Delusion is Highly Rewarded in Language Learning

How delusion plays a role in languages and life

Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI with prompts by the author.

I remember attempting to learn Finnish with The Fellowship of the Ring as an absolute beginner.

Lord of the Rings is way more advanced than Harry Potter, and I barely knew any Finnish at all.

I bought the Finnish audiobook and followed the original English book as subtitles. I had no idea if the English and Finnish versions even matched up.

Sometimes the translator takes too much liberty and rewrites their own version of the story.

It turns out the Finnish and English Lord of the Rings didn’t match up perfectly, but the sentences are “close enough” to be useful. Imperfect subtitles are excellent for learning because your brain has to intuit a lot from context.

I quickly learned that if I repeated Chapter 1 several times in one day (Finnish audio, reading English text), I would quickly understand most of that chapter.

Would I be able to speak the language?

Not yet.

But I learned a lot of new vocabulary in context. When words reappear in context, your brain assigns meaning to them.

Attempting to learn words in isolation is like…