I’ve gone a little quiet here over the last few weeks. I want to say that I was too busy learning Arabic, but that would be a lie.

I’ve been building a language learning app.

I know.

Why build another app when there is already a multitude of apps out there, some of them quite good?

The reason is simple: there are some things I need from a tool — most importantly, the freedom to learn the way I want to learn instead of following a syllabus — that none of them quite give me. And if I need that, chances are other people need it too. So that’s why I’m building it.

Plus, it turns out that now that the coding part — which I can’t do anyway — can be delegated to AI, building things is actually quite fun.

I know this all sounds a bit vague, but I can’t get into details just yet. I will tell you more as soon as I can. Promise.

In the meantime, I want to share some thoughts on what I believe actually matters when you’re learning a language. These are the things that have been swirling in my head for a long time, and that got me building this app in the first place.

Curiosity, not curriculum

We are all naturally curious beings. This is how we learn as kids — we desperately want to know what’s inside the flashlight, so we take it apart on a camping trip (get yelled at by our mom, maybe) and by the end of it, when it suddenly stops working, we’re the only one who knows how to put it back together.1

Yet, when we’re learning a language as adults (or often, even as kids), we’re asked to temporarily put aside our curiosity and focus on the curriculum. Want to know what that character in your favorite show just said, and why? Too bad, you’re gonna have to wait and go through two years of boring grammar instruction, then MAYBE you can go there. That’s backwards.

I don’t want to learn Arabic by listening to fake dialogues of people talking about random stuff. I want to learn it by listening to funny perimenopausal women talk about their symptoms on a TV show (That’s just me. You might not be interested in listening to perimenopausal women at all. That’s ok too.)

I’m envisioning a world where curriculum follows us, not we it.

Language first, grammar second

Listen, I’m the first person to be excited about grammar. I drool when I look at verb paradigms. I spent 10 years in academia researching a grammar of an endangered language. And yet I am convinced that for the vast majority of people (myself included, if I actually want to use this language rather than get high on its conjugation tables), the best way is to start with language use (reading, listening, whatever) and field grammar questions as they come up.

Think about it: why would you drill the entire paradigm of 15 Finnish cases if you haven’t encountered even one of them in context yet, and when in real life you’d only ever use four?2

There is no one best place to start

Who said you need to start by learning how to introduce yourself, or how to check into a hotel? Or by listening to a fake dialogue between two strangers talking about things you don’t care about? Nobody.

You can start anywhere. ANYWHERE.

Heard a song in Greek you can’t get out of your head? Start there. Get curious about why so many words end in -o and in -is (the answer is because it’s a love song, and -o is the first person ending for verbs, and -is is the second person (‘you’) ending). Then maybe learn to sing the chorus.

When I was learning Yiddish two years ago, the only thing that interested me was parsing the Yiddish songs that my father had listened to when I was a kid. I didn’t learn to speak Yiddish, but that’s just because it wasn’t my goal. If I did want to learn how to speak, the songs would have made as great a starting point as any.

Exposure, not memorization

Forget flashcards. Those don’t work. Your brain only holds onto things that you’ve encountered again and again, in contexts that were somehow relevant to you — not things you’re trying to drill into it.

Like, there is this show that I love —Bala Muwahade, the Israeli Arabic version of the Australian show “You Can’t Ask That!”, which invites people from different misunderstood groups (like, nurses or perimenopausal women 🙄… or children of divorced parents) to answer earnest questions from the audience.

At the beginning of every episode, when the host explains the rules, she says, in Arabic (obviously): “Take the question card, read it out loud, and then throw it in the air.” And when they’re ready to answer, participants say, “I’m ready for the first question.”

I know these sentences so well now that I can say them in my sleep. If one day I end up on that show as a member of some kind of misunderstood group, I would totally be able to say, without blinking, “ana jahzeh lal-sual el-awwal” (”I’m ready for the first question.”)

So there it is. These are the things that I think are really important in language learning, and they are why I’m making this app.

It’s a little bit scary to say it out loud just like this, because I really want this thing to work, and what if it won’t work and I’ve already told all the people in the world about it?

Or — what if I spend two more years on this and in the end it’s just me and seven beta testers (three of them my siblings who are staying just out of politeness)?

Who knows. But I think it's worth building — and I hope it turns out good.

P.S. I’m hoping to invite a small number of early testers this fall. I won’t be able to invite everyone (because it turns out apps cost money to run), but if you’d be interested in trying it and giving me feedback when it’s ready, I’d love for you to leave your details here.

