Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A central component of
Travel Every Day
is language learning. For many people, the idea
that another language can be learned is unbelievable. Especially for Americans, language
learning has typically meant attempts to memorize verb tables and obscure grammar rules.
And after years of this painful process, if students are fortunate enough to visit a country in
which their studied language is spoken, their experience is typically that everyone speaks
so quickly they can't participate in any reasonably complex conversation.
These observations are not new. In fact, to those who have grown up around multiple
languages, the problems of many American students seem perplexing. But in the United
States, class after class of bright and curious students become convinced that language
learning is difficult, when it is actually the most natural activity in which their brains could
engage.
The key difficulty with language learning in the United States is the classroom em-
phasis on reading and writing, instead of on speaking and listening. Although we as hu-
mans have some capacity to read and write in an abstract setting, we have a much greater
capacity to speak and listen in a social setting. As you'll find as learn your new language
through conversations instead of through reading and writing, we in fact all have an innate
talent for language learning, in much the same way that birds have an innate talent for fly-
ing or fish have for swimming.
The ideas above were articulated and supported in 1963 in a monograph entitled
“Underachievement in Foreign Language Learning,” by an American linguistic researcher
named Paul Pimsleur. In this document, Dr. Pimsleur explained how the classic American
language-learning approach is certain to produce students who believe that language learn-
ing is difficult, when in reality it's something we're all born to do. Fortunately, some of Dr.
Pimsleur's ideas have started to appear in classrooms, with more and more classrooms ad-
opting a social-based immersion style, but for those of us who attended school years ago,
the mental damage was done, and now the main challenge for us is to believe that language
learning is within our reach. With the remainder of this chapter, we'll lay out a program
that an adult with little to no background in language learning can follow to attain a funda-
mental level of comfort with a new language and the basic skills needed to communicate
effectively in a foreign country.
When beginning to learn a new language, the most important consideration is enjoy-
ment—if you aren't having fun, you won't be motivated for the daily practice that's so im-
portant for progress. For the same reason, it needs to be easy to find the time for learning.
So let's begin with a discussion of how language learning can most easily be scheduled be-
fore returning to our first topic, which is how to make sure the learning will be enjoyable.
As far as finding time to study language, there is fortunately a happy intersection
between practical time limitations and our brains' preferred mode of language learning.
