Learning English at 45
Is it too late?
A follower asked me on social media, "How did you learn English?
Can you give me some advice?"
It sounds like a simple question,
but I thought about it for a long time.
I realized the real answer isn't about English at all.
It's about the way your brain is wired to learn.
Hello,
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Let me start with the facts.
I took the IELTS once after graduating university.
I got a 6.0.
What level is a 6.0?
It's right in the middle,
the median for Chinese learners.
From then on,
for about twenty years,
I never specifically studied English again.
In October 2024,
at the age of 45,
I moved to the U.S.
When I decided to get serious about mastering English,
I did something many young people would find foolish.
I started memorizing vocabulary.
No short videos,
no casual chats with foreigners,
and no "immersive learning" gimmicks.
Just the most basic, old-school way: opening a vocab app.
Grinding through word by word.
Six hours a day,
one hundred new words.
Six hours for a hundred words.
Sounds inefficient, right?
That's because I didn't just glance at them.
For every word,
I would read through every example sentence.
I'd study how it's used in different contexts.
If I saw a word I didn't know in an example,
I’d click to look it up, too.
Digging deeper and deeper,
one word would lead to five or six more.
Then I used the app's tests to prove I truly remembered them.
Before starting new words the next day,
I had to review everything from the day before.
If you forget a word after three days,
it pops back up to test you again.
Is the process tedious?
Of course it is.
The first two weeks were the hardest.
You feel like you're retaining nothing.
Half of what you learn today is gone tomorrow.
But after over a decade in investing,
I know exactly what a compound interest curve looks like: flat at the start.
So flat you'll doubt your life choices.
But as long as you don't stop,
it will eventually soar.
Learning is also about compounding.
The first thousand words are the most painful.
But once you've built up three or four thousand,
you find you don't need to try as hard to memorize new words.
Because you've mastered the roots and prefixes.
That feeling of acceleration
is identical to the inflection point in investment compounding.
I kept this up for three months.
I memorized about 10,000 words.
Then I signed up for an offline English class.
I took four months of classes.
Before the course even finished,
I went to take the TOEFL.
First attempt,
a score of 97.
The maximum TOEFL score is 120.
97 is already a decent score.
But I had set a goal of 100.
100 is the minimum for international admissions at Ivy League schools.
From 97 to 100,
only three points away.
Guess how many times I took the test?
Five times.
But throughout the process,
I didn't panic at all.
Because with each attempt,
I knew my foundation was becoming more solid.
The gap between 97 and 100
isn't a lack of ability;
it's the foundation still settling.
And honestly,
I'm proud of myself.
Because if this were me twenty years ago,
I wouldn't have been able to sit down and do this.
When I was in college,
like many young people,
I was a typical "shortcut seeker."
As long as I passed the exam,
I wouldn't spend a single extra minute.
I attended Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications.
It wasn't a prestigious school,
but its graduates found good jobs.
After graduation, I joined Huawei.
Throughout middle school and college,
I mostly relied on talent—I didn't work particularly hard even before high school.
I just put in normal effort
and got into an average school.
Mind you,
by "talent," I don't mean I was exceptionally gifted.
I mean I just coasted on whatever score I got
without putting in extra work.
There's one thing
I remember very clearly.
My roommate was memorizing an English dictionary.
I was shocked—aren't dictionaries meant for looking things up?
I couldn't believe someone was actually memorizing one.
But they just ground through it, page by page.
And me?
I didn't even try.
Back then,
to put it bluntly, I was lazy.
It wasn't that I couldn't learn;
it was that I wasn't willing to put in the "stupid work."
This state lasted until many years after I started working.
I took my job seriously
because I chose it,
and I loved it.
But when it came to "deliberate learning,"
my attitude remained the same—take shortcuts whenever possible.
Save effort whenever possible.
Until I truly took a certain piece of advice to heart.
When Zeng Guofan fought the Taiping Rebellion,
he had a famous tactic
called "Build solid camps
and fight slow battles."
What does that mean?
