Is it ideal to learn Japanese in Japan and Mandarin in China or Taiwan? Yes. Is it a mandatory condition? Absolutely not. Let me be clear: living in Japan and Taiwan for a number of years was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and I go back to visit as often as possible. But while living in a Japanese or Mandarin speaking country can certainly provide learners of these languages many advantages, it’s critical to understand that it’s not a requirement for success. In today’s world, “I can’t learn Japanese because I live in rural Kansas” is an excuse, not a reality. With Internet access, a little creativity, and a lot of hard work, you really can learn any language, anywhere. As Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 Months puts it:

“…where you are isn’t what decides whether or not you’ll be successful. Attitude beats latitude (and longitude) every time. It’s more about creating an immersion environment, exposing yourself to native speakers, and doing everything you can in that language.”

Acquisition Depends on Active Learning, Not Osmosis

On the flip side, living abroad is no guarantee that you will pick up the language. While immersion is essential, language acquisition depends on active learning, not passive osmosis. Consider the ridiculously high number of Western expats who spend years in Japan, China, or Taiwan and never reach even a moderate level of fluency in Japanese or Mandarin. Or take the case of English speakers learning French in New Brunswick, Canada: despite being surrounded by French both in and outside of the classroom for 12 years, a government report showed that only 0.68 percent reached even an intermediate level in the language! No, my friends, exposure is not enough. You have to be hungry to learn and do everything you can to actively assimilate the language.

You Can Always Find Native Speakers to Practice With

There is no shortage of language learning communities, exchange sites, and tutoring services online today, with more and more popping up every year. And with the advent of free VOIP (voice over IP) services like Skype, you can talk with native speakers right from your computer or smartphone no matter where you live. If you prefer speaking face to face, find a local language and culture group on Meetup.com, or if you live near a university, see about volunteering to help tutor exchange students.

You Can Practice Listening & Speaking On Your Own

It certainly helps to speak with native speakers, and I suggest doing so as much as you can. But in cases where you don’t have anyone to talk with, you can always get more listening input via podcasts, videos, etc., and then practice using what you’ve learned by recording an audio journal, talking to your smartphone as if you’re on a call, or just saying in your head what you would say in various scenarios you are likely to encounter.

Detailed Tips on Developing an Immersion Environment

For heaps of resource recommendations and how-to tips for creating an immersion environment no matter where you live, check out my step-by-step language guides.

Enough.

This word should be your mantra when learning a language. When you find yourself procrastinating, making excuses, and putting off speaking practice out of fear, this string of six letters can help put you back on track:

• I have enough time if I prioritize my day and put language learning first.
• I have enough materials. My problem is probably not a lack of resources but a lack of motivation.
• I know enough words to at least start a basic conversation, even if I stall a few seconds later. That’s what dictionaries and phrase books are for!

So enough excuses already! Time to stop complaining and start learning.

I previously wrote about the similarities between learning to ride a bike and learning a language, but in this post, I’d like to share the parallels between language learning and another major passion of mine: martial arts. Just like learning a martial art, mastering a foreign tongue requires time and effort (which is the real meaning of the term “kung fu”), the proper blend of “self-study” and “sparring”, a great deal of patience, and a focus on mastering the basics instead of always chasing flashy new moves or words.

Both Require “Kung Fu”

One of my constant struggles as a language blogger is to find the right balance point between highlighting the importance of having fun in language learning and setting proper expectations about how much time and effort is required to reach fluency (however it is you define the term).

In both language learning and martial arts, you should do everything you can to ensure that you genuinely enjoy the learning process. Choose a good teacher, find other people to learn with, and find activities you love. But you must also accept that:

• Some requisite tasks will hurt (e.g. doing horse stances and learning conjugations).
• Some days you just won’t feel like learning and will have to force yourself to do so anyway.

This is where “kung fu” (功夫, gōngfu) comes in.  The word actually refers not just to martial arts, but to any form of learning that requires a great deal of time and effort to master:

“Gongfu is an ancient Chinese term describing work/devotion/effort that has been successfully applied over a substantial period of time, resulting in a degree of mastery in a specific field. Although the term is synonymous in the West with martial arts (though it is most over rendered Kung Fu), it is equally applicable to calligraphy, painting, music, or other areas of endeavor.” —Andy James

I don’t know about you, but I think learning a foreign language fits this definition perfectly!

Both Require a Blend of “Self-Study” & “Sparring”

Another challenge in both martial arts and language learning is finding the right balance between preparation and application.

Some learners spend all their time training or studying alone, putting off the messy process of sparring or speaking with others until they feel “ready” (a feeling that will never come). You get better at what you practice, so if your goal is to learn how to defend yourself from an attacker or participate in flowing conversations with native speakers, then you have to actually apply movements with someone trying to attack you and speak with actual human beings, not just your iPhone.

