill enough. You should have drilled even more, you conclude, feeling guilty for all the hours you've wasted browsing Instagram or playing Animal Crossing.

When in reality, what you should have been doing is to spend all day browsing memes on French Instagram, or playing animal Animal Crossing in French.

Real language learning—we call it “acquisition” rather than “learning”, to emphasise how it’s an instinctive, subconscious process—happens optimally when you’re in a state of flow where you don’t even remember you’re using the second language, i.e. when you aren't suffering.

But you're going to get weird cringe Japanese from anime and everyone will laugh at you

Sometimes people mock Duolingo for having weird, funky sentences that “you’re never going to use in real life”, like “The Loch Ness monster is drinking whiskey”. Now I’m the world’s #1 Duolingo hater and I can rant for hours on the 99 reasons it doesn't work, but useless sentences ain’t one.

To understand why the common sense about “weird language” is misguided, consider the following passage from Warrior Cats:

Gray Wing pushed himself onto his paws, his legs trembling. “Kill me,” he rasped at Clear Sky. “Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars you won.”

Now the incorrect opinion goes something like this: “It is extremely unlikely you'll ever talk with a brother who's about to kill you and dare him to do it, and people in real life aren't named things like Gray Wing, and what if the learner ends up calling their feet ‘paws’ and is taken for a furry, and yo, cats don't talk! You shouldn’t be focusing on unusual, niche language before you can even speak the basics like a normal person.”

The first counterpoint is that “useful” is a judgement of value. Reading fantasy novels is as important a use of language as any other. If this learner’s entire goal with English is to read fantasy novels, then mock-medieval literary English is the most useful type of English for them.

But even leaving that aside, from this passage alone a kid who's into Warrior Cats would have reinforced in their brain the linguistic pathways for all of:

All of that exercised in one go, instantly, without conscious awareness at all. Kid is just excited to find out what happens to the warriors of the jungle tribe. But every piece of language I listed is directly usable in daily-life contexts, too; and this bullet list is just off the top of my head—I could go on and on about the sheer amount of Language contained in any random passage like this one.

An intimidatingly complex series of diagrams illustrating how much structure is behind the simple sentence "The little star's beside a big star"; from the layering of phonemes into syllables and prosodic patterns to hierarchical syntax trees grouping the words into non-obvious sub-sentences, to semantic relations between subjects and places and states, to the spatial visualisation of sizes and positions. Some of the linguistic structures for the sentence “The little star's beside a big star”, from Jackendoff's «Foundations of Language» (2003) The more obvious linguistic forms I've listed are the tip of the iceberg; this figure illustrates the processing your mind does constantly, every time you hear a few words. Only linguists have abstract mental models detailing how all these structures are set up, but every human being can competently juggle all of them, instantly and without thinking; just like only biologists study scientific models of how muscles and tendons work, but every human being can move their own body.

The difference between the weirdest niche genre language and office small talk is extremely superficial. 99% of linguistic structure is always the same; that's just not obvious to people because all this underlying structure is instinctive and unconscious for native speakers. If you get the structural 99% from Warrior Cats, it's trivial for you to adapt to the 1% extra you'll need to speak fluent office-talk.

The subjective “99%” here is not even a hyperbole; if anything, it's underselling it. Consider vocabulary, for example—in all languages, vocabulary follows a Zipf distribution, meaning it's a sharp exponential where a small fraction of the lexicon comes up all the time in natural utterances, and the vast majority of the lexicon is in a long tail of sometimes-words. Your first task as a learner is to get familiar with those ultra-frequent, common words. By definition, the words that come very often all the time will come up very often in your text, too, no matter how fictional or niche it is. This is why “spaced repetition” methods are not useful; when learning from natural input, you always exercise vocabulary at the optimum frequency of repetition. The words that come most often, which are the ones you should spend the most time with, tautologically come up most often as you read. Sure, “rasped” is a rare word to use outside of literature, and “Clear Sky” as a personal name is specific to fantasy (maybe also to some Indigenous folk); but in the sentence “'Kill me,' he rasped at Clear Sky”, what you're actually practising is how to use “me” and “he” and “at”, which come up in the novel thousands of times more often than “rasped”.

I'll concede that yes, every so often maybe you say a cringe fantasy word or anime expression here and there. But no matter what variety of language you learn, that's liable to happen—the Japanese you learn from textbooks will embarrass you during an intimate chat at a drinking party, for example. The Japanese I learned directly from Japanese people in Brazil was inadequate to use in modern Japan, because they diverged after the War; the Japanese I learned from ten years of tea ceremony is never seen in modern life, though I see it when watching period dramas. If you acquire the language with full context, you also get a good idea of which kind of contexts each form is used. The details comes from experience, not from trying to deny yourself from having any fun.