It means no surprise attacks,
and no fancy tricks.
Everywhere he went,
he would honestly dig trenches and build camps first,
making his defense impenetrable.
Then he would push forward, step by step.
Others mocked him for being slow;
he ignored them.
In the end, the Taiping Army was ground down by his "slowest" method.
Generations later, summarizing Zeng Guofan's philosophy,
one sentence hits the mark: "Smart people must also put in the stupid work."
I heard this when I was twenty,
but back then, it went in one ear and out the other.
I didn't take it to heart at all.
Why?
Because when you're young, you assume you're the smart one.
You think "stupid work" is for stupid people.
You believe there must be a faster way.
Then you work for twenty years,
spend a decade in investment,
and witness the successes and failures of countless entrepreneurs.
You have to admit one thing—you are not a genius.
You are just an average person.
Of those who actually achieve great things,
not a single one relied on being "clever."
So,
If even smart people have to put in the hard work,
then an ordinary person like me has no right to be lazy.
You see,
I've heard this saying from age 20 to 45.
It took 25 years to truly sink in.
We have a saying: "I've heard so many truths,
yet I still can't live a good life."
Actually, it's not that the truths are wrong;
it's that your awareness isn't ready to receive them.
When you have enough experience
and enough life history,
that saying suddenly pierces through your ears into your heart.
But awareness alone isn't enough;
you also need a successful experience to ground yourself.
That experience for me
happened during the Shanghai lockdown.
I was stuck at home for three months,
unable to go anywhere.
Rather than scrolling through my phone in anxiety,
I decided to do something.
I decided to teach myself programming.
For me, programming
was much harder than learning English.
Think about it.
I'm an investor.
For decades, I've dealt with people, business models, and market sentiment.
Code is a language from an entirely different universe.
The first day I opened a tutorial,
I looked at those colorful characters on the screen
and thought I'd never learn it in this lifetime.
But I pushed through and typed away every day.
In the first week, I could only write the simplest print statements.
In the second week, I started learning logic and loops.
A month later, I could write small tools.
Two months later, I started making things with practical utility.
After three months,
not only had I learned it,
but I actually used it to develop
automation tools for my own work.
This accomplishment gave me massive confidence.
Not confidence in programming,
but confidence in the act of "learning" itself.
I was in my 40s,
starting from scratch,
learning something notoriously difficult,
and I succeeded.
In that moment, I realized: when it comes to learning,
the biggest hurdle is never IQ;
it's whether you dare to sit down and do it.
As long as you clear your head of thoughts like "I can't,"
"it's too hard," or "it's too late,"
you can learn anything.
If I could learn programming,
then English would be no problem at all.
So later, when I decided to memorize vocabulary in the US,
I didn't hesitate for a second.
Why not take the TOEFL cold first to test the waters?
Because I knew a cold score would definitely look bad,
and a bad score would crush my confidence.
I did the opposite.
I spent three months mastering 10,000 words,
building a foundation to my own satisfaction,
before taking the test.
That way, no matter what my score was,
I felt grounded.
As expected,
I got a 97.
My confidence skyrocketed immediately.
Even though it took five tries to pass 100,
I stayed steady throughout.
Because I knew,
every attempt was adding another layer to my foundation.
And don't underestimate those five attempts.
The prep process for each one was learning in itself.
My reading speed improved,
my listening response sharpened,
and my writing logic became smoother.
The score is just a snapshot of your foundation's depth.
The true gains were much greater than those three points.
Many people might say
You're starting to learn English at 45?
Isn't it too late?
Let me tell you,
not only is it not too late,
it's actually perfect timing.
When you're young, you can't sit still.
You're always looking for a faster way,
a smarter path, or an effortless shortcut.
You're eager for success,
wishing seeds planted today would bear fruit tomorrow.
But in middle age,
you're no longer in a rush.
Investors know this best—of failed startups,
eight out of ten don't die from a wrong direction,
but from being too impatient.
Once you've seen the cost of rushing success,
you won't make that mistake again.
