Overcoming the Beginner's Plateau as a Language Learner
Last updated: May 9, 2025
If you're new to learning a language, you have precisely one job:
Find a piece of content that you can make (some) sense of and (sort of) enjoy.
That's it.
That's all you have to do.
If you can do that, you'll have gotten your foot in the door, and the rest of the language learning process will fall into place quite naturally.
But of course:
"You need to use a language to learn it, but I can't do anything in the language I'm learning yet!"
Indeed! That might be true right now.
The beginner stage sucks.
You're stuck in the middle of two harsh realities:
- You must interact with your language to get better at it
- The further you are from knowing 1,500 words, the harder it will be to find content you understand and are remotely interested in consuming
Note that I said harder, not impossible.
Give me 127 seconds and try this:
↓↓ You'll get the gist of this even if you know zero Japanese ↓↓
This is a style of video called "comprehensible input".
→ Japanese | Korean | Mandarin | Cantonese | Spanish | French | Portuguese (BR) | Portuguese (PT) | German | Vietnamese | Others ←
It's not very interesting, admittedly.
BUT you'll be able to follow the gist of it even if you're a beginner.
In fact, you'll pick things up even if you know no Japanese at all.
The beginner plateau isn't very high. You don't need to be a genius to overcome it. You don't need the best tools, a PhD in linguistics, or a bulletproof memory. You basically just need to get the ball rolling and be consistent for a few months.
The single uberly massive key point you need to understand:
✨ ✨ ✨
You do NOT need to be fluent in a language to enjoy its media. On the contrary, fluency comes as a byproduct of consuming lots of interesting things in the language you're learning.
✨ ✨ ✨
At the risk of being impaled with an animated green feather—the #1 reason people fail to escape the beginner's stage is that they spend a lot of time learning about a language, but very little time in it.
If you do these 3 things, you're guaranteed to reach the intermediate stage:
No marketing shenanigans here. You literally need to do just three things.
1. Learn a few new words every day
We've got a blog post that breaks the math down in detail, but the key takeaway is that words are not used equally often. Some are used much more often than others:
- Every word in every sentence has a 50% chance of being one of roughly 100 words → learn these, and your language won't look so foreign any more
- Every word in every sentence has a 80% chance of being one of roughly 1,500 words → learn these, and foreign media becomes accessible
So, job one is to start working through these 1,500 words.
If you're learning Japanese, Korean, or Mandarin Chinese, Migaku has courses that spoonfeed those key words to you. They look like this:
You can start using Migaku even if you don't have any idea how you read your language yet:
2. Spend 10 minutes intensively consuming media in your language each day
Intensive immersion means:
- Picking a piece of shorter content (like comprehensible input!)
- Looking up everything you don't know
- Ideally, making flashcards when you find sentences with only one unknown word
This won't be easy, but it'll expose you to new words and sentence structures. Initially, you'll see noticeable growth from basically every video you conquer.
3. Spend your free time watching content with bilingual subtitles
Consume whatever sort of content you're interested in. Migaku generates subtitles if they aren't available and lets you display subtitles in two languages.
This has three main benefits:
- It's fun / takes basically no effort / you're doomscrolling anyway, right?
- You build a backlog of content you'll eventually be able to consume in your target language, which is hype
- You'll passively pick up some bonus vocab and build familiarity with your language's sounds
On the off chance you skipped the entire article:
All you need to do to escape the beginner stage is to find a piece of content you can understand and that you enjoy.
Migaku helps you reach this goal in two important ways:
- If you're super new to your language, we spoonfeed you the most important words and grammar points you need to know to begin consuming content
- We make it easier to consume (and learn from) content in another language by letting you click on words in subtitles and webpages to see what they mean
We're also totally free for ten days—you don't even need to enter a credit card.
So:
2. Download our Chrome extension and watch one of these 👇 beginner-friendly videos
→ Japanese | Korean | Mandarin | Cantonese | Spanish | French | Portuguese (BR) | Portuguese (PT) | German | Vietnamese | Others ←
3. Forget why the beginner stage seemed so intimidating in the first place 💪