Is Social Media Destroying Your Language Learning?

A listener named Andrew sent me a question that really resonated. He’d been living in Tokyo for over 16 years. After years of stop-start studying had recently made serious progress with Japanese by giving himself a distraction-free environment.

The one problem he couldn’t shake? His smartphone. Social media had weakened his concentration, stopping him from being able to get into a flow state. His question: what do I think about social media and language learning?

It’s a great question, and one that I suspect will strike a chord with a lot of people. The relationship between social media and language learning is more complicated than it might first appear. I’ve had my own evolving experience with it that’s worth sharing.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the YouTube version of this post at the top of the page. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this post about social media and language learning:

Are Apps And Social Media Actually The Same Thing?

Before getting into the substance of this, it’s worth acknowledging that the terms “apps” and “social media” have become increasingly blurred.

I gave a talk at the European Commission on the European Day of Languages in London, where I mentioned that I wasn’t a big fan of apps for language learning.

A young woman in the audience challenged me, making the point that she used apps constantly and found them invaluable. Her example? She read Le Monde — the French daily newspaper — on her phone.

Technically, yes, that’s an app. But as I pointed out, what she was doing was fundamentally identical to buying a physical copy of the paper and sitting down to read it. The medium is different; the cognitive activity is the same.

Her broader point, though, was a fair one: the internet and smartphones put everything you need for language learning in the palm of your hand. For many people, that’s genuinely useful. I’m not dismissing that.

But my own experience — and Andrew’s experience — is rather different, and that difference is worth exploring.

What Has Technology Actually Changed?

I had a long conversation about this with Luca Lampariello on the podcast a few years back, and one of the things we kept coming back to was the fact that we both remember what language learning was like before the internet.

I started learning French and Italian around 1999 or 2000. I’d go down to the European bookshop in Soho to find the right textbooks, visit my local library, and work through courses that came with tapes and CDs.

When I sat down to study, my mobile phone was for texts and calls — nothing more. The internet was barely a thing.

Looking back on it, what I notice is this: there is very little you can do with technology today that you couldn’t do with a good book, a notepad, and a pen. The fundamentals haven’t changed.

If you’re reading a French newspaper on your phone or in print, you still have to read it. If you’re listening to a podcast in your target language, you still have to listen. Technology has changed the delivery mechanism; it hasn’t changed the underlying work.

There are two genuine exceptions I’d grant to technology:

1. The first is spaced repetition software, which is so useful for storing and reviewing vocabulary that it would be cumbersome to replicate with physical flashcards.
2. The second is access to authentic material: you can now find reading and listening content in virtually any language, from anywhere in the world, almost instantly.

Both of those are real improvements. But they don’t change the core of how language learning works.

The Hidden Cost Of Social Media On Your Concentration

Here’s where things get more interesting — and a little alarming. There’s a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work that I recommend to everyone.

It’s about how people become genuinely productive: how university professors balance heavy teaching loads with publishing dozens of papers, how people with busy office jobs manage to write novels. It’s a fascinating read from multiple angles.

One section in particular stuck with me. Newport cites studies showing that the really dangerous effect of social media on your attention span isn’t the obvious one.

Yes, if your phone is next to you and a notification comes in while you’re studying, that’s a distraction — but the fix is simple: turn the phone off and leave it in another room. I do this every morning when I sit down to study, and it works.

The subtler problem is this: because social media conditions your brain to expect constant new stimulation — the next notification, the next scroll, the next hit of novelty — it actually rewires your baseline capacity for sustained attention.

So even when you’ve put the phone away and you’re sitting in a quiet room with nothing but a textbook in front of you, your brain has become more conditioned to distraction.

Your attention span has been shortened not just in the moment, but over time, as a result of your general habits around social media.

Reading that was a genuine eye-opener. It explains something I’d noticed in myself but hadn’t quite been able to articulate.

