The Five Stages of Language Learning Explained

When most people think of language learning, they think of something like a light switch: you're a beginner for a long time, and then, one day, magically, you wake up fluent.

And that's not how second language acquisition works.

There are stages of learning a language.

In this article we'll talk through the language learning process: roughly what you can do at each level, and also how to move to the next one.

More specifically, we'll cover:

What second language acquisition and cycling have in common

Before we start talking about learning a new language, let's ground ourselves with an example that everybody will be familiar with.

Let's talk about learning to ride a bike.

We might break down the "stages" of "bike fluency" like this:

Of course, we could go way deeper with this if we wanted to:

But I'm not a cyclist, and that's all beside the point.

What I really want you to take from this are three key ideas:

If you take those three things to heart, you'll be successful in your language learning pursuits.

To be clear:

Now that that's out of the way, let's get into it.

Disclaimer: Why learning a language isn't a linear process

Starting from the next section, we're going to break language proficiency down into five stages.

Know that this is an oversimplification.

While we're going to lay out the stages of language learning in an easy-to-follow fashion, learning isn't really a linear process.

There are three major reasons for this:

Passive vs active skills, or why you can understand but not speak

If you've got four minutes, I highly recommend watching this video. If you're new to language learning, it could very well change the way you think about memory and learning:

If not, know that we can largely break memory down into two categories:

With this in mind, language skills are broken into two main categories:

It takes much less effort to learn a foreign word well enough that you can recognize (understand) it when you see it than it does to learn a word well enough that you can recall (produce) it when you want to use it. As you progress in your journey, you'll find (frustratingly) that you often can't remember words when speaking, even though you know you know them.

To be more specific, every single word you learn in your target language (the language you're learning) will go through a journey that looks something like this:

The earlier stages come faster and the later ones come slower, but they all take time.

Domain specificity, or why learning a language isn't a linear process

We use language differently in different situations.

As obvious as this sounds, it's of massive importance for language learners.

Try to imagine these situations:

They differ in several ways:

The point I want to make here is that improving your skill in a foreign language really means developing a nearly countless amount of subskills. Or, more practically speaking:

Essentially, this means that the skills you develop won't be perfectly transferrable. An intermediate learner who primarily watches TV shows will have a very different skill set than an intermediate learner who primarily reads newspaper articles.

Levels of comprehension, or why learning a language isn't black and white

Fluency is more like a spectrum than a light switch. If you give the same piece of content to two different learners, the more advanced learner will understand more of it than a less advanced learner.

Generally speaking, we identify five levels of comprehension at Migaku:

The five stages of language learning

While we've stacked the stages of language learning up pretty neatly here, know that they won't feel so linear in real life. You make progress every day, but you only recognize that you've made progress in specific situations—when you realize that something is easier for you now than it used to be, when you do something you hadn't thought you could do, when you achieve a goal, and so forth.

Additionally, every language is huge. There are just so many directions you could choose to go. You might choose to work on all the skills equally, and be well-rounded but at a lower level, or focus on one thing like reading, and get very good at that but remain near zero in the other skills.

How your journey looks will be unique... but, generally speaking, the milestones ahead of you will look something like this:

😐 Absolute beginner: Everything in your new language is a headache

If you know less than 1,500 vocabulary words, which is the amount of words you need to know to recognize 80% of the words in any random sentence you see, you're in the "absolute beginner" stage.

At this stage, it's basically impossible to consume any sort of content in the language you're learning. There will be several new words in every single sentence you see, and your lack of grammatical knowledge means you may not understand the sentence even if you look up every single word.

When you're an absolute beginner, trying to interact with your foreign language will probably feel like work. Because your target language is currently something that takes energy from you, it's important to make sure you're getting a good return on the effort you're investing into it.

Goals for new language learners

Learn the most common 1,500 words in your language and work through a beginner's course to learn some basic grammar.

And you'll do that by...

How to overcome the absolute beginner stage

At this stage of the game, you have two main goals:

Migaku offers two types of courses:

If a Migaku course if available for your language, we naturally recommend using that. If not, download Anki and find a public Anki deck that teaches frequently-appearing words through sentences.

From here, you'll be juggling three activities:

Make a priority of doing the flashcards that Migaku (or Anki) schedules for you each day. After that, split your time evenly between intensive and extensive input.

As you steadily learn new words, you will become increasingly able to pick words out of the content you are consuming. Eventually you'll find that you can kind of follow the content you're watching, and that's a sign that you're well on your way to the beginner level.

🙂 Beginner: Your foreign language stops feeling quite so foreign

When you finish Migaku's Academy course for your language, or when you learn about 1,500 words, you'll enter the beginner stage. While most content is still challenging, it is no longer completely inaccessible: so long as you are willing to sit down, go slow, and and exert effort, you can actually work through quite a wide variety of things.

You still run into words you don't know very regularly at this stage. You recognize 80% of the words you see, and that's a massive achievement... but, doing the math, it means you don't recognize one in five words. For reference, a typical sentence has over ten words.

