You Only Need One Thing to Learn a New Language
Don’t Be Too Cool To Learn A Language
I’m fluent in English and Spanish. I also now speak a fair amount of Portuguese! That language combo isn’t rare, especially for people from the Iberian peninsula or South America.
But I’m not from either of those places.
In fact, I’m from the last place on earth where anyone would be expected to become bilingual: Birmingham, Alabama in the United States.
How did a gringo from the American Deep South learn to speak Spanish? I’ll tell you, because if I can become bilingual, so can you.
Here’s what didn’t make me bilingual:
How to Not Speak A Language
I started learning Spanish vocabulary at a young age from children’s books.
I took two years of Spanish in high school.
I majored in Spanish & Latin American Literature at university.
I took an intensive 9-month course in medical Spanish.
You might be thinking, “there’s no way all that didn’t at least help, right?” And you’d be correct. All those classes and books did help to lay a foundation…
…but none of it actually made me fluent.
There are those who have taken countless classes, read numerous books, and studied grammar for years…and yet they still can’t express themselves in their target language. You’ve heard of these people. They all utter the same sad phrase:
“I can understand more than I can speak.”
They can recognize the words, syntax, and grammar from their years of books and classes, but they can’t carry on a conversation. They can’t contribute more than perhaps ordering a drink or asking where the bathroom is located. They haven’t learned a new language; they’ve memorized words and rules.
They haven’t done the one thing that someone needs to do to become fluent in a new language, and they haven’t done it because they lack something super simple.
The one thing you need to learn a new language is the ability to consistently make a fool of yourself.
Let me explain:
Put Your Self Out There
So many folks study and memorize and read and listen, and yet…they refuse to actually speak. They’re terrified of sounding stupid. They’re afraid they’ll offend someone. They want to make sure they know enough vocab and can grasp all the verb tenses before they ever open their mouths.
That’s not how humans learn languages.
Did you know all the rules of English grammar before you started trying to speak? Did you sit in a corner as a toddler with books and conjugation charts, making sure you “knew enough” before trying to communicate?
No!
You listened to adults around you and then you tried to talk to them. In the beginning, you communicated with one or two words. You got a lot of words wrong. Soon, you started stringing sentences together — badly. The adults would correct you and you’d try again. Kids will keep trying to communicate until — BOOM — they can speak.
Kids don’t care about looking silly. They aren’t concerned with saying the wrong thing. They have no shame. And that’s what allows them to learn languages so quickly. It’s not because of their neuroplasticity or spongy baby brains. It’s because they have the thing that many adults lack: they’re fearless.
If you want to learn a new language to fluency, then you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself. You have to make mistakes. You have to use the wrong words and endure correction. You have to risk being laughed at by little kids in Honduras who nickname you with your own vocab errors (yes, that happened to me and I’m still alive).
You have to embrace imperfection, because you’ll never learn to speak a new language if you don’t actually speak it.
Trying to learn Spanish without actually having frequent conversations in Spanish — however halting and awkward they might be — is like reading books about tennis, watching tennis matches , listening to tennis podcasts, learning every rule of the game, and then never getting out on the court to play. You can’t play tennis. You just know a lot about it.
Here’s what I did to actually become fluent in Spanish:
I spoke Spanish. A lot.
Even before I could actually speak it, I just tried. I sounded ridiculous, and I didn’t care.
I attended meet ups with Spanish speakers at my university and talked their ears off.
I started attending Spanish-language services at my family’s place of worship and stayed afterwards to chat with people.
I volunteered in afterschool programs with Spanish-speaking kids and talked with those kids. They made fun of me. I learned Spanish.
I stayed after classes and rattled on to my professors until they were desperate to get away from me.
Even before I was fluent, I volunteered to travel with medical missions groups to Mexico and Peru to help facilitate communication. I spent most of those trips just yammering to anyone who would listen.
Before I graduated from university, I shadowed medical interpreters at a hospital…and talked and talked and talked.
There were many instances, especially in the beginning, in which I made a complete fool of myself. I got so many things wrong. I sounded like an idiot. But I didn’t care, and neither did the Spanish-speakers correcting me (except the kids, who thought I was hilarious). My ability to throw aside any semblance of pride and just speak is what made me bilingual.
You might be thinking, “yeah, yeah, but how well did all that actually work?”
Well… after graduating from university I worked for two years as a Spanish medical interpreter and freelance translator. I then moved to Miami for graduate school (speaking Spanish constantly to anyone and everyone) and after getting my degree I worked as a bilingual health educator for three years.
It works.
Granted, I did have to study to become a medical interpreter. I had undergo a 9-month intensive training course. But all during the time in which I was studying, I was still speaking. The classmates from that course who went on to work as interpreters were the ones who were actively putting themselves out there day after day. The ones who didn’t…? They didn’t find work as interpreters, and unless they carved out time to speak Spanish in their everyday lives, they eventually lost the ability to speak fluently.
“Use it or lose it” is true. I’d say “use it or never have it in the first place” is even more accurate.
That’s it: the one thing you need to learn a new language is the ability to make a fool of yourself by speaking the language before you’ve mastered it. That’s the secret. It’s what children do.
Put aside the pride, open your mouth, and use what you know.
I treasure my bachelor’s degree in Spanish Language & Latin American Literature. I freaking love reading poetry by Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. I’m a linguistics and grammar nerd. I love learning about the etymology of different Spanish words. But ultimately, those things are secondary, supportive activities to what truly made me bilingual: constantly speaking Spanish.
Do you want to learn a new language? Stop hiding behind your apps, books, and podcasts. Go out there and start talking.
