Alex Senoner When I started learning foreign languages in my late teens, I fell in love with them. I loved these languages, which at the time were mainly Spanish and Russian, their spelling and sounds. I loved to analyse and cherish every word, every chapter I went through in the textbook. I wanted to make sure I really knew every single word in a chapter before I’d move on to the next one. And I’d spend long afternoons memorising declension tables. When I learned a new word, I stuck with it for a while, repeating it, enjoying it, savouring it.
Analysing over consuming
Though I made progress in both languages, I was far away from reaching conversational fluency. At the time, however, I didn’t mind—I didn’t even have the intention to reach fluency. I simply enjoyed learning the language with no end goal in mind. Just a happy teenager without a care in the world. 😊 There’s nothing wrong with that, of course—it brought me joy at the time.
When the time came to finally use the languages with native speakers, although I could converse a bit, especially in Russian I often had to revert back to English. This was fine with me at the time, I thought to myself: “Reaching fluency in such a difficult language is impossible anyway. I’m just happy to be able to say a few words.”
Then I met people who were indeed fluent in Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, etc. They had been studying these languages for a shorter time than I and spoke them really well. How did they do it?
Does mass consumption work?
There is no one method that fits all, but something many of these people did that I didn’t was the daily consumption of lots of content. They watched TV series and films in these languages, they watched YouTube videos and listened to podcasts. But how could you do that if you don’t understand every word, if it’s mostly noise to you? This approach went against what I had been doing until then, which was cuddling every new word I learned.
So, I decided to give it a try with French. I had been learning French for about a year and decided to watch the entire Dragon Ball series in French. The first 10 episodes were really tough. It was the first time that I was listening to so much French: 20-minute episodes. Until then, I had always only listened to pre-recorded sentences of about 20 seconds. And to my surprise, my comprehension really took off after 10–15 episodes. I suddenly started understanding what they were saying. And at some point, after 60 or so episodes, I increasingly found myself so engrossed in the story that I forgot it was in French.
After I had finished the series, I went on to look for YouTubers, and I discovered Norman Thavaud and Cyprien Iov. I owe so much of my French skills to these two guys. This was back in the 2010s, and they put out incredibly entertaining videos which I loved to watch. At this point, I had completely lost the conscious awareness that this content was in a language foreign to me. I was entertained and I sought the entertainment.
What I knew about Language Learning had changed
This is how I discovered the power of daily content consumption. 🌟 Throughout all this time, I rarely opened a grammar book. I did look up words quite regularly, but that’s it—I never practised them with flashcards.
It was certainly crucial that I had built myself a foundation in French for a year before embarking on this new approach—it wouldn’t have worked from day one. But once I had the foundation, the daily consumption of content is what got me to fluency. And we’re blessed to live today because there’s nothing more abundant at the tips of our fingers than content. 🌐
Now, certainly this worked well with French because it is closely related to two of my native languages: Ladin and Italian. I have tried something similar with Russian, and it is certainly much more difficult. You need a different approach for a language that is so different from yours. I’ll discuss that in another post.
So, once you’ve built a foundation in your target language, immerse yourself in content that excites you. Watch shows, listen to podcasts, and let the language become part of your daily routine. You might be amazed at how far you can go—without ever opening a grammar book.
Have a nice day and happy mersing! 😊🪁
Alex
