How important is for languages that don't use the kind of Latin alphabet? How important is reading and writing? Reading and writing is something I also tend to put later in the intermediate regardless, even even for Latin based languages like Spanish or French, I wouldn't really pick up a book and try to read it until I'm at the intermediate stages because it's just too much work.

Like I literally with Spanish when I first started one of my failed experiments was I picked up El Señor de los Anillos, Lord of the Rings, and I thought if I read this I'll be fluent by the end of it and it took me weeks to get to page two because I was literally looking up every single word so that was really not a good use of my time whereas when I've reached the intermediate stage then it becomes more manageable then I'm only looking up every like 15th or 30th word so I can actually read significantly more and it becomes more pleasurable so personally I leave reading till later.

I wouldn't necessarily say this is something I would prescribe to everybody because I've interviewed a lot of other language learners it's people will see a lot of episodes on my podcast where I talk to a lot of very interesting people and like I can think of a bunch of them.

There's Steve Kaufman who runs the website Link, there's Professor Krashen who's very famous for talking about comprehensible input which is a philosophy in language learning where you try to get exposure to something that is within your language level and that leans a lot more towards reading and people would actually read from the beginning so that may work more appropriately for a lot of people but what I've found is it tends to work a little bit more for maybe either older generations or people who are really not as passionate to speak the language and that's fine they have a lot of goals in the language but walking up to people and using it with them ultimately is maybe not their biggest priority.

In my case I'm a traveler I'm a nomad so speaking the language is by far the biggest priority. I need to make friends, I need to interact with people in complicated situations so speaking is my priority. Once I've done that then I come back to reading and writing and that's regardless of whatever script it uses.

In terms of how they're different I don't really change how I learn a language when it's European versus when it's something like an Asian language. I mean maybe with something like Chinese that has a character-based writing system in that case I would absolutely learn all my vocabulary through pinyin which is the romanized version of Chinese characters.

So people would say well Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world. Actually Mandarin is not that hard. Grammatically it's very straightforward and the way the words are formed is very logical so I really don't think Mandarin is that bad of a language. But of course Chinese characters are a huge barrier that you have to work through so I just decide let's take this in two stages like a native Chinese person would have done.

Chinese children learn how to speak first and then they learn how to read and write so that's what I was going to do. I learned how to speak Mandarin and I would remember my vocabulary through pinyin which is using our letters from the Latin alphabet to remember how to say the words and then with time I added Chinese characters so I could begin to read when that was in my triage system of a bigger priority.

So that's the case with that but then for a language like Korean that I'm currently doing its writing system is actually very logical. You can learn it in a weekend if you put some intensive time into it. It's very straightforward so a lot of languages that have a phonetic system like Cyrillic for Russian or for Arabic or Greek or in the case I'm doing now Korean you can still incorporate learning the writing system because that's going to help you a lot with vocabulary.

You really want to be learning your vocabulary through its writing system when it's phonetic and people get intimidated because when I saw Korean before learning it I was like wow all these circles and lines this must take years to master. It is so easy. I cannot overstate how easy the Korean writing system is to be able to pick up.

It's extremely logical and it's something I did in a weekend so you would be surprised for a lot of languages. It looks intimidating because all these squiggles and lines you've never seen before but it's like anything you put a little bit of time in and it becomes manageable. Are there some languages that do skew on the harder or easier side to learn?

I definitely have talked about this quite a lot. There's a podcast I've done with Paul Jorgensen and he's a big YouTuber, millions of subscribers from the Lang Focus and in that we talked about how to make difficult languages easy. People can find that in my podcast talked about it.

Very fascinating when you dive into that one particular topic but what I say in general whenever I'm thinking about this is I like to get people in a different mindset and I'll give you an example. When I was in Spain learning Spanish I met a Spaniard who was learning both Japanese and French and I said to him well obviously French is going to be a lot easier for you isn't it because it's in the same language family and he said absolutely not.

Japanese is so much easier and I didn't get it. I was like how? It's so different and he said because I'm forced to learn French in school whereas I really want to go to Japan. I like anime. I think Japanese girls are cute. I've always dreamed of living in the country and that completely transformed his experience and it made Japanese easier and I think when people come from this more academic way of looking at a language they think of how am I going to decide which language is harder.

Well I'm going to put one language on one side another language on another side and compare them side by side and if I see more common words like between English and French that makes it easier and if I see complicated grammar like Japanese having a different word order in the sentence that makes it hard and that for me is such an inhuman way of deciding which languages are hard and easy and it is easy to scale it like you can say regardless of the person this language is harder than that but realistically each person has their own situation when it comes to learning a language they have their own passions they have their own motivations and when I think of all the languages I've learned and I compare my experiences I would say something like Chinese was actually easier for me than Spanish and people always think that doesn't make any sense because Spanish is much closer to English and and all these other reasons you know but ultimately I had a bad language learning approach with Spanish for a long time it took me a very long time to get to fluency with Spanish to even get to a conversational level and I kept kicking myself I kept telling myself your Spanish is miserable people are laughing at you who would want to speak Spanish with you and all of these reasons are why it took me so long to learn Spanish whereas with Mandarin at that stage I had a good language learning approach I had a good attitude I embraced making mistakes so after three months I reached a pretty good conversational stage and people can see YouTube videos of me where I'm interviewing people in Mandarin three months after I've started to learn the language I could not do that with Spanish now this does not mean I'm going to say universally therefore Mandarin is easier than Spanish obviously not it is the context of I was a more confident person I had a lot better motivation with Spanish I didn't have great motivation at the start I didn't really know why did I want to learn Spanish so I was putting the effort in in a very inconsistent way whereas with Mandarin I knew I want to travel China I want to take a train 2,000 kilometers deep into the country I want to make a video of me getting a kung fu lesson in a village with a kung fu master all these dreams that I managed to make come true I had these in mind and that made Mandarin easier so when I talk to people and I see they've decided they want to learn a particular language and it has real genuine significance in their life like their family background is there or they have a love interest in the country they want to move in with or whatever it may be that is their passion and that is going to make that language significantly more approachable because they have huge motivation to learn it so the fact that other languages are easier or harder is insignificant because they aren't going to be easier if you don't care about them so whatever language is the most important in your life that is the easiest language because that's the one you're going to be able to get momentum to learn