Anne-Sophie W

Latest posts from Exnilingo

• When Native Speakers Just Answer In English

  Jan 27

  Some countries are simply kinder and more patient than others when foreigners try to speak their language, and that single factor can make the difference between a learning journey that feels empowering and one that feels quietly soul-crushing. If you manage to resist speaking too early to say absolutely nothing of substance, there comes a moment when you finally have to, or want to, step into real conversations and start using everything you’ve been honing in silence. That first real immersion into native speech can feel thrilling or absolutely terrifying, depending on your temperament, your ego, your resilience. And a surprising amount of that emotional experience depends on how people react when you open your mouth. I tend to think in terms of national tendencies rather than linguistic groups, because countries can share a language and still behave very differently. Individuals are all unique, of course, but patterns do exist, and some are so frequent they’ve turned into stereotypes. Take the Netherlands for example. Dutch people are very often called out for having an allergic reaction to foreigners trying to speak Dutch to them, which obviously makes integration into the Dutch society harder for both expats and immigrants. I have personally known people who sincerely tried to learn Dutch while living there and who invested hundreds of hours into paid courses and personal work, only to be answered in English year after year, no matter how persistent they were. At some point, it stops being funny and starts being emotionally draining. Because when you never get the chance to actually use what you’ve so long learning, it doesn’t just stall your progress. It slowly eats away at your drive. At some point, you can’t help but think: What was all that work for? It begins to feel like effort squandered with no real payoff. The explanation you usually hear from Dutch people to why they just reply in English before you’ve even finished your sentence, is that they genuinely want to help, that they feel second-hand embarrassment when someone stumbles over their words, and/or that they simply want communication to be fast, smooth, efficient. It reflects a cultural attachment to directness and practicality. Many Dutch people even openly considers that their language is useless and “stupid”, like a bastardized version of English, and prefer switching to English, which they believe is just more straight-forward. It is even said that Dutch might one day disappear, not because foreigners refuse to learn it, but because native speakers themselves are generally oddly indifferent to defending or preserving it. But that’s another topic altogether. In reality, the Dutch, but also the Scandinavians and the Germans, have a habit of throwing you an unsolicited English lifebuoy even when you never (consciously) signaled you were drowning in the first place. The truth is, they come for rescue precisely when they sense that you are struggling - it can be because you are speaking abnormally slowly, because you hesitate, because you use a weak voice (something we all do when we aren’t self-confident) or because your pronunciation is poor (which downplays your assumed level) when addressing them. The problem is that a conversation needs a strong start to have room to grow; otherwise, the other person gets bored or feels unsure how to keep it going. You can’t just stroll in like a beginner warming up. You are expected to show up like a job applicant with an overqualified CV, references, and a portfolio, or go home (in this case, not try to interact with them at all). If your vocabulary is broad, your grammar solid, and your accent more than passable, it becomes harder for people to justify switching to English. Some will still do it out of habit or sheer stubbornness, but at that point, it is probably not worth chasing their approval. In these harsh environments, talking to native speakers is not a sandbox where you experiment and make mistakes. It is closer to a final oral exam, except the jury is ruthless, and your performance becomes a public verdict on all the effort you have invested so far. French has its own reputation. Many learners feel discouraged by how French people respond to foreigners speaking French. The stereotype is that we understand perfectly well but refuse to engage, or that we compulsively correct every minor mistake instead of partaking in the conversation. What learners often report is that “the French understand very well, but choose to nitpick mistakes instead of speaking'“. But in reality, and in our defense, what feels clear and understandable to a learner often is not nearly as clear as they imagine. Native English speakers tend to be unusually tolerant of imperfect pronunciation and shaky grammar because English exists in countless varieties and is widely used as a second language. They navigate a world where they constantly have to adapt their own speech to accommodate non-native speakers, and make extra efforts to understand poor pronunciation and grammar. English is a very flexible language in terms of vocabulary and syntax, too, so making mistakes isn’t the end of the world, and mistakes are expected anyway. When it comes to French, and many other languages that are very syntax-heavy, pronunciation mistakes can genuinely distort meaning, and grammar carries a lot of structural weight. When French people correct learners, it is actually meant as help rather than hostility, even if it comes across as rude and unsolicited. French simply allows less improvisation than English. And this is true for many other languages: deviating too far from the expected pronunciation or structure makes speech truly harder to understand or unpleasant to listen to. The point is, many native speakers correct mistakes instead of discussing, because they judge that your level isn’t good enough to keep up with that would come next, so they choose to help you get things right instead. Some communities welcome your linguistic attempts like a heartfelt love letter or a restraining order. Portuguese people, for instance, are famously proud of their language and tend to take offense if you butcher it. Brazilians, on the other hand, are usually just thrilled that you are trying at all. You can show up speaking a chaotic cocktail of Portuguese, Spanish, hand gestures, and pure optimism, and they will still hype you up like you just delivered a TED Talk. They are generally happy to chat regardless, treating it as friendly mutual practice, especially since many of them learn Spanish anyway. Speakers of languages that foreigners rarely attempt to learn often react with genuine excitement, sometimes bordering on disbelief. The Philippines or Iran first come to mind. They don’t care about your mistakes and the lack of depth of what you’re saying. The sheer fact that you are trying to speak at all makes them really happy. Other places react with curiosity mixed with bluntness. Turkish people, for instance, typically openly look around and remark loudly that you are a foreigner instead of proceeding to conversing, which, trust me, feels absolutely jarring, especially given that the word for “foreign” comes from the word “savage”. Turkish culture places strong emphasis on diction, rhythm, and speaking “properly,” and deviations lead to social judgments about class, education, or origin. They are remarkably sensitive to accent and will sometimes fixate on the fact that someone is a German Turk or a French Turk rather than a “real” Turk, even when that person speaks fluently. I would spend hours talking with my then-boyfriend, drilling advanced grammar at a B2 to C2 level, training my pronunciation; only to be casually reduced to a “foreigner” every time I was speaking to someone. Even when my sentences were factually flawless and my pronunciation sounded clear to my own ears, the hesitation in my voice still betrayed me, and that was enough to keep me on the outside. (creaking violins play sadly) The way people respond when you try to speak their language can make you feel encouraged, validated, energized… or embarrassed, deflated and slowly less willing to even try. Which, let’s face it, will be detrimental to your language learning journey and even your mental health in the long run. You can’t expect strangers to enthusiastically endure shaky, hesitant conversations unless they explicitly enjoy that kind of thing. (Those who do are like emotional support unicorns sent by the language gods, but they’re rare. You can’t realistically expect to bump into this mythical species on a daily basis.) The truth is, most people don’t want to hold a conversation that feels like pushing a shopping cart with a broken wheel uphill. You have to walk in their shoes and meet them on their own linguistic ground, where they can trust that you will grasp the advanced vocabulary and syntax needed to express nuance, so the conversation flows naturally and feels genuinely enriching for them as well. And that’s only possible if you trust yourself to contribute meaningfully, instead of staggering through the conversation like a drunk flamingo and hoping your interlocutor does all the heavy lifting.

