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How to learn a foreign language as an adult: the definitive guide
Anna Hollingsworth
19 — 24 minuty

On a global scale, it’s monolingualism — only speaking one language — and not multilingualism that is a rarity. Most people in the world learn more than one language. They may speak a local or tribal language with their families, be educated in the country’s official language and conduct business in yet another.

In the EU about two-thirds of working age adults speak more than one language. However, just under two in three Britons are unable to hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue. The trend is clear in schools; from 2017 to 2021 there has been a 5 per cent decline in modern language A-levels, from 19,885 to 18,715 entries.

A 2014 review commissioned by the government’s trade and investment department estimated that this “language ignorance” is costing the British economy £48 billion, or 3.5 per cent of the national income.

So is learning a language as formidable a task as much of Britain seems to think? And are we missing out on more than just economic benefits? The Times pulls together the latest science on what learning a language does to the brain and how to go about it.

Are some people better suited to learning languages?
Many will claim that they aren’t good at languages, they’re too old to learn or they simply don’t have a supposed language gene for it. So what does it take to learn a language?
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When it comes to individual differences, some of this depends on each individual’s cognitive make-up. Some learners will have better attention shift, for instance, being better at swapping between tasks. The kinds of standard language learning aptitude tests that are used by the Foreign Office or the military test people on their ear — how good they are at hearing the language and recalling sounds — as well as the grammar, or manipulating the building blocks of sentences.

“Those are two separate skills,” Dr Sam Hellmuth, a senior lecturer at the University of York, says. “Some people are really good at the sound system, and not so great at the building blocks. Some people are great at the building blocks, which is sort of like maths.”

Learners aren’t stuck with what they are born with, however. The more languages you learn, the better you will become at learning them, says Hellmuth.

“You can get better at pattern finding because you’ve seen how other languages work. You say, ‘Oh I see, this new language is doing it that way, they’re throwing the verb to the end like German does.’ You’re not fazed by new ways of being a language. And the same with sounds.”

Beyond cognitive abilities, motivation plays a key role. Research into the refugee population in Sweden shows that highly motivated learners have become very proficient in Swedish in a short space of time.

“There will be something in your aptitude, in the way in which your mental make-up that you were born with works, which will predict whether you become really good or not,” Monika Schmid, professor of linguistics at the University of York, says. “But much more important than that is that you make language learning an enjoyable experience for yourself. That is something everybody has to figure out for themselves.”

For her, this has meant re-reading books and re-watching TV series in different languages. At the moment, she’s reading Harry Potter in the Spanish translation, and previously she learned Dutch the same way. Star Trek comes with Spanish audio on.

Is it harder to learn as an adult?
Despite individual differences, the good news is that pretty much anyone can become fluent in any language at any age.
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“There’s one very important misunderstanding,” Schmid says, “which is that children learn languages faster than adults. That is not true.” In fact, the older people get, the faster they learn in certain respects, particularly in the initial stages.

However, it’s well established that learning a language as an adult poses challenges children don’t face. Children don’t have the multiple demands on their time that adults have, for a start; they don’t have to earn a living. More drastically, once we hit 20 or 25 years of age, we have passed our cognitive peak, meaning our memory becomes less effective, hampering the learning and use of language.

There are also differences when it comes to different areas of language. Vocabulary, for example, remains easier to learn than phonology — the sound patterns; for example, what sounds can appear together — or syntax, what we roughly think of as grammar. Older learners are less likely to have native-like pronunciation.

“Accent is very fine-grained movement of our articulatory apparatus, of the lips, the tongue and so on,” Schmid explains. “It’s possible that the longer you speak one language as your native language, the more ingrained and the more entrenched the way you move your mouth when you speak becomes and that it becomes more difficult to deviate from these gestural habits the older we get.”

It’s also possible that we simply get worse at perceiving the fine details of a language with age. Infants begin to ignore speech sounds that are absent from the language around them between six to nine months old, according to Hellmuth.

