The Psychology of Learning Russian. Why Most People Quit

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Nobody quits in the hard month

People who give up on Russian almost never do it in the month that nearly broke them. They do it later, in a month where nothing in particular went wrong.

A woman I taught for two years left in her fourteenth month, and when I asked what had happened she could not name anything. The lessons were fine. She was not busier than before. It stopped feeling like it was going anywhere, was the closest she got. That sentence is the whole subject. She had not run out of motivation in any sense worth the word. She had run out of evidence, and motivation is downstream of evidence more reliably than anybody admits.

Why the flat part arrives when it does

Early months in Russian are the steepest they will ever be, and that is a trap disguised as a gift, because nothing about the first ten weeks warns you what the next ten will feel like.

Everything is new, so everything you do produces something you did not have yesterday. Thirty-three letters. Two hundred words. A first sentence that somebody understood. You are not imagining the speed, and you are not imagining it stopping either.

By somewhere around month eight the same hour buys much less. Most of what you meet now is a variation on something you already half know, and variations do not feel like progress even when they are the whole job.

The curve did not flatten because you slowed down. It flattened because the cheap part ran out.

Almost nobody reads it that way from the inside. What they read is that they have hit their limit, and the phrase people use is some version of I’m just not good at languages, a statement about identity rather than about a curve.

What people say when they leave

Three explanations come up over and over, and none of them is the real one.

People do not leave because the work got hard. They leave because it stopped answering back.

Time is the first, and it is almost always false. The hours had been available for eleven months; they became unavailable in the twelfth, without the calendar changing.

Time is the explanation people reach for when the real one has no name.

Talent is the second. A person who was pleased with themselves in month three concludes in month ten that they lack something they never had in month three either. The third is the honest one and it comes out sideways: nothing is happening. That one is accurate, and it points at the fix, because a flat stretch that produces visible evidence is survivable and the same stretch without evidence is not. I could see it working and then I couldn’t, one student told me, and that is a better description of month ten than anything I have managed.

Habits survive the flat part; motivation does not

Motivation is a response to results, which is why it disappears exactly when results thin out, and why relying on it is like relying on applause to keep walking.

Habits work on a different principle. They run on the appointment rather than on the feeling, and that is why the students who come through month ten are so rarely the enthusiastic ones from month two.

What makes a habit hold has almost nothing to do with willpower and almost everything to do with how few decisions it requires. Same day. Same hour. Somebody expecting you. A learner who has to decide, every week, whether this is still worth doing will eventually decide it is not, and they will be reasonable when they do. That is also why studying alone stops working somewhere around the same month for most people, and why the fix is rarely a better method.

The language I quit, and the month I did it

German I started twice and walked away from twice, and the second time I was already teaching languages for a living, which did not help me in the slightest.

Both attempts ended in the same place. Around the ninth month the new stopped arriving, every text I opened was a rearrangement of words I half knew, and the sessions turned into something I was doing rather than something that was doing anything. I told myself I was busy. I was not busier than in month four.

What I could not see at the time is the thing this whole page is about: I had not lost interest in German. I had lost the weekly proof that German was moving, and interest went with it about three weeks later.

I diagnosed it in students for years before I recognized it in myself.

My student from the opening, the one who left in her fourteenth month, wrote to me the following winter. She had lasted longer than most. She had started again somewhere else, with a group that met on a fixed evening, and she said the difference was that this time somebody had told her the flat part was coming.

What we do about it, specifically

Small groups, the same two slots every week, and the same people in the room, because the appointment is doing more of the work than the method is.

Somebody notices when you miss.

It sounds like a small thing and it is the difference between a flat month you sit through and a flat month you disappear into, which is the same finding our comparison of classes and apps arrived at from the other direction. We also say the flat part out loud, in advance, because a plateau somebody warned you about is an expected stage and the identical plateau nobody mentioned is evidence that you are not good at this. At Palme School we teach adults online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there’s printable material in our resource library if you’d rather start alone. If what stops you is being heard while you get it wrong, we wrote about that separately.

Frequently asked questions

Why do most people quit learning Russian?

Not because it gets harder, but because it gets flatter. The fastest progress comes first, and when the same effort stops producing visible results people read that as a limit in themselves rather than a stage in the curve.

When do people usually give up on Russian?

In what I see, most often somewhere between months eight and fourteen, which is well past the difficult beginning and well into the stretch where everything new is a variation on something familiar.

How do I stay motivated learning Russian?

By not relying on motivation, which is a response to results and thins out exactly when results do. What survives a flat stretch is an appointment somebody else is expecting you to keep.

Is hitting a plateau in Russian normal?

It is universal, it arrives after the steepest part rather than during it, and knowing that in advance is most of what separates the people who sit through it from the people who leave.

Palme School: Conversation school · Russian for bilingual children · Free materials for learners

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.