Beyond Bounds Blog

Learning a new language is one of those new years resolutions that I see time and time again people swearing to. After the huge proclamation, they spend the next few days gathering study materials, such as Rosetta Stone software or a Chinesepod subscription, and tell everyone they know that they are going to start learning a new language. It almost always falls flat within two weeks. Luckily, no one will mention it because most everyone failed in their resolutions, so you won’t be the only one pushing your language materials or health magazines under the bed and pretending that nothing ever happened. It could be worse; you could be a student and spend four years in language class only to come out at the other end with only a small grasp of the language and absolutely no intention to use it. It happened to me. Don’t let this happen to you.

Language is a tool for most of us, and an art for some. For now I won’t talk about language as an art form, but only language as a tool that we use to accomplish other ends. If you have never considered what you would use a new language for, stop learning it - you are probably wasting your time. If you aren’t going to use the language, then don’t learn it. Learning language is not for everyone. That’s right, a blog about intercultural and international understanding and connection is saying that language is not for everyone. Learning language in many countries has become a fad, especially in China. Skip the fads and figure out what is right for you. Consider what I have written below, then asses your own situation.

The most important part of learning language is the actual choice to learn it. The foundation for learning a new language, or anything new actually, is motivation. Without the right amount and right kind of motivation, you are dooming yourself to failure from the start. Motivation has to stem not only from interest, but also from practicality. Most people that learn a new language from their home country lack practicality. People who are living in another country, who have made it practical for themselves to learn a new language, ironically often lack interest, which is more determined by courage than curiosity. This leads to failure more often than not.

Practicality:

Practical means useful. You can think of language as tool in your tool shed, a very expensive one at that. Many people buy tools because they seem useful - these are impulse buys. This is low conscious thinking. High conscious thinking involves identifying a need before you buy the tool. Don’t buy the tool and then find a need. Don’t learn a language out of impulse, because just like a wrench, your language skills can get rusty without use. Also, the pace that you learn at will be extremely crippled, for reasons other than just motivation. Taking four years of a language class amounts to less than a year in a foreign country; understanding practicality can save you time, money, and effort. I can just imagine someone buying a new power drill and looking around the house for something to drill.

Practicality can be split into the present and the future.

Present:

Present practicality means that there are immediate benefits to learning something. If you live in China town in San Francisco, the practical use of Chinese is high. You’ll be able to start understanding what your neighbors are yelling at you, and might be able to swoon a nice Chinese girl or boy into your life. If you live in a small town in Texas, I doubt that learning Chinese is going to offer any tangible benefit to you in your day to day life, or even month to month life. If you live in California, there is a good chance that learning Spanish will help you. Maybe you work in a company that needs bilingual Spanish-English speakers, or perhaps you deal with many Spanish speaking customers. Perhaps you are a construction manager and use Spanish speaking workers, or you are an entrepreneur and can tap into the Spanish speaking market.

Learning Spanish for 3 years in High school and during my first year in College was a disaster. I was acquainted with virtually no Spanish speakers, and the Spanish speaking population of my university, even though it is located in San Diego, was very small compared to Asians (as UC schools are known for). I would have had to go out of my way to find uses for the language, but the effort required was too great, or in other words not practical. As a result, I was always behind in class and lacked motivation to participate, even ditching whenever it was convenient.

When I made my decision to learn Chinese in College, just after giving up on Spanish, I was surrounded by Chinese speakers. My university, the University of California, San Diego, was filled with Chinese students and Chinese clubs. I already had quite a few Chinese friends, and after I started learning the language I started to notice that Chinese was spoken frequently at school. I was able to use it going out to eat, to joke around with my friends, and to talk to my girlfriend’s mom (which made her absolutely love me). While my Chinese at the time was very basic, the tangible results produced from learning it kept me fired up and excited in class.

Are you working in a Spanish/French/German/Italian/Thai/Chinese speaking area? Perhaps your girlfriend is of another ethnicity and her parents don’t speak English very well. Look around - will learning a new language help you in the here and now? Make a list of the practical uses of learning a new language to you.