“You just stop hearing different sounds that are not relevant to the languages you’re learning. Learning to overcome that, breaking the habit of ignoring sounds that don’t matter, is the thing you have to overcome in language learning.”

Some learners go on to sound completely indistinguishable from native speakers. Even if you don’t, however, it doesn’t have to matter. “For most of us, the goal isn’t to pass as someone who grew up there. The goal is to communicate and to be understood, to be intelligible,” Hellmuth says.
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Some linguists believe that the human species has over the millennia evolved in-born learning mechanisms that are specifically tuned to the acquisition of language. According to them, babies are born with their brains knowing what to expect from language. This learning mechanism doesn’t last for ever, the hypothesis goes; the ability to use that language-specific knowledge to learn a new language is lost around puberty, or possibly earlier for some aspects of grammar. After that, we can still learn languages but we don’t do it through the dedicated mechanisms, instead falling back on our general learning ability, the same we would apply to mathematics, driving a car or anything else.

The idea of a critical window for language learning is, however, controversial among linguists. “Take ten linguists and put them in a room and there will be twenty different opinions about this,” Schmid laughs.

While it is undoubtedly an important question for linguistic theory and how the brain works, the existence of a critical window doesn’t make learning a language impossible past puberty; it could just be the case that we’re using a different mechanism to do so.

Putting it into practice

There are as many ways of approaching language learning as there are learners. Here language teaching experts share their tips and tricks.

Make mistakes

When Benny Lewis was learning Spanish, he would copy the mannerisms of Captain Jack Sparrow, the swaggering adventurer from Pirates of the Caribbean.
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“If you imagine his character, he always has these dramatic pauses. I would implement that in my Spanish. I would say, I want to go . . . ” Lewis pauses and draws, like Sparrow, an exaggerated spiral with his finger, “to the supermarket.”

He had spent six months in Spain and had not learned the language despite taking classes. Things changed rapidly when he decided to simply start speaking, as he puts it, “caveman Spanish”. Channelling Captain Jack gave him time to think of the words he was missing without the uhms and ahms. Within six months he was confident in Spanish.

Lewis now runs his Fluent In 3 Months blog, where he shares his language hacking tips. Making mistakes is key to his method. “My mantra is to speak from day one. That is by far the simplest way to get into it,” he says.

“I had to embrace a philosophy of: today I have a goal to make at least 200 mistakes. That completely transformed the experience because I was genuinely using the language.”

In addition to Spanish and his native English, he speaks fluent Portuguese, German, Esperanto, Italian and Irish Gaelic. Also in his repertoire are American Sign Language, Mandarin, Dutch and “a bunch of other ones, that if you gave me a little bit of time I could revise them in my memory to bring them out”.

Lewis only spoke English until the age of 20. Despite doing Irish Gaelic and German at school, he still couldn’t speak them. “If you’re bad at languages at school, that doesn’t mean that you’re bad at languages. It just means that you’re bad at languages at school,” he says now. “You can still be excellent at languages in real life.”

Find a language community

“In real life” means spending time surrounded by the language. Dr Ida Hadjivayanis, lecturer in Swahili at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where more than 40 different languages are taught, emphasises the importance of the language community. “You will learn to speak very fast and gain a greater appreciation and understanding of the language, its culture, its norms, its politics, its civilisation. We send our Swahili language students to Zanzibar among other places in east Africa for what we call the year abroad or a summer abroad.

“When these students return, they are fluent. They integrate when they are there; some live with host families and they become sponges, taking in the language, the culture and everything in between.”

Many language learners will be familiar with offers to switch to English when they want to try out their newly acquired skills. As Lewis sees it, the reaction doesn’t come about because the native speakers think you’re butchering their language but because they see the learner in discomfort. “I tell them, by the way, could we not use English because I really want to use your language, I’m really passionate to learn it. I try to smile and relax.”

He also makes an effort to fit in in terms of how he looks. When he went to Egypt, he knew Arabic well enough to have conversations, but people would keep using English with him. He grew a beard and changed his fashion sense: “Egypt is very hot, but I started wearing jeans and what I saw the locals wearing.”