Conversely, some learners want to just jump in and start sparring or speaking on day one. This is certainly preferable of the two options (especially for languages since there is no risk of physical injury), but the importance of self-study and preparation must not be underestimated in either endeavor:

• The more hours you spend in a horse stance or doing Anki reps, the stronger your kicks and vocabulary will become.
• The more times you practice techniques and phrases with slow, perfect form, the easier it will be to apply them at full speed while sparring or speaking.

Start “sparring” as soon as possible, but don’t expect to have effortless, free-flowing exchanges with native speakers until you have spent the requisite time in your “linguistic horse stance”!

Both Require Patience

I freaking love movies, especially those that follow what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” or “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

But there is big unintended problem with such hero flicks: by showing the transformation from beginner to bad-ass in the course of 2 hours or so, they make us believe (at least at a subconscious level) that significant change can happen almost instantaneously. In fact, the majority of the learning in such movies is crammed into a short “montage” scene, where someone goes from zero to hero in the course of an 80s rock ballad! This hilarious clip from South Park sums up this absurdity nicely. At a conscious level, all of us know that developing actual abilities will obviously take more than a few minutes. But these films can leave us with a short-lived sugar high, a hunger for instant gratification that will quickly evaporate once one realizes what actual training or study feel like. Use films to pump you up, but make sure to start out in a new language or martial art with realistic expectations about how much time it will take you to reach your  personal proficiency goals.

Both Require a Focus on the Basics

In a similar vein, many new learners of martial arts or languages want to skip the basics and jump ahead to the “flashy” stuff, may it be jump spinning hook kicks or technical terminology. While there is a time and place for both, it is imperative to master the basics first. Just as you can communicate a great deal with a very small number of words (Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50!), a martial artist can defend themselves from an almost limitless number of attacks using a very small set of core techniques. The key is quality, not quantity. As Bruce Lee said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

I’ve been blogging about language learning for 6 years, teaching languages for over 10, and learning languages myself for 15. During this time, I have heard lots of excuses (and made a fair number myself I must admit) about why one/I cannot learn a language well. The most common three by far have been:

1. I don’t have enough time.
2. I don’t have enough money.
3. I’m not good at languages.

Now I don’t want to imply that these are completely invalid reasons why one fails to learn a language. Sure, having more free time would certainly make it easier to fit in the requisite hours needed to reach conversational fluency. Bags of cash would make it much easier to visit countries where the language is spoken, pay for tutors or classes, and buy the best resources available. And being a savant like Daniel Tammet would make the language learning process go much faster than us mere mortals (he learned enough Icelandic in 7 days to handle a media interview in the language!).

But it is imperative that would-be language learners understand that:

• Anyone can make at least a little bit of time each day to spend on language learning.
• Everything you need to learn a language can be found online or at your local public library for FREE.
• Everybody can learn a foreign language, even if it takes some of us longer than others.

The gap between making the above excuses and making serious progress in a language is not time, money, or ability but motivation. If you really want to learn—nay, must learn—a language, you will find the time by cutting out less important things, you will figure out how to acquire the necessary resources, and you will eventually get used to a language’s pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc.

The hurdles are inside your head, not on the clock, in your wallet, or within your genes. Now stop making excuses and start making progress.

Stephen Krashen is one of my heroes. He is a linguist, researcher, education activist, and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. I have wanted to meet him since I began studying linguistics in university, and finally had my chance at Ming Chuan University’s 2009 “Annual Conference on Applied Linguistics” in Taipei, Taiwan. He then agreed to conduct the following interview via email.

Note that this interview was originally only available to newsletter subscribers, but since I am now offering Language Mastery Insiders more than a dozen bonuses, I decided it was time for everyone to have the chance to enjoy Krashen’s unique brand of intellect and humor. Enjoy!

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JF: Could you try to summarize the results of the research you have done over the last 30 years in a few sentences?

SK: Of course. We acquire language when we understand what we hear and read, when we understand what people are saying to us, not how they say it. To borrow a phrase from the Jewish philosopher Hillel, “the rest is commentary.”

JF: Can you provide some of the commentary?

SK: With pleasure. We do not acquire language by learning about it, by consciously learning rules and practicing them. Consciously learned rules have very limited functions: We use them to edit what we say and write, but this is hard to do, and sometimes they can help make input comprehensible, but this is rare.

We do not acquire language by producing it; only by understanding it. The ability to produce is the result of language acquisition, not the cause.

Language acquisition proceeds best when the input is not just comprehensible, but really interesting, even compelling; so interesting that you forget you are listening to or reading another language.

Language acquisition proceeds best when the acquirer is “open” to the input, not “on the defensive”; not anxious about performance.

