How I learned languages, and what I'd skip

I grew up in Buenos Aires speaking Spanish. I taught myself English around the age of ten, studied Japanese and Chinese at the University of Buenos Aires' language center, got a degree in translation, and taught Japanese before moving to Japan. Today Japanese is my main working language, and I get by in Portuguese, Italian and French.

People ask how. The honest answer is less about method than about having a reason.

Input first, and lots of it

I didn't learn English in a classroom. I learned it from books and the internet, because that's where the things I was curious about were.

Classes are good at structure and bad at volume. You need both, but volume is the part most people skip.

A reason beats a method

Japanese stuck because I had somewhere to take it. I moved to Japan partly to play mahjong professionally, and a mahjong parlor is not a place where anyone slows down for you. Neither is a business meeting.

Every language I kept had something like that attached: a game, a job, people I wanted to talk to. The ones I studied just to study are the ones that faded.

Teaching shows you what you don't know

Teaching Japanese in Buenos Aires showed me how much I only knew by feel. Students ask why, and "that's just how it's said" isn't an answer. Having to explain a rule is the fastest way to find out whether you understand it.

Translation training is about meaning

Translation school beats one idea into you: you translate meaning, not words. That's also the difference between correct Japanese and natural Japanese. Keigo, the honorific register, is a good example. You can conjugate everything correctly and still sound strange, because the real rules are about who is speaking to whom and in what situation.

What I'd skip

Waiting to be ready. I've watched a lot of smart people in Japan hold back because their English wasn't perfect, and I've seen the opposite in foreigners with their Japanese. At Qiita Conference in 2024, my co-speaker Shusaku Uesugi and I both landed on the same point: what you want to build matters more than how perfect your English is. Having something to say gets you further than saying nothing flawlessly.

I'd also skip collecting apps and courses. Pick one source of input you enjoy and one way to speak regularly. That's the whole system.

Where AI fits

I use language models every day, and they are a great practice partner: they'll explain a nuance, rewrite an email in three registers or quiz you without getting tired. What they can't do is give you a reason to speak or people to speak with. Use them to practice more, not to avoid the conversations that make a language stick.