New Year, New Language?

Five Tips to Ignite Your Language Learning Goals in 2025

It’s January 1. The sugar-cookie hangover is wearing off and the inebriated pledge you made to live your best life in 2025 while sloshing champagne over the side of your coupe may be little more than a blurry memory.

But maybe you’ve made a few resolutions, like hitting the gym or establishing healthy boundaries with your in-laws? What about that language textbook languishing in the corner of your home office?

If learning a (primarily dead) language from scratch is on your 2025 resolution list—or if you simply need to recommit to your language-learning goals this year—this post is for you! It’s also for the time-strapped, cash-strapped, mildly unmotivated, serial procrastinator who wants to maximize gains while minimizing effort studying independently.

Now, I’d be remiss to suggest that you can learn a language by osmosis, or—what I suspect most of us would prefer—by spending a paltry hour a month on some flash cards and a grammar video or two. However, I do believe that for many of us dancing precariously close to, or already in the throes of middle age, everything but language study is vying for our attention. With discouraging research showing that several hundred hours of study are needed to achieve substantial proficiency, most of us will simply shrug off the language because, after all, if you can’t commit to ten hours a week of dedicated study, what’s the point?

However, if your goal is incremental gains, something is better than nothing. You might not be able to quote Boethius to the Alfred impersonator at the Battle of Edington reenactment, but you may be able to ask them, “Hwær is þæt gangsetl?” if you drank a bit too much tea before you showed up. Therefore, if you just want to creep through 2025 making a little progress, here is my graduated approach—from the bare minimum to the champion-level suggestions.

Tip #1. Build a targeted vocabulary.

“Wow, that’s your first tip? So glad I came to your blog,” you say sarcastically, but give me a chance.

So often we are drawn to a language because we have a goal in mind: reading an original text, falling in love with its poetry, or simply wanting to come up with a grammatically correct inscription for our latest bit of ink. Reconnect with your motivation and start focusing the key words to help you get there.

One of the biggest challenges I would identify when transitioning from beginner to intermediate-level learner is that all the grammar doesn’t do me a spot of good if I’m spending upwards of an hour on a paragraph looking up words that I don’t know. Therefore, if you can’t commit to textbook, why not commit to building a core vocabulary?

Now, of course, there’s evidence that one of the best ways to have vocabulary stick is to encounter them in situ (just check out my blog on Henry Sweet’s approach and you’ll see his thoughts on the matter). However, if all you’ve got in you energetically is the will to tap a few buttons on an app or make a couple of flashcards while binge-watching Netflix, then this is the path for you.

In my view, you can approach the building of a targeted vocabulary a few ways:

(1) You could download a list of the most commonly found words in your target language. If Latin is your bag, then Dickinson College’s list could be a good place for you to begin, while Peter Baker’s Old English Aerobics site has a list of the just-shy-of-500-most-common words. I haven’t done a crosswalk between the University of St. Andrews’ list with Peter Baker’s, but it boasts an extra three words that Dr. Baker doesn’t, so take from this what you will. This is a fairly easy print-and-do-something-with-it approach that requires minimal effort.

(2) You could access Memrise’s Community Courses, at least in 2025. I’m not sure what the plan is after 2025, but I was among the grumblers when the community course offerings were displaced last year after having built my own dedicated vocabulary lists on the app. One of the reasons I suggest Memrise is that, depending on the language, users have pre-populated core vocabulary from textbooks or vocabulary lists. Latin learners can find ample support for the Cambridge Latin Course (there’s the individual books, like Book I, or four books rolled into one), or Old English learners may save themselves the agony of making flashcards either by hand or on an app by simply using the University of St. Andrews’ list mentioned above already in existence. The one quibble I have is that you can no longer access these courses on an app, so you’ll have to use a browser window on your phone, tablet or laptop, but these can be great ways to double-down on language learning if you’re simply watching television.

(3) You could make your own list based on a target text. Now, this isn’t some invitation to grab Beowulf or De natura deorum, but rather to pick a poem, prayer, riddle or passage that you might like to read eventually and make your own vocabulary list. Even if you can’t read the text yet, looking up the words ahead of time and filing it away can help you down the line while expanding your vocabulary. This is likely the most labour-intensive of the three approaches because there is an active component—like using a dictionary and writing or typing the words out—but this also has the added benefit of engaging with the vocabulary more meaningfully for possibly improved retention.

Tip #2. “Active”-ate the Language.

Not to slag on the grammar-translation method of language learning—after all, it was a fruitful if not slightly terrifying approach for my earliest Latin learning experiences—but mounting evidence has shown that language proficiency gains can be achieved through more “active” engagement with the language. Reading, writing, listening and speaking (even if it’s just reading aloud) could help you advance your current language skills.