Language acquisition proceeds along a predictable order that can’t be changed by instruction. Some grammatical rules, for example, are typically acquired early and others much later.

JF: If all this is true, what happens to language teaching? Doesn’t this mean the end of language classes?

SK: Not at all. In fact, the comprehension hypothesis makes life much more interesting for both teachers and students. Classes are great places to get comprehensible input. Even if you live in the country where the language is spoken, it is hard to get comprehensible input from the “outside world”, especially if you are an adult. The language you hear is too complex. The beginner can get more comprehensible input in one hour from a good language classes than from days and days in the country.

Here is an example from my own experience. After having spent about six weeks in Taiwan, on and off over six years, all I could say was “I like ice cream” and maybe four more words, and I understood nothing. Then in the summer of 2007 I took a nine- hour short course in Mandarin, taught by Linda Li, using TPRS, a very good method for providing comprehensible input for beginners. Linda made the input comprehensible in a variety of ways, including pictures, actions, and the use of the first language.
I got much more comprehensible input in the first 30 minutes in that class than I had in Taiwan during the six weeks I was there.

The comprehension hypothesis helps clarify what the goal of language classes is: Acquire enough of the language so that at least some authentic language input, input from the outside world, is comprehensible. Then the acquirer can improve without a class.

JF: I noticed that you said that language acquisition “proceeds along a predictable order” with some grammatical items acquired early and others late. This finding must be a big help in teaching – now we know when to teach which grammatical rules, right?

SK: That’s what I thought at first, but I have changed my position: I don’t think we should teach along any order. There are strong arguments against using any kind of grammatical syllabus.

First, we don’t know the natural order. We know enough to be confident that the natural order exists, but researchers have not worked out the order for every aspect of grammar.

Second, if our hidden agenda in a reading passage or discussion is the relative clause, or some other aspect of grammar, it is very hard to make the input truly interesting.

Third, we have to constantly review the target structures: Every language student knows that one set of exercises and a few paragraphs are not enough.

Finally, we don’t need to use a grammatical syllabus. In fact, it is more efficient not to have a grammatical syllabus. I have hypothesized that if we provide students with enough comprehensible input, the next structures they are ready to acquire are automatically provided and are reviewed regularly and naturally.

JF: I assume that translation is out of the question…

SK: Too much translation can interfere with delivery of comprehensible input. This is because there is a tendency to pay attention only to the translation and not the second language input.
But there are ways of using the first language to make input more comprehensible, including doing background reading or having discussions on topics that are especially complex and hard to understand in the second language. This is part of the basis for bilingual education: Providing background knowledge in the first language that makes second language input more comprehensible.

In class, the first language can also be used for quick explanation or for providing the meaning of a problematic, but crucial word. This may or may not help much with acquiring the meaning of the actual word, but will serve to make the entire discussion more comprehensible and thereby aid in acquisition of other words and grammatical rules. Linda Li did this very effectively in the Mandarin class I attended.

JF: This sounds nice for developing conversational language. But we also need to talk about what Jim Cummins has called “academic language.” That’s the real goal for many students of English today. Now that English has become an international language, many people need high levels of English literacy and knowledge of specialized vocabulary.

SK: Again, the comprehension hypothesis is a big help. It predicts, and predicts correctly, that there are several ways of developing academic language proficiency. The one I think is the most powerful is wide, self-selected reading, also known as free voluntary reading.

There is an overwhelming body of research that shows that free reading is the main source of our reading ability, our writing style, our “educated” vocabulary, much of our spelling ability and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions, all important aspects of academic language proficiency.

A second way is through sheltered subject matter teaching, that is, making subject matter comprehensible for second language students in special classes, a form of “content-based” teaching.

Studies show that students in these classes typically make good progress in second language development and learn subject matter at the same time.

JF: One more question; a very important one. You have claimed that there is research supporting these hypotheses. But it is very hard to find the actual studies, especially these days when money is a problem for nearly everyone. How can we access the actual studies?

SK: I think the prices of technical books and journals are outrageous, and do a disservice to educators and concerned citizens. My approach is to make as much as possible available on the internet, for free.

I have my own website, www.sdkrashen.com, and readers of this interview are free to download, share, and cite anything on this website. I am adding articles as quickly as I can. There is already one book on the website and there will be more.

The website also has a mailing list, if people are interested in seeing short items I come across, and my own letters to the editor. I write several letters to the editor to newspapers all over the world every week. Again, readers are free to share anything from the website with others, including with their students.

We also started a free open-access internet journal a few years ago, which includes many of the research papers my colleagues and I have done, the International Journal of Language Teaching (IJFLT). Just go to ijflt.com and you have easy access. The journal emphasizes short, readable papers, a real contrast to the usual thing you see in some professional journals in education these days. And for those interested in the political as well as the research controversies in language education in the US today, I recommend two more websites which have been very important for me:

• www.SusanOhanian.org, which I regard as the center of gravity for the “resistance movement” in American education.
• www.elladvocates.org, the website of the Institute for Language and Education, a new organization dealing with policies related to children acquiring English in the US.

