Every Language Learning Method Ranked (Best to Worst)
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I'm ranking every language learning method from best to worst. In this video, I’ll show you exactly where the method you're already using lands, which one maximises your limited study time, which ones aren't nearly as good as everyone says, and which single method deserves the top tier.
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0:00 The Ranking System
0:51 Method #1
3:17 Language Goal Planner
4:01 Method #2
5:03 Method #3
7:27 Method #4
8:30 Method #5
10:13 Method #6
11:37 Method #7
14:29 Method #8
16:24 Method #9
18:31 Method #10
19:56 Method #11
22:07 Method #12
#StoryLearning #LearnThroughStories
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"It's the only one that made it all the way to an S-tier. And this winner probably isn't what you're expecting".
Yes, Olly you shilling your method is exactly what we were expecting.
I've just started the video. Let me guess, his top tier method includes his StoryLearning app?
Haven't even finished watching about Duolingo and I totally disagree. After about 1 year in Duolingo, I went to France and lost my wallet there. I was on a move in a camper van and a lady with 0 english contacted my on facebook and gave her phone number, I had to speak French 100% and I managed to organize shipping that wallet to my next overnight stay. I wasn't fluent my no means but I managed to get my wallet back.
Gold tier: marry someone and make them speak to you (normally) in their language haha
But what method is the best until you can get to comprehencible input?
Hear me out. Native CHILDRENS content
oohhh! have you tried Dothislingo? its great for building your vocab and learning natural phrases that people actually use in everyday conversations.
Aren't you just advertising your product, I feel your a bit bias.
You're just flogging your own stuff. The best avalable method is comprehensible input using simple approaches like Dreaming French. What a waste of 25 mins of my time !!
You don't really value your viewers time, do you ? Or why are the methods numbered instead of named ? And why can't we see the whole list at once somewhere ? Will this appreciation also be visible in your product ?
For immersion to work, you have to be disciplined and create the right structure. Just moving to a country is not real immersion. If single, you should date a native speaker, join clubs that locals attend. Find ways not to use your language, but if you have to teach English, then yes, a lot of your time will be taken up outside your target language and if you have kids you will have to decide to teach your native language to your kids and break immersion further. The best way is to find a pathway to use the language at work.
I tried the apps, well an app. I used it every day. It was on a language I had studied in high school and a little in college. I am decades removed from that and not really used the language since. A few movies and translating a passage in a book -- the gist of it. So I thought I would brush up on it. After a month, I actually thought I had lost more of the language than I already had.
Grammar is not a method.
It's a real and essential part of the language. You can study it or not; the better you study it, the more powerful your expression and understanding will be.
Thanks for this overview. My language learning goal is mainly speaking and writing. It's far easier to listen and read, but the rubber meets the road when I'm actively speaking or writing. So the methods that force me to practice these two skills rise to the top of the list for me. I can manage listening and reading easily enough.
Pfff! Yeah, surprise, the best method is the stuff you’re selling. Very poor and biased assessment of the benefits of reading. I’m really disappointed in this basically self-promotional video.
Reading is an utterly awful method where the written script is not at all consistent phonetically (like English), completely unusable where the script is non-Latin (Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Hindi…), and just generally a very poor method in itself, as you have to be quite skilled in self-directed language learning to be able to use it.
At the very least, graded videos should be above reading graded books, since video is much much better for training listening skills and correct pronunciation.
When you consider the 4 language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), reading does nothing whatsoever for the listening skill, and therefore is extremely poor in helping the speaking skill, since it cannot teach the correct accent.
Another reason which makes reading wholly inappropriate for an S-tier classification, is that, even with simplified graded readers, it only starts to become a useful technique once past the beginner stage. At the beginner stage, almost any of the other methods you list which can focus more on vocabulary acquisition (e.g. flashcards, text books, classroom, lists, immersion) would be better suited.
A final, more subtle reason, why reading alone is a poor language-learning method, is that early language acquisition should focus on highly frequent language domains such as greetings, introductions, numbers, food and drink, shopping, talking about the family etc. These topics are best dealt with using other methods you listed (e.g. flashcards, text books, classroom, lists, immersion). The problem with reading is that, although it can be good for building vocabulary and grammar generally, it is usually very poor at the sort of targeted language tasks that most beginners want to master.
Reading is fine as a tool, but not as a standalone method, and certainly not for beginners when vocabulary is non-existent, or for practising listening, or for developing a good accent when speaking, or for learning the high-value words and phrases in frequently needed language domains, nor for users who don't have a high degree of self-directed language ability.
Disappointingly biased self-promotional video. You are capable of better.
I use Duolingo every day. It does not promise to get you to fluency. I have picked up a lot of vocabulary with it although it is not my only language learning resource. The thing I like about it is when you life gets crazy and you can't sit down with story learning or a course you bought or whatever, it is easy to do a Duolingo lesson or two and keep your toe in the water. I think keeping a toe in the water (at least for me) is really important.
Duolingo is affordable, and the gamification promotes interest and motivation, which is half the challenge for those of us with no discipline 😅
The German course is actually pretty good though, I'm just using a few flash cards with it. And I might start watching Inspector Rex and 90s movies in German for more immersion.
Anyway I don't really need to become fluent any time soon, it's more just a fun way to keep my brain active.
Yes a bit of a conflict but having done Rosetta Stone and Duolingo learning how to read and speak the way we did in school make 🤯 total sense and I had combined a grammar book with Duo and that helped best. See Dick, see Jane ….
