Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy

(this is not a comment on you, or anyone, rather rant, or a comment on myself)

> but not sure what's going to happen next.

You don't know that.

I'd suggest start doing it ASAP. I lost so many previous years of my 30s due to COVID and the avalanche of fear and anxiety and isolation that came with it. A breakup that happened literally days before the first lockdown didn't help. But then I put myself in a shell and kept increasing the size of that shell. Not just personally, but professionally as well. Today it feels like I just transitioned into my very late 30s from my early 30s. Everything in between - these 5-6 years - almost completely lost.

You know, what will be the worst thing? That nothing happened and you stayed closed - like I have been so far. I am myself trying struggling, often I don't see any point in all this effort, but still…

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it’s probably safe to go to a language meetup.

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.

You get it, friend. It's unfortunate that so few others do as well. There's many expats where I live who have, at best, a completely rudimentary level of Spanish. It is both sad and disgraceful. I prefer talking to locals.

I've been getting into Latin music in the past year and absolutely love it. Mostly "classics" though - eg Juan Gabriel en Bellas Artes is sublime - I'm not a fan of most new stuff (though I am sure there's plenty of excellent new stuff, but it's hard to come across when reggaeton and narcocorridos are so popular). Will check out c tangana and Rosalía!

I've learned some basics to four or so and a few writing systems post-30's and will keep going. Other two learned in school. The joy and motivation is night and day better when you're not in school IMO.

But since that's not really data, I'll offer that I'm adjacent to a workplace where people come and go from around the world. Some may stay a few years, some may stay longer. Several adults have learned this massively obscure and quite hostile language (Finnish) while staying here even though they mostly get along with their work in English. I'd say there's no hard constraints stopping most people.

And it's not like you can exactly fail a language. If you give up, you might stagnate at whatever level you've reached. Maybe you'll even forget some things. But you always have the opportunity to learn more and practice. Recall practice doesn't even require any equipment or opportunity other than a quiet moment: Just form some sentences in your mind. See if you can express an idea. Maybe check and look up some hints afterwards. I find that's a good way to start a snowball rolling and recall is the most important tool for pushing the brain.

I have learned Czech for a year before moving to Czechia (self-learning) then 4 years doing classes.

When I arrived at my first class, I was a bit lost even thought I had 1 year of "experience". I did progress quite fast the two first years though because I had a bit of vocabulary under my belt, but I had to re-learn all the grammar/declinaison rules.

My advice to you would be: if you can afford, take classes for the language you want to learn, at least for the first year.

Also forget about the quick learning tools like Duolingo and such. It makes you feel like you're learning, but from my experience, not much is being retained.

I'm now switching to learning Russian and taking classes for 1 or 2 years.

In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.

If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.

For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.

Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.

> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.

Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.

As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.

There are two phases. Getting to A2, where you’ve learned all the grammar rules and have a starter vocab… and then everything else, which is basically grinding the hours and convincing your brain that this is worth changing to remember.

Getting to A2 is what Duolingo and similar are great for.

After that you need to grind the hours. When you have limited time, the best ways are swapping things you already do with something in the target language. Switch your audio track on Netflix, make a separate TikTok account where you only follow people in the target language, at some point, switch your phone so that you have to talk to Siri in your target language, and then finally, sign up with a teacher (online or in person) for speaking practice at least once a week. The social pressure of trying to communicate with a real person and not being able to will make your brain take the rest of the exposure seriously enough to start rewiring what needs to be rewired.

Yep, I learned Spanish, then French.

The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.

Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.

You probably need to pair it with something you like. For example, I'm interested in food history and also home food in general, so I made a python script and made a frequency list using a few cooking ebooks in that language. After that I made sentences with most interesting/useful words. Now, before reading any book in a foreign language, I use that script, and make sentences with 10-20 words that I never used in sentences before. All the sentences are saved in Anki, where I have now around 7000 german sentences, 3000 in spanish. I also watch youtube videos with closed caption.

The only thing this not taught me was speaking with people.

