On the whole, I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the English language, but when I tried to learn German in high school, I struggled quite a bit with it. I do still remember some of what I learned back then, but I’m hardly conversational. But more recently, I’ve been learning French to try to be conversational enough for when we visit France next month, and I’m finding it much easier. There are still areas where I struggle, but on the whole, I’m learning much quicker than I ever did in school. I have to wonder why that is.
Programmers Probably Make Good Linguists
I think the answer lies in the fact that I am a programmer. Programmers are required to know multiple languages to do their jobs, some more than others. In addition to needing to have several languages, you also need to know frameworks that work with those languages. The equivalent for spoken languages would be that English, for example, comes in many forms that are used at different times: sentences, questions, paragraphs, prose, poems, legal, dialogue, etc. And each of those forms will have subforms, such as different meters for poems. Different dialects for a language are also like a framework, though it may be closer to having different versions of a programming language, depending on the context.
So over the course of many years, I have had to learn dozens of languages and frameworks to do my job. This is a bit easier than spoken languages though because, for the most part, programming languages all follow similar patterns and syntax. And unlike spoken languages, figuring out how to do something in a new programming language is often much easier (95% of your problems have already been solved on stackoverflow). So, transitioning is generally easier with programming languages.
Still, I do feel like once you get used to having to learn a lot of languages for programming, it makes learning spoken languages easier as well. I know that with French I apply more logic to it than I ever had with German, so most of the time when I stumble it is because of some non-standard rule (which there are plenty of). I’m probably still a ways off from being really conversational in it, but I’m going through the lessons very quick, and I’m retaining more and more as time goes on.
The Inflection Point
Which brings me to another thing that I’ve noticed, and it is something I’ve heard before but never really gave much mind to. The inflection point is the idea that when learning something, you will get into a rut where you struggle more than usual, but then you suddenly hit a point where it gets a lot easier. This happened to me about three months in on my French lessons. I got to a point where I could just remember things better. It’s really hard to explain how or why, but it’s apparently very common. I noticed it previously with learning guitar and drums as well. You just get to a point where things you were struggling with are suddenly easy.
And the best part is that there are multiple inflection points on the path of learning. It’s like having a real-life level up. A lot of people assume that you get to be an expert after spending 10,000 hours on something (most likely getting the idea from Malcolm Gladwell), and that the progress is linear. That’s not the case at all though. At zero hours, you know nothing. At 10 hours, you have the basics. At 100 hours you hit the first inflection point and start feeling good about your progress. But the next inflection point may not be until the 300-500 hour mark. And then the next one may be at 1000+ hours. Since mastery is a game of diminishing returns, each inflection point takes longer to get to. This is why most people eventually give up on being an expert, the rewards get harder and harder to reach.
While that can be discouraging, it’s good to know before going into something. If you really want to get good at it, the time to mastery graph is logarithmic (meaning that each point of mastery takes more and more time as you go up). For me, I don’t intend to ever be an expert at anything aside from programming, as that is my job and my biggest passion. Everything else, I’m fine with being better than most (which isn’t that hard since most will never even start).
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Incidentally, if you want to learn a language for yourself, I highly recommend Duolingo. They only support five languages (assuming you speak English) so far, but the way they do it is great and the iPhone app is my primary means of learning. And I’ve learned the hard way that when they say you should practice every day, they really mean it. When I was struggling I would not want to do it, so I would let several days go by without touching the lessons. But when I forced myself back into doing it daily, the lessons got a lot easier. It also allowed me to hit that first inflection point faster.
Merci beaucoup pour lisent!