JF: Thank you, Professor Krashen.

Have you been studying a language for a few months, years, or even decades, but aren’t seeing any noticeable progress?

First of all, make sure that you’re using a good way to measure your actual—as opposed to perceived—progress. I suggest recording an unrehearsed audio or video diary at least once a week, and writing a daily journal. Both of these active output tasks are far better measures of your fluency than multiple choice tests, and best of all, encourage you to do the very tasks that lead to conversational fluency.

Assuming your progress tracking tools are not the issue, here are five likely reasons you’re not improving as quickly as you’d like:

1) You’re not putting in the requisite hours each week.

The most common reason we fail to progress in any skill based endeavor is that we simply don’t spend enough time on task. It’s all too easy to log in 40 hours a week marathon viewing Breaking Bad, but how many hours a week do you honestly spend hearing, speaking, reading, and writing your target language? As an experiment, jot down how many minutes or hours you spend studying or immersing in a language each day for a week and then tally up your results. Even the most diehard learners may be surprised how little they spend each week. This is but one of the highly under-appreciated components of child language acquisition. They have no choice but to immerse in their first language throughout the day, and end up spending an enormous amount of time in their first few years of life sucking up the language around them. Before you say “children are better learners than adults”, try spending the same number of hours they do actively acquiring the language. If you did, I bet you’d learn even faster than the little ones.

2) You’re spending too much time reading and not enough time listening and speaking.

Although reading skills are extremely important, many learners (especially highly educated adults) fall into the cozy trap of reading far more than listening or speaking. I get it. Reading is safe. There’s no messy two-way communication to deal with. No chance that people won’t understand you, laugh at your mistakes, or give you chicken feet when you wanted fried chicken. But realize that reading does very little to improve your listening and speaking skills. You’ve probably encountered non-native speakers of English who can read The New York Times without much difficulty but can barely order a coffee to go along with the paper.

3) You’re not engaging in “deliberate practice”.

Podcasts and YouTube are great, but passive input alone is not enough. To make quick, tangible progress in a language, you have to engage in deliberate practice every day:

• Stay on target. Deliberate practice requires a high level of motivation and intense, constant focus on your specific goals. If your goal, for example, is to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, ignore (or at least minimize) reading and writing tasks for now until you’ve reached your objective.
• Get immediate feedback on your performance. Deliberate practice requires immediate feedback on your performance in the language. Have your friends, tutors, or teachers jot down mistakes you make and go over them one by one once you finish your sentence.
• Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. Deliberate practice requires that you get repeated exposure to the same words, kanji, phrases, structures, topics, etc., especially those that prove most difficult for you. If you already know something frontwards and backwards, there’s no reason to waste valuable time reviewing it again. Spaced repetition systems (SRS) like Anki and Memrise are a great way to automatically schedule reviews based on difficulty and the time since your last exposure, but just like the reading trap I mentioned above, make sure that you are not spending more time doing Anki reps than you are actively listening and speaking your target language.

4) You’re not hungry enough for it.

Aside from using archaic methods and boring textbooks, there’s a major reason why most folks don’t learn much in their high school Spanish class: the class is mandatory. If you had been given the choice to learn more “exotic” sounding languages like Japanese or Chinese in school, I bet you would have been more motivated to learn and retained much more of what you studied. Choice is a powerful motivator. I’ve taught thousands of adult English learners over the past 10 years, and have observed two overarching trends:

• Even after years of study, students in mandatory English classes (whether at school or work) seldom make any real progress.
• Those who did excel had strong internal motivation. Even if they didn’t have to learn English or weren’t offered free classes by their company, they would have chosen to do so at their own expense.

5) You don’t have a clear purpose for learning the language.

While there’s nothing wrong with learning a language just for spits and giggles, you probably won’t progress very quickly if you’re just learning as a casual pastime. If you’re serious about making rapid progress, you must make the language your top priority, and create extremely “S.M.A.R.T.” (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. “I want to be fluent in Japanese”, for example, is not such a goal:

• It’s not specific. “Fluency” is a very broad concept. Do you mean oral fluency or literacy? Do you mean fluency in a wide range of topics or just for your specific professional needs and personal interests?
• It’s not measurable. Not only is “fluency” difficult to define, but it’s also extremely difficult to measure. Sure, you can use standardized tests like the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), but it is better at measuring your test taking ability and how much information about Japanese you’ve memorized, not your actual ability to use it day to day.
• It’s not attainable. If something can’t even be defined or measured, then how can you ever attain it?
• It’s not relevant. This goal is so large and vague that it has little impact on the day to day activities required to improve your fluency in Japanese.
• It’s not time-bound. There is no finish line in languages. Even native speakers continually expand their vocabularies and refine their communication skills, so by definition, this goal is not time bound is therefore not helpful for our purposes.

