How do you say “I work from home”? Learning languages in quarantine
By: Ben Bartlett
Tags: Quarantine, Learning, Freelancers, Languages Classes, Language

Cultural immersion might be off the menu, but it’s still a great time to learn a language

Nyhavn, Copenhagen — Photo by Max Adulyanukosol on Unsplash

In mid-March, it had come time to decide whether to leave my Lisbon apartment and return to my parent’s house in the UK, and soon I found myself at arrivals with half of my possessions on my back. One of the first things my Dad asked me during the car journey home was which language I’d be learning in quarantine during the lockdown. I’d already decided, of course — this would be the year I’d finally attempt Danish.

I’m a UK native who’s fluent in two other languages, and yet I’ve always got this feeling in the back of my mind that I should be learning more, and with that an order of preference for what’s next in line. Even speaking to people on our little island, who are famous for their monolingualism, everyone has a dream of a language they’d love to learn. When you ask people about it, you’ll usually get a very poor attempt at an introduction salvaged from some long-forgotten French class, or something along the lines of “life got in the way”.

So now that your hectic life is no longer in your way, you’ve got that dream language in your head and all that time on your hands. Where do you turn next? Traditional evening classes are out, but look at it this way: there are now no geographical restrictions on how and with whom you study. App-based language learning has surged in popularity in the last few years, with Duolingo leading the field for free learning and apps such as Babbel on the premium end of things.

But here’s the thing: taking the time to learn a language in quarantine offers so much more than a chance to catch up on your grammar. I found my Danish teacher online with Italki, a platform that has been described as a language learning social network. My lessons have become a constant in my life, and I take two hours out every week to escape reality, all from the comfort of my own bedroom. What’s really important is connecting with people, both because it helps me learn, but also because of all the new people we can communicate with even after the lockdown.

I was lucky enough to interview my friend Mollie, who’s been working with Italki for years teaching Irish and English, with some 2,900 lessons under her belt. According to her, right now it’s not just about achieving your goals, but a chance to “invite a new person into the home”.

Mollie’s taught nearly 3,000 lessons on Italki

There’s a number of different reasons for taking the time to learn a new language, all as valid as each other, for wanting to take the leap towards fluency. “It’s really unusual for someone to start learning Irish without a ‘soul’ reason”, says Mollie. She told me about one student who could remember Irish songs and poems from his childhood and wanted to connect with his heritage. “Sometimes you just get the odd person who heard the language in a pub once and can’t get it out of their head,” she laughs, “but a lot of my students are polyglots, too.”

Mollie’s seen a 50% increase in the number of lessons she teaches, from around 7–8 a day to around 12, and a 20% increase in terms of people she teaches. But with all of this, she says that teaching so many people is giving her strength during the lockdown. “I feel like I’m more focused on the job than ever, even though I’m busier than ever; my students are showing me more motivation and in turn, I’m inspired by that.” Something Mollie does with her students is to ask them to send in photos of their daily life and caption them in Irish — perhaps a family photo with a story behind it, or a nice pasta dish they made for dinner.

To close, I asked Mollie what her pitch would be to a potential student of any language right now, particularly keeping in mind our editors who work with multiple languages already. “It’s an ideal period to focus on your language — it distracts you from what’s going on in the world,” she told me. “Focusing on how you can grow during this time can be really comforting — you have control over your progress, and you’re doing something useful with your time. The sense of time during these days can be really disorienting, and if you have something to look forward to like a lesson, and you have homework due once a week, it can give you a purpose.”

It was easy to link this to my own experience — for me after a hard day’s work there’s nothing better than to transport yourself into a different world with a new, fun language. And what we talked about with growth really stuck with me — it’s not just about soft skills and the ability to learn that language, it’s about taking this time to build a growth mindset and focus on yourself.

So I suppose whether or not I achieve my goals of at least being able to pronounce very basic words in Danish or not, it’s about more than that. We’re all searching for ways to stop this becoming the forgotten year of our lives, and we can accomplish things in this time — but what’s most important is to find time to grow. And with a bit of luck, at the end of this, we’ll all be unhealthier, a little more socially awkward, but perhaps just a tiny bit more multilingual.