Confessions of a Monoglot

I have a confession to make.

I took Spanish every year grades 6-11, all the way through AP. I lived in Spain for a month with a host family and studied at the Universidad de Granada in high school. And after all those years of schooling and real world experience, I can barely hold a two-minute conversation in Spanish.

Some of this has to do with the fact that after my return from Spain two years ago I let my Spanish muscles atrophy and stopped attempting to practice my conversation skills. That is until I got to college and made many bilingual friends who constantly chatter away in Spanish or French or Russian as I stare at them utterly confounded. I thought that after a few weeks of being around Spanish speakers again all the information I supposedly learned in class would come flooding back to me and I would surprise them with my flawless Spanish. This was not the case. When I finally did work up the courage to try and converse with my Spanish speaking friends, my sentences were broken and my pronunciation was basically unintelligible.

So out of curiosity (and embarrassment) I set out to learn about the different methods of language learning and why some people seem so much more adept at speaking foreign tongues than others.

The Critical Period:

The critical or sensitive period for language learning is between six months and five years. Children who learn to speak two languages in this time frame will essentially have two native tongues. Learning multiple languages is much easier as a child because the neuronal pathways for language are forming and growing rapidly, which makes them extremely susceptible during the critical period. The brain is essentially comprised of programming language patterns and structures that will remain for the rest of an individual’s life. After the age of five, this development slows and language learning gets coded in a completely different area of the brain, making achieving fluency a lot more difficult.

After learning this, I was pretty upset that mom and dad didn’t throw me into a language school during those early years.

Learning as an adult:

A key finding of an experiment conducted by the University of Calgary did ease my insecurities. It reported that students who take foreign language classes in school do not receive enough exposure in class to learn a language fluently. Achieving fluency takes time and dedication. Any program that claims to help their patrons achieve fluency in X amount of time is erroneous. So the question remains, what is the best way to learn a language? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. Different techniques will work better for different people and there is no set time frame for how long learning a new language will take. Total immersion, dedicated self-study, and college classes are all opportunities to learn a new language. It has been shown that immersion is the fastest and best way to achieve proficiency, but every brain is wired differently. Just like every individual has to discover which studying methods work best for him or her, they must also discover the easiest way for them to learn a language.

According to Benny Lewis, a polyglot and self-proclaimed “language hacker,” it takes him three months of total immersion in a country’s language to achieve conversational fluency. Another theory suggests Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” rule applies to lingual proficiency. However, 10,000 hours would be equivalent to an hour of study every day for 27 years so this is not the brightest outlook for those who want to learn quickly.

Resources:

If you’re interested in learning a language on your own time here are some cool and cheap (or free!) resources I’ve found. Typical language software like Rosetta Stone are incredibly expensive and studies have shown that they yield mixed or negative results.

Italki.com: A website that connects you with language teachers all over the world for cheap lessons via Skype. This site also offers the option of language exchange, which entails Skyping with a native speaker of a language you wish to learn if you speak a language they wish to learn. This is a great way to practice your conversational skills if you don’t have the opportunity to practice with people in person.

Duolingo.com: A fun (and free) app and website that makes learning a new language seem like a fun game. When you sign up you get a profile and move through various levels as you complete lessons. The site tracks your progress and encourages you to finish the lessons until completion of the language program.

Scrabbin.com: A community of tandem language learners. Similar to the language exchange, this program connects people who wish to learn the other’s language in person, via email, and over the phone.

Even though I wasn’t raised bilingual, I’m determined to communicate effectively in at least one other language besides English, even if it takes me a bit longer to master. Since sitting in class for all those years clearly didn’t do me much good I’m going to need to try out a few different strategies this summer. Hopefully I’ll be free of my monoglot status in the not-too-distant future. Wish me luck!