As a language learning addict, I follow lots (and I mean lots) of polyglot blogs and podcasts. It is always interesting to see what has worked (and what hasn’t worked) for successful language learners. While most fluent foreign language speakers tend to agree on the vast majority of language learning DOs and DON’Ts, there is one area that always seems to cause heated debate, shouting, name calling, and occasional mud/poo flinging: the importance of language input (i.e. listening and reading) versus language output (i.e. speaking and writing).

I have sat quietly on the sidelines for some time now, politely listening to both sides of the argument. But it’s time to blow my referee whistle because both teams are “offsides” (Okay John, enough sports analogies already!)

The Argument is Flawed to Begin With…

The problem with the whole argument is that input and output are not mutually exclusive components of language learning. You need both. The key is order and balance.

1. Listen first, then speak

When just starting out in a language, it is important to get as much listening input as possible. Just like when you learned your first language, your brain needs time to get used to the patterns and phonology of the language. But unlike little babies, adults can also rely on reading input to back up what we listen to. This difference (along with the fact we already have fully developed brains and don’t have to wear diapers) gives adults a major leg up on babies learning their first language. For more on the many advantages adult learners have over children, read this excellent article by Benny the Irish Polyglot.

Once you have filled your teapot up with enough listening input, language will naturally want to start pouring out. That’s when it’s time to start speaking; and speaking a lot. But be careful with the “I’ll wait until I’m ready” approach, especially if you are a shy perfectionist. If you fall into this category, years or even decades may pass before you feel “ready”. Depending on your temperament and how many hours you spend a day with the language, a few months, weeks, or even days should arm you with enough exposure to start communicating.

And by all means, if you want to start speaking day one, go for it! Just don’t feel obligated to do so, and don’t let yourself be forced by a tutor or teacher as this often leads to a fear of speaking later on and negative feelings toward the very language you aim to learn.

To get started in a language, try to find short, simple dialogues of actual native speakers with transcripts. Then listen and read, listen and read, and listen and read again as many times as your schedule and sanity allow. Read the dialogues out loud if you want to get your mouth used to the sounds, but keep in mind that you will be mispronouncing things for a while until both your ears and mouth get used to the language.

And I suggest avoiding textbook companion CDs as they tend to offer overly stilted, monotonous dialogues that aim to teach a particular grammar point at the expense of natural communication.

2. Take equal doses of your input and output medicine.

Once you have gone through a few days, weeks, or months of listening and reading this way, start mixing in equal amount of output activities (speaking with friends or tutors, writing a blog post in the foreign language, etc.). It may be nerdy, but it’s a good idea to literally use the stop-watch feature on your iPod touch or phone to time your input and output activities each day. As Peter Drucker says, “What gets measured gets managed.”

If you follow the above regimen, your foreign language skills will progress quickly, efficiently, and most importantly, enjoyably. However, if you follow the advice of the extremists on either side of the input-output debate, you are in for heaps of problems and a world of pain. Here’s why:

Output Only Problems

Proponents of the “Output is awesome; input is lame” philosophy suggest that learners just “get out there and start communicating with native speakers”. This approach, while certainly sexier than what I prescribe above, has a number of problems:

1. Nasty mispronunciation habits.

Bad pronunciation habits develop when you pronounce things how you think they should be pronounced based on your overly limited listening exposure to the language, and your logical, but nonetheless incorrect, assumptions based on how words are spelled but not pronounced.

2. You’ll be that annoying guy at the bar.

Because you have a limited vocabulary and only understand little of what is said to you, you will likely attempt to control conversations by keeping them on topics you are familiar with, using phrases and vocabulary you have memorized. All but the most patient interlocutors will get bored or annoyed by such one-sided conversations. Don’t be that guy. But by the same token, don’t miss chances to speak with natives speakers out of fear you won’t be able to communicate. You’d be amazed how much you can communicate with a few words, body language, drawings on a napkin and animated gesticulation…

3. You probably won’t enjoy the process and give up early.

Many would-be language learners give up because they simply don’t enjoy the process. Much of the angst, tedium and phobias stem from having to speak before one has a chance of performing in the language (and yes, language is a performance). Language teachers are the worst perpetrators, presenting you with new words or phrases one minute, and then expecting you to actually use them the next. Well-meaning friends or language partners are no better, trying to “teach” you new words and phrases and expecting that you can actually use them right away. Assimilation takes time and repetition, so don’t beat yourself up if it takes a few times (or a few hundred times) of hearing or reading a new word or phrase before you can actually use it.