Of course not everyone can go globetrotting to pursue language skills. For those living in monolingual areas, many language schools are now offering the option to attend online classes as an upshot of the pandemic. City Lit offers 27 languages, mostly online, whereas the London-based Russian Language Centre introduced online groups during lockdowns, which now look to become a permanent feature. Many university language centres will offer evening courses and conversation groups that are open to all.

Tune in to music and films

“The way I learned English when I was in Iran all those years ago was obviously pop records,” says Narguess Farzad, senior lecturer in Persian studies at SOAS. “Those days you had the Osmonds, the Monkeys, the Beatles. There’s a lot of repetition. Anyone can mimic these lyrics without really understanding but you begin to get your mouth over the words.”

She encourages her students to watch films they know well which are dubbed. The Sound of Music, for example, is dubbed beautifully in Persian.

“It’s not that you’re suddenly going to learn immaculate Persian watching The Sound of Music in Persian but somehow the patterns of speech, the tones, the stress, where it falls, they begin to be demystified.”

Short videos on everyday topics or clear instructions are useful as well. Simple recipe videos on social media, for example, will teach you the imperative with common verbs like wash, chop or bake. Another tip is aeroplane safety instructions. “You know whatever airline you travel in, there’s a pattern, it’s the same old instructions, and they’re usually slow. It’s just playing those, trying to watch it and see what you pick up.”

For foreign language screen time, see our listings of the best foreign films and TV series.

Take the Lego approach

Farzad encourages learners to play around with bits of language like you would with Duplo, then graduating to fine-grained bits like Lego. The idea is to have some verbs and doers — the entity doing the action — for the verb and come up with different simple combinations: I am going to go, Allie is going to go. “Just play around with them to see what you can make, almost like cookery,” she says. “You teach someone to make scrambled eggs, but they need to learn so many skills before you teach them to make mayonnaise or meringue. They just need to develop a feel for how these ingredients of this language work.”

Become a teacher

“The worst thing you want is an old-fashioned 1920s Latin teacher who shouts out things and the students have to copy,” Farzad says.

Instead, she gets her students to teach each other Persian structures from the beginning. “They always say to teach is to learn twice. I know that the student who’s taught the class how to do the comparative adjective in Persian will never forget it because they’ve had to research it, they’ve had to be imaginative.”

Drill in on the details, little and often

Dr Nada Elzeer, lecturer in Arabic at SOAS, focuses on the details. “Know that this is a whole new language with lots of new things to learn,” she says. “Know that you don’t have to learn them all in one go, but note every little detail down to visit and revisit at later stages, which is the best way for all that knowledge to become embedded in your head. Be organised, think about what study plan would work for you, draw it and stick to it.”

She says that when it comes to vocabulary, nuance is everything. “Every time you learn a new word, do not just add it to your list, but add it with details about the nuance and context in which it is used. Failing that, you cannot achieve that near-native ability to use vocab.”

“Little and often,” says Naresh Sharma, senior lecturer in Urdu and Hindi at SOAS. “Engage in small amounts of learning regularly, ideally every day.”

Find similarities

Most languages will be related to another language. The biggest languages in Europe, for example, all share Indo-European ancestry. Spotting common features and regularities can help with getting to grips with your target language.

In her teaching, Farzad emphasises the shared Indo-European ancestry of Persian and English, and sets out to demystify Persian by breaking up its structures and contrasting them with English. As an example, she cites “setare”, the word for star. The language doesn’t allow a consonant cluster such as “st” at the start of a word, so it has to either be preceded by a vowel or there has to be a vowel in between the consonants. Deleting the first and last vowels from setare gives star.

Learning from home
Whether you’re looking to finesse your vocabulary or to chat to a native speaker, there is plenty you can do from the comfort of your own home. Here are some of the best apps to try out.

Duolingo

If language learning as a game appeals to you, try Duolingo. The app teaches you in bite-sized chunks and comes with the opportunity to unlock new levels.

