Spend the time. The rest follows.

Steve Kaufmann was born in Sweden in 1945, grew up in Montreal, and learned French properly in his twenties as a student in Paris. In 1969 the Canadian diplomatic service sent him to Hong Kong to learn Mandarin. He reached a working level within a year, spent nine years in Japan, and left the foreign service for a career in the lumber trade. Then, at sixty, he started Russian. Portuguese followed at sixty-two.

He now speaks around twenty languages to varying degrees, and by his own account learned more of them after sixty than before. In 2007 he co-founded LingQ with his son Mark, and started a YouTube channel that has since passed 1.4 million subscribers. He wrote one book about all this in 2003, The Linguist: A Personal Guide to Language Learning, later retitled The Way of the Linguist, and has been restating its argument in short videos ever since.

The reason to listen to him is not the language count. Plenty of people claim a dozen languages. It is that he has run the same experiment sixty times over sixty years, on languages as unlike each other as Mandarin, Russian, Arabic and Persian, and kept saying the same unglamorous thing about what worked. He is not selling a trick. He is telling you to spend the time, and explaining how to make that bearable.

Sluka is not affiliated with Steve Kaufmann or LingQ. This page is our reading of his public writing and talks. Every claim about what he thinks is sourced at the bottom of the page.

Two beliefs stop more adults than any grammar does. One is that children learn languages effortlessly and the window closes with puberty. The other is that some people have a gift for it and the rest of us do not. Kaufmann's whole career is a counter-example to both, and he is blunt about it: good language learners are made, not born.

On age, his argument is that adults are better learners than children, not worse. A child has one advantage, which is pronunciation, and it comes with thousands of hours of exposure and no alternative. An adult knows what a newspaper is, can already read, knows how to organise a day, and knows what they are interested in. Those are the assets that matter for reading and listening, and none of them decay. The record backs him up: nine languages at sixty, roughly twenty at eighty, and Russian literature readable within two years of starting from nothing.

On talent, he points at what people mistake for it. Someone who has already learned one foreign language believes they can learn another, so they put in the hours without doubting the outcome. Someone who has never got there does not believe it is possible, and stops when it gets hard. Confidence looks like talent from the outside. So does the ability to notice what a language is doing, and that is trained by exposure, not issued at birth. The hardest language, he says, is the first one.

“Anyone can do it at whatever age.” Steve Kaufmann, on why people struggle with languages

None of this means it is easy. It means the variable that decides the outcome is one you control. That is better news than a gift would be, because a gift cannot be scheduled.

Kaufmann reduces language learning to three things. He has called them the three keys, and the tripod, and the formula. The name changes and the three parts do not.

Of the three, only time can be measured. Attitude is yours to bring, noticing accumulates on its own if the hours are put in, and so the practical version of the formula is shorter still: find content you like, and spend an hour a day with it.

Everything else on this page is about making the hours pleasant enough that you keep putting them in. The hours themselves are the method.

It helps to know the size of the job. The US Foreign Service Institute has taught diplomats languages for seventy years and publishes how long it takes a motivated English speaker in a classroom to reach professional working proficiency. The figures are classroom hours, so they are not the same as hours on a sofa with a podcast, but the ratios between languages are the honest part.

An hour a day is about 365 hours a year. So Italian is a one-to-two-year project at that pace, and Chinese is a five-to-six-year one, and knowing that up front is what stops month eight from feeling like failure. Nobody is behind. The hours are simply not in yet.

Where do they come from? Kaufmann's answer is that most of them were already there. Commuting, cooking, walking the dog, the gym, washing up: he fits an hour or more of listening into an ordinary day without sitting down to study once, and says he concentrates better that way than at a desk. Reading takes the slot that the phone would otherwise fill. The hour a day is not found by clearing a diary. It is found by changing the language of things you were doing anyway.

Sluka counts both halves. Words read are credited only for text that was on screen long enough to be read while you were actually there, and listening minutes only for the language you are learning, by the track's own clock. The number on the Statistics tab is the hours, and it does not flatter.

Kaufmann describes listening as three stages, and the mistake most people make is applying the rules of one stage to another.

Two of his practical points are worth keeping. Full attention is impossible while listening and not required: on a thirty-minute drive he reckons he is actually following the audio for perhaps half of it, and that half counts. And listening with the text first, then without it, is how the sounds get attached to the words you already recognise on the page.

Reading is the biggest single lever on vocabulary, for a plain reason: text is far denser in uncommon words than speech, you set the pace, and you can look a word up without losing the thread. Kaufmann's own method for every language since Chinese has been the same. Read a great deal of material he wants to read, look up what he needs to as he goes, and let the words come back on their own.

The instruction is to read a lot, not to read carefully. A word met ten times in ten different sentences is learned in a way a word studied ten times on a card is not, because each sentence teaches which words it goes with, what it does grammatically, and what register it belongs to. He puts volume above everything: the amount of content you get through is the biggest determinant of how many words you end up with.

This compounds. Every word learned makes more of the language readable, which makes more content interesting, which means more reading. That is why the honest measure of progress is how many words you know and how much you have read, and why Kaufmann has watched his own known-word count on LingQ since the day it launched. A streak measures showing up. A word count measures the thing you were trying to grow.