What's different between the beginner stage and the absolute beginner stage is that, as an absolute beginner, you were missing entire sentences. Now, you're missing key words within sentences. You'll generally be able to point out why you don't understand a particular sentence. This is indeed a massive improvement, and you'll notice it.

Goals for beginner language learners

Learn the most common 3,000 words in your language. Reach level 4 comprehension (see "levels of comprehension" above) of easy content in your target language, such as the comprehensible input YouTube channels mentioned in the absolute beginner stage.

And you'll do that by...

How to overcome the beginner stage

At the beginner stage, you've now got your feet under you: you know your language's most common words and you've built a regular habit of interacting with your language. Now, we're going to expand on that foundation.

How to make flashcards

To achieve those goals, you'll again juggle three things:

As your vocabulary grows and you consume more content in your language, you'll realize something: the language you're learning isn't so scary anymore. In fact, sometimes, it might even be kind of fun.

You'll know that you've reached the intermediate stage when the scale tips and spending time in your language begins to feel more like fun and less like work.

😃 Intermediate: Fluency seems reachable in the main skill you've been focusing on

Once you built a vocabulary of 3,000 words, you've reached the intermediate stage. The intermediate stage is defined by independence: you can mostly do what you want, so long as you have time to prepare and tools to support you. Whereas in the previous stage content that you could understand and enjoy was relatively difficult to find, that's not the case anymore. You can consume basically whatever content you want, so long as you're willing to put in a little effort.

Unfortunately, you're not quite out of the woods yet. You're still going to run into words you don't know constantly... but, just as often, you're also going to run into sentences that you understand perfectly.

Whereas everybody's journey has likely looked pretty similar so far—the fundamentals are the fundamentals, after all—here is where paths begin to diverge. The sort of things you need to know to read crime procedurals are very different than the things you need to know to follow politics in the newspaper.

This stage is long—it's called the intermediate plateau for a reason—but it's also really cool. You should be proud to be here, and you're also going to have a lot of fun.

Goals for intermediate language learners

In the beginner stage, you reached a point where you felt pretty confident with content that was made specifically for learners. In the intermediate stage, you want to achieve that same level of confidence with some content that you actually enjoy—something you'd watch or read in your native language.

If you can do this once, with one skill, you'll be able to apply the lessons you learned to take the same journey with the other skills.

And you'll do that by...

How to overcome the intermediate stage

If I had to define the intermediate stage with one picture, it'd be this one:

You've made some serious progress up to this point... but you're a human, you have preferences, and it's likely becoming quite apparent that your skills are pretty unbalanced.

For this reason, at the intermediate stage, we're going to master one thing and get up to speed in another thing.

More specifically, you've got three main tasks:

And in pursuit of that goal, you'll be doing four things:

And now you're going to rotate between these tasks like this:

As you maintain this schedule, you'll find that you become increasingly confident in your strong skill. It will eventually become virtually effortless and become purely enjoyable: you'll look forward to interacting with your target language each day. Your weaker skill will still need work, but it'll also get notably stronger.

Following our "levels of comprehension" from above, your goal is to hit level 5 comprehension in your main skill and level 3 comprehension in your weaker skill.

😂 Advanced: You can do whatever you want without much trouble

You've done it. You hit the big number. You've learned 10,000 words in your language.

Whereas the intermediate learner can do one thing confidently, the advanced learner can do most things without much effort. You can effortlessly consume content in your genres of choice, and your foundation is solid enough that it isn't difficult to branch out into new genres. Your weaker skill, while still weaker, has become serviceable.

You're not bilingual, and you'll be painfully aware of this... but, generally speaking, you'll feel pretty good. You understand the vast majority of sentences you come across, and you can even understand some sentences where you're missing a word by leaning on context.

This stage is about exploring your interests using your strong skill and taking intentional efforts to strengthen your weak skills. This is also around the time where you might begin trying to practice output—writing and speaking.

Goals for advanced language learners

The world is your oyster, but there are a few obvious things standing between you and greatness:

So we're going to fix that.

And you'll do that by...

How to overcome the advanced stage

To keep things brief—you're basically going to be repeating the intermediate level several times over.

Whereas you previously developed supreme confidence in your main skill, now it's time to get your weaker skill up to that level while also developing basic confidence in one of the output skills, speaking or writing. After you get ok at speaking or writing, the process repeats again: now you master your chosen output skill while building a foundation in the second one.

You should know what you're doing by now, but here are two quick suggestions from me:

Two resources for learning to write

Check out the website Langcorrect. It's totally free. You submit bits of writing about anything you want, and native speakers will correct you. If you correct entries from people who are learning your native language, you'll get more feedback on your own entries.

Ideally, you find somebody you get along with well and begin exchanging snippets of writing regularly.

Alternatively, you can submit your writing to ChatGPT and ask for corrections. ChatGPT isn't perfect—it doesn't write as naturally in other languages as it does in English—but it's a free, accessible, and non-intimidating way to begin writing in another language.