Practical Goals

Practicality can take the form of goals as well. Someone who lives in an area barren of foreign language speakers isn’t doomed to failure. If your short term goals require or would be assisted by skill in a foreign language, then motivation will be easier to find.

Short term goals are the most important motivational factors for learning a new language if you are not living in a foreign country. Learning a new language requires a huge amount of time and focus, so it is extremely important that you can see benefits clearly up ahead and constantly remind yourself of why you are learning. Your tool then becomes connected to real life results, and every language class becomes a step toward larger life goals. Even if there are no foreign language speakers around you, passionate motivation will be easy to maintain.

Consider your short term goals. If you are a student - are you going to study abroad in this country? Are you going to be moving to an area that is highly populated with speakers of this language? If you have plans to live in Beijing, Shanghai, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver (Canada), Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, etc, learning Chinese will definitely be of use. Moving to a new city is the most obvious short term goal that would be able to add practical motivation to your studies. Others would included working for a foreign company, such as Japanese Sony. If you want to work at Sony, you would gain a huge leg up by learning Japanese, and could eventually be moved to their headquarters in Japan. Perhaps you are a business owner who wants to start open a small franchise in another country. The possibilities are endless.

Long term goals do not provide adequate motivation for learning a new language because they are not tangible and are subject to change. Wanting to learn Spanish because it might help you get a better job in the future, or learning Chinese because China is gaining power in the world and you want to be able to handle the new world order better are not strong enough to give any real motivation. These may accompany short-term goals, but they cannot be the lone reason. Wait until you are in a position to really take advantage of a new language before you start learning. Why would you buy the power drill now, when you aren’t going to use it for another few years? Those resources would be better spent somewhere else.

People want to prepare now for that long-term goal because they don’t know how long it is going to take to learn a new language. Too many people think that learning a language is a long-term undertaking and you need to spend 4-5 years learning it in college, and possibly then another few years abroad. I wasted 4 years learning Spanish, and I’ve seen countless Chinese spend 8 years or more learning English. This is bogus for so many reasons, and yet this is conventional wisdom. For most people and most practical purposes, learning a new language can be done in less than half the time that your language professor told you. This doesn’t include those who are looking to read classical Chinese texts and poetry - as I said earlier, these are the people who see language as an art.

So what time frame is more realistic? Anything within 2 years. For some it will be slightly more, for some it will be less. If you are learning a western language, 2 years isn’t even close to necessary. Learning a foreign language that is not based on older western languages should take up to two years. I will talk more about why in another post, but basically anyone who is properly motivated (see above), is smart, and is focused will have no problem, and I assume that you are as you’ve gotten this far without turning away.

Wait for your long-term goals to get to the short-term, aka within 2 years, then start learning a new language. This way you will be extremely motivated and less likely to have your language wrench hanging in the garage waiting to be used.

Interest and Courage

One half of motivation is practicality, and the other half is interest, which is actually courage in disguise. Humans are naturally curious, especially about each other (just look at how popular magazines and blogs about gossip are!). We don’t, however, like our way of life to be challenged, and will blind ourselves to the consequences to maintain a status quo. Lack of courage to communicate with others who live a different way and especially in a different language that is uncomfortable causes us to shut down that curiosity. This problem cannot be tackled in one article, so I will tackle it another time. It goes farther than just motivation.

For now suffice it to say that if you love to watch foreign TV shows and movies, without subtitles, (or something else of equal immersion) then you are already on the right path in terms of the required level of interest - courage and curiosity - to keep motivation going from this side. If you want to learn a language but you can’t do this, then perhaps you need to find out why, or you’ll either fail very fast, or it will take you all of your self-discipline just to gain mediocre results. I will cover this topic later.

Just the Beginning

The above is just the starting point for language learning. Even if learning about a new culture is interesting and practical to you, you still shouldn’t sigh in relief just yet. You are on the right path, but it will take a lot more than just that to determine your language success, such as courage as mentioned above. There are people out there who say that learning language is easy, which it’s not, and that anyone can do it, which they can’t, and others who say that it takes a long time, which it doesn’t.

Learning Language is fun, but it is more fun when you get results and at a fast pace. The first way to guarantee results is to see if learning a new language is for you. Hopefully this article was able to give you some answers!  You can find the second part here