How not to learn a language

10 Oct, 2026

Some people seem to expect that they will only have to learn some new vocabulary, new expressions, and maybe a new script, but they balk at things like word order, new verb tenses, and having to mark things that their native language¹ does not.

I took a language class once. I was there for fun, but most of my fellow students had more practical reasons for attending. Some had already bought a house in the relevant country and were due to move there in a few months' time. This is very late in the game to discover that you will have to let the subjunctive enter your life, or that some languages have very different ideas of where "blue" changes into "green". Some of them argued with the instructor that these things are "stupid" and they felt they should not have to learn them.

No matter how you feel about their attitude -- and I certainly have my opinion -- it does not help you learn the language.

I believe these people make life more difficult for themselves than it needs to be. Usually, if you encounter some strange phenomenon in your target language, if you think about it for a while and maybe squint a bit, you can find something similar in a language that you know.

For example, learning that in Japanese, the character 生 has seventeen different pronunciations is intimidating, and it is easy to regard this as some exotic and inscrutable fact that you as a stranger to the culture have no hope of ever comprehending.

But there's a rather neat analogue in English: imagine a native Japanese speaker learning that the word set has no fewer than 430 definitions² in the dictionary, and being equally intimidated. How can one learn a language where a common three-letter word has meanings ranging from "a collection of things", "to sink below the horizon", "to congeal", to "a section of a game"? Not to mention that it can either be a noun or a verb in several different tenses, and all of those are pronounced exactly the same.

A native speaker would of course be quick to point out that of those 430 definitions, maybe only 20 or so are used in real life, and those all coalesce around only a handful of semantic concepts, such as a collection of things, adjusting or placing something, etc. The meaning is always clear from context, and the worst thing you could do as a learner of English is to try and memorise all of the dictionary definitions.

The same thing is true of 生. The basic meaning is something like "life", with a secondary meaning of "raw, unprocessed", and the pronunciation is always clear from what's around it: as an active verb it's iki, as in 生きる (to live), but as a passive verb it becomes uma, as in 生れる (to be born). As a suffix, it's the sei in sensei (先生), and so on.

You don't sit there mentally rattling off all seventeen readings one by one; you see the ーれる and you immediately know the meaning that is being communicated, and hence how it's pronounced.

There are many things to be afraid in Japanese (the whole kureru / morau / ageru thing³, for instance), but kanji readings are really not that bad, and memorising them is probably not a good use of your time. What's important is knowing how to read kanji in context, which is what the native speakers do.

If you grow up in Japan, you learn the spoken language first, and then you have to understand how the script maps onto that. As learners we are trying to do both at the same time, which feels a lot like trying to solve an equation with too many unknown variables.

If I ever figure out how to square that circle, I will let you know.