The Rule of 3: How I Decide Whether to Learn a Language

People ask me how I learn languages all the time. After 11 languages, I've gotten pretty good at answering that question. But honestly, the more interesting question is the one nobody asks: how do I decide whether to start at all?

Because here's the thing most people get wrong. They think the hard part is the method. Picking the right app, the right textbook, the right course. It's not. The hard part is not quitting.

The enthusiasm trap

You know the feeling. You watch a movie in Korean, or you meet someone who speaks Italian, or you scroll past a travel reel from Tokyo. And you think: I'm going to learn that language.

So you download an app. You do three lessons. You tell your friends. You change your phone language. You're fired up.

Two weeks later, you've stopped. Not because anything went wrong. Just because the initial burst wore off and you realized this is going to take hundreds of hours of actual work.

That's what I call a "just cause" outburst. It feels real in the moment, but it has no structural support. No roots. The first time life gets busy or the material gets boring, it collapses.

I've been there too. The difference is that after enough languages, I learned to recognize that feeling for what it is: excitement, not commitment.

The Rule of 3

Before I start a new language, I need three strong, specific reasons to learn it. Not vibes. Not "it sounds cool." Three concrete things that will still matter six months from now when I'm grinding through intermediate plateau hell.

Here's what counts as a strong reason:

• A relationship. Your partner's family speaks it. You're dating someone who speaks it. You have close friends who speak it.
• A place. You live there, you're moving there, or you spend serious time there.
• A career need. Your job requires it, or it would meaningfully change your professional opportunities.
• A cultural obsession. You consume media in that language constantly. Not casually. Constantly.
• An identity thing. It's a heritage language, or it connects you to a community you're part of.

Here's what doesn't count:

• "It sounds beautiful." (Every language sounds beautiful once you understand it.)
• "I want to travel there someday." (Someday is not a reason.)
• "It would be cool to speak X languages." (Collecting languages is not a reason.)
• "I watched an anime/k-drama/telenovela." (One show is not a reason. Watching them obsessively for years might be.)

If I can't name three things from the first list, I don't start. Because I know myself. I know that motivation fades. And when it fades, I need those reasons to carry me through.

Why three?

One reason isn't enough. One reason can evaporate. You break up with the person. The job changes. You cancel the trip. Now you've got nothing.

Two is better, but still fragile. If one falls away, you're back to one, and that's not enough.

Three gives you structural stability. Even if one reason disappears, you still have two. And two strong reasons is usually enough to keep going through the boring parts.

I'm not saying this is some universal law. It's a personal filter I developed after starting and abandoning languages myself. It's saved me a lot of time and frustration.

The fun factor

Now, once you've decided to start, the method matters. A lot. But not in the way most people think.

The internet will tell you there's one optimal method. Immersion purists will say input only. Grammar nerds will say study the rules first. Flashcard people will say SRS everything.

The truth? The best method is the one you'll actually do.

A method can be incredibly effective on paper, but if you hate doing it, you'll quit. Pimsleur is brilliant, but if you despise audio-only learning, you'll last two weeks. Assimil is proven, but if you can't sit with a textbook, it's dead on arrival.

This is where Duolingo gets it both right and wrong. They understood that fun matters. That's real insight. But they overcorrected so hard that the gamification became the product. People follow the streaks, chase the XP, protect the leaderboard position, and somewhere along the way the actual language learning gets lost. The engagement is real. The acquisition is not.

The sweet spot is rigorous enough to work but engaging enough to sustain. Content that's relevant to your life. Progress that's tangible. A process that doesn't patronize you.

Method depends on everything

There's another thing people get wrong. They ask "what's the best method?" as if there's one answer.

The right method depends on:

Your base language. A Spanish speaker learning Portuguese has a completely different path than an English speaker learning Mandarin. Linguistic distance matters. If your base language shares grammar, vocabulary, or writing systems with the target, you can take shortcuts that don't exist for distant language pairs.

The target language. Japanese has three writing systems, pitch accent, and an honorific system that changes entire sentence structures based on social context. Spanish has gendered nouns and subjunctive mood but is otherwise structurally approachable for English speakers. The method has to fit the challenge.

Your purpose. Learning Arabic to read the Quran is a fundamentally different project than learning Arabic to chat with your wife's family in Lebanon. Same language, completely different approach.

What resources exist. Japanese and Spanish have incredible learning ecosystems: textbooks, podcasts, apps, YouTube channels, graded readers, tutors. Try finding the same for Khmer or Yoruba. The method has to work with what's actually available.

Your personal wiring. Some people are readers. They process language best through text. Others are listeners. They need audio input. Others are visual and want video. And it's not just about what works for you, it's about what you actually enjoy. If you're a podcast person who hates reading, a reading-heavy method will fail no matter how effective it is in theory.

This is why I built Mynago the way I did. Not as a one-size-fits-all solution, but as a system that adapts to you: your reasons, your context, your level, your life. Because the best method is the one that fits the learner and the language pair, not the other way around.

The real answer

So when people ask me how I learn languages, the honest answer is: it depends. It depends on the language, my reasons, my life situation, and what I enjoy doing.

But the constant across all 11 languages is this: I had really good reasons to learn each one. Not one reason. Not a vibe. Multiple strong, specific, durable reasons that carried me through the months when it wasn't fun anymore.

If you're thinking about starting a language, try the Rule of 3 first. Name three concrete reasons you need this language. If you can, start. If you can't, wait until you can.

Because the method will work if you stick with it. The question is whether you will.

We wrote more about the methods themselves in How Polyglots Actually Learn Languages.