Learn a Language More Easily through Childhood Learning Preferences

Image credit: Thirdman

During my language-learning journey with French (which you can read about via the article compilation here), I had an a-ha moment that turned into something of a hypothesis.

First, my a-ha moment: After having several people tell me that I “talked like a book,” tell me a word didn’t exist that did, and that normal people don’t use certain phrases and terms in everyday life, I realized that I’d heard the same thing as a child about my native language, English.

As a shy and rather bookish kid, I read a lot more than I spoke with other people. This made my conversational English, when employed, sometimes overly formal, often with words that either surpassed everyday vocabulary, seemed strange to others when spoken, or didn’t have at all the same pronunciation that I’d used (having only ever read, not heard, the word).

After several other conversations with language learners—more on that in a minute, so keep reading—I developed the aforementioned hypothesis: We might most naturally learn our second (and beyond) languages in the same way we learned our first.

How You Learned Your Primary Language (or Languages!)

Of course, we cannot exactly recreate the circumstances in which we learned our first language.

We emerged into complete and total immersion in our first language and didn’t even use it—instead, we simply soaked it in—for months or even years. We got to just listen to the language for almost a year before we tried out our first word or two and didn’t need to combine words into phrases for a couple of years or longer.

As young children, we benefited in our language learning from an environment far lower in stress, anxiety, and social pressure. We had much more freedom to explore, play, and make mistakes in our primary language. Our peers, other children, made errors just as we did and none of us knew better. The adults around us didn’t expect us to speak like adults and they didn’t talk to us as they’d talk to adults—they’d speak more slowly and more carefully and would naturally repeat themselves.

Formal language correction only arrives for children after years and years of experiencing a language via total immersion and playing in the language without consequences. Although parents may guide children with language acquisition, children don’t receive structured instruction, correction, and study when it comes to their first languages until they’ve attended school for a few years.

Identify Your Language-Learning Style and Lean into It

Though recreating this language-learning environment and timeline would be extreme or impossible for you as an adult, you can take certain steps and adjust your language-learning program to better suit your language-learning style—especially if you can remember some of the ways you got deeper into your primary language as a child and young adult.

My experience and the conversations I’ve had with other language learners indicate that perhaps my hypothesis that we can most easily and naturally learn new languages via the paths that helped us deepen our knowledge of our original language has some merit, even if I can’t find any formal research studies to prove it.

To start with my own experience: As noted above, I advanced my native-language ability as a young child through reading and writing. I loved (and still love!) stories. I remember my frustration that I couldn’t always find someone to read to me. This drove me to spend hours staring at words and pages and forcing my way through books as best I could, even though I rarely fully understood them.

For example, I remember reading versions of Dickens—of all things at that age—and understanding very little due to the vocabulary, language structure, historical social context, and adult emotions and situations, all of which fell far outside my experience and understanding. However, I knew that I didn’t understand it, I felt extreme frustration that I didn’t understand it, I desperately wanted to understand it—and all this kept me at it until I was reading more and at levels that didn’t even interest my classmates. I gradually improved my reading comprehension through sheer determination.

And because I wanted to tell my own stories, even in childhood, I then used the words and structures I’d learned in my own bizarre little tales. And this bolstered my writing ability.

Conversations with others indicate other possible paths. One friend with two working parents said that she and her sister spent their days outside of school hours in front of the television in their city apartment; she can remember many of the same sentiments I had about reading when it came to watching the news, television programs, and movies. Hearing words, phrases, and terms on television prompted her to look them up and to ask her parents questions about them so that she could better understand what she’d seen and heard. This process deepened her language ability.

Another friend loves music and said that he remembers songs as far back as early childhood that he didn’t understand. Because he wanted to understand the songs’ meaning, he found the lyrics and, when he didn’t understand them, looked up the words.

In both cases—as with my own—these people used these same paths to learn additional languages. If you have a fellow language classmate who tells you to watch more television, another who suggests you read more, and someone else who tells you to listen to more music, this is often because they love these mediums even in their native languages and leveraging them has helped them acquire their additional language more easily.

I don’t much listen to music even in English, and television and movies never really captivated me, so advice to consume more of both from my classmates didn’t draw me. I admit that I also fought reading in French—after all, I can read English, so I can get my story fix via my primary language—but someone convinced me to try. I spent hours each week struggling through French-language novels, but my desire to understand the books’ vocabulary, idioms, and social and cultural context pushed me to keep at it for hours each week.

If you can remember back to your own youth and what interested you enough to look up words and phrases and play with language, you might find that employing the same technique with your additional languages helps you learn them more easily.

Find a Goal and Tie it Back

Having an objective is a common thread across all these language-learning paths.

Babies learn their first language not because of some abstract notion of “language learning,” but to achieve another goal. Primarily, they speak to get something they want or to get away from something they don’t want. Only later do they speak to bond with other people, create connections, and make friends.

As a language learner, if you live in or visit an environment of immersion, you may have the same primary reasons for language acquisition as a child: You need to express what you want and what you do not want. (In fact, many people who move to other places get only this far when it comes to learning the local language, as I explain in this article.)

However, past the basic-necessity point, adults need to find and reference clear goals to keep progressing in their language learning. If you live in a place that has a different local language than your native language, your language-furthering goals could include making friends, attending or participating in cultural events, volunteering, and finding work. If you don’t live in a place that immerses you in your target language, you’ll need to identify a goal—and one pressing enough to keep you going when you get frustrated. (And you will get frustrated!)

If you can tie your goal back in some way to the way you remember deepening your understanding of your primary language, you’ll set yourself up for real success.

My goals with gaining ever greater French fluency? I wanted to integrate into the francophone environment in which I live, including making friends and attending cultural events, and I wanted to communicate more easily with my husband’s French family.

Does reading in French get me there? Not exactly—but through reading in French, I’ve learned so much about the culture, history, and society of the country and its people that I better understand references made, terms and slang used, and cultural differences that could otherwise cause misunderstandings.

To gain fluency, I’ve needed to work with French in every way, not just by reading. However, using my reading to have a little fun in my language learning has certainly helped.

Cut Yourself Some Slack

I’ll be frank: Language learning is hard.

There aren’t actual shortcuts, though I do believe there are ways you can make the experience more enjoyable and perhaps a little easier on yourself—like employing your tricks for learning your first language to your additional languages, as described here.

You’ll still get frustrated—but I invite you to remember that you probably got frustrated when learning your original language, too. (Ditto for making mistakes.)

And though you’ll likely never have learned “it all” in your additional language or languages, remember that you probably still haven’t learned it all in your original language, either. I learn new English words and phrases all the time!

Due to my passion for reading, I may forever hear from native French speakers that “people don’t talk like that” or “that isn’t a word” when I speak in French, but as my French improves, I gain more confidence, and I realize the only way we can grow as people is by being kind to ourselves, I shrug them off with more ease.

You can do it.