  

• Why Packing a Suitcase Won’t Make You Fluent

  Jan 11

  “The only way to really learn a language is to move to the country.” “Stop studying and just go. You’ll pick it up naturally.” You’ve heard it all your life, and you may even believe it. And if you’ve read me a little, you already know I have a tendency to reject what is commonly advised when it comes to learning languages. Not out of contrarian instinct, but because of what I’ve seen and lived myself: years of first-hand experience, and a lifetime of watching people around me struggle with the same thing. But why wouldn’t it be true? After all, when you’re abroad, you’re surrounded by the language. People talk. You read signs. You have to survive, so you have to talk. Well…at least in theory. Because none of this is entirely true anymore, and I’m not sure it ever was, and that’s the first problem. People around you talk, yes. But if you have absolutely no knowledge of the language, you have no anchor to hold on to. No crutch to help you make your first step. And people don’t talk the way textbooks prepare you for. They use colloquialisms, swallow half their words, rely on acronyms, speak backwards (hello verlan in French), or refer to inside jokes, shared situations, cultural references you simply don’t have access to. Which, incidentally, is also true in your own language. You can understand every single sentence and still miss the point entirely. (This happens to me often enough that I’ve decided it’s a universal human condition rather than a personal malfunction). And even if you do have a decent base, it’s not as if you’re going to stand or sit next to strangers and listen to them for hours. Well, admittedly, I did exactly that in Russia, and I wouldn’t recommend it. First, because it felt lonely. Second, because I was giving off strong someone should probably keep an eye on her energy. (Sad music playing internally.) When you’re abroad, you read signs, yes. Or… kind of. Many signs are translated into English. And when they’re not, say, labels in the supermarket, are you really expecting to learn much from the ingredients list of your shampoo or your yoghurt? You’re unlikely to remember those words, and they won’t help you start a conversation unless you want to ask whether that cream contains almond oil because you’re allergic to it, or whether it’s mosturizing because you have dry feet. Linguistically impressive, sure. Socially? A bit weird, let's be real. Especially if you can’t understand the answer and just stand there, wide-eyed, mouth slightly open, like a stunned deer. That’s the core problem when you know very little of a language: you can gather all the courage in the world to ask a question to start a conversation, but if the answer you get is completely incomprehensible, what exactly are you getting out of the interaction? It’s premature, discouraging, and often mildly humiliating. And that’s assuming you don’t give up halfway through the day out of sheer frustration and cognitive exhaustion, and retreat into the familiar realm of your phone, translating menus, the ingredients of a mosturizing cream for those dry feet of yours, or simply disconnecting from real life altogether by texting friends back home, listening to music, or putting on a comforting podcast that is, very deliberately, not in your target language. (Wow, that was an awfully long sentence.) Most “expats”, let’s be honest, end up using very little of the local language in daily life. Even the most motivated of them all. At the supermarket checkout, they repeat robotically unchallenging phrases like “by card, please” (“Mit Karte, bitte” has become a running joke in the German-learning community), apologize constantly for speaking badly, and eventually switch to English, while apologizing for switching to English. Sounds familiar? For a long time, this wasn’t my experience at all, and I admit I was quietly judgmental toward people who lived abroad for years without learning the local language. After all, what first drew me abroad (to Russia, to Ukraine and to Turkey) was precisely the desire to improve languages I had already begun learning. I had always moved with language as the destination itself, not as a by-product of a job, a relationship, or a life decision. In that sense, I had never really walked in their shoes. That changed in Prague, where I spent several months and, for the first time, became that person. I wasn’t emotionally invested in Czech, I relied on Russian to navigate, and English worked so smoothly that I never felt any real urgency to make an effort. There was no pressure, no necessity, no pull. And that’s when it became obvious: without desire or constraint, people just don’t put on the effort. That’s natural. When it comes to people who genuinely want to learn but feel unable to, they face several issues. They’re often too busy working all day, whether in their own language or in English, or they simply don’t know where to begin. Each attempt to speak tends to end the same way: freezing mid-sentence, switching to English out of embarrassment, avoiding conversations altogether and slowly isolating themselves, relying on friends or partners, or, if they persist in trying to talk, being answered in English anyway. In every case, it’s discouraging, and it usually cuts the learning process short before it ever has a chance to take hold. This is something expats in the Netherlands complain about endlessly: the Dutch are simply too proficient in English to let learners struggle quietly in Dutch. In such condition, how can you possibly progress? I knew a girl who had spent, I believe, six