The Myth of Language Learning Plateaus

One of the most common frustrations when learning a language is feeling as though you’ve stopped making progress. However, this is nothing to worry about. Though there certainly will be times when it seems you aren’t progressing any further, this is merely an illusion, and you just have to keep going.

With immersion, you’re actually improving all the time, even if you don’t realise it. There’ll be periods when you feel as though you’re not understanding any more than you did the previous day or week, but you’ll find again and again that you have what feel like breakthrough moments, where you have a sudden leap forward in your understanding, where things just seem to click.

These are not sudden leaps. They’re the tipping points of a cumulative process developing throughout your immersion. As you keep exposing your brain to the patterns, it will become better and better at recognising them. Whilst this exposure accumulates, you’ll often feel as though you’re plateauing, but in reality, you’re constantly building towards another moment where your understanding takes another leap forward.

Don’t worry about plateaus, they’re completely normal. All you have to do is keep following the process, and to keep immersing in resources you enjoy.


Image

Jordan Opel on Unsplash


Learn a Language

Sean Price

This article was written by Sean Price, the Founder of How to Learn Languages.

When he's not teaching English as a foreign language, he creates eBooks and Courses that make learning languages affordable and enjoyable for anyone.

He learnt French in 2018 during a study abroad year at the Sorbonne, before completing a degree in History at the University of Leeds with First Class Honours in the summer of the following year.

During his final year, he taught himself Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan, as part of dissertation research into fascism in Europe during the 1930s.

Although he says ‘learnt’ and ‘taught himself’ in the past tense, he also says one of the joys of learning a language is that there’s always more to learn.

More recently, he's been teaching himself German, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian.

Since moving to Vietnam to teach English in 2022, he's been enjoying learning Vietnamese. In less than one and a half years learning Vietnamese, he was able to achieve Level 5 (the highest being Level 6) of the official Vietnamese proficiency exam of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University, Hanoi (Trường Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn - Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội).

If you'd like to learn a language, all you need is an internet connection and a How to Learn Languages eBook or Course.

https://www.howtolearnlanguages.info
Previous
Previous

Rest Days and Language Learning

Next
Next

How to Learn Two Languages at Once