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Learning a Language in 2025

Key takeaways:

  • Everyone defaults to apps these days, but the library is also a great place to find old-school, tried/tested learning resources: books, audio, etc.
  • There are plenty of Spaced Repetition System (SRS) options out there; I am using Paul Noble's materials through Collins at the moment (~20 hours of audio content, plus books and guides), but I have used Language Transfer's audio content, too.
  • I am learning Italian for an upcoming trip to Italy and have noted that while trendy these days, learning a language is still a statement of advocacy in what is swiftly becoming a monocultural America.

I am old enough to remember the early days of tools like Rosetta Stone (originally sold as a set of CD-ROMs at hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single language) and Duolingo (originally offered on the web for only a handful of languages). Before that, language acquisition was largely books, classes, or immersion. Technology opened up a world of options, but in those early days was still cost-prohibitive. The smartphone (and user expectation shifts along with it) changed things.

Duolingo, in particular, was an unknown quantity, but a revolutionary idea: use your smartphone to learn a language, motivating you through gamification. (I'm not sure we even had that word at the time.) On the backend, Duolingo was a translation business, getting better translations through data gathering as the world learned new languages. Over the years, the business model and gamifying approach have gotten ever more complicated, but Duolingo really did flip the formula and inform a generation of tools that we now depend on for language acquisition, including the current versions of Rosetta Stone.

I will admit that I have no idea what Duolingo is as a business anymore, but as it has gotten more complicated to engage with it (including multiple tiers of pricing now), I have been turned off by the methodology, instead seeking out ways to intrinsically motivate myself versus depending on an algorithm to motivate me.

I am trying to learn Italian. We have an upcoming trip and I am a dual citizen, so it feels like the right time to be flexing this particular muscle. My wife and my mother have been using Duolingo with this same goal in mind and I will say, it works. There are tons of very smart people that ascribe to the way Duolingo teaches languages and I have done a lot of work in Duolingo over the years myself, but I can't help but yearn for another way.

Those same smart people note that apps cannot be the only tool in the toolbox; languages are meant to be used: spoken, read, written, and heard. But languages are also dynamic in a way that apps aren't (yet). So my quandary was "what methodology gets me to using the language fastest?" In the end, I turned to the library (as one should).

Books and audiobooks, native speakers and language teachers; these and more are all available in a library. I ended up grabbing books, including quick learning reference guides, full textbooks, native story books, and language acquisition-focused short stories. The thing that ended up clicking, though, was Paul Noble's "Unlocking" series.

Unlocking Italian with Paul Noble is not a new book; my copy was published in 2017 and is a simplistic approach, but it kickstarted my process. After completing that book, I moved onto his Spaced Repetition System (SRS) series for Italian; SRS is the style my generation would remember from high school language courses in which you hear a native speaker say something and you repeat it. I am about halfway through that resource and it has opened me up to other avenues to augment my learning: dictionaries for vocabulary building.1

None of this is new, in fact this approach is quote old, but I realized in this process that it might now be considered novel: to approach something that the smartphone market has effectively taken over through what might be considered an antiquated lens.

However, the thing that makes Duolingo—and its modern ilk—effective is its patterns and motivations; it gets you coming back each day to learn a little bit more. Some (dare I say the majority of) people seem to be unable to sustain a habit long enough on their own to see it through to the payoff. Apps support this common human condition by enticing people back each day.

Unlocking Italian with Paul Noble got me coming back each day because of its simplified format and approach. I blew through the book quickly, so it didn't form a long term habit (that part still has to be on me), but I carried the book with me and stole fifteen to twenty minutes each day to see it through.

I didn't intend for this post to laud or be a review of the Paul Noble series, but more of a suggestion to seek out more than just what everyone else is doing when learning a language. Language learning is inherently an act of leadership, inclusivity, and empathy, so find what works for you and stick to it; that way, we can meet new people and engage with them regardless of the language they speak.

  1. There is an aside here (or maybe an entire series of posts) about society's over-reliance on modern technologies when a paper resource can accomplish the same goal, but that makes an assumption that my wife has long since debunked for me that people are still taught how to approach and use those tools effectively. Dictionaries and Thesauruses are two of those paper resources that have long been removed from the public consciousness even though they are still effective at what they provide and a recent network outage at my kids' school was enough to bring to bear the fact that kids don't understand how to use them. ↩