Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
There are two phases. Getting to A2, where you’ve learned all the grammar rules and have a starter vocab… and then everything else, which is basically grinding the hours and convincing your brain that this is worth changing to remember.
Getting to A2 is what Duolingo and similar are great for.
After that you need to grind the hours. When you have limited time, the best ways are swapping things you already do with something in the target language. Switch your audio track on Netflix, make a separate TikTok account where you only follow people in the target language, at some point, switch your phone so that you have to talk to Siri in your target language, and then finally, sign up with a teacher (online or in person) for speaking practice at least once a week. The social pressure of trying to communicate with a real person and not being able to will make your brain take the rest of the exposure seriously enough to start rewiring what needs to be rewired.
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
You probably need to pair it with something you like. For example, I'm interested in food history and also home food in general, so I made a python script and made a frequency list using a few cooking ebooks in that language. After that I made sentences with most interesting/useful words. Now, before reading any book in a foreign language, I use that script, and make sentences with 10-20 words that I never used in sentences before. All the sentences are saved in Anki, where I have now around 7000 german sentences, 3000 in spanish. I also watch youtube videos with closed caption.
The only thing this not taught me was speaking with people.
I learned Spanish in my 30s, but was immersed by living in a Spanish speaking country. Though, I've spent a lot of that time alone, so my level is not where it could/should be. But I can talk confidently with anyone about almost anything.
But I really don't think there's any mental hurdle to learning a language at any age. In fact, I think it is EASIER to learn a language as an adult (as opposed to child) because you understand language in general, and so many other concepts.
There are two reasons that adults have trouble learning a language:
1. time. Adults have endless responsibilities, which make it difficult to dedicate the time required to learn.
2. Lack of humility. Not being able to communicate in even the most basic of terms can be humiliating, if you lack humility - as most adults do. You need to be able to completely put aside your pride, and just be eager to make mistakes endlessly.
There's a lot of language schools here - both to learn Spanish and English - and I've met so many people who are "trying" to learn a language and refuse to practice out of fear of making a mistake. At no point have I ever felt even the slightest bit self-conscious about my Spanish, and I simply just try to communicate as fluidly as I am able, even while knowing I am making mistakes. When I learn I've been making some mistake for sometimes years, I simply laugh.
Similarly, there's plenty of locals (and people around the world) who have learned English to a reasonably high degree. So it is clearly possible. Though, even amongst them it often find that there's a genuine hesitancy to talk to me, a native English speaker. Their motivation was simply for a higher paying job, and evidently they swallow their pride for $ and pain.
I can recommend https://languagetransfer.org as an excellent resource, if your target language is covered.
And also just to focus on the basics. I recommend people don't even worry about verb conjugation when starting. Just speak in infinitive exclusively.
I eat bread. Tomorrow/yesterday he eat bread.
People will understand 99% of the time. Just focus on getting vocabulary, confidence and fluidity. Add verb tenses in due course. Again, it takes humility to speak in completely broken sentences, like a little child. But that's the only way.
the conjugation thing is really interesting and you're right you should just plow through with mistakes, even knowingly.
One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.
Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.
And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).
It’s time and commitment for sure. On the mental side - 30s is still young. Most US academics and doctors are barely out of grad school at 30 and their careers (which involve continued learning) are just starting.
Approach it differently as a salaried adult. You can pay for better tuition on your own schedule.
But you can find time. I listen to Michel Thomas or other courses while I’m walking to work. Put on headphones and ignore other people, they aren’t listening to you anyway. Other things like flash cards you can do any time you’ve got 10-15 mins.
Learned German. A little Duolingo, then
* memorizing vocabulary and practicing pronunciation with Anki
* private lessons
* grammar book with exercises
* podcasts
* news
* some books.
Worked very well. Had a good starting point when I arrived in Germany, and the immersion then helped a lot (but I stopped using Anki due to laziness). I found this page very useful: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
All studies point that there is no easier to learn a language in your 30s than in your teens. Probably easier since you have better mental tools for study.
Of course time constraints can be worse (or better)
A friend learnt French and piano in her mid 30s and later. Then she went lazy as potato and pretty much is horrible at both. Never practised. Now she is in late 40s and rather spends time scrolling Twitter (yup!), Instagram, and Youtube or overworking. So, I seriously doubt the true brain capacity is the problem in 30s or later. She also had somewhat of a life in her 30s and then she never made an effort to keep having that life (something I am inching towards in my late 30s now; also in the geography we both are this is inherently difficult - no, it's not an excuse) and that also contributed to losing a lot of her personality, or that's how she puts it. So I think to use the brain the brain needs to be primed and well oiled et cetera.
Is she depressed? Laziness can be untreated depression sometimes
Pretty sure she is. She even suspects it. Even I do, for myself, but two psychiatrists cleared me so I stopped bothering.
Tried and failed in my thirties, succeeding much better in my forties. I doubt you've lost neuroplasticity.
Learning over Zoom with a real person using a service like Fiverr or something was a great way for my wife and I to start learning Indonesian.
Learning sign language was lots of fun in VRC with actual people. I'm actually going to visit a friend I made doing this, in his country, this weekend.
I've done that with Russian, got around level B2 so far. But I had quite a bit of experience with language learning before that (mainly easy-ish languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc).
Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.
You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.
I've done this by moving to Spain. It took literally years to get to a decent level and my partner is Spanish.
Persistent learning and repetition is key but the main way I improved was by letting go of the fear of sounding stupid and talking without shame.
I am thinking of picking up a musical instrument. But I am afraid that I will miserably. That I may be the oldest person in the class. It's not a country for solo old men and women, even in their late 30s.
You can’t play it any worse than you do right now, so there’s nowhere to go but up.
you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day
Yes, but in their 30s most people are:
- unwilling to move to a different country
- unmotivated to spend time chatting with people about random things in a foreign language
Yep, I learned Spanish, then French.
The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.
Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
> The trick is to immerse yourself
> I spent 2 years in Latin America
That is not very accessible to most people.
Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Tons of people work remote from Mexico and Spain.
I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
It gets very hard after childhood. This kid I know has learnt russian, chinese, arabic, spanish, hindi, apart from english and his mother tongue tamil. All with dedicated native teachers and zoom classes, where he actually speaks to a bunch of people in that language conversationally. Its not like he puts a shit ton of effort, he barely takes these things seriously. It just is that easy to learn languages when you're really young.
Yeah, and this suggests to me that the link isn't causal... If you succeed at learning a language late in life, you clearly have an unusually healthy brain and your act together.
Yes, it's possible. For me it went like this.
1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.
The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.
Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.
2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.
3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.
I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.
Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.
If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.
Immersion is key. Get a basic vocabulary going, then go to meet-ups, listen to music and watch tv shows in the language.
I did with what I consider a success. Basically, duolingo and then some beginner podcasts and then netflix with language reactor. I do understand pretty well, did not do much to speak - I dod not cared.
The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.
My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.