Three pathways to reaching your language learning goals
And how narrative plays into each one
Introduction
I want to talk about a few different things today. Some of this is practical language advice. Some of it is a little more psychological/philosophical. And some of it ties into my own life and business. Let’s start with language.
Three ways to reach fluency
If you’ve been following my work since 2023, you know that my focus has been very clear: helping people reach fluency, based on their definition of fluency.
Maybe that means:
Passing an exam
Feeling more confident
Having certainty their grammar is correct
When I look at it honestly, there are basically three ways to reach any level of fluency.
1. DIY
You do it yourself. You choose your resources. You design your own method. You decide what works for you.
This is definitely one option. I won’t talk about it much today.
2. Take hundreds of classes
They could be group classes, private lessons, or a mix of both. If I look at my own French journey, I took thousands of classes over the course of my life. It was similar for my Spanish, Mandarin, and Gujarati (though for those three I took hundreds of classes, not thousands). I did use other methods too (e.g., immersion, different forms of self-study, practicing with friends), but the classes without a doubt played a significant role.
If you stick with it, this method provides a reasonable chance of reaching your language learning goals.
3. Follow customized instructions
This one is interesting. It’s similar to DIY, though more precise. In short, an expert just tells you exactly what to do. For example, right now at Calgary Language Nerds, we have a student doing a two-week trial. She’s on day 7 or 8. She’s only seen her tutor once in that time, but the tutor has given her extremely specific instructions on what to do every day and monitoring her progress.
A quick tangent…
For the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative (i.e., the story I tell myself about about life). Let me give you a business example. A few months ago, my marketing narrative was:
“If I can get 1–2 trial students per week, that’s good growth.”
Then I changed the narrative…
“I want exponential growth. Not incremental growth.”
The second I changed that internal story, my behaviour changed. And the results followed. I’m currently on track to double last year’s business size. It’s still early, so I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch, but still: that’s a positive sign.
I’m also on track to learn multiple languages this year; something I’ve never done before. A shift in narrative shifted the outcomes.
Back to language learning
If you change your internal narrative when learning a language, I believe you can rapidly improve your results. What narrative do you tell yourself? What story is running in the background? Are you aligned with a pathway that you feel will actually get you to your language learning goal?
I don’t have the answers to any of those questions, but know this: you can create a narrative consciously. And that might just be the most important thing you can do as a language learner.
Thanks for reading!
Azren
Calgary Language Nerds owner
https://azrenthelanguagenerd.com