Discipline Isn't About Suffering: What It Really Takes to Keep Learning French

Introduction

Discipline is essential to learning a language. And yet I think most people have the wrong idea of what discipline is.

In this article, I want to give you my point of view: why discipline matters so much when you learn French, why the usual picture of it is misleading, and what actually keeps people going day after day.

Learning a Language Isn’t Hard, It’s Long

Learning a language isn’t difficult, but it takes a lot of time. When I say it isn’t difficult, I mean that I think anyone can learn a language, on one condition: they spend time learning it.

Something difficult, in my view, is something not everyone can do. Learning a language is something everyone can do. The criterion for success is simply the number of hours you put in.

A lot of content plays on FOMO, the fear of missing out, and promises miracle methods to learn fast (“it almost feels like cheating”). That kind of marketing is normal: it’s made to sell things. But it gives the wrong impression of language learning, because learning a language will always mean many hours of work. That part can’t be compressed. (I wrote about how to spot this kind of marketing, if you want to go further.)

You can know some clever methods, but you can’t reach a B2 level in 30 hours, for example. In my opinion, that’s strictly impossible. Some factors help: if you’ve already learned other languages, you have more experience and you’ll go faster with a new one. But there will always be a minimum number of hours.

So the goal is to spend as many hours as possible with the language. And that’s usually what we associate with discipline.

The Stick or the Carrot

When someone spends 30 minutes or an hour a day doing something, we think: “That person is really disciplined.” It’s the same for athletes, or for people with very demanding jobs. We see people who manage to do something regularly and build up skills, and we call them disciplined.

But I think that when we say someone is disciplined, we have the wrong picture in mind.

There are two ways to be motivated to do something. In French, we say le bâton ou la carotte: the stick or the carrot. Imagine you have a donkey (un âne) and you want it to walk with you. You can hit it with a stick so that it moves forward because it hurts, or you can dangle a carrot just in front of its nose.

Either you’re afraid of something, or you want something. Either you do it because you feel like doing it, or because you’re afraid of the consequences.

The 5 A.M. Cold Shower Myth

When we talk about discipline, we often picture the world of personal development: all the books you read hoping to become more efficient at work, at learning, at communicating, to become a better person.

The problem is that this quickly turns into advice like: get up at 5 a.m., take a cold shower to wake yourself up, study French for two hours straight, and then start your normal day.

If you try that, here’s what happens. You get up at 5 a.m. You take a cold shower, and it’s horrible, the worst experience of your life. You try to listen to two hours of French, but first, you’re tired because you didn’t sleep enough, and second, you’re in a bad mood because of the cold shower. The whole thing is a terrible experience.

And when we see someone who does this every day and think “they’re so disciplined,” what we actually imagine is someone who can resist suffering: something particularly unpleasant happens, and they just endure it.

That’s the biggest mistake we make about discipline: believing that being disciplined means doing something you don’t like.

Disciplined People Find Satisfaction

People who go running don’t do it because running is particularly fun. Running isn’t very interesting, and it isn’t especially entertaining.

When we see people who run 70 km a week, we think “wow, they’re incredibly disciplined.” But that discipline doesn’t come from being able to put up with something unpleasant. It comes from the fact that they get satisfaction from it.

That’s the most important point. Take anyone you’d describe as disciplined, anyone who manages to do something regularly. In French, I’d say je peux mettre ma main à couper (“I’d bet my hand on it”): I’m almost certain that every one of them finds satisfaction in what they do.

So instead of telling yourself “I can’t do this because I’m not strong enough, I’m not disciplined enough,” or “I’m not good at studying, I’m not serious enough to learn French,” ask yourself a different question:

“How can I find satisfaction in this?”

Why It Matters So Much in Language Learning

As I said at the start, learning a language takes hours and hours. Even if you have a lot of experience, even if you know every miracle method because you bought every course out there, in the end you’ll still need hundreds of hours. Everyone goes through it. Steve Kaufmann, a YouTuber and a real polyglot, explains that he just spends hours listening, reading, writing.

Personally, I try to listen to Japanese for an hour a day, so usually six to seven hours a week, and I review flashcards. That’s not optional: at some point, you have to learn a lot of vocabulary. It’s the key to learning a language.

Here are some rough figures (orders of magnitude, not precise statistics): a native speaker uses around 10,000 words when they speak, and understands 30,000 to 40,000.

How do you learn 10,000 words? First, you break it down by day. If you learn ten new words every day, by the end of the year you’ll know about 3,500 to 4,000 words. So for a B2 level, with around 10,000 words, or a C1, you’d need roughly three years of learning ten new words every day.

And ten new words a day is hard. On day one, you learn ten. On day two, you learn ten new ones, but you also have to review the ten from the day before, and so on. (If you use Anki for this, here’s my guide to Anki for French vocabulary.)

I’m not saying this to put pressure on you. You can learn a language over ten years. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon: the main thing is to keep going. I just want to show you that even if you study seriously every day, it takes time.

When you think about all that, it sounds awful: “I’m going to have to learn ten new words every day, and listen, and…” It doesn’t make you want to start. That’s exactly when the question becomes: how do you find satisfaction in it? How do I manage to listen to Japanese for an hour a day? The only answer is that I find it satisfying. Here are three ways to get there.

