What Does it Take to Learn a Language Well?

17 March 2005

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I often hear people say: "I had 4 semesters of Language X -- but I can't speak a word." That's a very common problem. In fact, it may be that most people who study a language have the same experience. So what's going on? The 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 that is true.

Let's assume we're not talking here about reading or understanding a language. Both reading and understanding can be learned to an advanced level without ever meeting a native speaker. But how do you get to speak a language well enough to talk fluently with people who don't speak English?

First, let's be clear that it isn't a matter of IQ or academic smarts: there are millions of people who have no formal education at all but speak several languages fluently. And let's not be pessimistic and say that only children can learn languages. You can learn a language at any age.

But you don't want to just limp along, sounding like Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther films. A language is a communication system, so it's not enough to memorize a few words and phrases. And don't believe the ads in airline magazines for courses that guarantee "mastery" of a language in just a few weeks. That's really nonsense. Like learning to fly a plane, language learning takes time, and the less similar the language is to English, the more time it takes. Think about this: in a typical four-semester course in college, you'll have fewer than 200 hours of contact time with the language.

In U.S. government schools, where languages are taught for real proficiency, none of the courses meets for less than 600 hours -- of full time study.

And then, beyond a realistic amount of time, you need two things for success: some prolonged exposure to people speaking the language; and someone to help you make sense of what's going on linguistically. You can do one before the other, or do them at the same time. But it's NOT enough just to hang out for a month or so in a country where the language is spoken. Imagine that you know no Spanish, and someone says "quien es esse chico?" That's four words, but can you tell where one word ends and the next begins? When you're surrounded by native speakers, the people around you are just trying to communicate. They aren't there to teach you grammar or pronunciation, and probably don't know how. Without someone explaining the system, your learning is random -- and inefficient.

After puberty most of us need classroom work to create a framework for hearing sounds, figuring out how sentences work, and understanding the cultural context. Adults who pick up a language without that framework often end up with a kind of "abominable fluency" – a lot of words, maybe even decent pronunciation, but typically mangled grammar and not much sensitivity about how the words are used... Inspector Clouseau with a bigger vocabulary.

So you need a guide. But the classroom 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 contact with people who speak the language. You can do that in 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 even by "talking" to native-speakers over the internet. And there are other technologies that can help. But without some in-depth experience -- without passing a threshold we can define as confidence in using the language, what you learn in class will probably fade away. Once you cross that threshold, like learning to swim, the language will be with you for a long, long time, and maybe forever.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Nina Garrett at Yale University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Melissa Drummond at April 21, 2005 01:32 PM