Middle-aged people have a severely underrated advantage:
Patience.
When I study vocabulary,
I often sit for three or four hours straight.
I used to be restless too,
but at this age,
those noisy voices in your head have quieted down.
You stop wondering if there's a better way,
or feeling anxious that others are learning faster.
You just go through it word by word.
Every one finished is one closer to the goal.
You know things worth having take time to nurture,
like planting a tree.
You water it and wait every day.
You can't rush it,
but as long as you don't stop,
it will eventually grow.
So when I sit down at 45,
spending six hours a day memorizing word by word,
I feel a sense of peace.
I know it's the slowest road,
but it's also the most stable one.
Quick fixes don't stick,
but the words I've spent six hours grinding into,
they are now part of my brain.
My son scored 111 on the TOEFL,
but he never formally memorized words.
Because he went to international schools,
he acquired English naturally.
He advised me against this 'clumsy' method,
but I didn't listen.
Because our generation is different.
Our entire way of thinking is already in Chinese.
To rebuild a language system from middle age,
the most familiar and solid method for us
is to start with rote memorization.
There's no shame in it.
I don't mind if others think I'm slow.
It's called respecting your starting point.
Actually, I've always felt that
much of what we do in life
is essentially building foundations.
Investing builds a foundation for cognition.
Memorizing words builds a foundation for language.
Coding builds a foundation for logic.
Foundations are boring.
No one sees them,
and they aren't worth posting on social media.
But when the day comes that you want to build a tower,
you'll find that those with foundations can start anytime.
Those without can only draw blueprints in the sand.
I've seen so many stories like this in investing.
Companies that seem like overnight successes—
if you dig into their history,
the founders often spent five to eight years
silently building the foundation in obscurity.
Those masters who seem to appear out of nowhere—
if you look into their past,
there was always a period of unrecognized hard labor.
No one's effort is ever wasted.
So back to that follower's question—how to learn English?
My answer: The solution isn't in the English itself;
it's in your attitude toward 'learning' itself.
First is the cognitive preparation.
Admit that you are not a genius.
Accept that old-fashioned hard work is the most reliable method.
You might be unwilling to accept this when you are young.
That's okay.
It's never too late to figure it out.
Next is time preparation.
Anything worth learning takes time.
You can't sow seeds today and harvest tomorrow.
Give yourself a reasonable expectation.
Invest yourself single-mindedly during this period.
Finally, calibrate your confidence.
If you've never learned something from scratch,
then start with something small.
Learn to cook a dish, play a song, or some coding.
What you learn isn't the point.
The point is to experience the feeling of "I actually did it."
This experience will become a confidence anchor for anything you learn later.
Lastly, I want to say something many might not like to hear.
When it comes to learning,
middle-aged people actually have an advantage over the youth.
Not because their memory is better;
your memory is indeed not as good as it was at twenty.
But you are more clear-headed.
You know your own limitations.
You don't deceive yourself.
You can stay focused.
You're no longer in a rush for success.
You're finally willing to do the tedious, hard work.
And the willingness to do that hard work itself,
might be more important than talent.
Looking back at my forty-some years,
my biggest regret isn't a lack of intelligence,
but that I figured this out too late.
If back in college,
I had been like my roommate who memorized the dictionary,
patiently putting in the hard work,
my English would have likely ceased to be an issue long ago.
But there are no "ifs" in life.
Whenever you start,
that is the best time.
When Zeng Guofan employed his slow and steady tactics,
everyone laughed at him.
But the one who won in the end
was the person who seemed the "dumbest."
Learning is the same.
Others look for a hundred different methods;
you just stick to one solid, simple method.
Others switch learning apps every three days;
you stick with just one.
While others are searching for shortcuts,
you are building the foundation.
You can search for ten thousand efficient learning tips,
but the one that truly works in the end
is always the person who sits down and memorizes ten thousand words.
Have you had a similar experience?
Is there something
you once thought it was too late to do,
but later realized it was actually the perfect time?
If there is,
please let me know.
I'd love to hear your story.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.