I really like learning languages. Today I speak Finnish (native), English (C2), German (C1), Russian (C1), and Swedish (B2). My latest project was learning German in three to four months over the summer of 2024 and passing a C1 language exam. Over the years, I have had multiple (maybe 2 :D) people ask me for advice on how to learn a language; so I thought I’d share my two cents on the issue. Many resources on language learning like to split the process into reading, writing, and speaking, but I will try to outline a plan, what I would do if I were to pick up a new language. As always, keep in mind that I am no psycholinguist and merely wish to present what worked for me and why I think that is the case.

Goal-Setting

I prefer to set concrete short- to mid-term goals that are easy to track. Instead of saying “I will be fluent in X language in two months”, I would rather set daily goals, like “I will add fifteen new Anki cards to my deck every day,” or “I will learn one hundred new words each week,” and then actually schedule dedicated time to accomplish them.

The Beginning

The first thing to do is, of course, to learn the script of the language. This shouldn’t be much of a problem. You can usually find informative Youtube videos with nice mnemonics for the whole script (that is, unless you are learning Chinese, Japanese, or some other language with thousands of characters). If not, I recommend using Anki cards, which I will cover later.

Having learned the script, I would first turn to some basic structured material that will help me off the ground. Something like a Youtube playlist, a textbook or some language-learning app. Before doing anything else, you should probably know the fundamental stuff, like basic formalities or how to form a simple sentence, like “I am going home”. I think it’s important to get a feel for the word order and the basic sentence structure of the language. This, however, should not take that long. Maybe twenty or so active study hours, if I had to name a number. If you are serious about learning a language, you must avoid getting stuck in the endless Duolingo hell of doing five minutes of beginner content each day.

Anki

I would already at this early stage create an Anki deck. Anki is a spaced-repetition app where you can create flashcards for vocabulary with translations on the other side. Although there are thousands of ready-made decks available online, I strongly recommend you create your own deck with your own memory cues on the cards. I typically create cards as I study, and just recap the cards that Anki tells me to recap before each study session. For most people the default settings of Anki are perfectly fine, but later on you might want to take a look at the “Interval Modifier” setting if you end up with thousands of flashcards. I really cannot stress the importance of Anki enough. During my 3-month crunch of learning German up to C1, I created somewhere around 4500 flashcards, meaning approximately 50 new cards per day. The chart below shows how much time I spent reviewing Anki cards daily, of course not counting the time spent creating new cards.

LLMs

I recommend using tools like Chat GPT or other LLMs from the beginning. Previously, when you had a question, why some niche word is declined in a certain way, you had to consult a dictionary or maybe even post a question on Reddit or some other forum. Nowadays, LLMs are pretty useful in explaining some of these things or grammar rules to you. I think this is an area where we’ll see significant progress in the next few years. In May 2025, I participated in a hackathon in Malmö, Sweden, where our team developed an AI-based language-learning app that would offer a personalized learning journey. We also won the Best Product Design category, I think partly because personalization is such a hot topic. For now, all textbooks and most language learning apps provide the same content for everyone, but in the future, I think this will change and we will be able to move towards more personalized learning content.

Comprehensible Input

The fun part begins after you have learned the basics. The concept of Comprehensible Input was first introduced by American linguist Stephen D. Krashen in 1977. The idea is basically that you should consume content, where you don’t know every single word, but know enough to infer the meaning of most words based on the context. This is basically what I did when I learned German. Each day I read everything I could find on Tagesschau or Der Spiegel and, of course, also translated all unknown phrases and created Anki cards for them. I think this is the most fun part of learning a language, because you just get to read a bunch of interesting texts on your favorite topics, and at the same time learn a new language. For me, podcasts turned out to be a good resource because you can listen to them at the gym or while running. Another thing to consider is that it might be easier to initially read things you have already read in your native language.

Grammar

I think the importance of grammar is often downplayed. People argue that we should learn languages like children, purely through immersion, and while I partly agree with that (see Comprehensible input), I do think that if children had the ability to use tools like Anki or a grammar book, they would learn EVEN faster. This ties back to the point of comprehensible input. If you know the usual structures of sentences, you can better infer other words. There are also tons of useful rules to remember. For example in German, every noun has an article der, die or das. You can easily remember that diminutive forms ending in -chen, like Das Mädchen, always have the article Das.

Output

I think you should worry about output only after you have consumed so much input that you can understand the news well. Of course, it may be different for you, if you have close friends or perhaps a loved one, with whom you would like to chat. What helped with output for me, was writing a DAILY essay and asking either a native speaker or Chat GPT for feedback. This really cemented the most common phrases and structures into my vocabulary. I also joined some Discord servers, where I could speak with native speakers and that turned out to be useful. I know there are also some services like Tandem or HelloTalk, but I haven’t used them.

Another technique I found useful for pronunciation was the shadowing technique. I would watch news in my target language with subtitles, so I would know what words were coming and I would try to echo the words spoken in real time and see if my pronunciation, rhythm and intonation were on point or not. Eventually, I would just to walk around my apartment and try to hold a monologue with myself.