The weird psychology of people who enjoy learning a language

Have you ever stopped to wonder why some people enjoy learning a language?

Some want to connect with other people and other cultures. They want to travel, and it's practical. Other people don't care. They might still like travelling, but when they're out and about they'd rather try the food or listen to the music than connect with people.

So why do some people love the journey of learning a language, and get so good at it, while others don't? If you can understand that difference, you can apply it to your own life. And if you're learning a language right now and struggling because you can't enjoy actually doing it, this is for you.

I'm James. I'm a native English speaker, I speak Spanish and Italian, and I've been learning languages for 13 years.

It always starts with an emotion

People start learning a language for an emotional reason. Maybe they've watched a film, or they've been travelling and met their partner's family in another country and thought, "Wait a minute, it would be really good to communicate with these people on a more emotional level."

So they go home, download an app, look for a course online and say, "Right, I'm going to learn Spanish." They learn the basics: hello, goodbye, a few phrases. And after a week or two they think, "Hmm, I'm not fluent yet. What's going on?"

At that moment you've got a motivation to get started. But if you're the sort of person who has new inspirations several times a day, you might switch what you're doing just as often.

Motivation is good for getting you started. After that you need systems built around your current lifestyle, so that motivation lasts long enough for you to actually see progress.

Find the moments in your life that are on repeat

So how do you go from an emotion to a routine you can rinse and repeat?

The first step is to find the moments in your life that happen every day. Maybe you commute to work or the gym every morning. Half an hour each way is an hour a day.

If you're currently listening to the radio or music in that time, the first thing you can do is swap it for your target language. For Spanish, I might listen to a podcast where two Spanish people talk about a topic clearly enough for me to follow. Even if I only understand 10% or 20% of the words, that's exposure.

There's a difference between active and passive listening:

• Active listening is paying attention to every word and actively trying to understand what's being said.
• Passive listening is when you're doing something else. You're driving to work, thinking about the day ahead, and you can hear the language in the background without really paying attention to the words.

Passive listening is powerful. People say "just move to the country" because if you live there, you can't avoid the language. You hear it on the radio in a taxi and on public transport. Passive listening gets you as close to living in that language as you can without actually being there.

Your brain is very good at picking up patterns. Over time it works out the intonation, the accents, the different ways of saying things and how fast people speak, without you even trying.

Use the spare five minutes

Another example: you've got five or ten spare minutes waiting for something. You're at the bus stop, or sat in the car outside a friend's house.

Open your favourite language app and do a few exercises. A few minutes every day, or every other day, adds up massively, because it fits into your life instead of needing extra time. And it compounds.

When you're good at something, it feels good

This is the simplest way I can put my next point: when you're good at something it feels good, and you want to keep doing it.

When I first started learning Italian, I didn't like it. I could already speak Spanish and I assumed Italian would be the same. Honestly, I couldn't be bothered.

My motivation came when I visited my partner's family in Italy. We sat around the table and they started speaking Italian. I could read their emotions and body language and pick out one or two words from my Spanish. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be good to actually understand what they're saying?" They're essentially my family-in-law. It was worth learning their language.

So I went home and tried. The spark of motivation was great, and then it faded.

So I asked myself: when's my next visit? How many months away is that? And how can I fit Italian into my life before then?

Every morning I had a 45-minute drive to work and about an hour back. That's an hour and 45 minutes a day. So I opened Spotify, found a podcast entirely in Italian and just listened. I didn't understand a word, apart from the odd one that sounded like Spanish.

I kept going for a few weeks, maybe a month. I still didn't feel like I knew anything. But then I heard Italian being spoken on the street in Manchester, and I recognised it. I didn't know what they'd said, but I knew it was Italian from the intonation and the accent.

That was exciting. It's a strange feeling when you hear something you've been learning out of context. And it told me the podcast was working, even on the mornings I was tired and couldn't be bothered and listened anyway.

It's like brushing your teeth. Sometimes you can't be bothered, but you do it because it's part of your life. If you can build language learning in the same way, and find a little buzz in it now and again, you'll keep going.

Get proof that you can actually speak

Maybe you're doing an online course. Maybe you've found a language exchange partner on an app or at a meetup, where you speak half in their language and half in yours.

Whatever you use, use it to collect evidence that you can actually speak the language.

The moment I started enjoying Italian was the first time I had a basic conversation without using a single word of English. My Italian was terrible. I was thinking of random words and sticking them together. It would have sounded like nonsense.

But with my body language, the topic we were talking about and what they expected me to say, we got there with broken Italian. They understood enough to fill in what I meant, and the conversation went well. It was only a 10-minute call, but I didn't speak a word of English.

I don't dislike learning Italian. I dislike being bad at something.

When I finished that call I thought, "Wow, that's amazing." And that's when I realised it.

A lot of people never get to that point. They study a language at school, get a bad grade and decide, "I'm not good at languages." But if you get to a point where you try, do it messily, laugh with the other person instead of at yourself, and say "let's give it a go, nothing to lose if it's wrong", the whole thing becomes more fun. You mess up, you think "ah, I should have said that instead", and you learn.

Make it a hobby, not a chore

Nobody forces you to play a game, go to the gym or do a bit of gardening. You do it because you like it.

So find the parts of language learning you actually enjoy. Maybe it's speaking, maybe listening, maybe reading or writing. I don't like writing or reading, but some people do. That's the point.

Then look back and celebrate the small wins. You don't have to be fluent. Having a conversation without speaking a word of English can be a goal in itself.

The difference between you and the person who orders for everyone

You know the friend on holiday who orders all the food in the restaurant, even though they come from the same place as you? You wonder how they got there.

They're just slightly more interested in the journey than you are. And you can do it too. You need to get good enough that it feels good, and fit it into your life so it isn't boring.

It doesn't have to be exciting every day. It just has to be fun enough that you don't give up for long enough to reach a good level.