years in the Netherlands and eventually gave up entirely. Not because she didn’t care, but because she never found opportunities to speak. And that’s the point. Native speakers are not teachers. They’re not emotionally invested in your learning journey. When they talk to you, they want to have a good time too and not feel trapped in a conversation where thoughts can’t be articulated. It sounds harsh, but I’ve been on both sides, and both are awkward. It’s awkward to try your hardest and be answered in English. It’s awkward to let someone struggle in your language when you know you could both communicate faster and more comfortably in English (the language most learners already know best). With that being said, some cultures are more encouraging than others. Personalities matter too. But all of this deserves its own article. Yet what feels certain to me is this: Moving abroad in the hope that the language will magically seep into you is a bit like standing next to a gym and expecting to get fit by proximity alone: technically closer to the action; still doing absolutely nothing. In your real life, unless you’re a student or a professional whose responsibilities force constant interaction, how much do you actually speak or listen to your own language all day? Probably not that much. You may even spend hours in silence because your lifestyle allows it. Abroad, chances are you work in your own language or in English, or you don’t work at all and suddenly have a lot of empty time. It’s delusional to think you’ll be bathed in the language all day, everyday. On the street, you hear chatter you can’t engage in. Waiters ask how you want your coffee. Shop clerks ask if you need a gift bag. To which you automatically answer “Mit Karte, bitte,” because that’s what you usually say when you see a cashier. And…scene. After that mind-bending interaction, you call it a day. And if you have local friends…well, you’re friends because you can talk. Which means you’ll likely keep speaking the shared language you already have. Switching is hard once one language has been established. I once met a German–French couple who had met in Spain and had accidentally built an entire relationship in Spanish, even though they both could speak English. Using English together felt odd to them. So immersion is, paradoxically, very limited even when you’re physically where the language is spoken. Tragically ironic. So what—does immersion not work at all? Of course it does. Immersion just means being surrounded by the language, and yes, that part is essential. The real question is whether that kind of immersion is even achievable abroad when you’re a beginner, especially when your phone is permanently glued to your hand, as it is for most of us. And in my experience, no, not really. Simply placing your body in a country doesn’t do much unless you’re actively exercising the language and absorbing content alongside it. Otherwise, you’re not immersed - you’re just geographically elsewhere. What being abroad truly does is reinforce what you already know and, eventually, carry you toward mastery—but only once you’re capable of actually living in the language. That means working, building relationships, taking on responsibilities, and being addressed as a linguistic equal rather than someone others need to slow down for or simplify things for. At that point, being abroad becomes almost indispensable. If your target language is a piece of jewelry, this is where it’s polished: edges softened, details refined, depth revealed. Immersion should start at home. In the comfort of your own space, where you can actually exploit everything the internet has to offer: hundreds upon hundreds of hours of content, thousands upon thousands of paragraphs - far more exposure than you’ll ever get by hovering next to strangers like the creep I once was in Russia. This is immersion you can control, repeat, rewind, and survive. It’s also the closest thing adults have to the kind of immersion they once experienced naturally. As babies, then as children, we were surrounded by language every waking hour. We were spoken to constantly at home, then again at school, every waken hour of the day (admittedly that wasn’t many hours a day, and the brain was very much still under construction, but still). That density of exposure is what made language acquisition possible in the first place. As adults, we don’t get that kind of immersion for free anymore. In real life, that level of constant interaction simply doesn’t exist. No one is going to take you by the hand and teach you a language all day unless you’re paying for an alarming number of private lessons, or unless your partner (if that applies) agrees to speak to you like a very patient toddler for months on end, without ever losing their sanity. Which means we can’t just wing it and hope exposure will magically happen. We have to recreate immersion deliberately and actually exercise it. That’s why home-based immersion isn’t a fallback plan when you are too broke to move abroad; it’s a necessity. For all these reasons, I consider that the very concept of “immersion” needs to be rethought. Not as the starting line, but as the final phase of the learning journey (not that you ever truly stop learning a language, but you get the idea). So yes—immersion is crucial. Just not abroad. Not yet. Not until you have solid, reliable foundations to fall back on. Only once you’ve reached a level that allows you to navigate life almost like a native does immersion abroad truly unlock its power—and take your language from “good enough to survive” to “did you grow up here or something?”.

