[4] How to pick your first resource
And why it's not a big deal if you pick wrong
Hi y’all,
So you want to get started learning a language but there’s a lot of apps out there, everybody seems to be trying to sell you something, and you’ve got a sneaking suspicion that most of it is bullschnitzel in a swanky scarf.
What do you do?
I’ve got a simple answer for you… but this is a situation where knowing the answer is less useful than knowing why the answer is the answer, so I’m going to start on a tangent and we’ll gradually work toward the point together.
Alas:
There exist only two types of problems
In a 2023 interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, one of the engineers over at Google’s X (not that X) asserted that there were only really two sorts of problems:
In 51/49 problems, being 51% right is good. So if you’re playing the stock market, and you can accurately pick stocks that are going up 51% of the time, you’re about to be really rich.
Then you have 100/0 problems—where 51% is not good enough, and even 99% is not good enough. If you’re trying to shut down a nuclear reactor in an emergency, you really need the 100% answer.
I bring this up because I’m almost certain that your livelihood does not depend on mastering Uzbek in three months. Learning a language just isn’t a need for most people. It’s a want—or, perhaps, something you need in order to get something you think you want; a second-order want.
In other words, you’ve got a 51/49 problem on your hands. All you have to do to win the game is semi-reliably move in the right direction.
Understanding (and, perhaps, accepting) this buys you a lot of wiggle room.
The fact of the matter is that you very well may be built different. Alternatively, I may just suck at this. For all I know, you’re fully capable of speedrunning my seven years of Mandarin progress in seven months.
Just, as dumb as this sounds, you don’t have to.
And that matters because:
A detour with Johnny Depp
Depp popped up on my local radio talkshow one day as I was returning home from college. I don’t remember what exactly he was talking about, but I do remember him saying this:
My mama’ always told me: You can be anything, but not everything.
And that ended up changing my life. You see, I was in like ten extracurriculars: a capella, glee club, social dancing, bouldering, judo, capoeira, BJJ, something related to my major I can’t remember. It was over 30 hours a week of practice sessions, on top of work and school. Before long, without time to practice between practices, I found myself near the back of the pack in everything.
The simple solution that came to me was to wake up fifteen minutes early to practice. (I was only getting five hours of sleep a night, as it was). I figured that if I didn’t want something as badly as I wanted to sleep a bit more, I must not really want it that bad, so I ought to cut it to make more time for the things I did care about. Within a few months, the only thing I was doing was dancing.
What I’m getting at here is that there are a lot of things worth doing in life.
By virtue of the fact that you’re old enough to be browsing Reddit, I assume you’re old enough that your life already has a sort of shape to it. You’ve got things you’re passionate about—things that make waking up to another day worthwhile. And time you spend learning a language is time you can’t spend doing those things.
Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn another language.
Do.
Just, for the vast majority of us, I think we’d be better off taking a less efficient route that fits comfortably into our lives than we would be taking a super sweaty efficient route that doesn’t.
So:
Step 1: Identify (your thing)
What would you do if you were already fluent?
Be specific:
Read (book)
Watch (movie)
Play (video game)
Chat up hot singles in your area
Whatever it is, put that on your calendar for three months from today. If you don’t use a calendar, set an alarm. Or something. I don’t know. Figure it out.
Step 2: Take one week to survey the market
Download any app that looks cool. Peruse textbook samples from Amazon. Go ham on polyglot YouTube. Evaluate your spoils according to one and only one standard: the likelihood that you’ll stick with them.
But what about quality? Effectiveness? Reddit’s collective opinion?
Not important right now.
Remember:
A mediocre routine executed religiously will outperform a perfect routine never done.
It doesn’t matter how effective a resource is if you won’t actually use it.
People have learned languages by doing (and not doing) pretty much everything. You’ve got a massive amount of leeway to work with, so long as you’re OK with this taking a month or two or six longer than is theoretically necessary.
Importantly, the word “doing” is doing a lot of work in that statement.
You must actually do something.
Until you are consistently doing something—anything—you’re not ready to worry about efficiency. Until then, planning is a form of procrastination.
For now, you’re better off getting 80% of 20 than 10% of 100.
But we’ll get there.
So:
Step 3: Commit to that thing for three months
Or until you finish. Whichever comes first.
If you know that you tend to not see things through, go see my first post in this series. It TL;DR’s several articles on the neurology of habit formation and a few of Amazon’s top books on the subject.
Step 4: Assess
When the day comes, try your thing.
If you succeeded, great!
If not (and most people won’t), that’s ok. In fact, it’s the point.
To move forward, take a moment to think about what the biggest obstacles holding you back from successfully doing (your thing) were. Then, ask yourself if (your approach) is building those skills:
If yes → Awesome! In this case, you just need more time.
If no → Consider switching up your approach, or adding in 10 minutes of daily effort targeting that specific weakness.
From here, start checking in with (your thing) every couple weeks until…
Eventually…
Mastering a language takes a long time.
Becoming able to sort of do any one specific thing in another language, with support and patience, on the contrary, does not. Depending on what your thing is, it might only take a few months before you can start incorporating that thing into your routine.
If you quit before then—or if you never really get started at all—that’s that.
…but if you stick with your language, you can proceed to optimize your routine for literally the rest of your life. You can:
Master this one. (Or don’t).
Goof around here to figure out an approach that works for you, then speed run your next language. (Or don’t).
Opimize your routine so you can spend less time on languages and more time knitting a hat with the lint from your belly button. (Or don’t).
You can do anything you want, so long as you stick with it.
So, optimize around sticking with it.
Until next time,
—Sui 🍉
P.S. — I’ve kind of waffled around for these first few posts, not sure how to get started. I’d like to tackle a more practical topic next time. We’ll see.
P.P.S. — This post took a stupid amount of time to write. I don’t want your money, but I would love your feedback. To let me know how I did, or to suggest a topic for the next newsletter, please fill out this form. It’s really short.