But it’s hard to internalize a language just by reading about its grammar — I needed to do something with it. Language drills and exercises aren’t my thing (and that site didn’t have any anyway).

So I went straight to children’s cartoons. Peppa Pig. Peppa Pig was already part of my world in two languages, since my daughter liked watching it in both English and Russian.

I picked an episode about a Tooth Fairy and decided it would be my learning resource. I gave myself two weeks to understand it fully — to parse every sentence, and maybe even retell the story in my own words. I committed to this goal publicly on Facebook, because I thrive under that kind of pressure, apparently.

For the next two weeks I was immersed in that episode, going through it sentence by sentence, fielding grammar questions as they came up — either by returning to that grammar site or by plugging a verb into Cooljugator.

Of course, I wasn’t just learning about Tooth Fairies in Finnish. I was learning a whole lot of language along the way.

By the end of it, I could follow the whole episode from start to finish, mouthing everybody’s lines in Finnish, and was already choosing the next episode to jump into.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just stumbled onto something that would change how I think about motivation (and progress) in language learning.

Usually, when people talk about motivation, they talk about finding your why.

Why are you learning French? Because you’re going to Paris in the summer? Because you want to read Molière in the original? Because you want to speak to your in-laws? For job opportunities? Or simply because you like the sound of French and you’ve heard that learning a language can protect against cognitive decline down the road? Whatever it is, the advice is the same: you need a clear, long-term, noble, emotionally resonant goal to guide you.

The thing about a ‘why’ is that it might point you in the right direction — the type of vocabulary you need, or whether to focus on reading or listening — but beyond that, an abstract why won’t take you very far when it comes to actual learning. In most cases, making it your North Star is a recipe for frustration.

I know why I’m learning Arabic. I live in Israel, where 20% of citizens are Arab, and our complicated dynamic — to put it mildly — isn’t helped by the fact that spoken Arabic isn’t taught in schools, so I went through the local school system without ever learning it.

And, most importantly, because I want to stop feeling my internal alarms go off when I walk through an Arab neighborhood, when I buy cucumbers at the Mahane Yehuda market, or when I get into a taxi with an Arab driver. Because I want to stop being scared of this language the way I used to be. (I’ve written a lot about my evolving relationship with Arabic on The Wrong Globe, if you want the whole story.)

That is my big, clear, emotionally resonant why.

But that why isn’t going to get me very far when it comes to actually placing my butt in a chair (or my earbuds in my ears) and getting to work. When I sit down for another episode of that show that takes me a week to understand, my why isn’t what drives me. Literally, in that moment, it could have been any other language I know a little bit of. The little bursts of dopamine you get when you recognize a word or a phrase don’t care about your why.

So what is going to propel you forward, if not a big, clear, emotionally resonant why?

What you need instead is a tiny goal. I call it a USSM goal — an ultra-specific, super-motivating goal. (It’s like a SMART goal, except less business-y and more exciting.) A goal so clearly defined, so specific to you, and so motivating that it makes you want to jump up, leave everything, and go work toward it right away.

Goals like…

▪ I will listen to one hour of Levantine Arabic a day

▪ I will achieve B1 level (whatever that even means) in Spanish by February

▪ I will finish three levels of Duolingo by the time my free trial expires (this one is a little better, just because it motivates you to save some money that would be better spent elsewhere)

…do NOT make great USSM goals.

Let’s face it: who gets excited about the vague prospect of listening to a foreign language for 60 long minutes (listening to what, exactly??)? It sounds like a chore.

A good USSM goal has something to do with using the language, not just studying it. Yes, yes, even if you’d only learned the alphabet and basic greetings the day before.

Here are some good USSM goals:

• I will understand (and sing!?!) one Joe Dassin song by the end of October.

• I will place my order in Thai next time I go to that Thai restaurant.

• I will understand the first three minutes of Bala Muwahade in Arabic by the end of the week.

• I will understand the first paragraph of my late grandmother’s letter to my grandfather in German.

See? A why is an abstract thing. A USSM goal is a very concrete thing.

“I will understand one episode of Peppa Pig in Finnish by the end of two weeks” was my first USSM goal with Finnish, before I came up with this genius acronym.

Crucially, once you have your goal, you reverse-engineer it. A USSM goal isn’t a North Star you glance at occasionally while doing your regular lessons — it’s the thing you’re actually working toward. You’re not doing Duolingo, vaguely hoping that one day you’ll understand that Joe Dassin song. You can still do Duolingo, but now it’s a supporting resource, when you need a bit more passé composé practice to understand why “j’ai beaucoup changé” is conjugated that way. The song is now your main resource. The rest of the language barely exists, except insofar as it helps you get through it.