Three resources for learning to speak

If you've never spoken before, I recommend finding a tutor to work with on italki:

While it might sound scary, 1:1 conversations are actually the easiest way to get started with output. The person you are talking to can focus on you and adjust to your level. If you don't understand something, you can ask for the sentence to be rephrased. It'll be scary at first, but all of the input you've gotten will enable you to make progress quickly, and it'll be exciting.

Alternatively, you can try:

🤠 Mastery: You may be mistaken for a native in some contexts

We've been pretty positive so far, but here's an uncomfortable truth: you're going to reach a point where you can pretty much effortlessly do anything you want in the language you're learning... and you'll also realize that there's still a massive gap between you and native speakers.

You see, whereas you can do whatever you want, native speakers can do pretty much everything, including many things they don't enjoy and frankly would prefer to never do again.

For example, I'm a native English speaker. My job is writing in English and my hobby is reading fantasy novels, but in the last month or so I have:

And all that stuff, to be frank, kinda sucked. Nevertheless, for one reason or another, I had to do them. Despite the fact that I don't like doing them, I had the English vocabulary to navigate them.

Heck, even the fun stuff can end up being not so fun. I recently read a short story by Amy Hempel and concluded that I have no writing talent whatsoever. There's always somebody better.

Anyway—that's the sort of thing is what's waiting for you in your target language. You've dominated your domain of preference and are now playing catchup: learning all the supplementary stuff that native speakers know, but could probably get through life just fine without knowing.

Goals for proficient language learners

From here on out, the goals are up to you. You've basically got two choices, though:

Personally, this is the point where I usually move onto a new language.

My Mandarin isn't perfect, but I'd rather be able to read webtoons in Korean than read dry academic essays in Mandarin. Maybe you'd make the same choice, or maybe you want (or need) to know the language you're learning super well.

How to overcome the mastery stage

Just kidding—this stage goes on forever.

To be honest, this is also where the game begins.

Sure, you can function pretty effortlessly in your target language. Let's be super generous and say that you're effectively a native speaker now... at least in your main areas.

But—I don't know how else to say this—have you ever noticed how stupid the average person is? And then considered that half of them are even more stupid than that? It's an incredible achievement to be bilingual... but that's not necessarily saying much, in the grand scheme of things.

How long does it take to learn a new language?

This article is already very long, so I'm instead going to direct you to two other articles that explore specifically this question:

What both of those numbers don't tell you is that you're not looking at thousands of hours of mindless boredom until you suddenly become useful. You'll spend a few hundred hours building a foundation, and then you'll proceed to learn your language by using it to do things you enjoy.

In either case, whether you're learning an easier language or a harder language, the language learning process is basically the same:

Strategies for success with your new language

And now for a few bits of advice that don't fit cleanly into any particular level.

Be consistent

When it comes to learning languages—or anything, really—consistency is key. Learning a language is going to take a lot of time, and it's hard to amass the necessary hours of experience if you only interact with your target language for half an hour every other Tuesday.

As such, the first step in learning a language is simply becoming the sort of person that spends time with the language every day. If you can do that, you'll make progress.

If you struggle with building habits, then:

The best way to build a new habit is to attach it to a concrete, unavoidable part of your day. If you do it right, having a trigger-action plan means that if you wake up and go about your day, you'll inevitably spend time with your target language, too.

Be picky about what you learn

You'll learn many words on your way to fluency, but that doesn't mean you should be learning just any words. At least, not at first.

We cover this in much more detail in our article on how to learn vocabulary, but certain words come up much more frequently than others. The words that are most important to you will depend on:

For this reason, it's essential that you're not just mindlessly memorizing vocabulary from a deck of flashcards or following a textbook.

Focus on one domain (type of content) at first

A big part of the difficulty of learning a new language is simply that each language is huge. There are tons of words and tons of ways to use those words.

You want to be able to understand your target language wherever you encounter it eventually, but you'll make your life much easier early on if you pick one specific aspect of your target language to focus on. For example, you might choose:

Or put differently:

You'll already have learned the key fantasy vocabulary, how fantasy stories are structured, and so forth.

With each book, you're effectively starting from zero.

You can pick any niche you want to focus on, but the narrower of a niche you pick, the faster you'll progress through comprehension levels.

Use flashcards and consume content

Flashcards and input go hand in hand.

If you only do flashcards, you'll lack the real-world context that will eventually enable you to intuitively feel what words mean and how they're used. If you only consume content and don't do flashcards, it'll take longer to remember some words than necessary.

How you split your time between flashcards and content (input) is up to you. So long as you're consuming content and reviewing flashcards each day, you'll make progress.

Conclusion

Wow! That was a lot.

At this point, there isn't anything more to say. You already know everything you need to get started in another language or to power through whatever plateau you find yourself on.

Now, it's time to take action.

You've got this, friend 💪