Attitude is All in Language Learning
When someone fails to learn a language in school (and most do), the standard practice is to blame one’s inadequate natural abilities, intelligence or discipline. While these factors do play a small role in learning and skill acquisition, they do NOT account for most people’s inability to master a foreign tongue.
As Steve Kaufmann so eloquently states:
“In language learning, it is attitude, not aptitude, that determines success.”
Most language learners fail because they hold onto one of the following detrimental attitudes:
- Everyone speaks English, so why should I bother learning a foreign language?
- Language learning is difficult
- The language I am learning (e.g. Chinese, Arabic, Russian, etc.) is particularly difficult
- I have no chance to use the language in my daily life so I can never learn it effectively
Please allow me to now thoroughly rip each of these beliefs to shreds:
1) It may be true that literally billions of people are learning English as a Foreign Language, but it does not follow that all these people can actually speak the language well enough to communicate. Most English students spend years sitting in classrooms, taking tests, and memorizing explicit information about English, not the tacit knowledge needed to actually use the language. And even if your foreign interlocutor can speak English, think of all the advantages that come with speaking their language: improved negotiations, ease of travel, ease of mind, making friends, and on and on…
2) Language learning can be difficult, but not in the way most people think. Traditionally speaking, the “hard” parts of learning a language include: 1) memorizing and applying grammar rules, 2) memorizing vocabulary and conjugation lists, spelling rules, new alphabets, etc., and 3) trying to understand and pronounce unfamiliar sounds. The good news is that NONE of these tasks are necessary to learn a language and are in fact the reasons why most people fail! Language is not an academic subject that can be learned consciously; it is a physical skill that can only be acquired through lots of input in the beginning, and lots of output when you are ready. Think about it: ALL healthy babies learn their first language perfectly without ever reading a grammar book. Adults can do the same. The hard part then is for adults to become language babies. This means putting up with lots of ambiguity and uncertainty, getting used to being misunderstood or not understood at all, and being willing to make heaps of mistakes!
3) Foreign language difficulty is usually rated by how similar a given language is to one’s native language. On the surface, this may seem like a logical idea, but it makes the same false assumption that leads to the misconception discussed under 2): that languages are learning consciously. If one goes about foreign language learning in a conscious, explicit fashion, then yes, the grammatical similarity between the two will make one’s task less difficult. But if one simply surrounds themselves with as much interesting, comprehensible input as possible, it will matter little how close the language is to their native tongue.
4) As Steve Kaufmann mentions in our interview, living where the language is spoken is advantageous, but it is not a condition. He also adds that you don’t learn to speak a language by speaking it. This is likely a very conterintuitive statement to most people, but I fully endorse it, as do most linguists. The key task in language learning is listening, not speaking. And the good news is that you can listen to your target language just about anytime, anywhere using an iPod or your media player of choice. And there is an ever growing mountain of free, high-quality content available to fill up your device. For the first time in history, geography is no longer a barrier to learning foreign languages effectively.
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I live in Italy and I can confirm that after having studied English at school for over 9 years, I couldn't talk with nobody in English, and all I know it's because I've studied it on my own and practiced it wherever I could.
Right on, Oscar. So many students struggle for years to study a language in a formal classroom, eventually being able to read and perhaps translate the language, but wholly unable to understand or speak the language. I hope that this site has proved a useful source of interesting English input. There is more to come!