For me the method at school of memorizing tons of words and then putting them together worked for some reason and it works in German right now as well
I actually agree with you. Reading in the target language (especially children's books, if you are just beginning) is amazing. However, I pair it with a short grammar textbook, and the reason I do that is that it would take a long time to get the hang of (mainly) verb conjugations and prepositions. I typically search for "(target language) Reference Grammar" because reference grammars are very short and cover the most important topics you should know with only a few examples. If I can, in fact, I look for bilingual texts/apps. I learnt Arabic (understanding) by basically reading an Arabic-English Qur'an, and to today, I haven't finished a single Arabic grammar book. I received that grammatical knowledge later on via lectures, classes, and other sources.
I wish I had checked the comment section before wasting the last 26 minutes watching this video. You made no mention of spaced repetition programs like Pimsleur. THAT would've been S tier. I understand that you want to promote your method. But if you're going to evaluate EVERY language learning method as the title suggests, you can't leave out spaced repetition programs. And if you're grouping Pimsleur with 'gamified apps', you're doing a big disservice to your audience.
At the end of the day, the best learning method is what works for YOU. I use Pimsleur, Preply tutors, PolyglotClub to chat with natives, watch shows/movies/educational videos in the target language, audiobooks, and ChatGPT for practice with speaking and writing.
Tha k god i bought one of his books
I have tried to learn languages in classrooms and from textbooks, to no great success. A short while ago I decided to start learning Spanish, and Mr. Richards’ “Short Stories in Spanish” are one of my study methods. In my opinion, they have been a big help — I read the story once through for the “vibe”, not completely worried about the grammar. I then go back over it with a fine-toothed comb making sure I understand the grammar and vocabulary. ChatGPT is good for this because if there’s some grammar I don’t understand, I just type it into the Ai and say “parse this sentence”. It gives the grammar breakdown, explains the vocab and provides example sentences. In just a few weeks of effort like this, and coming from pretty much zero Spanish, I am now able to read at a low-intermediate level almost as though it were in English, my native language. (It’s a lot of fun translating in real time). I also read a lot of it aloud, being careful with pronunciation (Spanish is pretty easy to pronounce, so a little care and you can get a good approximation, in my opinion). And, I guess not surprisingly, I am able to listen to Spanish (spoken for my level — clearly and fairly slowly) and comprehend it very well, and I know that’s a result of having done all the reading.
In my view, reading won’t spontaneously make you able to speak — that’s a separate skill — but it seems to help, especially if you read aloud.
What I notice about the stories is that they hammer away at particular and important vocab and grammar concepts until they just start to “sound” right and become recognizable patterns.
This method may not be for everyone, and I don’t think it’s a one-stop shop; I still drill vocabulary, direct and indirect object pronouns, verb conjugation etc., saving reading for the treat at the end. But from personal experience, it does seem quite effective.
It's murciélago, not murciégalo.
Not the "murciegalo" 😭
O, any reason you omitted the Direct/Natural Method in your evaluations?
The only S tier there is working in the language. Nothing pushes you the same way.
How do you know I use duolingo in the bathroom lmao
"I was surrounded by Japanese.. my job was in English..." That's not an immersion, bro, that's "living in the country of the target language" . And talking about flash cards as "a learning method": if a person is intelligent enough to use a spaced repetition app and do it correctly (frases not separate words etc), they definitely are intelligent enough to understand that it's just a way of training vocabulary, not "a learning method". Even if they don't do anything else. So I'm sorry to say but you're cheating here in reasoning to make your tier list
They whole "I did duolingo for 4 years and can't speak" is a strawman. How many minutes per day did that person actually commit to duolingo? 5 minutes? an hour? 2 hours? I've been doing duolingo for 10 months and I'm almost completely finished with the French course, and it has taught me a lot. Am I fluent? Not remotely. Can I produce sentences that can be understood in French? Bien Sur. But I've been doing 2 to 3 hours a day for that full 10 months. At first it was all duolingo, though once I had a big chunk of vocabulary, I expanded to include a bunch of lingq as well, so now it's more like an hour of Duolingo and 1 to 2 hours of consuming content in lingq (in which I can do pure listening, listening with subtitles of the transcript, or just pure reading - it's all about consuming input in the target language).
But the whole "orange elephant" argument is a bunch of malarkey. Is there an occasioinal sentence like that in Duolingo? Sure. But such sentences come up in the real world sometimes as well... Like the guy who showed up at a virtual court hearing during the pandemic and his kid had turned on a cat face overlay that he didn't know how to turn off, so he said "I'm not a cat". People who have something to sell and want to put down Duolingo/Pimsleur/Rocket/whatever always pretend that they're just doing nonsense words or button clicking. It's just not true. C'mon Olly, you're better than that. You can give the more popular methods their do without devaluing that your contributions have value as well.
And BTW... I have read some of Olly's graded reader stories (using lingq) and they're just fine. They're good for one piece of the puzzle, as are tutors and Anki and listening and... apps.
And Olly, you know what really would have helped you when you were in Japan and had no time to study Japanese during the day because you were working? An app. You could have come home, eaten dinner, then run an app for 2 hours and made some progress in Japanese. I know because I did that for about 8 months. That's a thing that moves apps ahead of several other techniques - you can do it at any time, for a short or long amount of time each day. You could have been studying Kanji or using Pimsleur to learn some simple words and phrases.
Also tbh I think I learned more words in the past 4 days learning Italian on Duolingo, than I learned French words in 4 semesters while I was in high school.
Practice practice practice
For any 日本語 (Japanese) learners out there reading these comments, there are a bunch of free books to read at Tadoku for literally all language levels. They have per-kindergarten level all the way through N1 level proficiency, and many of them have audio you can use to follow along. It is an excellent source. 頑張って! 👍