If you have some grammar under your belt, then reading easier texts may be more your pace in the year ahead. For beginner Latin learners, the Fabula Faciles website can be a helpful place to find content at just the right level, while a quick search of “Latin novellas” on the Internet Archive yields a handful of material available to borrow and enjoy. Beginner Old English learners may have a slightly more challenging time (though Colin Gorrie has published his much-anticipated Osweald Bera, which I bought and have been reading with great joy this holiday season!). As I mentioned in my earlier post on Henry Sweet, you could also access his beginner-stage textbook, which contains various easy-to-understand passages adapted from primary texts like Ælfric’s De temporibus anni.

Listening to level-appropriate content may be easier for Latin learners as there are several incredible Latin content producers on YouTube that have recorded textbooks, conversations, or even short stories or expositional works (Satura Lanx, Scorpio Martianus, Latinitas Animi Causa: Latin for Fun!, and Found in Antinquity just to name a few). Old English learners may have a slightly more difficult time insofar as there are fewer original content producers, but Dr. Drout’s Anglo-Saxon Aloud recordings remains my go-to to supplement any source texts with listening reinforcement.

And, of course, there is the dreaded original composition—but perhaps I’m projecting my own insecurities about language composition onto the collective? As mentioned in a previous post (and certainly, as you can detect from my Substack notes), writing about my cats or captioning photographs they’re in is my beloved outlet for Latin composition. Although I haven’t taken the plunge into original Old English composition, I will say that journaling about your day in your target language by doing something as simple as substituting a Modern English word for one in your target language can help immensely, while varying the modalities in which you are accessing and reinforcing the language.

Tip #3. Passive Parsing.

Parsing complicated sentences in foreign languages should be an Olympic sport. Maybe I’m the only one who loves watching people parse sentences, but I appreciate the nitty-gritty dissection of language mechanics. (It also saves me the trouble of doing it when my brain is too tired.) My other argument for watching people parse sentences is that it helps you see constructs or examples that you may have laboured over yourself, especially if you don’t have the benefit of the classroom experience to discuss trouble sentences with peers and teachers.

For Latin learners, Christine Hahn’s YouTube channel has recorded the parsing of a healthy segment of Geoffrey Steadman’s glossed Fabulae ab urbe condita, and you can find similar videos for texts like Caesar’s De bello gallico or Augustine’s Confessions from other YouTubers.

I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but when it comes to Old English your options are fewer. Colin Gorrie’s video parsing Matthew 7:24-27 is useful for demonstrating how to parse sentences effectively, while Peter Baker’s “extreme annotation” of Psalm 1, Beatus vir/Ēadiġ bið se wer takes a paper-based approach, but nonetheless one which gets the point across: seeing how the staples of a language come together and how the various components work together. The aim of parsing, in my view, is arriving at a grammatically correct translation that makes sense in Modern English. Sometimes we can muddle through tough passages when reading for exposure, but parsing tests how effectively you understand the various forms and functions of a language’s constituent elements and can be an effective way to supplement your studies.

Tip #4. Times Twelve.

Sometimes the only thing that’s really preventing us from learning a language is time. Cracking open a textbook seems daunting; after all, with tens of chapters and only twelve months of the year, there’s no way to get through the entire tome in a few hours of study a month.

I’m here to say, toss out the textbook. Make that textbook a 2026 resolution if you just can’t muster the energy to crack it open in 2025. Maybe you can only commit to a few hours of study one Sunday per lunar month? Why not be strategic?

Instead of staring helplessly at the table of contents of Wheelock or Mitchell and Robinson, take a pragmatic approach. In two or three hours on a Saturday morning, what core concept might you be able to learn? Perhaps you could take a stab at learning nouns? Maybe adverbs are easier given timing constraints? Be realistic. Obviously, you can’t and won’t commit everything to memory, but that isn’t the goal with this idea: it’s about exposure. You’re laying the foundations for later, more dedicated study by beginning to engage with the language in smaller conceptual units. Got four hours? Perhaps you can spend some time with nouns—case, gender, weak, strong, first declension versus third, and so on. Only an hour? Maybe the ablative case and its prepositions could be mastered quickly?

The point isn’t about building cohesion or even progressive continuity: the goal is about using time to make some sort of headway without feeling the pressure of a course, textbook or other prescriptive approach mount. I haven’t come across anything comparable in Old English, but Allen and Greenough’s Important Rules of Latin Syntax could be a good place to start for anyone with a little exposure to Latin. Latintutorial has even made videos explaining these on YouTube.

Tip #5. A Sentence a Day.

While this one is definitely for anyone who has some foundational mastery of the language and does involve some dedication, it can also yield nice end-of-year results. If you can manage to translate a sentence a day from some accessible text—and by that I mean one that is within reach of your current language level—then, theoretically, without skipping a day, you will have translated 365 sentences by December 31, 2025.

I might even take this one on myself this year since my ability to commit to hours of language learning ebbed and flowed in 2024, with several weeks sometimes passing before I could meaningfully turn to translating texts or brushing up on grammatical principles that were violently resisting internalization.

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I hope these ideas were helpful to intrepid autodidacts! What strategies helped you maximize learning when you were strapped for time? Drop your comments below!