Read what you would have read anyway. A news site, a forum about your hobby, the novel everyone is talking about. Interesting material with forty percent unknown words beats graded material with five, because the interesting one gets read to the end and the graded one gets read once.

If there is one habit that separates people who get there from people who stop, it is this one. Kaufmann calls the willingness to accept uncertainty, fuzziness, things not being clear the sign of a good language learner. Most of what you read and hear for the first two years will be partly opaque, and the instinct to fix that immediately, to look up every word and re-read every sentence until it is transparent, is what turns a story into an exercise and an hour into twenty minutes.

Set the blade high on the first pass. Lower it on the next. His brother's lawn-mowing analogy, which he uses for all of it

The picture is his brother's, and it is exact. Grass that has grown tall cannot be cut short in one pass; the mower stalls. So you set the blade high and take off the top, then lower it and go again, and each pass takes a little more. Content works the same way. The first time through a podcast you catch the gist. The second time, a few phrases. The third time, the joke. Forcing full comprehension on the first pass is trying to cut the lawn to the ground in one go, and the mower stalls.

The practical rules that fall out of this:

• Move on when you understand fifty to seventy percent. Not when you understand all of it.
• Do not look up every word. Look up the ones that keep stopping you, and let the rest ride until they turn up again.
• A sentence that will not resolve is skipped, not solved. The next paragraph often solves it for you.
• Expect to forget. A word looked up yesterday and blank today is normal, and the brain is not failing when this happens. It is doing the thing where the third meeting sticks.

This is why a new word in Sluka stays blue until you say otherwise. Nothing blocks the page, nothing asks you to deal with the word now, and the highlights can be switched off entirely with Shift+H to read clean. The word will be lit again in the next article, which is the next pass of the mower.

Kaufmann is not against flashcards. He used paper ones for his first thousand Chinese characters in Hong Kong at the end of the sixties, then learned the remaining thousands by reading. Fifty years later he still uses spaced repetition for what he calls a few specific needs, and says plainly that plenty of people have become fluent without ever touching a card. His two conditions are that they are an addition to reading and listening rather than a substitute, and that they are only efficient if you actually enjoy them.

The argument against making them the main course is about what a card cannot carry. A word on a card is a word with the sentence removed, so it does not teach which preposition it wants, which words it travels with, or when it would sound wrong. The page teaches all of that, and it teaches it in a new sentence every time, which is what the brain needs to generalise. And a review queue grows while you sleep. What was a hobby on Monday is a debt by Friday, and debts get abandoned.

Sluka has no flashcards and no review queue, on purpose. The four levels you grade a word into are not a schedule; they are your own note of how well you know it, and the only thing they change is how strongly the word is highlighted the next time you meet it. Review happens when you open the next article, because the words you are learning are still lit on it. If you like flashcards, run a flashcard app alongside; Sluka will not stop you. It just will not nag.

Words over grammar. His fourth secret is that if you have a large vocabulary the grammar eventually falls into place, and the reverse is not true: knowing the rules for a language you have no words in gets you nothing. He still reads grammar explanations, but as a reference and not a course. When something in the reading raises a question, look it up, and the answer will make you notice that pattern for a week. Then it sticks, or it does not yet, and you read on. Correctness arrives as a feeling for what sounds right long before it arrives as a table.

Speak when you want to. Kaufmann puts input first and output when he feels like it, which for some languages was months in and for others longer. Speaking is useful mainly because it shows you your gaps, the words you reach for and do not have, and that sharpens the noticing when you go back to reading. It is not the engine. Someone who talks from day one and someone who waits a year both get there, provided the hours of input keep coming.

His fifth secret is patience, and the reasoning is mechanical rather than motivational. The brain does not learn on demand. It may take six months for a construction you have met a hundred times to sink in, and then one day it is simply there. Progress in a language is a staircase seen from below: long flat stretches and a step you did not see coming, usually when returning to something that used to be hard.

Forgetting is part of the mechanism, not a fault in it. So are plateaus, bad days when the mouth will not work, and words that have been looked up five times. The one thing that does real damage, in his view, is the negative emotion attached to those events. Frustration at forgetting makes you stop, and stopping is the only way to fail.

This is why Sluka has no streaks, no badges and nothing that goes red after a quiet week. Kaufmann does not have a streak either. He has a word count, and it only goes up.

Everything above, as the list you would pin to the wall.

Sluka is a tool for the reading half of this, and a counter for both halves. It is not a course and has no content of its own, because the method says the content should be whatever you already wanted to read.

• Noticing, made visible. New words are blue and words you are learning are yellow, on any page, so the thing Kaufmann says to notice is already marked.
• Look-ups that cost nothing. Hover for the meaning, press a key to grade, keep reading. No tab switch, no copy and paste, no losing the sentence.
• The honest numbers. Words known, words read, minutes listened. Counted only when it happened, and never as a streak.
• The whole open web, plus books and video. Because the interesting article is rarely the one in a graded reader.
• No flashcards, no queue, no nagging. The page is the review.
• Yours. Runs on your machine, pays once, sends nothing anywhere unless you switch on the one feature that does.

If you have used LingQ, all of this will be familiar, and that is deliberate. Kaufmann built LingQ to do his method. Sluka does the same method on the pages you were already reading.