Language Creates Access
A new language opens parts of the world that were previously difficult to reach.
It lets you talk to people you may never have been able to really know. It lets you travel somewhere and participate instead of simply observing. It gives you access to books, music, games, movies, jokes, ideas, and culture without everything having to pass through a translation first.
It can help you understand friends, family, coworkers, customers, and communities differently. It can create opportunities to work, travel, live, or build relationships in places that once felt inaccessible.
Learning another language expands how much of the world you can experience directly.
Connect With More People
Language allows conversations, friendships, relationships, and professional connections that might otherwise never happen.
Experience More of a Place
Traveling changes when you can read what is around you, understand conversations, ask questions, and interact without always depending on translation.
Understand More Culture
Stories, humor, music, media, and ideas often lose something when they have to cross through another language first.
The Hard Part Is Getting There
The value of knowing another language is easy to understand. The difficult part is learning one.
Languages contain thousands of words, unfamiliar grammar, new sounds, expressions, and sometimes entirely different writing systems. Reaching a useful level can require hundreds or even thousands of hours of exposure and practice.
That creates a very practical problem: language learning has to survive real life.
Most people already have jobs, businesses, families, hobbies, school, friends, and responsibilities. It is difficult to consistently carve out large blocks of time for vocabulary lists, grammar exercises, flashcards, and formal lessons.
If Learning Takes a Long Time, It Has to Fit Into Your Life
Motivation can get someone started. It is much harder for motivation alone to carry someone through hundreds or thousands of hours of learning.
The easier learning is to incorporate into things you already do, the easier it becomes to keep going.
That idea is behind several of the language-learning projects I have built.
Different Ways to Learn
There is no single activity that teaches an entire language.
Sometimes you need deliberate memorization. Sometimes you need repeated exposure. Sometimes you need to read. Sometimes you need to listen. Eventually, you need to actually communicate.
I have built several projects around making those different parts of learning easier, more accessible, and easier to incorporate into everyday life.
Rememble
Rememble is an SRS (Spaced Repetition System) platform that's entirely online, free, and user-friendly.
Spaced repetition helps with one of the unavoidable parts of learning: remembering information over time.
Instead of repeatedly reviewing everything equally, an SRS helps bring information back for review as you are in danger of forgetting it. That makes it useful for vocabulary, characters, definitions, exam material, and many other things that require long-term memory.
Benefits of Rememble
- Accessible and Free: Rememble is available online and completely free, making it easy for anyone to begin using spaced repetition.
- Customizable Decks: Create and share decks tailored to your own learning goals, whether you're studying languages, preparing for an exam, or learning another skill.
- Easy to Use: The platform is designed to keep the process straightforward so more of your attention can stay on the material you are actually trying to learn.
The Word Sponge
The Word Sponge approaches language learning from another direction: instead of asking you to stop what you're doing and study, it brings some of the language into something you were already doing.
The Word Sponge is a Chrome extension that replaces words during your normal web browsing with words from the language you are learning.
You may already spend hours every week reading websites, articles, forums, social media, documentation, or news. The idea is to turn a small portion of that existing reading time into additional language exposure.
Instead of seeing a vocabulary word only on a flashcard, you begin seeing it inside actual sentences and alongside information you were already trying to understand.
Benefits of The Word Sponge
- Seamless Learning: Language exposure becomes part of your normal web browsing instead of requiring a completely separate activity.
- Contextual Learning: Words appear inside sentences you are already reading, helping connect vocabulary with actual meaning and usage.
- Customizable Settings: Adjust how many words are replaced so the experience can remain understandable while gradually increasing your exposure.
Learning Where Language Actually Exists
Vocabulary lists are useful, but languages do not exist as vocabulary lists.
Words exist inside sentences. Sentences exist inside conversations, stories, instructions, jokes, arguments, songs, and everyday life.
The more often you encounter a language in those real contexts, the more opportunities you have to understand how it is actually used.
Learn Japanese with My Books
My approach to learning Japanese also places a strong emphasis on learning while reading instead of relying entirely on rote memorization.