1. Know Why You’re Learning

The first thing is to know why you want to learn the language. It can be for an exam, for a visa, or as a pure hobby.

For me, Japanese is a pure hobby. I started because the first time I went to Japan, I listened to people talking and thought, “I’d love to understand them and be able to talk with them.” And now that I’m back in France, it’s a way to keep a connection with Japan, a country I love that’s very far from here.

So ask yourself why you want to learn French. Maybe it just seems cool to speak French. Maybe you love French films and would love to understand what the actors are saying. Come back to that reason, and to what would feel satisfying for you in the learning.

When I listen to an hour of Japanese a day, sometimes it’s a bit annoying, sometimes it’s a bit boring, and some days I don’t really feel like it. But I get real satisfaction from it: “I can understand what this person is saying. I’m getting closer to the dream I had at the start.” I can’t quite explain it, but I find it pleasant to listen to Japanese. So much so that when I walk down the street and see people I think are Japanese, I listen to check whether they’re speaking Japanese. It’s a bit weird, but that’s how it is.

Really ask yourself this question, because online, everyone tells you “you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this, it’s the only method.” And that interferes with your own motivations.

Say you think speaking French is super cool. Then you go online and see someone saying “whatever you do, don’t start speaking at the beginning, wait until you understand well.” That’s actually an opinion I have, but I don’t try to push it on everyone. If what you love about languages is speaking, then start speaking right away. Don’t overthink it, and don’t create problems for yourself when your basic motivation is to speak. Instead, try to understand how you can enjoy the learning.

2. Build a Habit

The second point is building a habit. I talk about this a lot: a habit is doing something a little bit every day. And it’s often what we picture as discipline. James Clear’s book Atomic Habits describes this process very well. (I wrote about what it means for language learners.)

Going for a run isn’t very pleasant. What’s very pleasant is the moment after the run. When you’ve finished, you feel great: your body is relaxed, you feel almost purified, if that makes sense. That’s the feeling I personally get when I run.

The problem is that at the beginning, when you don’t run much, the effort of going out is an obstacle. But the more you run, the more the unpleasant part shrinks and the more the satisfaction grows. The first few times, it feels awful and you don’t feel much satisfaction. The more you go, the more it flips.

It’s the same with surfing, which I love. In winter, when it’s cold and I haven’t surfed for a month or two, the first time I go back, I find it unpleasant: it’s cold, I have to put on the wetsuit… But if I go every day, that moment feels much less unpleasant and I focus on what’s satisfying.

Language learning is exactly the same. At first, it can feel a bit intimidating to sit down and tell yourself “I have to learn, I have to learn.” But the more you repeat it, the less difficult it becomes.

So rather than two hours once on Saturday, do 15 to 30 minutes every day, to make it as little unpleasant as possible and, above all, as satisfying as possible. Because when you start finding it truly satisfying, you’ll repeat it, and that’s when it really becomes a habit.

And the day you’ve built that habit, people will look at you and say, “You’re so disciplined!” And you’ll think: “No, it doesn’t feel unpleasant to me. I actually like it.” From the outside, they’ll picture someone taking cold showers at 5 a.m. That’s the gap.

3. Track Your Progress

Another way to make things satisfying is statistics: seeing that you’re making progress. If you do something to improve, it’s important to see your improvement, and you get a lot of satisfaction from that.

I didn’t like running at all. But when I bought a Garmin, a sports watch, I found it much more interesting. When I run, it calculates my speed and suggests workouts, and above all, at the end I have all my data on my phone: roughly how many kilometers I run each week. Once I could see that I was running 5, 10, 20 km every week, deep down I was satisfied, and a little proud. “Yeah, I’m a runner now.”

It’s the same with language learning. I use an app called Migaku, which shows how many Japanese words I’ve learned, and my streak: every day I’ve reviewed or created cards. At the time I recorded the episode, it had been 117 days in a row (I missed a few days at some point, I can’t remember why). When you see that, you’re satisfied with your effort and simply proud of yourself.

That really matters, because it’s what keeps you going. The worst thing in language learning is feeling that you’re not making progress. If you don’t feel you’re improving, you get frustrated, you give up, and you never reach your goal. (More on that in how to beat French learning frustration.)

So do the things you enjoy in language learning. If it’s speaking, speak with a tutor, or with AI: there are plenty of tools for that. And if you don’t like apps, buy a calendar and put a cross on every day you study French. When you have a page full of crosses, you’ll think, “I’ve worked well, I want to keep going, I don’t want to stop.”

Conclusion: A Virtuous Circle

I wanted to talk about discipline because, from the outside, people who learn languages look like they have incredibly strong discipline. In reality, I think they’ve simply managed to find satisfaction in something that can seem unpleasant.

That’s what matters most. Not getting up at 5 a.m. and taking cold showers, but finding satisfaction and cultivating it. Once you’re in that virtuous circle, that’s when you really make progress, because that’s what gives you the strength to keep going all the way.

Learning a language is long. It’s a lot of hours. But it’s worth it.