WHY LEARNING A LANGUAGE IS HARD & HOW TO MAKE IT EASIER

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Why learning a language is hard & how to make it easier💙😃


 



How we learn

As adults, we tend to learn by accumulating vocabulary, but often don’t know how each piece interacts to form grammatically correct language.Research from MIT even suggests that adults’ tendency to over-analyze hinders their ability to pick up a foreign language’s subtle nuances, and that straining harder and harder will not result in better outcomes.

Voxy’s Katie Nielson blames this on the idea of ‘language as object’. ”In history class, you start chronologically and you use dates in order of how things happened. That’s just not how language-learning works,” she says. “You can’t memorize a bunch of words and rules and expect to speak the language. Then what you have is knowledge of ‘language as object’. You can describe the language, but you can’t use it.”



It’s better, she says, to consider the process “skill learning” (something you do), rather than “object learning” (something you know). The remedy? Lose the perfection. Get messy in your learning – whether via app, class or travel – be happy to make mistakes and realize that you will feel silly at times.

Similarities between languages

We empathize! It’s not easy to learn a language vastly different than your own (think English speakers struggling with Korean, or a Thai native wrestling with Arabic). Interestingly, studies show thatthese difficulties arenot due to personal aversions to challenge, but rather, to neurological preferences.

Research at Donders Institute and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics indicates that our brains are not indifferent to the similarities between languages, and will reuse our native tongue’s grammar and characteristics to make sense of a similarly-structured foreign language.

Professor of psycholinguistics Nuria Sagarra agrees that learners of vastly differing languages have a greater challenge ahead: “If your native language is more similar to the foreign language (e.g. your native language has rich morphology and you are learning a different rich morphology, such as a Russian learning Spanish), things will be easier.”

Tips to make your journey easier

While learning a language will never be 100 percent easy – nothing truly worthwhile is – it can definitely be enjoyable and successful. So what can you do?

Know yourself and your goals

Why are you learning this language? For professional reasons? Pleasure? To communicate with family? With your goal in mind, actively search for opportunities to learn what you need and filter out what you don’t (for example, vocabulary for talking about your work is very different to that necessary to navigate North America on a road trip). Focusing on your overall learning goal will help you combat burnout when it comes

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