Imagine friendly aliens landing on our planet and observing our learning habits, especially our language learning habits. Although I write literary fiction, I‘m going to step briefly into science fiction territory and imagine that conversation:
'So, you’re learning languages, because not every human on earth speaks the same one?'
'Exactly!'
'And you’re learning languages to communicate with one another, that’s correct?'
'That’s exactly it!'
'And you spend the whole time learning those languages in books and apps?!'
I’d like to think that said friendly aliens at this point would look utterly confused. And rightly so! The one constant across the globe, is that language learning is theoretical when it fact, it is everything but.
Let’s continue the above dialogue, shall we?
'Do people end up speaking languages that way?'
'No, not really.'
'How does that make them feel?'
'Mostly like a failure, actually.'
'Why?'
'Because they’re not able to use the language!'
'But… they haven’t used it with books and apps in the first place, have they?'
Replace the friendly alien with a friendly teacher, yours truly, and the human is now a new student and you have in a nutshell every single first lesson we have together! And this is what I invariably end up saying:
'You’re not bad at languages, you haven’t used any yet. And if you’d like to know how to do so, let's get started!'
As always, if you have any questions about language learning, don't hesitate to get in touch.
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