A lot of people have asked me how I learn languages, so here’s the whole method written down.

Some context first: I’ve learned about 1.1 languages so far. I taught myself Romanian starting in January 2025 and I’m now upper-intermediate, and I’ve started on Russian. Nearly all of my experience comes from Romanian, so I’m surely generalizing in places. Still, I think this approach is more efficient than what most YouTube videos will tell you, and I explain my reasoning at each step. Treat this as a living guide. It will change as I learn more languages.

The method in a nutshell

I do a few days of prep up front: grammar terminology, the alphabet, and a quick skim of the grammar. After that, it’s the same loop every day:

1. Read a short story in LingQ and look up every word I don’t know.
2. Drill those new words as flashcards in Anki.
3. Listen to the stories I’ve already read.

Speaking comes later, once I’ve built up a real vocabulary.

The tools I mention

• LingQ: a paid reading and listening app. Every lesson comes with text and audio. You click unfamiliar words to see a translation, and it tracks how well you know each word on a scale from 1 (new) to 5 (known). A word you’ve saved for review is called a “LingQ.”
• Anki: a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition. It shows you each card right before you’d forget it, so reviews get further apart as a word sticks. It’s free on desktop and Android.
• Aminte: a free Chrome extension I built that turns the words you save in LingQ into Anki flashcards. Since it’s my own project, take my enthusiasm for it with that in mind.
• elon.io: free grammar guides, organized by level.
• iTalki: a marketplace for paid one-on-one tutors over video call.
• OmeTV: a free video chat site that pairs you with random strangers.

What it costs

The daily loop costs about $120–$155 for the first year on LingQ’s annual plan: $120 for LingQ alone, or about $155 with the iPhone version of Anki and the text-to-speech add-on. Tutoring is the big variable later. At three $20 lessons a week, it comes to roughly $260 a month.

Why this over other methods

The biggest reason: it works for almost any language. LingQ supports a ton of languages, and that’s why I ended up with this method in the first place. Romanian has very few learning resources, so I was pretty much forced into it. If you want to learn more than one language, this is the most versatile approach I’ve found, because you don’t have to change your approach for each new language.

Here’s how it compares to the approaches I hear about most:

• LingQ’s own advice: just keep reading and listening. It works, but slowly. Research on learning words through reading finds that it takes roughly 10 or more encounters before a word reliably sticks (see this meta-analysis on repetition), and some studies (like Waring & Takaki, 2003) find more than 20 are needed, depending on what you count as “knowing” the word. In plain reading, those encounters come whenever the word happens to show up again. Anki spaces them out, showing each word right at the interval where I’m about to forget it, so I need far fewer exposures. That seems like the more efficient way to spend my time. Anki doesn’t replace the variety, though, since each card shows a word in only one sentence. My pipeline keeps LingQ for exposure to new contexts and adds Anki for the repetition.
• Passive immersion: putting on shows and hoping the language sinks in, the way it supposedly does for babies. Audio you don’t understand is mostly noise. I only listen to stories I’ve already read and drilled, so I’m more likely to understand what I’m hearing.
• Sentence mining (Refold method): pulling sentences you come across in native content into Anki. I felt a lot of pressure to decide which sentences were worth a card, and I had no good way to check whether I’d already made a card for that word. I suspect a tool like Migaku solves this, and it would probably work for me if it supported the languages I want to learn.
• Writing my own flashcards. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so my sentences were often grammatically incorrect. I’d run each one through AI for corrections and then build the card by hand. It felt super slow, like I was spending more time crafting the perfect card than actually learning it. My pipeline avoids both problems: LingQ’s content is already relevant to my level, so I never second-guess it, and Aminte turns those sentences into cards with one click.
• Audio courses like Pimsleur. I did the Romanian course long before I started this method, and it put me at the peak of the Dunning–Kruger curve. I finished it thinking I knew a lot of Romanian, when it was really a measly ~500 words. (To be fair, Romanian only gets one short Pimsleur level; bigger languages get several.) The phrases are also overly polite. When I shared with my family the way the course taught me, they all laughed. At least in Romanian, you come out sounding like Monty Python.

With this method, each stage feeds the next: I discover new words reading in LingQ, drill them in Anki, and decode them by ear by listening to stories I already know.

My daily schedule

If you want to try this yourself, I’d set aside about 2 hours a day. Treat these numbers as a starting point, not a rule:

When you’re starting out, you’ll notice you progress much further in LingQ than you do with 30 new words a day in Anki. The answer is not setting 100 new cards a day in Anki 😄. You’ll hate yourself when you have 400 daily reviews at your peak and it takes 3 hours to finish your deck every day. Instead, I adjust the schedule to keep the two in balance:

• If Anki is falling behind LingQ, I skip the LingQ reading for the day and make up for it with another 30 minutes of listening, so Anki can catch up.
• If I’m much further ahead in LingQ than in Anki, I wrap around within the same course, starting again from lesson 1 and re-reading it. When that wraparound happens to you, you’ll finally see what your effort so far has added up to.

If you can’t commit 2 hours a day, I’d drop Anki and split 1 hour between LingQ reading and listening. Just know that this will slow your progress significantly.

The parts

1. Before starting: how long it takes, Duolingo, and whether to care about an accent
2. Prep: grammar terms, the alphabet, and a grammar skim, over a few days
3. Reading and Anki: daily, ~1.5 hours
4. Listening: daily, ~30 minutes
5. Speaking: starting around 6,000 known words

Part 1: Before starting ->