That one time when I accidentally learned a language
I'm currently learning Arabic and Persian, and the progress is just so excruciatingly slow. It makes my mind wander back to the good old times when I was mostly focusing on romance languages. And to the time when I learned Catalan without really planning to.
I'd just gone through a big breakup and left Barcelona. I missed the city, and my freshly-lost life and friends. So when one day YouTube recommended me a local series, I hit the link.
The series was Plats Bruts (Dirty Dishes). It was one of my first ever contacts with Catalan. I've lived there for years, but almost never heard it on the street. No one spoke it at work. And me, when I first moved there, I didn't even speak Spanish.
But I didn't need to understand much to follow the easy plot. It was entertaining. It helped a little. And it soon became part of my daily routine.
After Plats Bruts I watched La Riera. I'd watch it while cooking, or eating, or procrastinating writing my thesis. At first, I'd watch with subtitles. But soon they weren't needed. I never thought of it as a language learning activity. It was pure entertainment.
And just like that, over some three years or so, 700 hours of immersion went by. I watched the last, 1,500-ish episode of La Riera and... realized I'm actually kind of fluent. I could think in the language. I've read a couple of books. Fiction, non-fiction. Everything was easy.
That was really astonishing. Three years isn't any record-breaking speed, but I normally take much longer to learn a language, because I keep interrupting my learning, jumping between languages, etc. But watching series didn't really feel like work. I didn't want to procrastinate that. I just did it and the hours went by.
It took me all this to shift my approach to learning. The school system is so broken. I thought painful memorization is the only way to learn. And that you're not supposed to consume content until you're... well, fluent. And now, whenever I see someone online say, "This podcast/series sounds great, I'll check it out when I'm more advanced.", I want to yell at them like at a friend who is about to text their ex. Noooo...