Don't be discouraged/mislead by all these "polyglots" that learn a ridiculous ammount of languages at a time, AKA general advice to combat burnout and other bad habits.

In recent years the whole obsession with being a polyglot fast, and even more recently being a hyperpolyglot, has really ruined the way we look at studying languages as a community. Big names in some circles, mostly YouTube, are more concerned with ticking off as many languages as possible in a short period of time, denounce formal education, and generally avoid using official metrics (like CEFR).

This is going to be a long and rambling post, but I hope I can point the issues I see being pushed by the more popular people:

More preoccupation with planning to study rather than actually studying.

I feel like some of the bad habits from other communities, particularly BuJo, have seeped into language learning. We're too preoccupied with having all these books and making pretty planners, so much so that with many people I've seen they feel like the actual reason they take learning a language. It's just filler to fill the pretty agendas.

Encouraging impatience.

There's like a bajillion websites, all claiming that you can become fluent in 3 months, 6 months, 4 weeks, etc. Completely ridiculous timeframes, but we're buying into it! I think it has to do with how scammy some "polyglots" are, speaking in dozens of languages (and more recently taking obscure languages so actual fluent and native speakers can't call them out on their bullshit) in order to sell us courses and books and whatnot.

There's so many people now who think they will become fluent very quickly and very easily. They'll get a 3-day streak in Duolingo and assume they're well on their way to C2 Italian. This feeds directly into dropout rates, with people growing impatient because, hey, the 2-month mark is already over, why can't I understand anything?

Quantity over quality.

Another recent trend is studying like 10-something languages at once during a period of time. This point actually ties to the previous two. It's boring to say that you're only learning one or two languages, it doesn't have the same impact as saying you have this meticulous system where you're learning 9 languages, though in reality all you're doing is a quick Anki session of basic vocab.

Nobody can actually keep up with this, at the very least not without neglecting a couple of languages. It might not be as click-worthy, but a notebook filled with lessons for one language is much more useful in the long run than a notebook filled with notes about totally random languages interrupting one another.

You don't even care for that language, why learn it?

I'm a firm believer that any reason is a good reason to learn a language, but not all reasons are made equal. In this rat race to being the one who's learning the most languages, we're picking up stuff that we're genuinely not interested in. I know I've been guilty of this, but I stopped because it's a dumb thing to do. If your interest in a language is literally nonexistent, outside of just being part of a party trick, why bother? I can assure you all those youtubers that are guilty of pushing this one point abandon a sizeable chunk of the languages they "want to learn", but they'll never tell you it was a bad idea.

Discouraging formal/structured learning.

Apart from the get rich quick schemes, there's also this constant push of apps and whatnot that "revolutionize" learning, but at the end of the day just end up being some Anki or Duolingo clone. "Polyglots" also only really ever promote speaking and learning vocab, mainly because they'd get busted for their poor reading and writing skills.

People nowadays seem to think that just playing Duolingo daily is enough to fully learn a language, and there's a general disinterest in actually studying grammar/pronunciation/etc. This is strongly tied to point 2, and is another big part into why people drop out so fast. That learning plateau is reached too quickly and unnaturally, and it ends up leaving people frustrated.

TL;DR: Learn Uzbek.

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