Input Only Problems

If, however, you spend months and months diligently listening to your iPod and reading online newspapers, but never actually speaking with native speakers (by design or chance), you will understand quite a bit of what goes on around you but will struggle to actually verbalize your thoughts well or have natural exchanges with native speakers. This happens because:

1. Proper pronunciation is a physical feat.

You can’t think your way through pronunciation (believe me, most introverts have tried and failed!). Good pronunciation requires that your ears first get used to the new language (i.e. through getting lots and lots of listening input), and then also getting your lips, tongue and larynx used to new sounds not found in your native tongue, which of course takes lots and lots of talkin’ the talk.

2. Speaking and writing identifies your learning gaps.

Until you actually try to say or write something, you won’t know what you really know. While you may passively recognize certain words, phrases, idioms or Chinese characters, you may still struggle to say or write them. This is even true for your native language (as I found out when I first started teaching English and was confronted with such conundrums up at the white board as “Wait a second…How in the hell do you spell “misspelled”?)

The more you speak and write, the more you know where the “holes” are in your language cheese, and the easier it will be to fill them with focused study and review.

Conclusion

So as in all things, the extremists tend to be just that: extreme. They tend to get more attention, but the efficacy of their advice tends to be an inverse proportion to their popularity…

To become fluent in a language, just consume a balanced diet, rich in listening and speaking, with plenty of reading and writing sprinkled in for flavor.

I often hear English learners and English native speakers alike complain that certain English words are “difficult” (in fact, I’ve heard the same thing said by native and non-native speakers of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, too).

Consider the words shoe and happy. Are these English words difficult? To you and I, these terms are probably as easy and basic as they get. But what about for a 6-month old American child? Or what about for a hunter-gatherer living deep in the Amazonian rain forest who has never heard a word of English spoken or seen any English writing? For both all English words are more or less difficult, or rather, “unfamiliar”.

And that right there gets to my basic contention. There are no “difficult” words in English or any human language; there are just those words that are familiar, or as of now, unfamiliar to you.

Consider the words vapid and insipid. If you are well-read or have just studied for TOEFL, you are probably familiar with the words and would not consider them difficult. But if you were to poll the average American high school student, they would probably not know the meaning of either word despite the fact that neither represent advanced cognitive concepts (and in fact have the same basic meaning of bland, flat, dull or tedious), have few letters, and are easy to spell. These words aren’t difficult; they are just uncommon and therefore perceived as difficult to the uninitiated.

I do concede, however, that there are some words that are difficult to pronounce in certain languages. One prime example came up once when I was discussing different types of cars with my girlfriend at the time (she had just moved to Seattle and was quickly realizing how lame our public transportation system is compared with Taipei, hence the need for a car). I was explaining the pros and cons of front wheel drive cars and rear wheel drive cars, when I suddenly realized what a mouthful “rear wheel drive” is when said many times fast in quick succession. The combination of R’s, L’s and W’s requires quite a bit of tongue and lips movement and can quickly wear out the mouth muscles. Similar challenges are experienced by Mandarin Chinese learners when trying to wrap their mouths around “retroflex” sounds like zh, ch, and sh, that require bending the tip of the tongue back towards the top of your mouth.

But just as the pronunciation of words that you once found hard to produce get easier and easier to say over time, so too do once “difficult” words that become clearer and clearer every time you hear, say, read or write them. And that right there is the key to learning words (and the languages in which they rest): exposure and practice.

I am often asked if there any tricks or shortcuts to learning a language more quickly. I always respond with the same answer:

The trick to learning a language is to actually learn the language.

This may sound obvious, but it points to the fundamental (and so often under-appreciated) reason why most adults fail to learn a foreign language no matter how many years they sit in a classroom or live where the language is spoken:

Most adult learners spend nearly all of their study time reading and learning about their target language, with very little time truly listening to or reading in the language.

If you doubt this, you need only look at a typical foreign language classroom, textbook, audio CD or podcast intended for native English speakers: with a few exceptions, nearly all of them present 75 to 90% of the course in English, not the target language. The same is true across the globe, though is perhaps most pronounced in Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea where materials intended for English learners are nearly all in Japanese, Mandarin and Korean respectively.

This approach is certainly more comfortable for adult learners (and therefore allows publishers and schools to sell more courses), but it is a recipe for failure. Just look at how few people emerge from years or even decades of formal language study unable to say more than “My name is…” or “One beer, please.”