• "How many languages do you speak?"

  Jan 11

  If you’re anything like me - openly interested in foreign languages from a very young age (or not), and occasionally overheard speaking a few of them - you’ve probably ended up being known, willingly or not, in your small circle of family or friends, at work, or in your tiny rural town, as ✨a polyglot✨. Whether that’s a good thing or not really depends on what you plan to do with that flattering label. Because, come to think of it, it really is flattering. Most people, fuelled by traumatising memories of language lessons from their school years, are very aware of how intense, long and tedious learning a language is. So the mere idea that you haven’t done it just once, not twice, but several times? Surely that must mean you’re some kind of genius! It’s hard not to enjoy being on the receiving end of exaggerated praise about the supposed depth of your mind. So when you’re introduced as “the person who speaks tons of languages”, a sentence you mentally footnote immediately if you’re the humble and self-conscious kind, you don’t really know how to respond. Well, actually, you kind of do, because you’re already anticipating the question that almost inevitably follows: “Which languages?” You’re asked with wide eyes and genuine, dazzled interest. And unless you’re either extremely confident in your skills or mildly delusional about them, your next instinct is usually to launch into a brief explanation of fluency levels and why they’re much harder to define than people think. That is usually when you lose people’s interest. Because people don’t really want to hear you explain the intricacies of what speaking a language actually means (unlike you, my dear reader. I know you will happily read on). No, what people want is a demonstration. A proof. A performance. A visible token of your brilliance. In their minds, you are now a jukebox, and they are ready to toss the coins. You are a circus monkey doing hula-hoop on a walking globe rolling up onto a platform and back down again. (Something that I mention not for dramatic effect, but because that was the proud final act on my first year of circus school, so I can tell.) Because what is very likely to happen, if you agree to show off just a little bit, is that someone slightly cheeky will ask you something very specific: oh yeah, you speak Zulu? Then how do you say ‘Government is most stable when its decisions are mistaken for necessity’. Or something equally twisted, pretty much designed to put you on the spot, that son of a b…. And then there is, of course, the risk that someone around you has a complete command of the language you’ve just claimed to speak, whether they’re native or not, and simply wants to switch and chat with you. Not out of malice. Just out of genuine pleasure. This is where your credibility can collapse dramatically if you’re not quite as good as you may have implied, or as people have generously assumed. You lose instant aura points, as Gen Z would say, and there is no real recovery from that. So better safe than sorry: the safest bet is to never brag about your language skills to begin with, and to not show off when prompted even if you are pretty good. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, you little monkey. Even if you’re just asked to say something relatively easy, like “I tried to study and I ate instead.” Speaking on demand is a strange enough concept to make anyone freeze, even when they genuinely can speak. And there is always the added risk that stress will make you stumble over pronunciation, which immediately casts doubt on everything else you’re saying. People start wondering whether you actually speak the language or are just babbling something vaguely foreign-sounding. There is, unfortunately, a strong correlation between pronunciation and the level of mastery people think they’re witnessing. Which is deeply unfair, when you consider that someone can know a language in depth - its vocabulary, its grammar, its expressions - and still never quite sound the part. Pronunciation carries authority in a way it probably shouldn’t (even though I have argued in an article that aiming for a good pronunciation is paramount to make real progress). Conversely, people with excellent pronunciation are often trusted more, and assumed to speak better than they actually do - a dynamic on which many internet polyglots have built entire careers. And when you stop to think about it (and thank you for sticking with me, dear reader: I promise I’m about to land this plane), what does it actually mean to speak a language? At what point do you decide that you can speak it? This is a question I ask myself every time I update my CV and have to compress my language skills into painfully narrow categories, usually ranging from “elementary” to “native”, or from “school level” to “professional”. What do those terms even mean? Because what usually comes after “native” is “fluent”, and what comes after “advanced” is often “intermediate”. So if you happen to have a wide range of linguistic abilities across several languages, where exactly do you put them? Am I only “advanced” in English if I’ve organised my life in such a way that I breathe English every minute of it, even though I wasn’t born into the language and still make occasional pronunciation or wording mistakes? Is my Spanish merely intermediate if I understand everything I listen to and read, yet wouldn’t be able to write articles like this one? Is my Italian only elementary if I intuitively understand most of the content I consume, but hesitate when it comes to actually contributing substance to a conversation, simply for lack of practice? And when it comes to “school level”, what exactly is implied here? Personally, after three years of high school, with around three hours a week of almost private Russian classes (because the rest of my class was uninterested and most people simply didn’t show up to class), I had reached a level good enough to travel freely in Russia for nine months after high school—and to obtain a TRKI-2 level at the end of that period, which roughly corresponds to a B2. That was quite a measurable progress. Although, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I had actually reached that level—but that’s material for another article, because proficiency tests like the CEFR are, in my opinion, deeply flawed and not especially representative of one’s real abilities. And finally, “professional” is probably the level that makes the least sense to me. Your job is likely so niche even in your native language that many of your fellow citizens wouldn’t fully understand your jargon and what the heck you are doing everyday. So the idea that you could do the same job, in another language, without friction (if that’s what “professional” is meant to imply) feels slightly absurd. Try asking a bilingual lawyer or a doctor to perform the very same tasks in another language. It’s wildly unrealistic. Even translators and interpreters, whose sole job is to work between two languages they are supposed to master completely, still have to learn new vocabulary every single day, depending on the situation: a conference, a scientific article, a novel. There are also things you can probably say in one language that you simply can’t in another, regardless of your official level in either. My Turkish is much more lived in than my Spanish, simply because I have (literally) lived in Turkey and never in a Spanish-speaking country. I have also been in a loving relationship in Turkish, fully integrated into the family, and I haven’t experienced that in Spanish. As a result, I comprehend the first on a much deeper level than the second, even though my Spanish is objectively much stronger in academic terms: a very broad vocabulary, a solid command of grammar, but very few cultural references and little emotional attachment to truly feel connected to it. Once I spent a full week enjoying Baselang’s first free week of unlimited classes in Spanish, where you can book 30-minute lessons with speakers from all across Latin America whenever you like (and I cannot recommend it enough). The first day alone was a blur of back-to-back half-hour sessions in which I struggled constantly and stalled mid-sentence. And yet, by the start of the second day, I was comfortable again and ended up being placed at a C1 level and constantly congratulated on my “neutral” accent and my neat speaking abilities, despite having almost never practised Spanish conversationally in my life. What really struck me, though, was the realisation that I had very little to say. I knew almost nothing about the cultures of the people I was talking to. I’d seen maybe three films in Spanish in my entire life, at best, and I’d never really listened to music from their countries. I was genuinely stunned to be able to understand and speak freely, using fairly intricate grammar and words I didn’t even know I knew; yet still have so little substance to bring to the conversation. I’d experienced something similar a few months earlier with my Latin American and Spanish friends. We spoke English at first, because we were in Australia and it simply made more sense - but also because whenever they switched to Spanish, they were usually talking about cultural references I didn’t have access to. My attempts to join in felt awkward to me, and probably just as awkward to them. What this leaves me with is the feeling that fluency isn’t about how much you can produce, but about whether the language feels like a place you can exist in comfortably. And once you see it that way, the urge to impress people with it mostly disappears.