A good USSM goal feels just slightly out of reach to keep you on your toes.

And it doesn’t have to be time-bound. I like mine to have a deadline because I’m motivated by pressure, but if that stresses you out, you can totally skip it. A good USSM goal should be motivating enough on its own. Maybe you want to take your time getting to the point where you understand that whole first paragraph of your grandmother’s letter, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A why is a nice-to-have. A USSM goal is a must. You can learn a whole lot of language without knowing why you’re learning it, simply jumping like a kangaroo from one USSM goal to the next.

I know I’m past my fear of Arabic. But I’d never have gotten there without listening to real people speak on Bala Muwahade (and other shows) one satisfying three-minute chunk, one USSM goal, at a time.

So, what’s your USSM goal? I’d love to know.

If this post changed how you’re thinking about your language goals, forward it to someone who’s still clinging to their ‘why’. Or if you're a writer on Substack, recommend The Language Obsessive from your Dashboard > Recommendations.

If the language in question was Arabic, my attempts to translate anything (by saying it out loud — which I preferred — or typing) would often end like this:

Google Translate is problematic in the best possible scenario, but it’s especially problematic with Arabic. Because Google Translate only does Modern Standard Arabic, which is very different from what I was interested in: Levantine Arabic. The different dialects of Arabic are more like different languages (like French and Portuguese — related but not mutually intelligible).

Now with AI, things have changed for the better. Now I’ve more or less figured out, through some trial and error, how to tame Gemini for my language learning purposes.

Specifically, how to make it into my listening assistant, because listening is what I do these days.

Saying things out loud (didn’t work so well)

At first, I set up a dedicated thread to help me translate words and sentences from the content I’m watching.

I wanted to be able to say things out loud because 1) I like saying things out loud and I think it’s good for me, and 2) it is faster than typing.

I shared the video I was watching with Gemini (it can now ‘watch’ videos) to make sure we’re on the same page and to avoid any misunderstandings. Then I wrote this prompt:

It seemed like enough guardrails for it to do what I wanted. And at first (like, the first three or four translation attempts) things were going pretty well. I was saying things, and Gemini was translating them.

Then at some point, it understood me so well that it switched to speaking to me in Arabic.

I was flattered. And also stoked to discover (when I caught the phrase ihtiyar mumtaz ‘great choice’) that Gemini is as encouraging in Arabic as it is in English.

But this wasn’t ideal. Because now I was spending 20 minutes trying to decipher what the hell it actually said, because my pride didn’t allow me to ask it to please repeat it in English 🙄.

After that, things quickly went downhill. It started misunderstanding me and generally making things up.

The whole thing culminated in me apparently saying a Korean swearword (For the record: I did not say ‘the word’. That’s just what it heard):

I mean, I WAS at a point where I wanted to swear, but not in Korean because I didn’t actually know any Korean swearwords until that moment.

After that, Gemini got into its head that we’re learning Korean and couldn’t be convinced otherwise.

I lost patience.

A better way: Screenshots with subtitles

Then I found a better way.

The videos I’m watching come with Arabic subtitles, so now I simply take a screenshot of the utterance I’m interested in and send it to a dedicated Gemini thread.

Here, Gemini is pretty good at doing what I asked it to do: transcribe the utterance in Arabic and Roman transliteration, translate it, and break it down for me.

Only a couple of times it got distracted and commented on people’s clothes instead.

(btw the same set-up seems to work with ChatGPT. I use Gemini because my free ChatGPT credits run out too quickly.)

I try to keep one thread per show, but I’m not super organized like that. Gemini doesn’t seem to mind. I keep the thread open on my phone so I can quickly screenshot, share, review what it said, and keep watching.

Then I forget to delete the screenshots from my camera roll, so 15 years from now Google Photos will probably send them to me as ‘memories.’

The cherry on top

What I really like, though, is that often Gemini goes beyond just translation and explains idioms and important cultural context that Google Translate would never be able to go into.

Like, I was watching the Arabic version of the show ‘Come Dine With Me’ and the host said a sentence where I only understood the word ‘our week’. What he was saying, literally, was ‘Our week is musk’, but before I knew it or had a chance to wonder what it even means, Gemini volunteered this explanation:

In another episode of the same show, I heard a sentence where I understood only the words ‘if’, ‘see,’ and ‘teeth’. I sent the screenshot to Gemini and got this. (He got the participant’s name wrong, but that’s ok):

And sometimes, especially if I’ve chosen ‘learning mode’, it volunteers grammatical information or prompts me to jog my memory about grammar. This isn’t essential, but it’s a nice touch:

So all in all, when it doesn’t accuse me of swearing in Korean, Gemini and I are pretty good friends.