Memrise

“If it isn’t fun, you just won’t learn,” Memrise promises. The website and app offer courses in dozens of languages, complete with videos of native speakers. Memory techniques and word-concept associations are the key here.

WaniKani

If Japanese is your chosen language, WaniKani helps you with your kanji. It promises that you can tackle more than 2,000 of the characters in a year and a half.

Italki

The online platform connects teachers and learners through video chats in more than a hundred languages. You can pay and book sessions with teachers, or find a language exchange partner for free.

Brain benefits
Whatever happens in the brain with learning a language, research shows that it can have beneficial effects that go beyond linguistic ones. Dr Roberto Filippi, associate professor at University College London and director of its Multilanguage and Cognition Lab, highlights the relationship between knowing more than one language and general cognitive skills.

Skills involving executive function are one such area. The umbrella term covers three components: the capacity to ignore irrelevant information, such as noise, the ability to switch from one task to another, and the capacity to keep the previous task in your memory.

“We can see some evidence that when bilinguals perform a task measuring these kinds of non-verbal abilities, they outperform the monolingual speakers,” Dr Filippi says, although he cautions that these effects aren’t seen in all studies. “Outperforming means they are generally faster in doing these kinds of tasks, and also in some cases they are even more accurate because they can concentrate, they can focus their attention in a more efficient way.”

When someone knows more than one language, they will need to suppress the others when using one. This causes a competition and a multilingual speaker’s mind will always be engaged in this exercise. Eventually this will produce beneficial effects in non-verbal tasks as well such as selective attention.

Knowing more than one language also forms part of the cognitive reserve when it comes to protecting the brain from the effects of ageing. Although the mechanisms aren’t clear, some studies suggest that bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia by as much as four or five years.

Which language to choose
Language learning is open to all of us, throughout our lives, but which one should you go for? Learners who pick some of the less familiar languages will know the frustration of being asked “but isn’t it the hardest language in the world?” Those learners know that the comments are misguided.

“There are not languages that are universally, intrinsically harder or simpler,” Schmid emphasises. If that was the case, children learning their first language would progress much faster or slower depending on which language they’re learning; instead, all children move through language acquisition at more or less the same pace, irrespective of what language they’re exposed to.

Whether a particular language will be easier or harder to learn depends on the learner’s mindset, what languages they already know and how they compare to the new one. Spanish, for example, can give an English speaker a relatively easy time in terms of vocabulary, as many words overlap with or sound similar to English ones. Its system of verbal tenses, however, is likely to be a challenge.

Similarities may also turn against the learner. There is evidence that learning things that look the same but are subtly different is much harder than learning a completely new thing. Hellmuth gives the example of the French word “Pâques” — Easter. English speakers tend to assume that French has p and b just as English does. Yet Pâques is pronounced with an initial sound like that in English back; a French word that is written with an initial b will in turn have a much stronger b sound. Most English speakers will apply their English p and b to French, which will contribute to their English-sounding accent.

The same goes for alphabets. While many languages share the Roman alphabet, the letters will represent wildly different sounds in different languages. This means unlearning the mapping between the letter and the sound in English and then adding the mapping to the new sound in the new language. When learning a language with a different writing system, there is no need to unlearn the old mappings first.

Hellmuth has found this when learning Hindi: “I learned that a squiggle to the left means he, and then I know it’s a he and that’s it, every time I see it, I know, oh that’s a he.”

Some writing systems can be more complex to learn than others, though. It has been suggested that this is the case for systems that mix ideograms and alphabets, such as Japanese, where there are two scripts, hiragana and katakana, that represent sounds, as well as Chinese-based kanji symbols, which represent ideas. On the other hand, scripts like Arabic or Korean will tell the speaker more or less exactly how the word is pronounced.

Whichever language you pick, there is a good chance that you won’t be the only one speaking it in the UK. In the 2011 census, 4.2 million people in the UK reported having a main language other than English; and in London schools, children speak over 300 different languages. As monolingual as many are, the opportunities are there.