NoaLingua Try the thing you keep putting off. You might like it.
Fifteen years of meaning to
For fifteen years, maybe more, I told myself I wanted to learn German. I come from a poor country, and knowing languages has always meant a comparative advantage — German most of all, because the German-speaking countries are the closest to mine. English I already had. That one was simply assumed.
Then, a little under two years ago, I decided. I was so sure that I booked the Goethe B2 exam for six months later — at a point when I could not introduce myself in German.
Fifteen days on Duolingo
And of course, like everyone, I made a Duolingo account and tapped away for fifteen days. My progress was miserable. To this day I do not really believe people learn languages on that app.
I started to panic a little. I had spent a twelfth of my time and still could not introduce myself, and I would have gone hungry in any German city. (If you are in the same place, here is what to use instead, including the cases where staying put is the right answer.) Then Instagram — that pimp — began feeding me posts from teachers and learners: HOW I REACHED B2 IN TWO YEARS.
Two years? I had thought B2 was the minimum level at which you could hold any kind of conversation. I looked into cancelling the exam. They would not refund it. And I sat there thinking: why did I ever believe anything worth having could be done in six months, and how arrogant was I to assume I was cleverer than an entire world that considers two years to B2 a success?
Then I found the polyglots
Around then I came across a man who speaks thirty languages, fifteen of them fluently. His name is Steve Kaufmann. And I did the arithmetic: if he had spent two years on each, that would be sixty years. So what did he know that I did not?
I started researching polyglots and how they actually study. The person who helped me most was Luca Lampariello, an Italian polyglot. I got interested in the science too — how memory works, how to optimise learning — and I went deep into it, and it became genuinely fun to test all of it on myself, as the lab rat.
I tried every method. What works, what does not. I installed and subscribed to — and I am not exaggerating — at least fifteen applications, each offering some kind of studying I wanted to try.
Six months later
In short: after six months I was sorry I had not signed up for C1 instead of B2.
I started to genuinely enjoy speaking German with people. I even applied for jobs in German. (I am a software engineer by trade — odd, I know, but no, I am not the social type.)
Then I began using the same methods I had used for the language on other things, and I got the job I wanted, with a good salary and remote work. For the first time I felt my brain working for me. And the motivation was there, because things were moving. The progress was material. Visible.
French, then Italian
When I started, I knew I would not stop at German. I did the same for French: booked the B2 exam six months out.
Worth saying — the whole time I was working full time, with a small child, keeping German alive, and now French on top. After three months I was already holding conversations fairly easily with native speakers on Tandem (which I recommend). Meanwhile I got an even better job offer. Everything was going the way it should. I was living far better than I had a year earlier, and I had the feeling that all of it came from one day deciding to learn German.
I passed French. I moved on to Italian. And guess what — B2 there too. I should mention that I had never seen what the exam looks like, and never studied for the exam. I just turned up.
What I worked out actually works
My native language is Serbian, but there is not much material in Serbian about the things that interest me, so ninety-nine per cent of what I consumed was in English — as, I imagine, it is for most of you.
So my tactic for any language was this: everything you used to watch, read and do in English, do in the language you are learning. Technology, science, space, chess — those are my areas, so I found German, French and Italian channels about exactly those. I found books in French about design patterns, C++, business, anything I cared about, and used an app that translated a word when I clicked it. I read websites in that language with a Chrome extension for it. I watched Netflix in the language I was learning.
Words from every source and every app, and sentences too, I wrote down. I built Anki decks and put them into one app that had spaced repetition. For grammar I used ChatGPT — I would send it a sentence and ask which tense this is, how it is formed, and so on. And I did not study in order. When a sentence came along that I did not understand: explain it, how is it formed, how does it conjugate.
But the idea is to stay on content that interests you. Once I got past that first period, I simply carried on watching videos and listening to audiobooks, because by then I could understand them. The good part is two birds with one stone: I was listening to audiobooks in French to learn something I needed for work anyway.
That is the only way to stay motivated. If you study “Marko goes to school, Marko comes back from school” — verb tenses, rules — the motivation disappears and it becomes painful within three days. Do it this way and it comes naturally.
On speaking
For speaking, I am not a believer in “just start talking to people immediately”. It is not pleasant, you have no words, you cannot say anything.
What I did was shadowing. Excellent technique. I hear a sentence and repeat it in the same tone. And once I could put normal sentences together, I moved to Tandem and talked to people. Before that — no. It is not enjoyable.
Fifteen subscriptions, and the thing I kept meaning to build
The point is to move everything into the other language. I was subscribed to LingQ, Language Reactor, Mate Translate, Lingua for reading books, Anki apps for spaced repetition, apps that offered shadowing repetition — I assembled a set of about fifteen applications. And I did not resent the money. I was just glad that in the end I had a setup I was happy with.
And since I am a software engineer by trade, I kept meaning — and meaning — to build something of my own that would bring all of those processes together and offer them in one place. I automated some of it for myself, but never all of it, and I kept putting it off.
And then, exactly like the day I decided about German, I just sat down. For about fifteen days I did nothing but write the plan: how I would organise it, what I would want it to have, what the optimal setup is for me. I built it feature by feature, testing on my own Italian, until I got to the point where I had moved over completely to my own Chrome extension — and the whole internet became my playground.
What went into it
Everything I wished I had had: shadowing on one click, spaced repetition, grammar explanations, practice games that all follow the spaced repetition schedule and come back at regular intervals to remind me what to study, PDFs that translate a word on click, then a fully aligned bilingual book one click away from a book in the language you are learning, conjugations on clicking a word — tense, the conjugation across every tense, grammar. A great many features. Everything I wanted to have had.
What comes next
I am also thinking about writing a plan — something explaining how to use it as well as possible (free, of course). Everything I learned, everything I put into the app, and how to use all of it optimally. In one place, everything I wish I had known.
I am thinking of putting it in the app: six-month plans, three-month plans, broken into real steps without big words. Concrete actions. Because everything looks distant until it is broken into its simplest parts — if you want to start a company, open a bank account so people can pay you, and suddenly it does not look so complicated. The point is that everything is complicated while it is discussed in big words.
If there is any interest in this app at all, I will start writing those plans and these articles, and taking the mystique out of language learning. Because it is not talent, and it is not anything else. It is a skill — and every polyglot will tell you the same.
PS. Duolingo is still angry and disappointed. I never uninstalled it, so it can remind me that I could have lost months on it — and lost “only” fifteen days.