One of the founding principles of this site is that learning your first second language is a different experience than learning successive languages.  Why is it so different?

The Path is Unlit/You Have No Map

Since you haven’t ever reached a high level in another language, it’s very difficult to gauge your progress.  Language learning is a confluence of several skills – speaking, listening, reading, writing – that can often develop somewhat independently.  This is why the “how long is this going to take” question is so prevalent.  When we’ve never done it before, we have no idea where we are on the map; how far we’ve gone or how much we have left to go.

You Can’t Hear the Sounds

There’s often a lot of focus on pronunciation as something related to the mechanics of the learner’s mouth.  “Learn to roll your r’s like a native!”  But what is seldom addressed is that the more essential part of pronunciation has to do with your brain.  You need to be able to master the ability to hear the sounds in your target language.  Just because you can hear the other language, doesn’t mean you are hearing the sounds of that language in the same way as a native.  You are hearing the target language filtered through the spectrum of the sounds of your native language.  So with your first second language, you not only need to learn how to make new sounds, you need to learn how to hear them.    For more on this:

Everything Blurs Together

This is related to not being able to hear the sounds, but it’s not quite the same thing.  I noticed that when I was beginning to learn Portuguese, even after I had learned the individual sounds, spoken words would blend together, even at relatively low speeds.  I also noticed that friends who already spoke another language, seemed to be better at picking out words in other languages that they didn’t know.  Since becoming more advanced in Portuguese, I can now say this is definitely true, though of course it depends on how similar the other language is to Portuguese.  I now believe that the ability to isolate individual words in a stream of sounds is yet another ability that is improved and refined when learning a new language.

You Don’t Know that Your Brain Can Do This

Your brain is wired to learn languages.  People with little advanced schooling will eventually pick up languages with enough exposure.  Many other methods you’ll find online rely solely on this principle.  The idea that all you need to do is speak a lot or listen/read a lot to learn a language is based on the fact that your brain will gradually build its capacity for the language solely through these types of repeated exposure.  You are not trying to learn how to levitate objects with the force, you are doing something your brain already has the essential foundations to do.  Part of being a successful language learner is trusting that over time and with lots of different types of exposure, your brain will figure this stuff out.  When I started learning Portuguese, it seemed impossible that I would ever instinctively put the adjective after the noun instead of before it, as in English.  The idea of “memorizing” which nouns were which genders also seemed impossible – I have to remember a gender for every object in the world?  But the truth is, you don’t memorize these things.  Through practice, your brain will just gradually start doing them.

You Harbor Illusions About How Difficult This Is

A lot of first-time language learners, especially in the US, have been led to believe that language learning is a quick process when given the right tools.  While your brain is totally ready and able to do this, what you’re trying to do is to physically build thousands of new connections and relationships in your brain: that’s not going to happen overnight.  Language learning is not information.  It’s not memorizing facts that are then retrieved.  It’s learning a skill, which means creating and reinforcing brand new neural pathways in your brain that with repeated use are capable of smoother and more complicated flows.  High school language classes give the impression that if when called upon, you can basically recall or construct a given phrase, you are learning a language.  But language learning is hearing, using, and experiencing that phrase so many times, in so many different situations, that eventually that pathway is so strong in your mind, you don’t even have to think about it anymore.  I used to always google for “how long does it take to become fluent in a new language.”  Let me save you some time: you will never find an answer that helps you learn any faster.  Just be prepared to spend hundreds to thousands of hours consuming the language.  Think about how much language you were exposed to as a baby.  The good news is, you won’t need that much.  But you’ll need a lot more than just reading a lesson book cover to cover.

You Question the New Language

A lot of first-time language learners constantly compare aspects of their target language, to their native language.  Comparing the structures of the two languages is great if it’s giving you new insights and helping your learn.  But often, these comparisons are made in the wrong spirit.  The learner acts as if the way the other language does things is silly or doesn’t make any sense.  “Yeah, but why can you just say it this way, like in English” or “Yeah but why is ‘estar’ used when you said it was only used for…” You must become comfortable with and even enjoy the fact that the new language does things differently.  It’s really cool that through this new language you are going to learn new ways of approaching the world.  If you challenge the new language as if they came up with an “inefficient” or “nonsensical” way of doing things, you’re going to make everything a thousand times harder for yourself.  The language learner’s mentality is to try and see why the new language is in the right, rather than how it is totally wrong.  You want to assume that the target language is right, and then look for ways you can understand it in a way that’s easy to remember.