About

Becoming fluent in a language comes with a hefty price tag. The going rate is 1,000s of hours. You can’t avoid paying altogether, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay full price.

Here’s the thing: not all language-learning hours are created equal.

Take two people who each spend an hour a day learning a language.

Person A spends the whole hour on Duolingo. Person B divides their hour between 15 minutes of targeted flashcards, 15 minutes speaking with an exchange partner, 15 minutes listening to a daily podcast, and 15 minutes writing a journal entry.

They’re both spending an hour on language learning. But they’re not getting the same return.

And over time, those differences compound.

Finding the right shortcuts could mean reaching fluency in two years rather than ten.

Welcome to Loophole Languages, where I record the strategies that make language learning more efficient.

I started finding these loopholes while learning French for a second time, having given up for more than ten years. Now I’m sharing what I find as I work my way through the next languages I learn.