5 things I wish I knew when I started learning languages

You know, I was thinking the other day, you know, other things that I have learned now after so many years, I don't know, 60, 70 years of learning languages, are there things that I wish I knew then when I was getting started learning languages? And there are, and I can think of five things that I wish I knew then. The first thing is it needn't be that difficult. Traditional language teaching puts a lot of obstacles in front of us that destroy our confidence. We have to learn these grammar rules. We have to try to remember these words. We don't want to get things wrong on the test. As a school kid, you know, from grade two on, we had French, maybe from grade one on in Montreal. And at the end of it all, I couldn't really speak French. I was never very motivated, but it wasn't me taking the initiative and learning a language. So the first time that I can remember where I deliberately said I want to learn a language was when I was in France, because I eventually did get interested in French and went to France and studied at the university there. And I was in Grenoble, Grenoble. And a friend of mine said, you know, you should you should study Russian. So I thought, yeah, that sounds kind of neat. So I got the textbook was by a Nina Potapova. I still remember her name, the book. And I started, you know, flipping through the pages. And it just struck me as so difficult. The writing system, you know, the backward R, which is ya, for example, which isn't a backward R, but whatever. And it's just so difficult, you know, case endings and so many different things. And so I gave up. I said, no, I'm not going to do this. Besides, I'm in France. I'm taking all these courses in French, which is difficult enough. I'm going to take English as my foreign language. Fine. But my point is that it just seems so difficult. We have this feeling that we can never learn this language. It just is too difficult. And so what I wish I knew then was it doesn't matter. The strange letters, the, you know, case endings, all of these things in time will become easier as you continue to expose yourself to the language. So I wish I knew then, first of all, that take it easy because it's so important to be confident that you can learn. And traditional language learning makes us think that it's a very difficult task I will never learn. And I think a majority of people who study languages and who very often give up on those languages actually don't have the confidence that they can learn. Now, the second thing that I wish I knew then is you actually have to have a lot of repetition. So the average language book takes you from lesson one. Very often you're, you know, at the airport and then you are going through customs and then you're at the doctor's office. And so different scenarios. And in fact, that's not very good because you're dealing with different vocabulary in each of these episodes or scenarios. And you don't spend enough time with the content in each of those episodes. You actually have to have a lot of repetition at the early stages. Twenty, thirty times listening to the same story. Not necessarily all at once, but, you know, if you do less than one and you listen to it and read it three, four or five times, then listen, then do the next one and the next one, you then have to go back to the first one again, that it's this constant cycle of repeating audio and text and always combining the two, you're not sort of going through something in the hope that you're going to learn it. It's more a matter of exposing yourself repetitively to material that will eventually cause some form of, you know, connection between your neurons to take place. So this idea of the importance of repetition of audio and text is something that I was not aware of originally. I thought I was sort of trying to learn these things as I was coming across them, whereas in fact, that's not the process. The process is one of constantly exposing yourself to a limited amount of content in order that some of these things start to take hold in your brain. So that was the second thing, the importance of repetition at the early stages of language learning. The next thing that I wish I knew then was that languages is not about trying to understand or theorize about the grammatical structure. It's more a matter of putting yourself in a position where you can start going out to explore and to find content of interest. So I realized this when I was in Hong Kong learning Mandarin. I would go to the bookstores, look for books that had lessons on history, on other subjects, literature with glossaries behind each lesson. But I was constantly exploring. So I eventually did know that, but I didn't know it when I started in at first that the responsibility was going to be with me to go out and find things. My initial exposure to Mandarin was more sitting in the classroom and going through these expansion drills where you're kind of forced to, you know, respond and add a word. And so there is a lot of repetition there, and that was good. But I didn't realize then that in order to really progress in the language, I would have to go out and explore. And of course, exploring, finding content, which is a big part of language learning, is now easier than ever because of the availability of YouTube and podcasts and things of that nature. But I didn't understand initially that the journey was going to be one of lots of repetition at the beginning and then more and more, you know, exploring the language later on and certainly not one of trying to nail down the grammar. And this is point number four. I wish I knew then that as I was going through German declension tables or, you know, French or Spanish conjugation tables, it doesn't matter. You don't have to remember those things. If you review them, which I do from time to time, it's more a matter of exposure. It's just exposing yourself again to elements of the language. You can be exposed to them in context, which is better. We know that from research, but you can also every so often expose yourself to those elements in a concentrated format like a conjugation table. It has some impact, but in either case, the objective of doing that is for more exposure. It's not to try to nail them down. For a long time, I thought that in reviewing these, it was the case with Russian, with Czech, and of course, I could never remember the endings. I couldn't use them properly. And so I felt, gee, I better go and study those tables again and again and again. And in fact, now I understand that all the details of the language, they will eventually come to you. You needn't deliberately try to remember them. Again, I'm talking from the perspective of an independent language learner. If I'm a full time learner of a language and one of my activities can be to review details of the language, the tones in Chinese or the tables in Romance language, but that's a very small part. And if I understood then that don't sweat it, these things will eventually get better. If you give yourself enough exposure to the language, I would not have put so much pressure on myself to learn those things. And finally, I think in certainly in French, maybe in Chinese, I was keen to try and, you know, why can't I speak better? You know, I want to have better pronunciation. I want to be more fluent. I want to speak more quickly and so forth. Again, pressure on myself. Had I realized then that the input drives the ability to speak, that I needn't speak until I'm ready, if I wait until I've heard enough of the language, I will probably pronounce better. It doesn't matter how you pronounce in the early stages. I remember I had decided to learn Russian finally, and I was on some kind of, you know, website. And I decided to upload myself saying something in Russian. And of course, people just made fun of me. Oh, your Russian is terrible and so forth. Well, of course, it's terrible. I haven't heard enough Russian to be able to pronounce it well. So then I backed right off and then I went through a long period of just listening and reading. And then eventually my Russian pronunciation improved. So I'm a believer and I know this can be controversial. I'm a believer that if you wait and don't speak too early, when you've had enough of the language in you, you have enough words, you've heard enough of it, you're eventually going to speak better and pronounce better. So input drives output. However, I'm reminded I had a dog called Tank. And Tank would chase birds or squirrels through the bramble bushes and come out kind of bleeding from the brambles, didn't care, was oblivious to that. And that's kind of how we have to be. Once we have enough of the language in us, we know it's going to be uncomfortable. We just have to go for it. Don't let people correct us. Don't worry about corrections. The corrections are going to bounce off you anyway. You won't remember much of what these corrections were. Eventually, and including the impact of corrections or hearing it more often or recognizing where you've made a mistake, you will gradually improve. So input drives output. But when you're ready to output, just go for it. Those are five things that I know now and I've talked about before, but I wish I knew them when I was first starting out because I would have been more confident and when we are confident, we learn better. So there you have it. Five things that I wish I knew about language learning then, which I know now. Bye.