• Learning a language is like moving houses

  Jan 11

  Learning a foreign language often feels like moving houses, except no one warns you how many emotional phases are involved, and there is no checklist that actually applies, no method that truly fits your linguistic profile. At first, it’s pure excitement. You haven’t moved in yet, but you’re already mentally hosting dinner parties. You walk through empty rooms in your imagination, assigning them functions with absolute confidence and zero prior measurements. This will be the living room. This will be me when I speak Swahili. The language looks like a room: open, bright, full of potential. You don’t know where the switches are, or whether the water pressure works, but that feels like a detail you’ll handle later. Enthusiasm is high, and you’re eager to start packing. Then packing begins. Or maybe you misread panicking. The words are close for a reason. Suddenly, everything you own is your problem. You’re sorting through drawers asking deeply philosophical questions like why do I have this and will I ever need this again. In language terms, this is when you start wondering what you use every day in your native language, and what you never do, so you begin bargaining with yourself: I don’t care about farm animals, so I don’t need to learn them. The subjunctive is too complicated, so I’ll just find ways around it. You realise how much you already have in your native language, and how little of it transfers cleanly. Everything needs to be boxed first. Everything needs a label. That already feels daunting, but the world has been informed that you are moving into this new house and that you will soon be hosting those kick-ass dinner parties in Swahili. So you can’t give up. And of course, you shouldn’t give up. The moving truck has been ordered already. By the time you’re ready to leave, you’re tired but far too invested to quit. Your new place isn’t ready, and you’re living among stacks of things that technically belong to you but are completely unusable. This is the linguistic no-man’s-land: you know it’s time to stop relying on your native language because it’s holding you back, but you can’t express yourself in the new one just yet. You are linguistically homeless, surrounded by structures and rules you know are in the boxes somewhere, but you don’t know exactly where. Then the moving truck arrives. Instant relief. Something external is finally happening. Things are being lifted. Progress looks visible. This is often when comprehension suddenly improves, and you remember why you decided to move in the first place. Everything feels promising again. You start recognising patterns, understanding more than you expected, and you even catch yourself thinking or dreaming in your new language. Simple thoughts, sure, but thoughts nonetheless. You think, Yeah, I can see my new home. I’m half-way there. You are not remotely half-way there. You’re now standing in the new place, surrounded by boxes, none of which contain what you urgently need. You don’t know where to start. Every decision feels monumental. Kitchen or bedroom? Vocabulary or grammar? Pronunciation drills or syntax you’re not mentally ready for? You open one box, get distracted by another, and then somehow end up watching videos about how to fastest and most effective way to unpack, instead of unpacking anything at all. And you can stay surrounded by half-opened boxes for a very long time. Long enough to forget what “finished” is supposed to look like. Long enough to feel stuck despite being surrounded by everything you need. When it comes to your target language, you don’t actually need to add anything new at this point, well, at least not to make it through those dinner parties with dignity intact. You already have the material in your boxes. It just isn’t organised. Words don’t talk to each other yet. Sounds haven’t settled, and structures keep collapsing like badly assembled shelves. The task now is not learning more, but making what you already have coherent. You actually have to unpack now, rearrange your place, and finally get rid of those cardboard boxes. And then, slowly, without ceremony, things begin to work. A chair gets assembled. A light turns on. You find your toothbrush. The space becomes livable not because you acquired anything new, but because what you already had finally found its place. The language works the same way. Not at the moment of arrival, not when the truck pulls up, but after the long, slightly chaotic work of unboxing, rearranging, reassembling, and accepting that this, too, was part of the move.

