How Can We Fix Language Learning?

Learning a new language is by no means a simple, straightforward task. Between thousands of vocabulary words, complex structures that may not directly relate to anything you already know, and just eking out a comprehensible accent, there are many ways to get things wrong and far more limited options for successful communication. At least in the US, the collective enthusiasm around signing our kids or ourselves up to learn a new language (with Spanish being far and away the most popular) far supersedes our rate of thorough acquisition. Unlike in much of the world, a second language is not typically a survival necessity for Americans, thus preventing our brains from fully prioritizing it among the many other thoughts spinning through our minds. The best we can do is to try and simulate such a genuine need through comprehensive immersion, but the most proven methods haven’t yet become universal across educational settings. 

I was blessed to attend a high school that genuinely helped further my language learning journey. They offered an impressive assortment of eight different world language options - Spanish, French, German, Latin, Hebrew, Mandarin, Japanese and American Sign Language. Perhaps it’s not surprising that not all languages had an equal number of learners - we had 12 teachers for Spanish, and only one for my ill-fated four-year attempt at learning Mandarin. Spanish had an additional leg up from which I had benefited - several local elementary schools provide “two-way immersion” (TWI) instruction, which means that the entire curriculum is split between English and Spanish. Certainly not every English-native student who had been enrolled in this program ended up excelling at Spanish, but among all English-native students who did finish high school with fluent Spanish, almost all had been TWI students.

A year ago, I returned to my former high school and visited a few of my favorite teachers. Upon reuniting with my junior and senior year Spanish instructor, she told me that this already modest trickle of English-native students who obtain Spanish fluency has all but dried up in recent years. While I wasn’t too surprised to learn of a decline given general post-pandemic educational disengagement, the scale of the current problem took me aback. This trend seems to reflect a pattern of increased isolation and lack of interaction across invisible social boundaries. However, the world is just as vast and interesting as it has ever been! We need not despair regarding these outcomes, so long as we successfully recognize core methods to bring the right energy back into the process of language learning. The following is a list of such guiding principles that I believe will lead to maximal success with language fluency, with key considerations for both students and instructors. 

1. Hyper-personalized approach

Language is all about communication, and communication inherently needs to be (at least) a two-way street. Boring lectures are often not the most effective form of education, but they’re particularly bad for learning how to communicate given that the teacher tends to be the only one speaking. There’s just so many ways to get things wrong when speaking another language that any gap in consistent feedback is sure to leave lingering errors. 

Furthermore, no two language learners are going to face the same degree of struggle with every concept. The biggest difficulty could be anything from spelling to gender agreement to simply producing the right words on the spot even when theoretical knowledge is strong. Many language lessons are built around only one or two challenging aspects, and it’s easy for unrelated mistakes to slip by if feedback is inconsistent. 

How can educators rectify these problems? 

Firstly, classes should dedicate a generous amount of time to individualized practice. Having the whole class repeat words out loud won’t get anyone very far on its own - students should be practicing creation of sentences from scratch based on specified principles and grammatical concepts. Interactive dialogue between students is helpful to this end, but instructors should also pair with students in order to instill increasingly advanced vocabulary. If this is not universally feasible due to class size, lists of new target vocabulary should be provided and required to be used in practice dialogue. Educators could also provide a simple survey-style system, i.e. a Google Forms link, that allows students to submit questions about their target language whenever they come up. This will both allow for reviewing any topics that weren’t addressed thoroughly enough in the short term and serve as valuable guidance for future curriculum modifications.

2. Simulating real-life circumstances / Discouraging “forbidden” content

A lot of beginner language practice just has people using the present-tense indicative form for everything in stiff, formal language. This won’t get you very far anywhere with native speakers besides being reasonably understood while providing a basic self-intro. Imagine you tell someone that you’re from the US, and they tell you that you went to Miami last year. You want to say that you’re not from there, but you went there for a week six months ago. If you haven’t learned how to do the past tense of “go” or describe a point in the past like how we add the word “ago”, you’re SOL on relating to the other speaker - you’ll just have to say you’re not from there but you like it, to much less relatable impact. 

If you’re a big fan of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, you can try adopting shortcuts on your way to higher fluency - grammatical forms that may not be entirely correct for the context, but would likely be understood in their intended meaning. For example, in Spanish, the construction for the present perfect tense (i.e. “I have eaten” in English) is often simpler than that of the simple past tense (i.e. “I ate”). Both generally refer to an action that has already occurred, so one could use the former to make sentences that translate like “I have eaten an hour ago” even if this may sound a little off in Spanish just as it does in English. 

So much of language involves pleasantries and filler words that are often left out of written text - anything from “nice!” to “um” to “nevermind” in English. In order to communicate fluidly with native speakers, it’s important to adopt these and understand how their usage likely doesn’t map one-to-one with those of other languages. If you’re not too anxious about hearing your own recorded voice, you can try recording a casual conversation with friends (and permission!) in your native language to get a better sense of how you use such words yourself, thus allowing you to consider how to use similar words in your target language in a way that feels natural. With all this said, nobody is expecting you to sound totally organic as a beginner learner, and you don’t need to in order to get by. The most important thing is to comprehend native patterns, not necessarily to reliably produce them - not knowing that the local variation of “um” doesn’t really refer to a specific thing can lead to some wild misunderstandings, for example. 