I like that I don’t need to spend ten minutes figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. And I like that I get the occasional relevant cultural context.

I’ll keep figuring out how to make AI work for my learning, and I suspect most of you are still figuring it out too.

If you’ve found something that works — for Arabic, for Korean, for Tagalog, for listening, for reading, or anything else — I’d really like to know.

If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending The Language Obsessive to your readers. I write about language learning from the inside. (Go to Dashboard > Recommendations)

I found an app called Radio Garden that lets you roam the globe listening to live radio stations in different countries, and zoomed in on Finland. I spent some time searching for local radio stations that didn’t just play music all the time (it wasn’t easy) and picked two or three favorites.

It sounds like a good idea in principle — and Radio Garden is amazing, it’s like Google Earth for radio — but it didn’t work in practice.

There was obviously no transcript, no translation, and no subtitles, which is a problem if you’re a beginner with zero listening experience, who can’t even recognize the boundaries between words.

I’d be sitting there (or walking) and listening very intently, and every 90 seconds I’d hear a familiar word (jalkapallo ‘football’ - it’s a sports show!!!) and do a little happy dance.

Luckily, it took me only two days to understand that I was wasting my time. That I was taxing my brain and not getting much out of it. That whatever I could learn from it, I already did, which is: that people all over the world prefer to listen to Elton John on the radio.

Useless listening. That’s what it was. That’s the term I wish existed in language learning spaces, instead of the terms people use: ‘passive’ listening vs ‘active listening’.

Because, honestly, the term ‘passive listening’ is either misleading or actively harmful.

What is ‘passive’ listening?

I’m not sure exactly what people mean when they say ‘passive’ listening. Listening to content while doing something else? But there is nothing passive about it, or there shouldn’t be.

That’s exactly the problem.

Some people say that ‘passive listening’ is just playing content in your target language in the background while doing other things and hoping your brain will just absorb it. Because, the reasoning goes, this is how babies acquire language, by being constantly exposed to it.

The problem is that your mind is different from a baby’s. It’s the baby’s job to absorb everything going around her because she needs to learn how to survive in this world.

Your mind has already learned how to survive very well without spoken Vietnamese. In fact, it has learned to effectively filter out things that are not necessary for survival, and spoken Vietnamese belongs in that category.

(By the way, just because that baby is not taking any notes while listening, doesn’t mean she’s doing passive listening.)

Some people would say that my Radio Garden session counted as the 'passive' kind. But it didn't feel passive. It felt like my brain working super hard and getting almost nothing out of it.

What useful listening looks like

I still like to listen a lot, and I do the vast majority of my listening while doing something else, because I’m a single mom and my time is limited.

When I was learning language after language for a year, like a madwoman, 80% of that learning was done by listening while going about my daily life.

Even now, with Arabic, sometimes this is the only sort of listening I do for days.

But whether I listen while multitasking, or sit down for a super intense listening session there is nothing ‘passive’ about it. I’m always actively listening, at the very least trying to understand the gist of what is being said.

And I’ve learned to choose my listening content more wisely. For Finnish, after Radio Garden, I quickly switched to Peppa Pig (Pipsa Possu). It has subtitles (helpful), plus — cartoon characters tend to speak more clearly than sports commentators on the radio.

With Arabic now, I can listen to grown up shows without subtitles, because most of the time I can at least reliably parse where one word ends and the next begins.

Occasionally, if I’m tired, I might listen to stuff I’ve listened to earlier and already understand very well. This is as ‘passive’ as it gets.

There is really no such thing as passive listening or active listening. There is just useless and useful listening.

I don’t know if there’s a magic threshold for how much you need to understand for it to be useful (70%? 43%?) - it’s hard to say. But I think if you can get the gist of the story, if you recognize the boundaries between words, if you feel like you’re enjoying yourself because you’re getting at least a little bit of the story (and not just one stray word every 90 seconds) — then I’d count it as useful.

‘Useless’ listening is worse than nothing

Listening to content and managing to understand only one word every 90 seconds = useless listening.

Listening to content in the background and not trying to understand it = also useless listening.

Some people say that even these kinds of listening are better than nothing. I disagree. They’re worse than nothing. Why?