• The Cost of Speaking Too Early

  Jan 10

  This is it. You have decided, at last, to learn that language, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time and are now slightly blurry. You have been diligent. You followed the first lessons in the book. You did some of the grammar drills. But more importantly, you are on an impressive Duolingo streak, which is basically fluency gamified. You are, by any reasonable metric, doing great. Even more crucially, you have added yet another A1 flag to your Reddit profile. Identity has been updated. The world has been informed. After watching approximately a gazillion beginner-friendly videos—each one promising you will “LEARN [insert language] IN 30 MINUTES”—you start catching words you vaguely remember seeing once. Progress feels alarmingly fast. Clearly, you are absorbing the language at an unprecedented rate. You know more than you did yesterday, far more than you did last week, and it doesn’t feel that hard just yet. Your motivation is high, which keeps you in the flow. You got it, you genius! You happily spend at least an hour a day studying, probably even more because you are really into it, and frankly, time flies by. You feel confident that all these efforts will soon pay off and that you’ll be able to have short conversations that will justify all that hard work. Well I hate to break it to you, but you are in fact on the rising curve of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and soon you’ll be collapsing. But for now, you aren’t aware of it and you feel that nothing can stop you from there. Words come to your mind quickly, you can already conjugate in the present, probably even in the past and future tenses, and when you throw in some adjectives and adverbs here and there, you feel invincible. Grammar bows before you; syntax fears you. Surely this is is easy-peasy and you are so bright that you will nail that language in no time. Why most people spend years learning their target languages seems like a mystery. You are standing right at the peak of Mount Stupid (not my term), very confident in your ability to progress exponentially. After all, why shouldn’t your habits continue to pay off? And this is when you begin to gradually fall off the top of the hill. (Told ya.) You’ve been so eager to put into practice everything you’ve learned so far - to communicate and/or to be praised (usually both)- that you have sped up the natural pace your brain needs to form and solidify those neural connections. (Turns out the brain does not respond well to being pressured). In doing so, you have already heard yourself make a bunch of mistakes with approximate pronunciation, excused yourself for lacking vocabulary, and tripped over grammar in the broadest sense of the term. And along the way, those early mistakes can settle in, becoming habits that are hard to undo later; a process known as fossilization. In short, you have tried to run before you could walk, and now you are beginning to be afraid to toddle. And unless you have tried to talk with a tutor you were paying, or with a loved one who doesn’t mind the lack of substance of your exchanges (bless them), you have most likely bored everyone to death… if they haven’t already tried to switch to English, or simply disengaged altogether if what you’re learning is English. Two reflexes seem especially hard to shake in language learning. One is the impulse to rush ahead before the ground is ready, fueled by the brief exhilaration of hearing oneself produce words in a language that still feels new. A linguistic sugar rush, really. The other grows right out of it: a kind of attachment to that rush, to the pleasure of being heard, noticed, sometimes even praised, instead of staying with the quieter work of listening to how native speakers actually speak, and paying attention to what they are saying rather than to the sound of one’s own voice. I know, that may sound a bit controversial, and mildly unflattering, but that is the feeling I get from so-called polyglots, both online and offline. Of course, it is motivating to know that progress is happening, that all that tedious work is not going to waste. It is also reasonable to want to check whether we are on the right path, and practicing a bit certainly helps with that, or at least in theory. Because real-life conversations, or even conversations with AI bots (something you can now do with apps like Langua), are high-stress environments. They force you to speak about something fairly specific, within a limited amount of time, to keep the exchange going. But linguistic ping-pong gets tiring fast when the ball keeps coming back faster than expected. When the language is still so new that it hasn’t settled into long-term memory, retrieving the right word, syntax, and pronunciation all at once becomes extremely difficult. It’s not even necessarily easy in one’s native language when asked to speak on a precise topic, which is essentially what language tutors make you do even in the early stages of learning, to give you a chance to make use of all the words and structures that you have learned. If stressful environments aren’t particularly kind to proficient speakers, you can easily predict the fiasco in the making when the learner knows very little of the language. As the linguist Stephen Krashen explained in his famous video on language acquisition in the 80s: “We acquire a language in one way and only one way, when we get more comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.” And I will elaborate on the first part of his argument some other day. I keep coming back to how much modern language learning distrusts the natural phases required to acquire a new language. There is a rush toward speaking, toward being heard. Silence is treated as hesitation, or worse, as avoidance. If