Reading gives you something vocabulary lists cannot provide by themselves: context.
You see how words fit together, how grammar changes meaning, how ideas are expressed, and how the language behaves inside something larger than an isolated example.
My books are designed around allowing someone to learn while continuing to move through material that is actually interesting to read.
Why Learn While Reading?
- Engaging and Practical: Stories and useful material give you a reason to continue reading beyond simply completing another lesson.
- Contextual Understanding: Seeing words and grammar in context makes it easier to understand how they function in actual language.
- Reduced Reliance on Memorization: Memorization remains useful, but understanding and repeated exposure can do part of the work too.
Language Learning Should Happen in More Than One Place
No flashcard system, book, browser extension, class, or app can expose you to every part of a language.
The more different ways you encounter the language, the more opportunities you have to understand it.
That can mean talking with native speakers, reading stories, watching movies, listening to music, playing games, browsing websites, traveling, or simply changing some of the media you already consume.
Other Ways I Recommend Learning a Language
- Language Exchange: Connect with native speakers and practice actual communication. Platforms such as Tandem and HelloTalk can make it easier to find people interested in mutual language practice.
- Learning Through Stories: Bilingual and assisted-reading books allow you to encounter vocabulary and grammar in the same type of context in which you will eventually need to understand them.
- Movies and Television: Watching media in your target language exposes you to natural speech, pronunciation, expressions, and cultural context.
- Music: Music provides repeated exposure that can make words, pronunciation, and phrases easier to remember. I like studying Japanese by listening to Japanese music and singing along.
- Games and Everyday Media: Changing some of the entertainment you already enjoy into your target language creates additional exposure without requiring another dedicated study session.
Consistency Matters
A language is simply too large to learn in a weekend.
Progress comes from repeatedly encountering the language over long periods of time. That makes consistency one of the most important parts of learning.
A method that is theoretically perfect but miserable to maintain is not very useful if you stop doing it.
Finding ways to make learning enjoyable, convenient, or connected to things you already care about can make it much easier to accumulate the enormous amount of exposure required.
Language Learning Tips and Strategies
- Set Specific Goals: Give yourself concrete targets, such as learning a certain number of words, finishing a book, understanding a song, or holding a short conversation.
- Practice Regularly: Frequent exposure helps keep the language active and reduces how much you forget between sessions.
- Use Flashcards: Flashcards and spaced repetition can be extremely useful for information that simply needs to be remembered.
- Practice Speaking: Eventually, understanding a language and producing a language become different skills. Speaking practice helps bridge that gap.
- Immerse Yourself: Surround yourself with opportunities to encounter the language through reading, listening, entertainment, conversation, and everyday activities.
- Track Your Progress: Language learning happens slowly enough that improvement can sometimes be difficult to notice. Looking back at what was difficult months ago can make progress much easier to see.
Some Languages Take Longer Than Others
Languages that share vocabulary, writing systems, sounds, or grammar with English can generally be easier for an English speaker to begin learning.
Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish all share various similarities with English that can reduce some of the initial difficulty.
Other languages require English speakers to learn substantially more unfamiliar systems.
Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean are commonly considered among the most challenging major languages for English speakers because of differences in writing, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, or combinations of those factors.
That difficulty makes the larger point even more important: when learning requires an enormous amount of time, finding sustainable ways to keep interacting with the language matters.
Why I Build Language-Learning Tools
Knowing another language can give someone access to people, places, culture, information, and experiences that were previously harder to reach.
The obstacle is that gaining that ability requires an extraordinary amount of learning.
I am interested in making more of that learning happen naturally: while reading, while browsing, while listening, while enjoying something, and while living normal life.
The easier learning is to keep doing, the more realistic it becomes to eventually reach the part that mattered in the first place: actually understanding and communicating.
Start Learning
Whether you use spaced repetition with Rememble, add vocabulary to your normal browsing with The Word Sponge, learn Japanese through reading, talk with native speakers, or immerse yourself through music and media, every additional interaction with the language moves you a little further.
The goal is not simply to finish lessons.
The goal is to reach the point where another part of the world becomes understandable to you.