The second kind teaches you to filter out the language you’re trying to learn.

The first kind uses valuable brain energy without giving you much in return.

You’re much better off listening to some relaxing music, or nothing, and then coming to your actual, useful listening session freshly rested.

So if you’ve been half-heartedly playing French radio on your tired drive home from work (and wondering why it’s not improving your French), I hereby give you the official permission to switch stations and listen to some Elton John.

If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending The Language Obsessive to your readers. I write about language learning from the inside. (Go to Dashboard > Recommendations to add a recommendation)

I know the grammar and can have a simple conversation (occasionally even on sensitive topics), but the moment someone isn't speaking directly at me, I understand close to nothing.

So I’ve been doing a lot of listening.

Here is what you would see if you peeked into my living room at 11 am on a Tuesday:

I’m sitting in a deep squat at my coffee table, laptop open in front of me — because apparently, sitting in a deep squat is good for your hip health and we should all do it for at least ten minutes a day, so I might as well do it while I listen. I’ll take way longer than ten minutes, though, so I’ll change positions a few times.

One show I like to watch is Bala Muwahade (literally ‘No Offence’) on the Israeli Arabic language channel. It’s a version of the Australian show ‘You Can’t Ask That!’ that invites people from misunderstood groups to answer questions from the public (sent in advance).

It’s educational, entertaining, and actually quite moving. These are the questions you’d never dare ask someone to their face, and they make people open up in ways that are hard not to connect with. Some questions are insensitive or genuinely stupid (one of the questions on the episode about eating disorders was ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’), so people also get a chance to explain why something is a dumb question.

Before I get myself into my deep squat, I might listen to the whole episode — it’s about 25 minutes — while I’m walking somewhere or washing dishes. Sometimes I challenge myself not to look up the title from the start, but to figure out, even in general terms, what the episode is about.

This show is waaay above my level. On that first pass, I understand maybe 20%, and I’m lucky if I get the topic right.

This is not ideal.

The ideal is to listen at a level just slightly above our current level. In practice, though, it’s rarely possible to find content at that precise level that doesn’t also bore you to death.

This show does not bore me to death. I’ve watched episodes featuring divorced women, transgender people, parents of special needs kids, nurses, people in their eighties — to name a few — and I found them all fascinating.

The episode I’ll walk you through here is one about children (and grown children) from divorced families.

Once I settle into that deep squat, I watch the episode in two- to five-minute chunks, because this is roughly how long it takes people to answer each question. During this part, I’m not doing anything else. Not walking, not washing dishes, maybe not even scratching Misu’s ear. Because I want all my attention on the video.

Or rather, on the audio.

First, I listen to the chunk with my eyes closed. No kidding. Closing your eyes not only prevents you (me) from seeing the Hebrew subtitles but also removes visual clutter, freeing you to focus entirely on the audio.

Seriously, try it. You might be surprised how much more you catch.

I might listen to the same chunk two or three times before I look at the screen, and every time I catch a little more.

Take this chunk, for example, where people are answering the question “Who do you live with?” On my first listen, I caught only a few scattered words and phrases: “house…” “I have…” “I grew up with my mom…” “They asked me: with whom…. ”

On the second listen, I understood that the two kids both said “I have two houses” (ʕandi biteen) and… “my grandmother’s house….” and “only my cat…”

When I stop catching new words — or by the fourth listen, whichever comes first — I open my eyes and read the Hebrew subtitles (The Arabic subtitles are also there, but they’re too much effort to read, and if I did the whole thing would take me three hours.)

Now that I know the meaning, I listen again and usually catch more words I already knew but hadn’t recognized in the flow.

When I definitely can’t catch any more familiar words, I take screenshots with subtitles and send them one by one to ChatGPT — I have a thread set up to help me parse each utterance (more on that in a future post.)

Normally, I’d simply use Google Translate to figure out unfamiliar words, but Google Translate doesn’t do Levantine (Palestinian) Arabic well — it only does Modern Standard Arabic, which is essentially a different language.

Once I understand the meaning of each sentence and can break it down, I might say it a few times (this is called ‘shadowing,’ where you repeat sentences after the native speaker) before moving on to the next one.

Crucially, my goal isn’t to understand every word, but simply to understand what people are saying. And yes, even then it takes a while.

Sometimes, I take a side trip. For instance, if there is a sentence I like, I might say it a few times, maybe converting it to first person and past tense (and maybe also take the time to write it down in Arabic if I’m feeling particularly masochistic).