you are not producing anything, you must not be learning. But that doesn’t quite match how the mind behaves when it is actually absorbing patterns. Perception seems to need time on its own, without the pressure to perform. It rearranges itself quietly. As I discussed in another article, when you focus your energy on listening without feeling the urge to participate, intonation settles before words do. Rhythm arrives before accuracy. You notice how sentences breathe, where they tighten, where they loosen. You overhear conversations you don’t fully understand and still come away with a sense of how they moved. It’s a bit like listening to music from another room: the melody reaches you even when the lyrics don’t. Something registers anyway. You are not wasting your time. You are sowing the seeds for a strong tree, whose branches will be able to grow exponentially once the roots are sound. Children are allowed this. They listen for years, accumulating sound without being asked to demonstrate much. And they aren’t expected to, because they simply aren’t capable of using their vocal cords properly yet. Their early speech is sparse, sometimes clumsy, but it rests on a dense foundation of familiarity. Adults, by contrast, are pushed straight into output. The result is speech that appears quickly but carries very little weight behind it. The accent lingers, the rhythm resists the natural flow. Sentences feel assembled rather than grown, and roots fail to take hold the way they should. I don’t think this is a failure of effort. It’s more a question of reference. Without having heard enough, correction floats in the air. You’re told something is off -but off from what, exactly? The language has no internal anchor yet. Listening provides that anchor slowly, almost imperceptibly. Patterns repeat. Structures reappear. At some point, you stop noticing them consciously, which is usually when they start to work. Listening a lot instead of speaking right away is like preparing for an exam rather than winging it and hoping for the best. Extended listening and reading do something strange to time. You don’t feel productive while you’re doing them, but later you realize that expressions and words come to mind before you actively search for them. Because you just know them. Somehow. For some reason. You anticipate turns of phrase. You recognize what is likely to come next. Speech, when it finally shows up, feels less like construction and more like recognition, as if you were stepping into something already prepared. The first time I ever spoke English in a real-life situation, I was a few months shy of turning seventeen. My first class had been when I was around six, but aside from learning colours, animals, vegetables, and a few isolated words like window, I wouldn’t say I really learned anything until I was around eleven, when I had more formal classes three to four hours a week. Back then, there was almost no opportunity to practise or even listen to English. The internet as we know it didn’t exist, and films and series were only available on TV and were dubbed. So I read, and read, and read everything I could find - from whatever I could get my hands on online to newspapers made for young English learners. I devoted a lot of time to consuming English without worrying about whether I was wasting my time or not. I was doing it with pleasure, and to this day I don’t remember ever learning lists of vocabulary. I learned in context, through intense exposure. And more importantly, I never doubted that I was progressing. So when an elderly English couple asked me what time it was near a campsite, I answered with confidence. I knew, internally, that I could, even though I had never spoken to anyone “real” before. I remember distinctly that they congratulated me on my command of their language and my accent after the brief conversation that followed. That alone gave me all the motivation in the world to keep going. Within a week, I had made friends - mostly Dutch - and we had seamless conversations using words I had no idea where I had learned. So the takeaway I am trying to share here is simple: take your time. If you don’t, you may completely jeopardize your learning for years, as happened to me with another language. (I will write about it some day). I know that the slow approach doesn’t look impressive from the outside. It doesn’t reward quick wins. It offers very few visible milestones. It asks for presence without display, attention without immediate reward. But eventually, speaking does emerge - and it does so differently. Not urgently, not defensively. Sentences move with fewer interruptions. Pronunciation still needs work, of course, but it bends more easily. Grammar feels familiar, not because you can explain it, but because you’ve encountered it many times before. Pauses no longer signal confusion; they feel more like listening continuing inside the speech itself. There is always pressure to show progress, to prove that learning is happening. Silence makes people uneasy. But the brain seems unmoved by that discomfort. It keeps responding to repetition, to time spent close to the language, to the slow accumulation of sound and structure. The effects remain hidden until they don’t. None of this feels passive to me. It feels patient, which is something else entirely. Not doing nothing, just not rushing in and messing with it too soon. Letting the language settle where it settles, without poking it every five minutes to see if it’s working just yet. The work happens quietly, without proof, without anything you could really point to, which is mildly unsettling but also kind of the point. And when speech finally comes out, it carries this odd sense of recognition, as if the language had already been there for a while and you’re only now catching up.

