When I say to learn a language slowly I am making two different, though not unrelated, points. One is practical, the other philosophical.

The first is that, simply from a practical perspective, the primary determiner of a person’s skill in a language is the time that they have spent in the language. Language-learning takes time and trying to rush that process is immensely frustrating and demotivating, and motivation really is your most valuable resource when it comes to getting those hours in.

The second, which to me is extraordinarily motivating, is that time spent in the language is the fun part. You unequivocally do not need to be fluent, or even anything more than the most beginnery of beginners, to enjoy using a language. Enjoyment in multiple forms is available immediately from “I recognised that word!” to “I liked that joke!” or “this show is cool”. There is no delayed gratification here – you are not working hard so that one day you can use the language, you are using the language every moment that you are “working” on it, be that watching a YouTube video for learners, listening to a podcast for native-speakers, or reading your favourite book in translation. That is not to deny that sooner or later this joys will be followed by the joys of “I am really enjoying this conversation” and “I understood that joke and its cultural referents without subtitles!” (and oh man are jokes funnier when you feel a little bit smug about understanding them), but really the language and the cultures it gives you access to are worth it every step of the way.

What this means is, essentially, that you can cut out most of the boring stuff that you would be doing to make the process faster – most of which does not really make the process faster. Being able to recognise common words and grammatical structures can give you a good start at the beginning, but drilling them until you can reproduce them perfectly is neither as fun nor as useful as just enjoying the language.