Or I’ll encounter a new verb form and want to find out what it would look like in the past tense. I haven’t decided if these side trips are the best use of my time, but there we are.

At my current level, without distractions or side trips, I’m lucky if I get through three minutes of a video in one session. A session runs from one to one and a half hours. By then, I hit the point of diminishing returns because my brain is totally fried.

Do I feel like I've made progress by the end of the session? Depends what you mean by progress. I've made progress with this particular video — and that's not just good enough, that's exactly what I came here for.

There is probably a lot of dopamine stuff going on every time a word or a sentence clicks, which is why I don’t get bored. Plus, I genuinely connect with the people in the show, and I look forward to meeting them the next day.

I’ll start tomorrow’s session by watching the same three minutes again (maybe even a couple of times) before moving on to the next three-minute chunk.

It might take me a week or more to get through a single episode. Sometimes I abandon it halfway and start a new one. That’s fine too.

Do I feel like my Arabic is improving from session to session? No, not really. But that’s the wrong question.

I think of it like weightlifting. When you just start, you might go from 30kg to 60kg in deadlift in your first couple of months. But after that, each additional kilo might take a year.

Each session feels like nothing happened. But skip enough of them, and that kilo won’t come.

And that’s why you’re completely screwed if you hate what you’re doing.

💬 I’d love to know if any of your listening sessions look like this or if I’m the only loser who listens to the same three minutes on loop for an hour and considers it good times. Lemme know in the comments!

My listening comprehension in Arabic is severely lacking — especially when it comes to cooking shows — and I’m working on it by watching lots of TV.

And then it occurred to me that I need to tell someone about it.

Because I suspect that most people don’t know what the process of language learning looks like from the inside. They know what it should look like (“Listen to content slightly above your current level...” “10 minutes of learning every day is better than two concentrated hours on a weekend...” or whatever... ), but the reality on the ground is much messier and stranger than any advice out there.

I lived in this strange reality for 15 months, learning languages like it was my job, when I set out, two and a half years ago, to learn on average one language a month for a year.

I’m a linguist by training, and languages have always been my natural habitat, but that mega language learning experiment was something else. I started it because at that particular point in time, I needed an escape from reality. The world had just fallen apart, and grammar was the only system that still made sense.

I documented the whole challenge in another newsletter — the languages themselves, what I found in them, and what the year did to me. That newsletter, now called The Wrong Globe, has grown into something broader — stories about language, culture, and belonging.

But there was a whole layer of my 12 languages challenge that I just barely touched: the actual texture of the learning process, day by day. This is what The Language Obsessive is for.

Here I will share what I actually learned about learning back then, and what I’m still learning now. Because even though that challenge is over, I still find myself — almost always — in the middle of some language learning experiment.

I’ve been a language teacher before, and a language researcher, but I’ve always liked being a learner, an explorer, most — even when I was those other things.

Maybe you also love the learning process. Or maybe you kind of resent it and just want to find the least painful way towards the destination. Maybe you’ve had a nagging feeling that your 477-day Duolingo streak isn’t going to get you where you want to go — but you keep doing it anyway because at least it feels like you’re doing something.

Maybe you’ve been at this for two years but you still can’t understand a native speaker talking at normal speed, and you’ve started wondering if you’re just not a language person.

Maybe you don’t even want to learn how to speak and are wondering if you’re normal (spoiler alert: you are.)

The Language Obsessive is a place where we’ll get childishly excited about the languages we’re learning and unreasonably curious about how our mind acquires them.

This is not a “Get Fluent in 30 Days” course nor a “10 Proven Ways To Learn 200 New Words in Four and a Half Days” system.

There are theories and methods that we can reference and learn from, but I’m personally more interested in experimenting — with a new tool, a new way to dive into a language, a new way to listen, or a new way to trick your mind into thinking that you absolutely need this language — because honestly? We’re all different. And you never know what will work until you try.

About once a week or so, I will share a tool, a method, or an experiment — whenever possible, from inside the process — including the messy, the strange, the ridiculous, and the truly helpful.

I’m on a perpetual quest for what works for me, and I’m also curious about how other minds work — all of them, including the ones that are convinced they’re hopeless at this — because I happen to believe (although I have no proof) that there is no such thing as ‘bad at languages.’

I don’t know what works for you. I know some of what works for me, and I’m still finding out the rest. Let’s figure it out together.

➡️ Next time: I’ll show you what actually happens in that hour of listening, and why it’s a totally normal way to spend one’s morning.