My Own Wake-Up Moment With Social Media

I had a fairly vivid illustration of this problem once a few years back. I was in Hong Kong and I love posting photos when I travel, so I’d been on Instagram for the first week or so.

Then one day I caught myself walking down the road, and without even noticing, my phone was out of my pocket. I’d navigated to Instagram — which I’d deliberately hidden on a back screen — and I was scrolling through strangers’ photos. I hadn’t made a conscious decision to do it. It just happened.

I stopped and thought: what should I actually be doing with this time? I could be daydreaming, thinking things through, noticing the world around me, creating the kind of mental space where interesting ideas can surface.

That moment of awareness was enough. I deleted Instagram on the spot, and shortly afterwards deleted Facebook and Twitter from my phone as well.

I’ll be honest — I’m not a complete convert. I still log on through the browser sometimes, and my work at StoryLearning means I need some kind of social media presence.

But having those apps off my phone means I’m no longer reaching for them as a default reflex every time I have a spare thirty seconds. The effect on my concentration has been noticeable, and I think the longer you sustain it, the more significant it becomes.

Does This Affect Everyone Equally?

Honestly, no — and I think it’s important to be upfront about that. There are people I’ve met who seem genuinely unaffected by this. They can leave their phone on the desk, ignore the notifications and focus without much difficulty.

Whether that’s a matter of temperament, habit, or simply having grown up with the technology in a way that I haven’t, I can’t say for certain.

What I can say is that the experience Andrew describes — finding it harder to enter a state of deep focus than he did before the internet — is one that I share, and one that I hear from a lot of listeners.

If you don’t recognise it at all, that’s genuinely great. But if you do, I’d encourage you to take it seriously, because it won’t resolve itself on its own.

Environment Is Everything

Andrew also asked more broadly about environment and language learning, and I think the two questions are really one question.

Social media is an environmental problem as much as it’s a technology problem. It’s about what you put within reach of yourself during your study time.

I think about it the same way I think about diet: the number one rule is to get the chocolate out of the house. Our willpower is not as reliable as we’d like it to be — mine certainly isn’t — and the more you can engineer your environment to make distraction difficult and focus easy, the better your results will be.

That’s why I try to protect what I call core study time: an hour in the morning, before anything else, with no phone, no notifications, no people and no internet.

Whatever else happens during the day, that hour is locked in. It’s a success before the day has really begun.

• If you're like Andrew and study best in a café, leave your phone at home.
• If you need it for the commute, turn it off and put it in your bag the moment you sit down to study.
• If you want to work with an article from the internet, print it off before you go.
• If you listen to audio while you study, put it on a dedicated device without an internet connection — an old iPod, for instance, costs almost nothing second-hand and keeps you entirely off the grid.

Social Media And Language Learning FAQ

What To Do About Social Media And Language Learning

Cal Newport’s advice in Deep Work is straightforward: take a one-month cold turkey break from social media, and don’t announce it. Don’t post that you’re going offline. Just do it quietly, and pay attention to whether your life is genuinely worse as a result.

His argument — and I find it hard to disagree — is that for most people, the honest answer would be: not really. Your friends would still call. Your family would still be there. You’d find other ways to fill the time, probably better ones.

For language learning specifically, the same principle applies. If you’ve identified social media as a problem — as Andrew has, as I have — then treat it as a problem and take real action. Don’t try to moderate your way out of it with willpower alone.

Change the environment. Delete the apps. Put the phone in another room. Make it structurally difficult to reach for social media as a reflex, and see what the effect is on your study sessions.

The relationship between social media and language learning doesn’t have to be a hostile one. Used deliberately — a target-language newspaper app, a listening resource, a spaced repetition tool — technology is genuinely useful.

The problem is that most of us don’t use it deliberately. We use it reflexively, and that reflex has a cost that shows up every time we sit down to do serious study and find we can’t quite settle into it the way we used to. The good news is that this is fixable. Take back control of your environment, and the focus will follow.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.