Language, Learning and Change: Part One
These two pieces are about language, learning, mindsets and social change — and the connections between them.
The first is based on my personal experiences, and is below. The second explores how mindsets shape the world around us, and is here.
Rewinding to 2013…
For three months I had been trying to learn Spanish while living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was frustrated, feeling like I was making little progress.
Things changed when Sofia, the eighteen-month old granddaughter of the landlady of our apartment, came to visit for a birthday party. She crawled around the living room — her eyes wide with curiosity and excitement.
She picked up a piece of birthday cake and looked expectantly at my housemate.
“Torta” — my housemate told her — the Spanish word for cake. “Toorrr-ta.”
Sofia gave it her best shot. “Tooo-ta?”
It was good enough — everyone gave her a round of applause, and she smiled proudly at the new word she could add to her vocabulary.
Excited by this new game, Sofia crawled around the room to see what else she could find. She pointed at the sofa, and looked towards her grandmother.
“Sillon,” she replied. “Siiii-llon.”
“Sii-yohh!” Sofia shrieked with delight, prompting another round of applause.
The game continued with the table, a cup and various other every-day objects, until Sofia found a sock on the drying rack at the side of the room. She picked it up and brought it over to me, smiling with excitement.
In that moment I realised that in all my time studying, I’d never come across the Spanish word for sock. Sofia stared back at me blankly, confused as to why I wasn’t playing along.
Needing to say something, I took it from her and said playfully “Que es?” (What is it?!) “Que es?!” Sofia smiled and everyone else in the room started laughing.
It was only then I turned to my housemate and said, “seriously, I don’t know. Que es?”
Sofia couldn’t have cared less whether she pronounced the words correctly or not. She enjoyed learning and saying them, not because she had to, but because it was fun.
I, on the other hand, felt the weight of potential failure and humiliation every time I wanted to say a new word. Not because my friends were judgemental — in fact they’d been very supportive. It wasn’t even because I was a particularly proud person — normally I would have no problem laughing at my mistakes.
So why was Sofia so much more confident than I was? I had twenty years of life experience to call upon, and yet that experience was proving more of a hindrance than a help.
Sofia didn’t need books to learn — she learned through trial and error, through play and performance. I felt too old to play and too uncomfortable to “perform” the new language. My voice sounded too foreign, too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
In other words, it wasn’t the judgement of other people that held me back. It was my judgement of myself.
That was a lightbulb moment for me. All I had to do was drop the self-criticism and see the language as a new world to explore, discover and grow within — just as Sofia did so instinctively. Learning was a game I could play, with lots to gain and little to lose.
Learning how to learn
I invite you to think about a time you learned something for the first time. It could anything from learning to ride a bike, to drive a car, to dance or to do a new sport. If you can recall a specific moment early in that learning process — where you were, who you were with and what you were trying to do — even better.
Take a moment before reading on to identify that moment — and the following will make much more sense.
Try and remember how you felt physically in that moment.
As I realised I didn’t know the word for sock, I felt my heartbeat rise and my body become tense. No wonder my brain wasn’t helping me find the right words — it was too busy preparing me physically to run away from the situation.
With the benefit of hindsight, this seems obvious. The process of learning will always feel uncomfortable, unnatural or clumsy.
Learning a language can be one of the most uncomfortable, because the way we communicate is so crucial not only to our functional every-day lives, but also to our identity as human beings. Can you imagine life without language, without even an inner monologue that we experience as thoughts and dreams? Language is a sense-making machine, helping us understand our selves and the world around us.
Learning a new language makes us vulnerable. It takes us into a world where we don’t have an identity, where the link between our inner consciousness and external reality is broken. That can be a scary world, and it’s no wonder it puts people off.
But — in such a world, even the most mundane of moments is full of opportunities to develop and grow. A bus journey, an advert break in between television programmes, a coffee in a cafe or thoughtless stroll through the city.
And the good news is, every single one of us has been in that world before. We were there for several years, and we weren’t frightened. We embraced it without fear of failure, and many of us say it was one of the most joyful times of our lives.
We were there as small children, like Sofia. In this sense, learning a new language is probably the closest experience we can have to being a child again.
There was something so liberating and magical about that opportunity that I had totally ignored, all to my own detriment. Now if I encourage someone to learn a language, I will tell them the same thing I wish I had known all those years ago.
You are learning much more than a language. You are learning to be uncomfortable, to be curious, to challenge yourself, to take risks, to fail, to laugh at yourself, to go against your instincts, to see new perspectives, to explore new worlds and to expand your identity in ways you had never imagined.
You are learning to be a child again — you are learning how to learn.
The power of mindsets
I later learned that this experience was an example of what has been called as a “mindset shift”. And that the relevance of mindsets goes far beyond learning languages.
Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset” is widely known, especially among teachers, but I regrettably discovered it only recently. Dweck talks about the difference between a “growth mindset” and a “fixed mindset,” a distinction she admits is overly simplistic, but is a useful idea when it comes to learning.
Fixed mindsets take the current situation and assume that it is evidence of an unchanging or objective truth. They suppose you have been dealt a set of cards that are either good or bad and can’t be changed, that the unknown is uninteresting or insignificant, and that the future will look much like the present. They see failure as a reflection of your ineptitude that is by definition shameful and unpleasant, and therefore encourage avoidance of risks and new challenges.
By contrast, a growth mindset embraces the opportunity to learn, is driven by curiosity of the unknown, accepts failure as part of a wider learning journey, and gets a kick out of risk, challenge, and exploring new worlds.
Who better embodies that growth mindset than the purest and most expert of all learners — a young child?
Dweck says:
What on earth would make someone a nonlearner? Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward.
What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of the challenges.
In a twist of irony, our society teaches us to unlearn the skill of learning. Proving yourself is considered far more important than improving yourself. Demonstrating your skills is more important than developing them. Winning the argument is more important than learning from dialogue.
This is despite, according to McKinsey, intentional learning being “the most fundamental skill” that we can have in the current moment. By prioritising pride over learning, we go into mental isolation, a self-imposed lockdown. Life, surely, is too short.
New research on neuroplasticity tells us that as we learn, we build new neuron connections that previously didn’t exist. By learning, we are very literally rewiring our brains — the only tool we have to experience and explore the world around us.
That is a privilege of being human, and one we should be eager to embrace.
Ultimately, the path we take will have ripple effects beyond our personal experience. Click here for Part 2, which considers how mindsets have shaped the world around us, for better or for worse.
