Foreign languages have always been my passion since I took my first English class at school when I was seven years old. I was incredibly fascinated by the fact that I could communicate in a completely new code, thanks to different sounds than I was used to and with people who didn’t understand my language. Besides, I was good at it without making much effort: I learned new vocabulary with ease and was able to reproduce different sounds and accents completely naturally. In fact, at the age of fifteen, I had a very good English accent and people couldn’t guess that I was Italian. Over the years, however, learning other languages and, as I’ve always done in my life, studying unsystematically but mostly intuitively and spontaneously, my accent got a little worse. But whatever. On the other hand, I learned five foreign languages, at different levels: English, German, Spanish, French, and a little Russian.

Having always been interested in language learning and teaching (in fact, I’ve been doing this job for about 4 years now) I’ve often followed YouTube channels or blogs of polyglots, teachers, or language coaches and I have to say that for a while I was a victim of this obsession of always learning new languages and being perfect in all of them. Just like in any other field now, the world of language learning has been influenced by the obsession with productivity and monetization. As if having a hobby that we don’t intend to turn into a job or in which we’re okay with not being perfect is a failure. Here, especially with English, I had my periods of perfectionism, where I never felt I was good enough and felt like everyone knew more than me or had a better accent. With other languages maybe I was always a little more self-indulgent because I was less passionate about them after all. There were times when I would use German more often, at other times I would use French. Spanish then played a big part in my life, as I lived in Spain for about four years, and as a result, at times when I was using some languages more than others, I seemed to forget those that were left on standby. 

So I found myself thinking that if I had a perfect learning and review system this wouldn’t have happened, but I would always have a very high level in all languages. The biggest worries were definitely coming from Russian, a language that I studied in college and eventually learned quite poorly because I never needed it in real life (for the time being) and as a result, I never had any real motivation to learn it well.

Whenever I was confronted with a new language, I often felt like learning it, for example, Greek when I was in Chios, or Arabic when I was in Granada (yes, okay, in Spain we speak Spanish, but Granada has a very strong Arabic influence) and probably in the past I would have done so, also encouraged by the various videos and podcasts of polyglots always struggling with a new language.

But after all this nice introduction, let’s go back to the title of the article: so why did I decide to stop learning foreign languages? Simply because one day I realized that it’s too challenging to handle. Learning a new language really well takes a lot of work, it’s not something you do in a month, as many gurus promise, it takes years and years. It can be compared to a musical instrument. And the hardest thing, in my opinion, is not even the learning phase, in fact, to reach a B2 level (a fairly satisfactory level to use the language independently) with the right commitment takes about 6 months (or at least, this is the time I usually took). The most difficult thing, I believe, is the ability to maintain several languages at once at a high level without having a big mess in your head. 

Until I only knew three languages (Italian, English, and German), one of which was at a native level and the other two at an advanced level (C1) I didn’t have major issues, I could switch from one language to the other without much difficulty. But since the arrival of Spanish, French, and Russian a great deal of language chaos began to reign in my head. Very often even when I speak in Italian I have a concept in my mind, but I can’t find the words so I refer to what I have in my head as “the thing of the thing” or something like that. Often some words come to my mind only in a certain language and I have to think about how you say them in others, for example Kupplung (in German, the clutch of the car) always comes to my mind in German, maybe because I learned to drive in Germany. Maybe I’m just too hard on myself, but I frequently get the impression that because of all this linguistic jumble in my head, even my thoughts have become more confused and I don’t express myself as well as I would like. In no language.

I’m not saying it’s not possible to learn ten, even fifteen or twenty languages, some people have done it, and if they are happy, good for them! Hats off! But it’s not for me, I think that for the moment six is a more than acceptable number and I’ve realized that if I want to make any more efforts, they will be directed at perfecting the languages I already know, perhaps deepening my lexical knowledge or learning new accents (how beautiful are the Southern American accent or Scottish?) rather than learning a new language from scratch. After all, going from C1 to C2 level takes almost more time and effort than going from A1 to C1!

Besides, at the end of the day, even if I didn’t want to put any more effort into it, I think I’m already fine with my language skills now, just as they are. Even though I’m not perfect, I have an accent and occasionally I make a fool of myself (like the time I said “hand job” when I meant to say “manual labor” because for some reason all I could think of was the word “Handarbeit” and I translated it literally. Yes, that really happened to me, and moreover quite recently and in front of a guy I liked). But whatever! We’ll get over it! I really think we should reclaim hobbies as such, without any obsessions of perfectionism and dreams of glory, but cultivating them because they give us pleasure. And that’s enough. Then no one’s stopping us from inventing a job out of our passions or getting better and better at something, but here, it wouldn’t hurt to shake off all this social pressure of bravura and perfectionism and do things a little lightly once in a while.