Me speak good Deutsch

Ali – So 1.5 months in, and I feel highly qualified to speak with pompous certitude about foreign language acquisition. 

Now I realize that most language acquisition takes place in children so you would think they would be the best authority. But let’s face it, a kid learning a language has, I think, zero self-awareness of the process. They have very little experience with capability in any subject, so being incapable is a fairly natural state of affairs. So I wouldn’t look to your average 2 year old for insight on this one. The adult learner, however, has a keen sensitivity to the process as we have spent a lot of years basking in the illusion of capability and independence. Being thrust into the world of inability and dependence for basic skills like communication and reading is discomfiting to say the least. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s an unqualified negative experience; on the contrary I have gained a deep well of empathy for ESL students and brain trauma patients. Each day is humbling as kindly language-capable folk speak slowly to me with lots of hand gestures and supportive statements. But, with the perspective of an unspecified number of decades of living, I find the challenge highly motivating. 

I think part of this feeling comes from all the times I have heard that adult language learners are doomed to failure. I think this is complete nonsense born of a failure to recognize that the way adults go about language learning is usually quite suboptimal. Compare your average adult language learning experience to that of a child. The child is totally and completely immersed in the language, surrounded by native speakers who go out of their way to use all tools at hand to convey meaning. “Look at the ball, Timmy,” says mom in a sing-song clear voice while holding a ball in front of Jimmy’s chubby face. An adult likely self- motivated to sign up for a once per week language class at a community college, getting at most 3 hours of exposure out of every 168 hours. Frankly, I would love to do the experiment of taking a non-English speaking adult foreigner and a non-English speaking baby and plopping them into the same language immersion context to see who learns the fastest. My money is totally on the adult, but sadly I’ll never get this study through the IRB. 

Further this declaration of futility probably also stems from an unreasonable definition of success, which hovers around the threshold of fluency. But functional success where one can communicate their wants and needs with caveman-like verbal skill is really all that is needed. I’ve had highly successful conversations with sales clerks and bank representatives using not more than 10 subject-verb-object combinations semi correctly ordered and conjugated. Success might also be measured based on less apparent indicators. This fantastic article about the benefits of just trying to learn a language indicates that a reasonable goal of language learning might have nothing to do with functional use of the language. Anecdotally I fully subscribe to the brain goosing effects of struggling with a language. German word order might generously be called unexpected by an English speaker (there are less generous ways to describe it). For example wenn ich Zeit hätte is if I time would have, i.e. if I had time. Or ich hätte fahren sollen is I would have to go should, i.e . I should have gone. Trying to get this Yoda-like word order right is the equivalent of mental burpies, and is the reason I have no reserve impulse control at 5pm to keep me from eating a WHOLE bar of chocolate after work. Chocolate must have! I declare as I walk in the house.

Finally I think a better point of view in language learning and everything else is to embrace learning for learning’s sake. Nothing is futile if the goal is simply to have the journey without a care for the destination. Turns out there are huge upsides to just going down the path of new skill development and we adults may be best equiped to enjoy the long hike. 

So, German learn I will! Maybe I’ll even have some impulse control in a year…..now that may be expecting too much.