It’s time and commitment for sure. On the mental side - 30s is still young. Most US academics and doctors are barely out of grad school at 30 and their careers (which involve continued learning) are just starting.

Approach it differently as a salaried adult. You can pay for better tuition on your own schedule.

But you can find time. I listen to Michel Thomas or other courses while I’m walking to work. Put on headphones and ignore other people, they aren’t listening to you anyway. Other things like flash cards you can do any time you’ve got 10-15 mins.

I learned Spanish in my 30s, but was immersed by living in a Spanish speaking country. Though, I've spent a lot of that time alone, so my level is not where it could/should be. But I can talk confidently with anyone about almost anything.

But I really don't think there's any mental hurdle to learning a language at any age. In fact, I think it is EASIER to learn a language as an adult (as opposed to child) because you understand language in general, and so many other concepts.

There are two reasons that adults have trouble learning a language:

1. time. Adults have endless responsibilities, which make it difficult to dedicate the time required to learn.

2. Lack of humility. Not being able to communicate in even the most basic of terms can be humiliating, if you lack humility - as most adults do. You need to be able to completely put aside your pride, and just be eager to make mistakes endlessly.

There's a lot of language schools here - both to learn Spanish and English - and I've met so many people who are "trying" to learn a language and refuse to practice out of fear of making a mistake. At no point have I ever felt even the slightest bit self-conscious about my Spanish, and I simply just try to communicate as fluidly as I am able, even while knowing I am making mistakes. When I learn I've been making some mistake for sometimes years, I simply laugh.

Similarly, there's plenty of locals (and people around the world) who have learned English to a reasonably high degree. So it is clearly possible. Though, even amongst them it often find that there's a genuine hesitancy to talk to me, a native English speaker. Their motivation was simply for a higher paying job, and evidently they swallow their pride for $ and pain.

I can recommend https://languagetransfer.org as an excellent resource, if your target language is covered.

And also just to focus on the basics. I recommend people don't even worry about verb conjugation when starting. Just speak in infinitive exclusively.

I eat bread. Tomorrow/yesterday he eat bread.

People will understand 99% of the time. Just focus on getting vocabulary, confidence and fluidity. Add verb tenses in due course. Again, it takes humility to speak in completely broken sentences, like a little child. But that's the only way.

Learned German. A little Duolingo, then

* memorizing vocabulary and practicing pronunciation with Anki

* private lessons

* grammar book with exercises

* podcasts

* news

* some books.

Worked very well. Had a good starting point when I arrived in Germany, and the immersion then helped a lot (but I stopped using Anki due to laziness). I found this page very useful: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/

I am thinking of picking up a musical instrument. But I am afraid that I will miserably. That I may be the oldest person in the class. It's not a country for solo old men and women, even in their late 30s.

Tried and failed in my thirties, succeeding much better in my forties. I doubt you've lost neuroplasticity.

A friend learnt French and piano in her mid 30s and later. Then she went lazy as potato and pretty much is horrible at both. Never practised. Now she is in late 40s and rather spends time scrolling Twitter (yup!), Instagram, and Youtube or overworking. So, I seriously doubt the true brain capacity is the problem in 30s or later. She also had somewhat of a life in her 30s and then she never made an effort to keep having that life (something I am inching towards in my late 30s now; also in the geography we both are this is inherently difficult - no, it's not an excuse) and that also contributed to losing a lot of her personality, or that's how she puts it. So I think to use the brain the brain needs to be primed and well oiled et cetera.

I've done that with Russian, got around level B2 so far. But I had quite a bit of experience with language learning before that (mainly easy-ish languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc).

Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.

You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.

I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?

If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.

All studies point that there is no easier to learn a language in your 30s than in your teens. Probably easier since you have better mental tools for study.

Of course time constraints can be worse (or better)

Learning over Zoom with a real person using a service like Fiverr or something was a great way for my wife and I to start learning Indonesian.

Learning sign language was lots of fun in VRC with actual people. I'm actually going to visit a friend I made doing this, in his country, this weekend.