There is an important realm of real communication needs that many language textbooks don’t touch on at all due to their age - tech-related terminology. Words like “download”, “password” and “code” can prove extremely essential in the modern era — thankfully, there’s a pretty convenient way to practice this vocabulary in a new language. Anyone can change their phone’s language settings, either briefly or indefinitely, to see these words regularly. From my personal experience, comprehension comes rather quickly as we often know what the English equivalent of text that appears would be given our previous phone usage. Even if teachers can’t convince all their students to try this out on their own phones, they can share the screen of a device in target language settings for an interactive comprehension activity. 

3. Leaning on catchy examples

Any language with a good number of speakers is bound to possess a rich assortment of inspiring media from music to soap operas to philosophical writings. Educators should dedicate lots of time to expanding their knowledge of such works, as they will both bolster their own fluency and gain new examples to provide in teaching environments. Some nerdy tips in this regard:

• Some cultures have a tendency to completely switch up word order away from how it appears in daily speech when it comes to song lyrics. Hindi is a notable example. Music can still serve as useful practice with one of these as your target language, but more on the end of recalling vocabulary than for grammar education. 

• If they do indeed follow the rules well, love songs often serve as stellar examples for grammar lessons. The frequent references to what would or would have been, the descriptions of wanting others to do things, and the regular switching of subjects all provide abundant examples for complex ideas in context. 

• Bringing in small clips of target language media that are impactful in some way (a funny moment, a catchy jingle, etc.) allows novice students to remember specific ideas more effectively than putting them through long-form content which they could easily tune out. 

4. Consistent connection with the language ecosystem 

This may be the most important factor of all! It’s extremely rare - perhaps impossible - for someone to succeed at language fluency without some amount of unstructured real-life practice. This may sound obvious at face value, but how many American youths are taking Spanish classes without ever using it outside of school? How many immigrant kids only hear their parents’ native tongue when being scolded? The answer to both is “quite a lot”. 

Unless the language in question is a dead one like Latin, there’s bound to be a rich network of media to which anyone can expose themselves. It can feel like a very well-earned accomplishment to understand enough of your target language that things you see can be funny or touching in a comprehensible fashion. Here are some key recommendations to start such a dive into local media:

• If you don’t know any native speakers of your target language, get the app Tandem and use it to exchange language practice for general improvement. These same people you meet through the app can also provide a diverse assortment of recommended music, films and more. 

• Don’t feel ashamed if you need English subtitles at first - hearing the language with a direct visual comparison available is a great way to learn. Real world results support this idea - there’s a marked difference in English fluency between countries that subtitle English media into local languages vs. those which tend to implement dubbing. The next step towards thorough comprehension would be to use subtitles that are also in your target language. This phase is likely to feel discouragingly long, as there are so many peculiarities to realistic native speech that require a quick Google search to properly understand in context. No need to feel embarrassed about this, either - staying on this path will allow you access to your target language in a way that doesn’t require native speakers to adjust their typical speech patterns. 

• News reports are a great way to practice your target language, particularly if you’re already a bit familiar with the topic being covered - it’s relatively easy to piece together the meaning of yet-unknown words with such context in addition to visual cues. However, it’s important to consider that news is often delivered in a sort of stiff, formal dialect that can be significantly divergent from daily speech. Among major world languages, Arabic faces this issue the most - Modern Standard Arabic is used for news reporting, but it is rather far off from any spoken Arabic dialect. 

• Around the world, young people are increasingly mixing English phrases into their casual speech. Unless a language course is heavily centered around classical texts, there’s no issue with educators showing or recommending media that has significant English admixture. If the goal is for students to be able to interact with native speakers successfully, it’s helpful to understand their full speech patterns, although more formal alternatives shouldn’t be left out of the curriculum. With some languages, such as Hindi, leaving all English phrases out of learning is highly detrimental to student success as many native speakers are not very familiar with non-English-based words for particular concepts. 

  • In some places, English is not the most common language to be mixed with the native tongue. For example, Moroccan Arabic borrows many French words, and Quechua many Spanish words. Educators of such languages/dialects should be honest with their students about the significant benefit that comes with existing fluency in whatever the language with which it commonly mixes may be. 

I’ve seen students thrive whenever they’re presented with engaging educational methods combined with a convincing prospective social “reward” for their efforts. There’s no shortage of boring textbook-style materials for most major world languages, but the magic truly happens when learners obtain access to unique interactions that result from organic existence. We shouldn’t hide this content until students are “ready” enough with basic drills - the endless possibilities that they can attain should always be in clear sight to encourage the best of every individual’s abilities. 

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