The First Few Pages Problem

There's a second, deeper issue with established common sense about repetitive vocabulary drills of “useful words”. If you ask someone like my Warrior Cats friend, who has read a whole novel in a second language, about how hard it was or how it felt, they’ll probably say something to the note of: “yeah the first few pages were kind of a drag, but once I got into it I was just devouring the thing”. This is because so much of language hinges on context. Consider the list above of “lessons” the subconscious can get from one single passage; this would only have worked because the reader knows that Clear Sky is Grey Wing's own brother and long-time companion at arms, that Clear Sky is still mourning the loss of his mate, that this loss has made him paranoid because he feels overwhelmed by his responsibility for the safety of his tribe, and that he has already bloodied his paws with this paranoia. The kid reading the book knows how deep is the bond between Clear Sky and Grey Wing. It’s only because the kid has all that in mind that they know, instantly, without having to have it spelled out in some boring reading comprehension lesson, that Gray Wing's quip “then tell the stars you won” is meant as bitter irony, that he's daring his brother to do something they both know he will regret; Grey Wing is betting his life in an attempt to make Clear Sky wake up to the reality of his choices.

Imagine getting all that context from flashcards or gamified drills.

After you get a story past Act 1 and the pacing starts to build up, you’re already used to the vocabulary and grammar that this particular author favours, you know what to expect from each character, you’re aware of the structure of stories generally—it all adds up to a reasonable expectation of what things must mean, even if you don't know the words yet. “After the roaring lion and the sharp-eyed jay, peace will come on dove's gentle wing”, says the Omen of the Stars prophecy. You don't know what the heck is a “jay”, but your subconscious is taking notes, building synaptic connections between semantic fields: A jay can be saliently characterised by having sharp eyes; a jay is probably a type of animal; a jay is the kind of animal that may be used symbolically in prophecies, like doves or lions… The longer you stay within the same story (or author, or genre, or conversation partner, or special interest, etc.), the more context you build, the easier it is for you to acquire new language from partially intelligible input.

The common sense but misguided approach would be to try to cram all the important semantic fields serially, one after the other, changing them like zapping TV channels; for example, the ubiquitous textbook structure that goes, lesson 1, “introducing yourself”; lesson 2, “asking for directions”; lesson 3, “at the doctor”, etc., which Duolingo replicates unthinkingly. Or maybe they'll want to give you short and simple stories in a graded reader, so you can finish them quick and feel accomplished. The consequence of this is that you're constantly losing the all-important context every lesson, and the context is exactly what you needed to understand the gist of it, which is what you need to get hooked despite lacking vocabulary, which is what you need to read in enough quantities to absorb the rest of the vocabulary in the first place.

That is, by constantly switching contexts, you get stuck in the “first few pages effect”, forever.

It works much better to do what the Warrior Cats fan did and pick 1 (one) thing that deeply interests you, that you perceive as compelling—compulsive, even—and then binge on it start to end.

And to emphasise: no matter how funny or dorky the niche language may feel, all this context matters, it tells you in which kind of situations that kind of expression is used.

Gray Wing pushed himself onto his paws, his legs trembling. “Kill me,” he rasped at Clear Sky. “Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars you won.”

Maybe ten years later you're in a parallel, if much less dramatic, situation. Maybe your friend is about to get a job at an unethical company, and after a long argument you're exasperated, and in the throes of emotion, without any conscious thought, you blurt it out: “OK, whatever, do it. Do it, then tell yourself it was worth it.”

And you won't even realise that this extremely sophisticate, native-like commandment of English pragmatics originally came from Warrior Cats. That's how language ability works; it's instinctive, unconscious, and always rooted in social contexts and specific situations.

Babbling

Another comment:

I started reading books in French at the same time that I started learning the language overall (which I admittedly had an advantage in because I had Latin in school and am relatively fluent in Spanish). Even though I did not understand everything it helped me so much for getting a feeling for the language so I can no pick up the grammatical concepts easily when they are explained to me… After reading a few chapters in French my brain continues to make up nonsense sentences that feel French, afterwards. Like a small child that's singing and babbling.

Yup, that's one of the signs that it's working.

This section is more of my personal experience than the rest of this discussion (which is backed by formal studies), but anecdotally from me and other successful learners I know, some signs that your Language Acquisition Device is fully engaged include:

OK but what if I'm a total beginner and can't understand a single word, I don't see how I would go about pretending I can read whole-ass books

See the post on tandem for suggestions :)