What does it take to learn a language well?
Nina Garrett
Do you have to be clever to learn a new language? How long does it take to learn one well? Is ‘total immersion’
the only real way to do it? Are there any shortcuts?
People oft en say, ‘I had four semesters of Language X, but I can’t speak a word.’ Th at’s a very common problem—in fact, it may be the typical experience of adult classroom language learners. Why is it so common? Th e implication seems to be that we’re not very smart, or we’re bad at learning languages, or we had poor teachers.
But probably none of those are true.
We’re talking here about speaking a language, speaking it well enough to talk with other people in their native language about real-world topics, with the confi dence both that you’re understanding the cultural context of what they’re saying and that you’re representing your own thoughts and feelings so that they’ll understand you. Th at’s a very diff erent matter from reading knowledge or even listening
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comprehension, both of which can be learned to an advanced level without ever meeting a native speaker.
Speaking another language fl uently isn’t a matter of IQ or aca-demic smarts: there are millions of people who have no formal education at all but who speak several languages fl uently. Nor is it a matter of youth: it’s too pessimistic to say that only children can learn languages. Th e Modern Language Association insists, ‘Never too early, never too late.’ Children can certainly pick up a new language easily when they’re immersed in it, but they’re not necessarily better than older learners when they take it as a school subject, because the latter have cognitive advantages.
Still, you don’t want to massacre the language, sounding like Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther fi lms. A language is not just a set of words and phrases that you can memorize to get simple here-and-now meanings across; it’s a complex system for communicating—and even more fundamentally for structuring thought. So don’t believe the ads in airline magazines for courses that guarantee ‘mastery’ of a language in just a few weeks—that’s just nonsense. Language learning takes time, and the less similar the language is to English, the more time it takes. Th ink about this: in a typical four-semester course in college, you may well have fewer than two hundred hours of contact time with the language. In U.S.
government schools, where languages are taught for real profi ciency, courses meet for a minimum of six hundred hours of full-time study, and getting to profi ciency in the languages most diffi cult for English speakers—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic—takes twice as long as in the easier ones like French or Spanish.
In addition to a realistic amount of time, you need two things for success: a long period of regular interaction with people speaking the language, and some help with making sense of what’s going on linguistically. It’s not enough just to hang out for a month—or even a year—in a country where the language is spoken. Imagine a foreigner just starting to learn English, who hears an American acquaintance say ‘Wutchagonnado?’ Th ere’ll come a day when she can recognize
that, and understand it, as a colloquially compressed version of the six-word sentence ‘What are you going to do?’ But as a beginner she’s likely to hear just a single burst of sound. Th at’s what any of us will experience with an unfamiliar language. How do you learn to make sense of those bursts of sound? Not through ‘total immersion’; when you’re in the country, the people around you—native speakers—are simply communicating with others who already know the language.
Th ey aren’t speaking so as to teach you grammar—how to put words together to make meaning—and they probably don’t know how to do that. (Most native speakers can’t articulate why they say things the way they do.) But without someone explaining the system, your learning will be random and ineffi cient.
Aft er puberty most of us need classroom work to create a frame-work for hearing sounds, fi guring out how sentences frame-work, and understanding the cultural context. Adults who pick up a language without that framework oft en end up with a kind of ‘abominable fl uency’—a lot of words, good speed, maybe even decent pronuncia-tion, but typically mangled grammar and not much cultural sensitiv-ity about how the words are used. Th ey reach a plateau where they sound like Inspector Clouseau with a bigger vocabulary, and they oft en can’t get beyond that plateau.
For adult learners it’s ideal to have some solid academic back-ground in the language before going abroad, but the classroom experience on its own isn’t enough. If you took a language course and a few years later couldn’t remember what you learned, it’s probably because you left out the second step: prolonged interaction with people who speak the language. You can do that in the country, of course, but you can also do it by immersion in a summer language school or camp, or by dating a near-monolingual speaker of the language, or by fi nding intensive uses of the internet—listening to or watching news broadcasts, fi nding audio materials with tran-scripts, ‘talking’ with native speakers in chat rooms (which gives you
‘spoken’ language even in written form), reading, reading aloud to yourself, watching movies over and over, practicing the dialogues
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or songs that you hear. Emerging technologies are increasingly good at simulating—or even providing for real—the experience of communicating with native speakers. All of this takes serious motivation; but once you’ve gotten to the point of real comfort in another language, the excitement and the advantages of your fl uency will give you all the motivation you need to keep it up.
About the author
Nina Garrett has taught French and German at junior high school, high school, and college levels, and has also taught graduate-level courses on Second Language Acquisition, especially as its theory underlies language pedagogy. Her fi rst language was Dutch, and she has also studied Rus-sian, Latin, and Spanish. She is internationally known in Computer As-sisted Language Learning for her work in developing the use of compu-ter technology both for teaching languages and for conducting research on how language is learned. She is currently Director of the Center for Language Study at Yale University (http://www.cls.yale/.edu), working with teachers of fi ft y languages.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Chapters relevant to language learning by adults include 15 (language and the brain), 27 (foreign accents), 29 (adult advantages in language learning), 31 (history of language-teaching methods), 32 (study abroad), and 34 (language-teaching technology).
Elsewhere:
Lightbown, Patsy, and Nina Spada. How Languages are Learned (Oxford University Press, 1993). A very readable account both of children’s fi rst-language learning and of second-rst-language learning both in the class-room and in the immersion environment.