The Challenge of Language Learning
Learning a language may seem difficult and sometimes even impossible. It is understandable, because whenever we face something new, we tend to take some time to adapt and understand how it works.
A Different Approach
With language learning it’s different, meaning that we do not need to know or understand everything about the new language. This is because there are many things to know, and not even native speakers know everything about their own language.
For example, I don’t know everything about Spanish (which is my native tongue) and I’m still learning many things about English even when I speak it fluently.
Grammar Rules: Helpful but Not Everything
So, is the idea of trying to understand all the grammar rules wrong? Not completely. This is because learning or understanding the grammar of a language gives us a great advantage because we understand why some things change. At the same time, it’s not good to try to remember all grammar rules because there will be things that we won’t understand by ourselves.
Spanish is a language in which you will find that there are rules for most things. However, if you ask a native Spanish speaker, they may not know the majority or almost none of them. This happens because learning a language doesn’t need to be based on grammar structures and rules. How did you learn to speak your mother tongue? Did your parents teach you about the present Perfect tense? Did they tell you that in questions the auxiliary goes before the noun? No, right?
Learning Through Natural Repetition
When we were kids we learned to speak by repetition, by mimicking what our parents told us and from what we heard. We learned their accent, intonation and pace, we adapted that to our own style and we kept forging our own way of speaking.
The same should apply when we learn a new language. Instead of putting a lot of effort into learning all the grammar rules, let’s focus on learning by repetition just like when we were kids.
Finding Your Learning Style
Now, this doesn’t mean that this technique is 100% effective, no. Nothing is perfect and what works for me, may not work for you. You can try and see how it works for you, because each of us has a different learning style. Learning a new language doesn’t need to be tedious nor boring. We just need to find our learning style and improve until we master it so learning can be fun.
Enjoying the Journey
The process is not to feel like a race or something weird, it’s about enjoying the learning process of speaking a new language. It doesn’t matter if you are learning by yourself or with a tutor, what matters is that you enjoy it and see the constant progress.
Learning a language is not something of a couple of days, weeks or months, it can take years; however, that doesn’t mean that you won’t feel the progress
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