I have recently been thinking about the challenge of learning a language while in your home country.
I can remember back to my time spent learning both German and Spanish while living in the states.
It was often really tough.
I have now had the privilege of living in Turkey while learning Turkish and I guess I have found that while living in the host country will not guarantee that you learn the language well, it does offer some real advantages over learning the language in your home country.
I came across two statements in a book I have been reading that sparked this thought.
The quotes speak to the main reason why learning a language while living in your home country is so often more challenging than learning in an immersion environment.
But these two ideas also give me a lot of hope for the millions of everyday language learners who want to learn another language, but are not able to spend significant amounts of time traveling to or living in another country.
As I have worked with language learners and followed others through their blogs, I have seen a pattern emerge that resonates with my own experience. The pattern is this:
Destiny + Experience = Powerful Language Learning The life that is most powerfully lived is the one that finds passionate urgency fueled by a sense of destiny.
In my own experience, this was the main reason why my year of German in university was futile. I was perhaps the least
dedicated student in the history of the professor’s tenure.
I had no dream of visiting Germany. I knew no German speakers and I wasn’t a philosophy major interested in reading Nietzsche, Kant or Marx in their native tongue.
In regards to my knowing German, I had absolutely no sense of destiny. There was no purpose.
Three months after completing my long year of German and
graduating from university however, I decided to move to Tijuana, Mexico to work with the urban poor.
I began in earnest to study Spanish on my own. I checked out books from the library, bought dictionaries and the 501 Spanish Verbs book, made lists and flash cards and proceeded to learn more Spanish in one month than I’d learned of German in an entire year.
I had stumbled into a passionate urgency fueled by a sense of destiny.
I was moving to Mexico!
I need to tell you that you don’t need to move across the ocean to find the purpose that will fuel a passionate urgency to learn the language.
But you do need to find the purpose, the destiny that awaits you in learning it. I want to encourage you to take some time to think about the purpose learning the language will serve in your life.
• How will it positively affect your life?
• How will it positively affect the lives of those you love?
• How will it positively affect the community?
In answering these questions, you should be able to come up with a reason and a purpose to learn the language. You don’t need a giant sized purpose either – you just need one. Otherwise you motivation to learn will quickly wain and you will quit working at it.
It’s that simple and it’s true.
We need to have a dream we are pursuing and at the same time experience enough of that dream to keep us inspired.
When Langston Hughes penned the poem A Dream Deferred, he was of course writing about issues far larger than my desire to
The principle though is the same. Bad things happen when we do not experience enough of the dream to keep us inspired.
As a language learner, I saw this happen with my Spanish. After nine months living in Mexico, my Spanish was okay.
It was not nearly as good as I wanted it to be though. I returned to the states determined to keep working at it.
And for about two months, I worked at it.
But then life moved in and I moved on. My desire to improve my Spanish was always there, but without a means to use it, my Spanish quickly went the way of “out of sight, out of mind.”
Over the next ten years, I would occasionally reconnect and return to my Spanish journey.
When I was experiencing the dream, i.e. using my Spanish with Spanish speakers, I was far more intentional and consistent in my progress.
Finding ways to use the language you are learning, to
experience the dream you have of mastering the language, is an inescapable necessity if you are to succeed.
Thankfully, in today’s world, this is easier than ever before. Here are a few ideas for how to experience more of the dream:
• Make a friend with a native speaker in your community.
• Join a club or association. Here are two examples: The
French Table in Omaha, Nebraska; The Chinese Association in Wichita, Kansas.
• Visit Meetup.com and search for language meet-ups near you.
• Use The Mixxer to find a language exchange partner you can talk with over Skype.
I think we can all agree that both of these – destiny and
experience – will be a bit easier to find or create in an immersion experience.
But it is also easier than ever before to create and find them so that you can have a powerful language learning experience while living at home.
If you are serious about language learning then you must work to identify the destiny it plays in your life and find ways to experience the dream.
If you can do both of these, you will be well on your way to success.
*The quotes above come from a book called Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus.