Entry #2: Language Acquisition

 The idea of speaking another language

... has always been an interesting one to me.

Recently, I was watching some videos by Pablo from Dreaming Spanish, where he described his idea of language learning by comprehensible input. This is a theory that applies to learning languages, even as an adult.

[Source: Skylar Kang]

 What surprised me the most is the discovery that you don't actually need to fully understand what input you're recieving in a new language. I am someone who grew up around Spanish, it being my mother's first language (though she stopped using it at around 8 years old, in favor of English since she was US-born). To this day, my mom understands the language, but can't speak much of it, if any at all.

I am someone who can understand, read, speak, and write in the most basic of Spanish. I recieved my initial "lessons" from pre-school's teaching of the colors and numbers in the language, while figuring out how to read and speak some basics during 6th-8th grade. I did not have the ability to sign up for any Spanish classes until high school, however, where I took both the 1st and 2nd classes for it, as well as the French I. Interestingly enough, I don't have a very strong American accent when using the language, and was wondering what factors might be at play.

It's actually very simple.

It appears that you speak a language much like you are taught to speak it, and you're taught to speak it by how others use it. The reason we see a lot of foreign accents is due to people being pushed into situations where they either learn from someone local who has a "foreign" accent or they're forced to speak a language prematurely, many times at no fault of their own due to unique circumstances. Think about someone in Germany who has a teacher that was formally instructed in English, with a strong accent in English due to spending a lot of time reading and speaking the language without having the ability to really soak in the English language prior, then such a person uses that English when talking to other Germans. Of course there would be many Germans with a German accent when speaking English, then. But, it's not impossible to reduce that accent or to learn to a much higher degree of fluency. Truth be told, regardless of the way we speak, there will always be people influenced by the way their community and/or their family speaks, along with general regional influence and the influence of people who have been forced into situations of prematurely speaking a language, as well as people who are exposed to, or frequently speak, other languages.

If you speak Spanish all day, the way you speak such a language would be different from how someone would typically speak English or Chinese Mandarin or Brazilian Portuguese, and vice versa for others.

There is nothing wrong here; in fact, we all, as individuals, have our own unique individual way of speaking (our idolect). Some people speak their own language in a way that can be hard to comprehend for other native speakers, or they may have a speech impediment.

While I fully accept that people are capable of speaking closer and closer to a native of the language they seek to learn and use, I also recognize that people have a multitude of reasons for not doing so.

The Difficulty

Not everyone has the luxury of being exposed to spoken language by a perfect native speaker, with coaches or expensive programs to correct pronunciation, and ample (hundreds of) hours of listening prior to reading, writing, and speaking.

Myself, I recieved copies of Pimsleur's Spanish courses for free, with the help of local libraries at the time, and listened to quite a few of the initial recordings. Something I've realized very quickly is that I already have a whole lot of exposure to Spanish itself, and I always have. There are times where I will watch TV in Spanish, or listen to music and podcasts, etc.

[Source: bRoken]

By this method of language learning, I have found that it's better to simply limit the use of speaking, reading, and writing until I'm sufficiently prepared. How strange, I thought with respects to this novel method, that all my life I've been told that it's all about grammar and boring rules.

When you really think about it, why is that so?

I mean, intuitively, it makes sense to get the listening part down quickly, right?

If that's the case, your intuition might be right. It can take thousands of hours to really pick up a language, but it's totally possible to acquire a second language, or even a third, as an adult, with a method similar to how you might've learned a first or second as a young child.

I find the process fascinating.

Fin.

As much disagreement there is, I stand firm to my conviction that anyone can learn a new language, even as an adult, with the right method, and I agree with people like Pablo from Dreaming Spanish that you can acquire a language through comprehensible input. I don't believe you're stuck with whatever you learned as a child.

Whether you want to learn Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Laotian, or even Nahuatl, there is a way to get there.