Hour 1 of Learning a New Language
2025-06-19
Controversial opinion: if you want to learn language X, before anything else,
read the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_grammar from start to
finish.
- Most of these grammar pages seem to be written as a fairly comprehensive,
mostly self-contained overview of most of the important things going on in
the language.
- They often also include a bit of historical context, or info on how it fits into a language family - both of which will give you better priors on what patterns to expect.
- It'll probably take you under an hour.
- Even if you don't remember all the details, and don't yet have the context to
understand the implications, it'll prime you with a really good framing of
what to expect as you move on to all the usual resources (Textbooks, Anki,
YouTube, Netflix, Duolingo, elaborate hacked-together python scripts, etc).
- It turns all the unknown unknowns into just unknowns.
- You won't waste as much mental energy maintaining a distribution of hypotheses that cover unlikely possibilities.
Fundamentally, there's just not that much grammatical variety in natural human languages. It's entirely feasible to get the gist of it down on one page, and a complete grammar isn't much longer (maybe a short textbook). Check it out for yourself: