![]() While our brains are no longer as flexible as kids’ are, we can be as curious as them! Immersion and play are key, and for adults excellent approaches are taking a class in your language (French cooking in French or salsa in Spanish) or going on a study abroad program that combines language learning with travel and cultural immersion. Focusing on your overall learning goal will help you combat burnout when it comes. 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). So what can you do? Luckily, a lot! Know yourself and your goals While learning a language will never be 100 percent easy – nothing truly worthwhile is – it can definitely be enjoyable and successful. 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 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. 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. Interestingly, studies show that these difficulties are not due to personal aversions to challenge, but rather, to neurological preferences. 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). 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. It’s better, she says, to consider the process “skill learning” (something you do), rather than “object learning” (something you know). You can describe the language, but you can’t use it.” Then what you have is knowledge of ‘language as object’. “You can’t memorize a bunch of words and rules and expect to speak the language. That’s just not how language-learning works,” she says. ”In history class, you start chronologically and you use dates in order of how things happened. Voxy’s Katie Nielson blames this on the idea of ‘language as object’. 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. Unfortunately, our more sophisticated grown-up brains get in the way of learning.Īs adults, we tend to learn by accumulating vocabulary, but often don’t know how each piece interacts to form grammatically correct language. However, it’s clear that because adults have to, you know, be adults, we simply can’t learn “implicitly” as young children do, by following around a nurturing native speaker all day. While this could mean that some people are simply cognitively better equipped for language learning, it doesn’t mean that everyone shouldn’t try (and yes, it really is that good for you)! How we learnĪfter-work classes, studying abroad, apps, talking with your foreign partner, working overseas, taking an intensive language course – there are so many ways to learn a language. Researchers found that stronger connections between brain centers involved in speaking and reading were seen in the better-performing participants. In a study conducted at McGill University, participants’ brains were scanned before and after undergoing an intensive 12-week French course. Have you ever wondered why some people sail through Spanish and others can barely mutter “hola”? Well, there is research which suggests that our own brain’s unique wiring can pre-determine language success. In this article we’ll explore three major factors that make language learning difficult – and give you six tips to make it that much easier to put a little spring in your language learning step! The brain itself Adults famously find language learning more difficult than children, whose super-flexible brains actually grow the connections necessary to learn an additional language.īut, why is it so hard to learn a foreign language, anyway? Put simply, it’s hard because it challenges both your mind (your brain has to construct new cognitive frameworks) and time (it requires sustained, consistent practice). If you’re struggling to learn a new language, breathe, you’re not alone.
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