• Your confidence in your ability to learn.
• Your feelings about the language and culture.
• Your willingness to try things out.
• Your ability to learn from (and laugh at!) mistakes.
• Your tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

Here now are five of the most insidious psychological obstacles standing between you and fluency:

1) Negative Beliefs About Your Ability to Learn the Language

The most common—and arguably most destructive—psychological obstacle in language learning is the belief that you are not good at learning languages. Okay, maybe you didn’t do so well in high school or college Spanish class. But guess what? It’s probably not your fault. In most cases, poor performance in language classes is a reflection not of your inability to learn a language, but rather:

• How ineffective the standard academic approach to language learning tends to be for most people. A small percentage of learners with high linguistic intelligence manage to pick up languages in school, but most people do far better using more natural, immersion-based approaches that leverage multiple intelligences (visual-spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, etc.). Some teachers do indeed try to integrate such methods, but the limitations imposed by large class sizes and standardized testing make the task all but impossible.
• How few chances you likely had to use the language in fun, meaningful, personally relevant contexts. Your language teacher may have planned some skits and “culture days”, but these are a far cry from the exciting, messy, real world interaction you need to reach conversational fluency.
• The fact you were required to learn a language, especially one you didn’t get to choose. Language learning should be optional. Or at the very least, students should get to choose which language they learn. And I don’t just mean a choice between Spanish and French. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today; learners should be able to choose from a larger pool than just 2 or 3 Romance languages. If a particular language isn’t offered at one’s school, why not allow learners to develop a self-study program monitored by a faculty member or parent? The more power an individual has to choose, the more likely they are to take ownership of the learning process and put in the time and effort needed to make tangible progress.

2) Negative Beliefs About the Language & Culture

Looking back at my former English students, the one’s who made the most progress tended to be those who loved American culture, watched American movies, listened to American music, ate American food, and dreamt about traveling to—or living in—the United States. Those that had little interest in Americana (or the cultures of other English speaking countries) made far less progress no matter how important the English language may have been for their academic or professional careers.

In my case, my deep love and respect for Japanese culture gave me the extra fuel needed to continue putting one foot in front of the other even on days I really didn’t feel like studying.

3) The “Wait Until I’m Ready” Delusion

Many learners (especially those with perfectionistic tendencies) spend many years diligently preparing to use a language, flipping flashcard after flashcard, watching foreign films, listening to language podcasts, etc. All of this is well and good, but focusing only on input leads to an imbalanced language acquisition diet. You need to mix in healthy servings of output, too. Speaking and writing are by far the most efficient ways to solidify what you’ve previously learned, identify gaps in your vocabulary and grammar, and remind yourself why you started learning the language in the first place.

Look, I know it’s scary. There are so many things you want to say but don’t yet know how. So many unknown words and structures that fly right over your head. But so what? No matter how long you study, you will eventually have to go through this messy, two-way interaction. Why put off the inevitable? Why let fear stand between you and fluency? Regardless of your level, you can always try to communicate something today. If you only know five words, use those five words. If you don’t know any words yet, use gestures, drawings, inference, etc. to get your meaning across, paying close attention to what words and structures you hear as you go.

Imagine, for example, that you are at a market in Taiwan and want an apple. You don’t know the word yet, so you just point at one. There are many fruits on the table, so the merchant confirms which one by pointing at the pile of apples: “píng guǒ (蘋果)?” Boom, you now know the word for “apple” in Mandarin! He then asks you how many you want, but you don’t understand him. So he asks, “yī gè (一個)?” and holds out the universal gesture for the number one. You now know the number one in Mandarin, or more accurately, the phrase for “one thing”. Not bad for 10 seconds of person to person interaction! Had you tried to learn these words alone at your desk, you would miss out on the opportunity to:

• Eat the delicious apple!
• Mimic proper pronunciation.
• Encode words in a far more robust, multi-sensory way.

4) Fear of Making Mistakes & Looking Stupid in Front of Others

The “Wait Until You’re Ready” delusion above is largely fueled by fear. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of not understanding others. Fear of making embarrassing mistakes. Fear of ordering the wrong food. Fear of getting on the wrong train. Fear of accidentally saying you’re pregnant in Spanish when you meant to say you are embarrassed! This fear is not completely unjustified. You will indeed make mistakes. Heaps of them. You will order the wrong food and get on the wrong train. You will accidentally insult someone when trying to express praise. But in the vast majority of cases, the only real victim is your pride. And the ego can only be bruised if you let your sense of worth be tied to your perceived ability in the language. Tie your pride instead to your willingness to try things out and laugh off mistakes, not how perfectly (or imperfectly) you can use a language.

As Viktor E. Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When you say the wrong word, butcher a sentence, misunderstand someone’s question, or make a cultural faux pas, you have a choice about how you respond to the potential embarrassment. Do you get frustrated or have a good chuckle? Do you let the gaffe serve as proof that you suck at the language or interpret it as an opportunity for growth? The choice is yours.

5) Frustration With Not Understanding Everything You Hear & Read

Just as most learners put off speaking and writing practice out of fear of making mistakes, many avoid powerful listening and reading opportunities because they grow frustrated with ambiguity and uncertainty. They stop watching an un-subitled foreign film half way through because they don’t know exactly what’s happening in the story. They limit their reading to bilingual books. They only talk with native speakers who also speak English, allowing them to always fall back on their native tongue when confusion arises.

While it is indeed ideal to choose materials just above one’s current level of understanding, and bilingual speakers do offer some advantages over their monolingual counterparts, don’t let a pursuit of the perfect resource or tutor stop you from getting valuable linguistic exposure right now with whatever and whomever happen to be around. The pursuit of perfection usually just leads to procrastination.

How about you? What psychological obstacles have you encountered in your language learning adventures? How did you overcome them? Let me know in the comments.

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 waist 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.

And here’s the trailer for The 4-Hour Chef:

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 yesterday as I was discussing different types of cars with my girlfriend (she has just moved to Seattle and is 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.

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

Multiple Intelligence Categories

Gardner believes (as do I) that human intelligence is manifested in a number of different forms, including (though not limited to) the following seven categories:

Sadly, traditional education systems focus only on the first two kinds of intelligence, a fact that is especially true when it comes to foreign languages. Nearly all language courses, teachers and materials focus exclusively on linguistic intelligence (e.g. overt explanations of grammar, word usage, etc.). When people claim that they are not good at foreign languages, what I think they are really saying is “I have low linguistic intelligence.” The good news is that it doesn’t matter!

Consider my case. When attempting to convince would be foreign language learners that they too can learn, the reply is usually the same: “You are just good at languages.” In fact, my linguistic intelligence is actually quite low. I have been successful in foreign language learning not because of innate linguistic smarts but because I tap into other intelligences (in my case, musical intelligence, visual/spatial intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence).

Applying Multiple Intelligences in Language Learning

So how then can we apply multiple intelligences in foreign language learning? First of all, you need to identify your strengths and weaknesses. You will then be able to make the most of the former and mitigate the latter. There are countless online surveys you can take to identify your multiple intelligence profile, but I recommend this survey from Literacy Works since it allows you to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 (more accurate than the yes/no questions used on most multiple intelligence surveys you’ll find on the web).

Once you finish all the questions, they will provide a score out of five for each type of intelligence and offers suggested study methods and activities that suite your strongest intelligences. Most of the learning suggestions are related to reading and writing (since the survey is prepared by an adult literacy organization) but you should still be able to take away plenty of ideas on how to apply your multiple intelligence profile to all language learning tasks, including listening and speaking.