Three key ingredients to help learn a new language
Throughout my youth and young adult years, I discovered how essential immersion, purpose and entertainment are to acquiring a foreign language.
Immersion
In terms of immersion my experience was quite radical. At the age of ten, my bilingual parents suddenly uprooted us from our lovely French Alsace to move us to the UK and enrol us into English speaking schools. One month later my seven year old sister and myself had become bilingual. Until then, our comprehension skills had somewhat improved due to regular exposure, however our speaking skills remained close to non-existent. Looking back I am still completely blown away at how fast my sister and I learnt a whole new language.
Naturally not all children get to experience full immersion as we both did, especially not for four uninterrupted weeks. If total immersion is not an option, the next best thing is to maximise exposure. I will further explore different ways this could be done, but let’s first explore two other components without which I believe, exposure on its own would not suffice.
Purpose
As well as exposure, the learner needs to have their own personal, deep-seated sense of purpose. The desire to learn a new language is much stronger when we find our own reasons to learn it. An adult simply telling us it will be useful to us in life is not enough. My mother tried many times to no avail. In fact the same happened with ballet, yet my desire for it faded away before I could even get my leg up onto the high bar. Being told is not enough, we need to experience it with our own eyes, minds and hearts. We need to be inspired. As a child I was continuously told do this, learn that, you’ll see. See what? It all seemed abstract and pointless.
In regards of learning a foreign language my first experience of purpose was pretty dire. Suddenly switching from a French speaking world to an English one left me with no choice. Purpose was born. I needed to make new friends, to communicate, to learn, to grow. I needed it to live. My second encounter with purpose was as an eighteen year old, going on my first independent holiday with a friend to Barcelona, in Spain. For many years we had been taught Spanish in schools, some of our teachers were even native speakers. Yet once again I only felt there was a true point to learning this beautiful language, the day I immersed myself into their culture and realised I would not reach its depths using either English or French. Through my desire to travel and connect with locals, I had found my own purpose to learn Spanish. At that point in my life I could not benefit of full immersion to reach my goal. I was once again living in Alsace, France. My family had moved back there a few months before my thirteenth birthday. I had to go back home to my family and resume my studies in Psychology. My third significant experience with purpose was in retrospection. At age twenty I was offered a job as an airport hostess working for Air France. All other hired candidates had degrees in tourism or other related industries. I was simply selected because of my fluency in English. I had been told it may be useful for my future career. It all became much more tangible through that concrete life-experience.