After a long day of learning a language, you decide to make a video or blog post about your progress. You think you’re doing fairly well as a learner, putting in all that effort throughout a long period of time. However within the first few minutes of speaking, you suddenly feel that you are not as good as you think you are. No matter how many motivational posts you have read or words that you have learned, you start to doubt yourself.

There are many harsh truths in language learning that are hidden from you, but I picked some that I thought would have been nice to know before I started learning foreign languages.

When you evaluate other learners, you often judge their language ability harshly, disregarding the amount of effort they put in. When you are being evaluated, you hope that people appreciate how much effort you’re putting in. Someone might receive more praise than you even though they are worse than you at a language, but it almost never matters in the long run. Language hacks allow you to put on a good act, making you look more fluent, but rarely does it improve your own ability. Using excessive filler words and slang to sound more native might increase fluency, but it makes communication harder, defeating the purpose of speaking that language. The better you speak a language, the less outward praise you receive. At a higher level, you are also less likely to care about other people’s opinions, which may have been your source of motivation to begin with. When asked for how many languages are you fluent in, the best polyglots will lie down saying they know only 2-3 languages, knowing how difficult it is to reach a high level. The rest will lie up, claiming fluency even at a beginner level. A skilled polyglot will admit when they are reading off a script. Most polyglots would rather not admit this, for it lowers their perceived ability, even if they only had a little to begin with. People who think that they can speak well but not read or write well tend to overestimate their ability (see heritage speakers). The converse is true, where many foreign speakers learning English have a minor accent and apologize for their writing, even though they don’t need to. The worst mistake you can make is thinking that you are saying the right thing but you are completely off. It’s even worse when you present your knowledge to other learners as authority. Knowing all the words in a sentence doesn’t mean you understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole. You could definitely encounter miscommunication problems at a later time and not even realize it. Asking for advice from the wrong people can lead to a destructive cycle of failure and criticism, but it can be hard to filter out good advice when you are inexperienced. Bad advice includes “keep speaking more, you just need to try harder”. Knowing multiple languages doesn’t mean someone is smart. There are uneducated drug dealers who are multilingual, but you wouldn’t consider them to be smart as the word multilingual implies? Fluency and native level have multiple different interpretations. These terms can be used to inflate your own ability without feeling like a fraud. Most polyglot videos are uninteresting and involve a limited number of topics with a limited vocabulary, almost always about language learning or mundane personal history. Native speakers can evaluate people’s speaking abilities incorrectly, by assuming that a foreign looking person must be bad at the language, even if that speaker has a flawless command of the language. If people however cannot understand them through the phone, it’s their fault. A lot of struggling learners would benefit more from trying to improve their communication on their own, instead of complaining and expecting natives to accommodate them. Getting a significant other for free practice doesn’t work as well as you expected. Analyzing sound graphs and annotated texts makes you feel like you have a precise command of the language, but you could still pronounce words completely differently from the audio. A language with fewer phonemes or simpler grammar can seem really easy, but you can still make mistakes by using multiple different sounds for a single sound. It’s even worse if you believe you can pronounce words better than a native speaker (see English speakers learning Japanese). You could imitate audio wrong by mixing up two similar phonemes, since they exist as a single phoneme in your native language. It’s even worse when you think you are pronouncing words perfectly and you can’t understand why natives keep trying to correct you. When you are young, you have a lot of free time to learn languages to a high level (at least C1 on the CEFR scale). As you get older, your chance of reaching a high level in multiple languages decreases. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do this in your 30s and 40s, but why make things harder for yourself? People will discourage you from learning foreign languages because you know English. The same people fail to justify that many other activities, such as mindless Internet surfing and TV watching, are just as useless. The next time you wonder whether learning languages is useless, apply the same logic to your other activities.

Finding quality advice is not easy and this is one of the reasons why this blog exists, even though blogging takes away valuable time from language learning. It is worth writing this blog, even if it only helps a single person.

What are some truths that you wish you had known? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.