You can study grammar rules and memorize vocabulary until you are blue in the face, but this will do little for your ability to actually speak the language. Researchers like Victor S. Ferreira (Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego) have shown that this is due to a significant difference in memory types: most formal language study focuses almost entirely on “declarative memory” (e.g. information and facts), while the ability to actually form grammatical sentences off-the-cuff is determined by “procedural memory”, the same mechanism that allows you to drive a manual transmission or swing a golf club without “thinking” about it. (See How Does the Brain Form Sentences? in the April 2009 edition of Mind Magazine and don’t miss my interview with Dr. Ferreira, available as a free bonus to Master Japanese readers). If you are terrible at a foreign language (or golf for that matter…), it’s not because you are stupid or uncoordinated, it’s simply because you haven’t practiced enough yet to develop the necessary procedural memories.

Or as Khatzumoto of All Japanese All the Time so eloquently puts it:

“You don’t suck at the language; you’re just not used to it yet.”

The following post is by Khatzumoto of All Japanese All the Time and is republished here with his permission. Khatzumoto’s posts are funny, pragmatic, and the product of someone who actually practices what they preach. Enjoy!

OK. Everyone knows that quote by Woody Allen or whoever about showing up. You know, 70% of winning is showing up. Well, Woody Allen, that daughter-dating scoundrel, lied to you. The truth is 70% of winning is showing up is a bunch of bull!

Because, in fact, 100% OF WINNING IS SHOWING UP. I mean it. Thats all you have to do. Show up. Be there. And it will take care of itself. Have you ever noticed that people at the top of their respective fields are often the most prolific? Do you think this is an accident? Chief, this is not a coincidence. Sure, there are exceptions. But take TEZUKA Osamu (手塚治虫), one of the most prolific manga creators in history. Ask yourself, was he prolific because he was good or good because he was prolific? I say the latter. Shakespeare wrote quite a bit of noss, too. Michael Jordan and Larry Bird practiced like absolute fiends; we shouldn’t insult them by attributing their skill to race, height (MJ was below NBA average, by the way) or even talent until we’ve spent at least as much productive court time as them. Let me put it this way: assuming you are able-bodied, if you worked as hard as an NBA player for as long as an NBA player on basketball, you would be an NBA player, but only if you worked as hard. That Pavlina chap has like a kajillion articles on his blog: he didn’t make it off one post. More on topic, the best group of Japanese speakers on the planet, a group many call the Japanese, just happen to spend more time hearing and reading Japanese than any other group. They’ve “shown up” to Japanese as if it were their job or national pastime or something. But there’s nothing special about this group of people; when a Japanese person speaks Japanese to you, what she is demonstrating is nothing more than the result of dedication, albeit often unwitting dedication. Whether you are Japanese by default (born and raised in Japan) or by choice, it doesn’t matter, your path and your task are essentially the same: show up.

I’m from Kenya. Sure, we have a snow-capped mountain, but we don’t have real snow or ice or anything. Yet I learned to ice-skate last year. Do I have some talent for ice-skating? No. But I read up on Wayne Gretzky and how he had ice-skated every day (4-5 hours a day), how his dad had made him a home rink and everything. Apparently, he even had his skates on while eating dinner (he’d wolf down that Canadian food they fed him, and then he’d go back outside; he skated for hours every day, and went pro at about 17). I’m not an ice-hockey expert, but it seems quite clear to me that Gretzky made himself a great hockey player purely through ice time; that man showed up on ice for more hours than any of his peers. So I tried to model the man in my own small way, and ice-skated almost every day (4 days/week minimum, 2 hours per day sometimes 3 hours, sometimes 90 minutes) for two straight months (November and December). Now I can ice-skate. It wasn’t magic. The combination of being on the ice all the time and the people who saw me on the ice all the time and decided to give me some pointers, and this burning desire to not be out-skated by 6-year-olds (freaking toddlers giving me lip and having the skill to get away with it over my dead body, man, over-my-dead-body), all that combined to make me a competent skater. No one who sees me knows it’s been less than a year since I actually learned to skate. I can barely even remember what it was like when I used to walk around that rink holding onto the wall for dear life. (For the record, the first time I touched the ice was in August 2002 at a mall in Houston, Texas. The second time was in December 2002 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In both cases, I didn’t actually know how to skate, and nothing carried over to my ice-skating project that started in November 2006). Anyway, the point is, after being on the rink all that time on a daily basis, Greztky or no Gretzky, it would be hard not to learn how to skate. When you show up, it’s hard not to succeed. With all the time I spent hardcoring on Japanese, it would be a struggle not to be fluent.

Today, all over Japan, Greater China and the world, kids are being born. OK, admittedly not that many kids (haha, gotta love that population shrinkage humor! *wink* *nudge*), but they are being born. Those kids are going to know Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese. But not because of parenting or genetics as such, but because they’re going to show up. They’re going to be surrounded by Japanese/Chinese 24/7/365.24219878. Are you going to let them beat you? Babies? Freaking BABIES? Beat YOU? Are you going to take that? You, a human being with a marvellous working brain capable of learning whatever is given it? And you’re going to let babbling, drooling half-wits (sorry, babies, don’t take it personally) beat you? If not, then get up off your rear and start doing all [language] all the time!