I've done this by moving to Spain. It took literally years to get to a decent level and my partner is Spanish.

Persistent learning and repetition is key but the main way I improved was by letting go of the fear of sounding stupid and talking without shame.

you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day

Yes, but in their 30s most people are:

- unwilling to move to a different country

- unmotivated to spend time chatting with people about random things in a foreign language

It gets very hard after childhood. This kid I know has learnt russian, chinese, arabic, spanish, hindi, apart from english and his mother tongue tamil. All with dedicated native teachers and zoom classes, where he actually speaks to a bunch of people in that language conversationally. Its not like he puts a shit ton of effort, he barely takes these things seriously. It just is that easy to learn languages when you're really young.

Yes, it's possible. For me it went like this.

1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.

The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.

Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.

2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.

3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.

I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.

Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.

If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.

Yeah, and this suggests to me that the link isn't causal... If you succeed at learning a language late in life, you clearly have an unusually healthy brain and your act together.

Immersion is key. Get a basic vocabulary going, then go to meet-ups, listen to music and watch tv shows in the language.

I did with what I consider a success. Basically, duolingo and then some beginner podcasts and then netflix with language reactor. I do understand pretty well, did not do much to speak - I dod not cared.

The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.

My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.

The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.

As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).

But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..

The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.

It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.

It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.

English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.

I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.

Dealing with frustration is such a fundamental skill that we should all have learned it as kids.

Immersion, unfortunately.

You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.

If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.

Go somewhere you are forced to learn and speak it.

Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.

I watch and read different things. I like different things in foreign language - stuff that is simple or kind of cringy in my own. So I rarely ends up comparing it.

Second, I rewatch things I liked a lot. Watching them dubbed with more need to rewind makes me notice different stuff about series - how they are composed. So it is a bonus.

Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?

These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.

I knew a German person who was a NLP practitioner who said that he didn't know how to be depressed in English

I don't think it's just language. I remember having this happen just by having separate groups of friends. You end up in a situation where the two friend groups meet and suddenly realise that you are two different personalities and that you don't know how to act.

You can absolutely learn a language even if you don't need to. But it's just a lot harder.

I have done it and know many people who have done so too. It's frustrating and slow, but if you figure out a system that works for you, you can do it.

I do think that practicing different programming languages should have a corresponding brain benefit as well.

I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing to talk to you at any length, you are not interesting any more (in fact, in some cultures, local people will have heightened suspicion of you). Language learning becomes more a passive endeavour with few opportunities for real-world speaking.

And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.

Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.

Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)

> social aspects of learning another language

Maybe if you are near the native speaking country, or potentially if there are significant numbers of immigrants.

But knowing Spanish adds nothing social within New Zealand.

I had a Spanish girlfriend when 30, which made learning Spanish rather incentivised, and I embedded overseas for many months to learn conversational Spanish.

However I rarely hang out with South American immigrants in New Zealand, and those I have met (say at the pub) often prefer to stick with English.

Knowing Spanish is fantastic when travelling - the months spent learning have led to way more enjoyment when subsequently travelling to South America or visiting friends in Spain. Spanish also helps a little in France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.

I intend to spend a few months in South Korea so maybe I'll try and learn Korean (without a girlfriend). However I'm now older so I suspect it will be much much harder.

Confounding to learning language, on top of one's base ability to do do in general, are the teaching methods not meshing at all with the individual. For me, rote memorization of anything is nearly impossible, doubly so if the thing to be memorized has no immediate utility. "Conversational" language learning and similar that give you a bunch of vocabulary and bring in the grammar later are why I failed Spanish 1 three times. I need the grammar first, then words with etymology. It also helps to not fight with phonetic collisions between different languages using their own bastardization of Latin script, which is why I was far more easily able to meet my college language requirement by teaching myself classical Greek and translating the things I thought were interesting.

> The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language

Unless you have large learning disorder, you can learn second language. It is not some kind of rare talent

Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.

Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.

probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)

I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin

similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain

Is a programming language a language?

I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.