Language Learning Hacks
Are you someone who struggles to learn a second language or feel it is taking you too long? Do you seem to get stuck at “a level”? Have you tried this and that but your progress is still not as good as you wish it was? Your issue might be in general language skills or it might be with one aspect of them, such as pronunciation. If this is you, you might be interested in some language learning hacks you can take on to transform the process.
Is This The Language Learning Hack To Top All Hacks?
Sometimes to find really good hacks that can put us on a new trajectory we have to consider possibilities that we have not even thought of. I would like to explore one possibility here that is seldom looked at. This one possibility can yield us insights that can impact nearly everything we do. The one I am talking about is the view that as children we were given everything we needed to learn a language. The way kids learn can provide us with real hacks. Sure, they take years to learn. Don’t forget, though, that they are learning a lot more than “just” a language. They are learning to express their humanity for the first time! If we took away that element, then their speed, I would suggest, would be … pretty impressive.
As children, we are the ultimate learning machines. We learn nearly everything, as we come with so few reflexes at birth, unlike animals that are born with nearly everything they need. So, many four-legged creatures are walking sometimes within minutes of being born whilst we can take a year to learn to walk. Humans are given the potential to be and do “anything”. This can be seen by the amazing breadth of skills, we show as well as with all that humanity has accomplished. Language is just one element in all that, but it is a clearly a critical one.
Consider for a moment that we have everything we need to learn a new language. This is not so hard to accept as we all learned our mother language, the most difficult language to learn by a country mile. It is incontrovertible that we learn the majority of our first language by ourselves. It has been said that if we intentionally set about teaching the whole of a new language to an infant, they would never learn. Of course, some parents do teach some vocabulary and other things to children, but it is ad hoc. On the other hand, many parents don’t teach their children much at all and still they learn. Which parent teaches their child the use of “ever”, “considering”, “if” and so on? None, I would say. Yet the child learns everything they need to sound like a native and to express all they want to.
Once this understanding is taken on board, even tentatively, then it is not a long stretch to consider that amongst the other things that may be preventing us from learning is what we are doing to stop ourselves from learning. In other words we have to consider that we have taken on views and practices that are preventing us from exercising what we need to learn a new language effectively.
Some of you may be thinking that there are other reasons why there are differences between infants learning and adults learning. Yes, we could say a lot about the differences. But for now I am asking you to consider (not accept) the possibility that we still have everything we need. All we have to do is find what it is we have. Let us consider (again, we don’t need to accept) that some of the ways we are learning are inhibiting us. That is, that they are preventing us from expressing the capacities to which we all have access.
This mental attitude of “considering” is something we all do in our lives when are facing, for example, personal problems. We consider – we might say this, we might say that, or they might be saying this for such and such a reason, and so on. So, I am not asking you to do something that you haven’t done before. I am just asking you to do something that you might not have done in regards to the subject we are talking about in this post.
What is stopping you?
So let us look at what exactly might be stopping us. What if the following practices were actual