• What makes a text feel off, even when it's grammatically correct

  Jan 10

  Something caught my attention last night, as I was inspecting the automatic translation Google made of my last article into my native French. An early 90s kid, I was raised during the toddler years of the internet, when little existed yet, and most of what did was in English. Back in the early 00s, translations were awkward, to say the least, and nobody would have suspected they would become so good one day, because languages can’t really be translated word for word - they are lived, and interpreted at best. In fact, this very observation encouraged me to take up languages early on, and I soon found myself browsing the early internet in the very limited English I had back then, just to be able to find actual information rather than weird translations of it. I never used Google to translate any page, because I didn’t really ever need to. But this writing platform allows me to automatically translate my articles into several languages, so I thought: of course, why not let native speakers of other languages read me? My Spanish is advanced, but not native-like, and I wouldn’t be able to judge the quality of an Italian text, let alone of all the other languages offered, so I could only go mistake-hunting in French. I read each sentence carefully as it unfolded, thinking to myself that I don’t know whether I would have been able to phrase them so accurately, because I have long since lost the habit of writing in my native language. Yes, the sentences unfolded almost suspiciously well: the grammar held, the vocabulary behaved. The text marched forward with suspicious discipline. Nothing jumped out as wrong, or even slightly crooked. Except… there was, at times, that faint sensation of displacement. Not enough to stop the reading, not strong enough to name immediately. Just a soft awareness that something in the phrasing didn’t quite belong where it had landed. Like guests who followed the instructions on the invitation, but still showed up overdressed. Or in pijamas. Either way. What struck me was that I couldn’t correct them in any obvious way. There was no error to fix, no rule to invoke. The problem, if it even deserves that word, was not one of correctness but of likelihood. These were sentences that could exist, but probably wouldn’t, for some reason. I was particularly attentive to this because, just an hour earlier, I had gone through a translation task for a gig, where I basically had to provide French equivalents for marketing sentences (what’s called “copywriting'“). I found myself noticing that, although such sentences were easily and directly translatable (a good half of the English vocabulary being derived from French and Latin), that’s just not really how we would say it. We don’t say “des termes et conditions s’appliquent” for “Terms and conditions apply” (notice how transparent the words are). We’d say “Offre soumise à conditions” (“offer subject-literally submitted-to conditions”). The first would be understood, but it would sound unnatural. The fact that these subtleties are well known is the reason why human translators are still (although less and less) in demand. Because industries localizing their content are still aware that machines aren’t (yet) able to interpret messages as well as natives do. What translators are doing right now is helping train the systems on the only thing they can’t figure out themselves, and that will eventually replace them. I’ve been thinking about this since I got up this morning. We tend to think of language in terms of permission: what is allowed, what is grammatical, what passes inspection. But living languages don’t really operate on permission alone. They run on habit, preference, repetition, avoidance. On things people say because they’ve heard them said a million times before, and on things they never say—not because they’re forbidden, but because no one ever quite reaches for them. I think that’s what I was hearing in my own text: phrases that had arrived by logic rather than by use. They made sense, they were even elegant in places, but they hadn’t passed through the soft filter of everyday speech. They hadn’t been worn down by mouths. This feeling comes back very clearly when watching dubbed films—which I never do, but sometimes overhear when I’m at someone’s place who doesn’t speak a second language. To me, dubbed movies can’t offer a truly immersive experience, unless we’re talking about cartoons, where voices are performed by expressive actors and the text doesn’t have to fit precisely the movements of the characters’ lips. No - movie voices sound slightly inflated, almost theatrical, yet still oddly flat, with a certain breathiness to them. There’s the sense that everyone is enunciating for a room that doesn’t exist. And then there’s the strange constraint hovering over every line, making it such a hard job for dubbing writers: the need to fit words to mouths, syllables to lips, timing to faces that were never meant to produce those sounds. And Brad Pitt ends up sounding uncanny, his talent as an actor compromised, because what he says—and the way he says it—just isn’t it. But even if you look past all of that—even if you generously suspend disbelief—the unease persists. What the characters say simply isn’t how people speak. Not because it’s grammatically wrong, but because it’s unfamiliar in a deeper way. The sentences feel imported. You can sense, almost physically, that they began life elsewhere, under different pressures, with a different tolerance for explicitness, for length, for rhythm. They’re sentences that survive translation but lose their social camouflage. You don’t hear them in real conversations. Not at the table, not in arguments, not in moments where people hesitate or overshare or choose the wrong word and live with it. They sound complete in a way everyday speech rarely is. That’s also why, in my opinion, dialogue and monologues in movies—spoken by actors in their native languages—often feel a little off as well. The lines are just too good. Too impactful. Too witty. Too long, at times. Too… too much. I remember how hard it was for me to understand movies in English without relying on those little wheels that are subtitles. I had passed my C1.2 level long ago and could speak with natives, across accents, with ease. But movies were still difficult to follow. And for the longest time, so couldn’t quite understand why. Until I did. And that was because, beyond the occasional cultural reference I was missing, the scripts were just too intense - for lack of a better word. They felt too performative, too clean, too cookie-cuttered to fit the situation wittily. To this day, even though watching movies has become a walk in the park (on the topic, I wonder how this expression will be translated!), I often think that films are the ultimate boss level of a language. You hear in movies the most intricate sentences that a regular person, with a regular brain, would never come up with in a real-life situation. But back to our initial topic. What really makes a translated message blur into something oddly translated is what linguistics calls non-idiomatic phrasing. It seems to live exactly there, in that narrow gap between sense and use. It doesn’t announce itself loudly, and it doesn’t even break comprehension. It just carries a quiet accent—technically correct, but phrased in a way a native speaker wouldn’t have chosen. You can smooth, adjust, nudge, but some part of it remains intuitive, resistant to explanation. You end up thinking, it’s correct, but there has to be another way to say it. Which leaves me wondering—though not conclusively—whether fluency is less about mastering rules and more about intuition carved through intense cultural exposure. And whether mastery in a foreign language is even achievable at all. About absorbing not just structures, but preferences. About learning, slowly but surely, which sentences a language seems to avoid, and trusting that avoidance as much as its rules. I’m not sure what it takes to sound unmistakably natural. But I suspect that this awkwardness, the kind that doesn’t break anything, is where languages reveal what they are most protective of. And having said that, I’ will (ironically) check my own text for unnatural phrasing before posting it. [Note: a few sentences were very slightly adjusted, which, incidentally, illustrates quite well the point I was trying to make!]