Thursday, September 6, 2007

On motivation

First of all, I have no particular talent for languages. I studied Latin in high school, and I was pretty good at it, but when I studied Russian in college I crashed and burned and for years afterwards thought it was because I was bad at languages and that that meant I couldn't learn them as an adult; I thought that I was good at Latin in high school only because I was younger, and that adults couldn't learn. Well, my experience with Spanish has completely revised that theory: it wasn't that I was bad at languages, exactly, it was just that I was lazy.

To put it in a more positive light, not only can adults learn a second or third language, I would even say it's not particularly complicated and requires no special talents, although of course it helps if you're one of those people who can hear a word once and repeat it perfectly, which I am definitely not. The thing that is lacking in most adults is a deep motivation to speak the language and the willingness or the opportunity or the obligation to work on it every single day.

So, the reason I failed at Russian in college was because I didn't really spend any time working on it outside of class, and I thought it would come easily or not at all. I thought that some people were "good at languages" and they would just absorb things without work, while other people were "bad at languages" and studying was futile. I never stated this to myself explicitly, but this is how I rationalized my failure to lift a finger. Now, on the contrary, I think that anyone of normal abilities who works on it every day will make progress, and, conversely, without regular work, it will never come to anyone, even those who have a knack.

Now, I said above that it's not particularly complicated. That's somewhat of a lie. It is somewhat complicated, and I'll go into that in later posts. However, if you are highly motivated, everything else is just a detail; you're already on your way to succeed. Now you just need to maintain your motivation, do some things right, and give yourself the right amount of time.

The reason I say this so definitively is that I have read a great deal of research on language learning, along with a number of informal accounts by experienced language teachers, and one of the main conclusions I have drawn from all this reading is that a student's progress is mostly dependent on the total amount of time they spend working on the language. That's not to say that students don't have different talents, or that different teachers or different teaching techniques don't make a difference — of course they do — but, for a given student, the main question is just how much time they are putting in on a weekly, daily, and yearly basis. If you can work every day for 20 minutes, there is no doubt that you will make progress. If you can work every day for an hour, or two hours, then you will make more progress. The rest is important, but not as important as the fact that you are working on it diligently.

The main reason I would point to for why I have made progress in Spanish is that I have worked hard on it; even excluding the month I was in Guatemala, I've been putting in probably on average at least an hour a day and sometimes more. I say that I've made progress because, at the moment, I can express pretty much whatever I want to in Spanish, either writing or speaking, without making too many horrible errors; if I have access to a dictionary I can write pretty well, and Spanish speakers tell me that my spoken Spanish is, while far from fluent, quite understandable.

This gives me a great deal of confidence that, even though Russian is supposed to be much more of a challenge for English-speakers to learn, and though it might take two or three years to get to the same point, I will make progress in proportion to the effort I put into it, and that makes even such a steep mountain seem surmountable.

So, my single most important piece of advice for anyone wanting to learn a language is to figure out some way to motivate yourself. Book a one-way ticket for someplace they don't speak English, get a job that requires you to speak the language all the time, start dating a native speaker, do whatever you need to do to force yourself to learn it.

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