This is the reason why you’re still not fluent in your second language yet
Mid-August 2022.
The heat from the burning car engine had started cooking the sausages, in the shopping bag located at the foot of the passenger seat.
It was about 38 degrees celcius outside (and a little hotter inside the car) but I still felt a shiver as I fumbled for the bonnet release underneath the steering wheel as black, noxious smoke swirled around the footwell.
A cluster of animated French shoppers and supermarket staff had gathered around the vehicle to give me their two, often-conflicting, centimes on why the car had spontaneously burnt into flames.
With unreserved, Gallic forcefulness they spoke over each other, waved their arms and instructed me on the needlessly bureaucratic protocol for removing the wreckage of a car from a downtown carpark on a national holiday.
No amount of classroom French can prepare you for real life in the Hexagon…
In fact, no amount of any language lessons can prepare you for life in a foreign country.
We act as if learning a language is an experiment in a laboratory — that it has measurable variables that we can predict and that if we just learn what others tell us to learn then fluency (whatever that even means) is inevitable.
After coaching hundreds of non-native speakers of English as well as learning five languages to various levels myself I have both seen (and fallen victim myself) to a slew of false mentalities and beliefs that limit our capacity to use a second language like we would our own.
Here the three tenets that I now use instead to track the moving targets of learning a second, third or fourth language and why they are quintessential if you want to move beyond an intermediate stage in your progress.
Anti-fragility
You can know the third conditional like the back of your hand but it’s not much use when something ACTUALLY happens to you and you are forced to respond quickly and directly under pressure.
In my work, I train non-native English-speaking professionals to be more adaptable in unfamiliar scenarios, less dependent on memorised materials and better able to respond spontaneously when faced with unpredictable circumstances.
During our workshops together I will put up on the screen random paintings, diagrams, maps, graphs and photographs and ask my students to talk without any preparation for several minutes as if they were on stage in front of an audience.
It terrifies them at first but after a while they slip into a rhythm and emerge with a new-found sense of confidence.
Without new stimulus we fall back on what we know, repeat the same expressions time and time again and further ingrain our old knowledge into our patterns of behaviour.
We become complacent.
When we are faced with unfamiliar content, unexpected situations or challenging questions we are forced to think outside the box and scramble for new ideas.
Often, this information exists on the periphery of our sensory experience but has not yet been consolidated into our medium and long-term memory.
This widens our field of perception and keeps us our toes making us better able to respond in flow rather than from a place of surprise and reactivity.
Iteration
In order to master a skill you have to go through a gruelling apprenticeship cycle In Robert Greene’s book mastery he breaks down the whole process into three steps:
- Observation
- Skill Acquisition
- Experimentation
In the phase of Observation, we examine, gain familiarity and compartmentalise what others have done in the past within our own (limited) frame of reference.
In the skill acquisition phase, once acquainted with the sounds and the scripts of a language, we start forming our own patterns of meaning and insight. This is where we gain a general level of competence or “intermediate” abilities. sadly, a lot of people get stuck in this phase…
Finally, experimentation in language learning requires you to step back from your competencies and dabble extensively in areas that terrify you and in which you have almost no knowledge.
People avoid this last phase like the plague and choose instead to play it safe by mimicking others or settling on one set way of doing things; an anodyne pattern of conversational speech, a chapter-a-month reading habit or worse Netflix with subtitles in your native language…
Instead of playing it safe, you must find the parameters of your own linguistic universe through fearless experimentation and radical imperfection.
It is infinitely more beneficial to be speaking badly every day with different people and in different contexts than accurately for sixty minutes a week over zoom.
This also ties in with Stephen Krashen’s well-known theory of comprehensible input in language learning — allowing the language to wash over you time and time again in a slew of weird scenarios before you begin to play with the constructions and rebuild the wide-reaching possibilities of your target language in your own image.
In Mastery, Greene goes on to list several famous outliers in history who demonstrate this capacity for life-long experimentation like Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Proust.
Only after extensive periods of protracted experimentation, failed attempts and publicly humiliating imperfect attempts were these experimentalists vindicated.
As language learners, we are desperate to reach that mythical, elusive point in the distance when you are no longer recognisable as a non-native speaker.
True virtuosos, in any domain, show us that blending in with the crowd and being exceptional are not compatible and that the search for fluency is a false prophet.
Instead, Mastery shows us that we be thrilled to sit in this uncomfortable period of apprenticeship for as long as possible.
By spending a longer period of time here, the competencies that you are developing, with more risks taken and more unusual structures applied to your language- the more rich, complex and expressive you language will become.
It is through bold iteration and novel mistakes that your unique abilities are formed — not through mimicry and imitation .
Experimental iteration is the only way out of the apprenticeship stage and unless you consciously sail head first into new storms you will be stuck in the Scylla and Charybdis of intermediate mediocrity.
Immersive eco-systems
The numerous comparisons that exist between learning a language and learning a musical instrument irritate me.
Unless you are in a marching band you are unlikely to take your instrument out on the streets with you and play it loudly and confidently at everyone you pass.
Language is not just a tool for communication either — it is a way of perceiving the world and interacting with it.
To use it sporadically is like only wearing your glasses to read and then wondering why you knocked over that old man in your volvo at the pedestrian crossing.
How will you break the news to his poor, bereaved family if you have no understanding of that culture and their belief in an afterlife?
I’m being facetious obviously but the point remains; immersion teaches you about nuance- the subtleties of the language and the culture that are picked up intuitively over months and months (sic. years and years) of exposure.
You cannot expect to just tune in for an hour a week, unplug from the simulation and then go about your day in your native language and see real results.
Sure, time is limited — there is work, kids, admin, life — it just happens.
Besides weren’t you living in the country where your target language was spoken?
But this suggests that an immersion is hard to simulate without going abroad…
When in fact an effective, immersive ecosystem can be curated with a focus on high exposure and minimal friction.
Algorithms do half the work for us these days…
You may not be able to live abroad but you most certainly can re-jig your you-tube and social media preferences. You can dedicate weekends to only reading in your second language and you source podcasts and playlists to fill those inevitable gaps in the day.
It’s really just a matter of priorities.
When you apply these principles to your language learning…
…well, you’ll see.
Freddie Kift
I write about language, communication, flow, collaboration and technology.
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