I’m going to take a leap here and tell you what I really think: I don’t believe in prodigies. I do not believe that any person holds a significant advantage over you; I do not deny the possibility that some people may have an advantage over you, but I absolutely reject the idea that that advantage is significant. I explained this in “You can have, do, or be ANYthing, but you can’t have, do, or be EVERYthing.” I think people invented the idea of prodigies in order to excuse themselves and their own children while seeming to congratulate the receiver of the title “prodigy”. It’s much easier on everyone’s egos to say “I or my child cannot do thing T like person P because person P has some semi-magical genetic superpower” than to say “I or my child cannot yet do T like P because I have not yet worked as hard W as P”. This is why Buddhism, which started off as a personal development movement, metamorphosed into a religion. Why be like Mike or Siddharta, when you can just sit back and worship them? Why work on your jumps, when you can watch the fruits of Michael’s work on his? Why free your own mind, when you can look up to someone who’s already freed his? It’s a very aristocratic idea that has no place in a true meritocracy, but the very people who are screwed over by it (regular folk like us) are at the same time very much in love with it: If there are prodigies, no one will call us out for not trying because they’re not trying either, and because we have created a condition that can only be fulfilled by accident of birth, our excuse is airtight: we can go about being mediocre for the rest of our lives, blameless.

Gretzky, Jordan, these people worked harder at their sports than you and I. So they started working earlier than you, this doesn’t make them prodigies, child or otherwise, this just makes them people who started earlier (and not even that early, Jordan famously got cut from his HS basketball team). To admit that they were not prodigies, to admit that they busted their little behinds to get where they were (no matter their age), does not make them less. To me, it only makes them more; it makes them greater. These were not superhumans. These were normal humans who made themselves super; they were not given a legacy like a Betty Crocker cookie mix that just needed eggs and milk, they made one from scratch. And that, to me, is something (someone) infinitely greater.

Bruce Lee is reported to have said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

A lot of times, we judge people (including ourselves), we call them (ourselves) “normal”, “prodigy” or “challenged” based on their first try. On their FREAKING first try. Don’t EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER judge yourself on your first try. At least wait until your 10,000th.

Don’t buy into all this kafuffin about how you have to start golf or violin or a language in the womb if you ever hope to be good. The only real reasons that there aren’t many late bloomers are money and flexibility. Money to buy equipment and time to practice, and flexibility of the mind a willingness to learn and grow, to accept change and, yes, even to accept sucking for a while.

Adults have this competence fetish; they cling desperately to their dignity like a little boy to his security blanket; they want to be good at everything they do, and (they think) everyone expects them to be good at anything they do if they are to do it at all adults are meant to be dignified and able; adults aren’t allowed to show ignorance or confusion. Well, forget that crap. Let go of your pride: you will suck at anything you are new at and little kids will be better than you. It’s okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be those kids used to suck, too. Sucking is always the first step on the path to greatness; it’s not a question of how many times the earth has made a full rotation around the sun since you were born; it’s a question of what you’ve done during those rotations. As my gamer friends might say “all who pwn must first be pwned”. And the time to be pwned is at the beginning. You are a noob, accept it; it’s not a death sentence, it’s just a rank you can win yourself a promotion.

The fact is, you are a human. Compared to other animals, you can’t run very fast, you can’t jump very high, you aren’t very big or strong. But you have this thing called a brain. And it’s purpose is to learn to do things new things, things that it didn’t know before. This brain is, of course, connected to the rest of your body so your whole body can join in the fun of learning new things; your body itself is constantly growing and changing. You’re not like a statue, motionless and set in stone, unless you choose to be. You’re not “too old”, it’s not “too late”, who even gave you the right to decide what time was right? I never got that memo! Who died and made you the god of When It Is No Longer The Right Time To Do Something?! Are you going to let your life be ruled by stupid old wives tales and stale folk wisdom? Are you going to fit yourself to bad research results? Are you going to be guided by how things are usually done? Are you going to be a little worker ant and live inside that cruddy little box of mediocrity that the world would draw for you if you would let it? Are you going to just read history or are you going to make it? Are you going to spend your whole life Monday-morning-quarterbacking yourself, talking about what you would do if you were younger? Are you going to live out your own little Greek tragedy, fulfilling everyone else’s lowest expectations of you? I think you know the answers to those questions. So, stop whining, and start doing. Whatever it is. Do it. And keep doing it. As long as you keep moving, you’re always getting closer to your destination.

Nap Hill said it best:

“Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”

This article is copyright (©) 2007 Khatzumoto/AJATT.com and reprinted with permission | May 18, 2010