Will you be on the next plane out when things turn out more difficult than expected?
While a good school, teacher and good materials can help a great deal in learning a language fast and well, the single most important factor that will determine the success of your language learning is: you.
In earlier posts, I have covered many of the common excuses for not learning a language, such as:
- “I am too old to learn a language well”
- “I am not good at languages, never was and never will be”
- “I have no time”
The fact is that almost anyone is able to learn a new language up to a decent level. But it often doesn’t happen, because learning a language takes more time and persistence than most of us are willing to put into it.
We tend to forget that learning our mother tongue has also been a process that took many years and involved making countless mistakes and facing the frustrations associated with all that.
Learning another language is not going to be more difficult than the languages we learnt before, but it’s not going to be any easier either. If you start with that mindset and are willing to commit the time and effort to make it through, you will be successful. In many cases, though, it takes so long to see any progress that we grow demotivated before we are able to harvest from the learning effort we put in.
I know a particular case where a German girl quit her Mandarin lessons after about 1 month of full-time learning. It was ‘just too difficult’. I and most of my fellow students with a European background started to see the first results (being able to ask for something simple) after about 6 weeks.
By quitting so early, this girl wasted 4 weeks, along with the money it took her to come to Singapore to learn Mandarin. I don’t doubt her intelligence – she may be more intelligent than me. But what’s the use of intelligence, if because of her attitude, she wasn’t able to make full use of it?
As a positive contrast, I once heard a long term American expat in Japan say: ‘Everyone in Japan needs to learn Japanese eventually. There is no way around it. It takes about 2 years to learn Japanese. I am a rather slow learner for languages, but I am here for 10 years now and took about 3 years to learn it.’
If she had put in the same amount of effort, would the German girl have been able to learn Mandarin? Of course she would. It’s a simple fact that whatever your IQ is, learning a language takes continuous effort over a long period of time. I’d rather be a bit less intelligent, but ‘stubborn’ enough to stay the course for long enough to see the results.
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
Attitude and putting in full action are the two key ideas in learning a language (or anything else). When I was in Beirut, Arabic had been phenomenally hard. Likewise, I never stayed long enough in Tokyo and never built up my Japanese to a good-enough level. As for Chinese, I spent 7 years learning how to read and write it – and got nowhere. Even today, I can’t read or write Chinese – but that’s just me. In all three cases, I couldn’t do it, but I never gave up the idea that I couldn’t.
The third key idea is to USE IT. Open up and connect the language being learnt to daily life. Quite a lot of people have this bizarre disconnect that what happens in the classroom is self-contained, almost as if it’s a language version of a time capsule. That is true enough in the early stages of learning the language. Down the line, though, it’s up to us – our own selves – to open up and start making language connections beyond the classroom. The job of the language instructor is there to help you make the connections (alas, not always the case with some teachers or with some students).
I used to know a Chinese lady who was learning French. She went to class and did everything diligently. Great. But her French was awful. In an Asian-speaking country like Hong Kong, French will never be good enough. What to do? A simple but crass trick was to reset her mobile phone to French. That way, she had French constantly in her face. Try to use as much French in her appointment book as possible. Again, French in her face all the time. It worked for me. Your mileage may vary, of course. But every little bit helps. The whole point of the exercise is to keep up with the attitude, because heaven knows it’s hard enough to learn anything new when you’re an adult.
Applying what’s taught in the classroom actually goes way beyond languages. My brother and I used to push the boundaries of Lego by building a small bathtub boat, complete with propulsion. We also shot plastic bottles using water and a bike pump, and spent DAYS trying to make it shoot higher. Made bike tours navigating with a map. Looked at mountain ranges and discussed what their age was likely to be based on their shapes (rounder shape means more erosion has taken place).
I see much less of this in Singapore. Maybe the ‘rigorous’ education system takes away the realization that what’s in the classroom is actually out there in real life. And it’s the real life version that matters. The classroom version can only give you a start.
Exactly, Guus, exactly. We spend maybe, what, 15 to 20 years in school and the rest of the 40 or 50 years in real life. If that doesn’t tell us what’s important, I don’t what will.
I think that you’re right but one of the biggest factors is that being stubborn allows you to overcome the biggest challenge in (language) learning, frustration. Frustration with progress, problems or anything related to the language fuels a very powerful negative cycle. The cycle then reinforces itself, increasing frustration, negativity etc. I think this simple graphic explains it very well (can read the full study also if really interested).
Pride & Frustration model
We all have been there – get frustrated, stop studying for a couple days, try again only to have it seem harder because you had stopped for a few days, then it becomes a few weeks and then you’re saying ‘well… I tried but haven’t studied…’ Or on the other side, when you have a great class or good conversation, all the sudden really motivated to study again. Full study
Hi Brandon, great to see you here! Yes, that graph pretty much summarizes it. We all have positive and negative experiences. But being resistant to the negative impact, you can get enough positive reinforcement to keep going.
Of course there’s frustration – and a helluva lot of it too. If it takes a quarter to a third of our lifetimes to get to grips with our own mother tongues, it isn’t going to be any different when learning another language. That just comes with the territory.
We now have a whole generation weaned on the Internet and it’s a generation with the lowest attention level compared with any generation ever. We can expect lower tolerance to non-instant results. Be that as it may.
Trouble is, expectations of instant results is usually accompanied by expectations of ‘perfection’ or ‘workability’ – call it what you will. Learning a new language is always fraught with boo-boos. Many years ago, when I first started working, I remember my manager told me, “Disasters will always happen. It’s how you manage your disasters that really counts.”