English: The Last Language You’ll Learn?

Bottom line upfront: Because once people know you speak English, speakers of the language you want to learn won’t want to practice their language with you.

English is a handicap to learning new languages.

The most common question people ask me when they find out I’m a linguist is, “Cool, so how many languages do you speak?”* To some linguists, this question is annoying because it misses the point. Linguistics is less about learning languages than about trying to understand the nature of human language (rude awakening for me too the first time I showed up to linguistics grad school). The main thrust of inquiry is supposed to be using language to plumb the depths of the human mind. But perhaps it’s irritating to linguists because most of the ones I know don’t speak that many languages — probably the same number as your typical academic in any field.

There’s nothing wrong with being outed as a monolingual but over the years, I’ve come to believe that English is probably the last language most people will learn to a high degree of proficiency. I base this claim on my experience as a native English speaker who’s tried to learn a number of languages, many not very successfully, and as a language instructor (Vietnamese, Hebrew, English) who has watched eager students struggle. Simply put, knowing English can be a major handicap when it comes to language learning. Here are some reasons why.

Suppose you want to learn Turkish…

No one wants to practice with you.

Most Turkish speakers you’ll encounter have likely been learning and using English for much longer than you’ve been learning Turkish, and their patience for working with a learner has limits. If you think putting a few hundred hours into learning Turkish is solid, they’ve probably been learning and practicing English for many thousands of hours. That’s because (i) English is mandatory for study as early as elementary school in Turkey (along with many other countries), and because (ii) many Turkish speakers have likely had to learn through English for higher education or work, with many technical books and training materials published only in English.

Okay so say you pack away a thousand hours of Turkish language study (that’s like 3–4 years of college study), then you start speaking with your new Turkish friend. They’re incredibly impressed by your skills. Compliments. Oohs and aahs. Whoa check out the foreigner who speaks Turkish. But then, five minutes in, they start to discuss why coalition-driven democratic governments are awesome (or terrible), or begin to gossip about some celebrity’s new scandal, etc. Then they politely switch back to English when they realize you can’t keep up, not just with the topics but with the fast switching between totally unrelated topics. Or they can’t deal with your accent because your English phonology just makes your otherwise-grammatical Turkish incomprehensible.

While living in Vietnam, I’ve met plenty of foreigners who have nearly perfect Vietnamese; I just can’t understand a word they’re saying.

When you practice with native speakers, it’s difficult not to switch into English after a few minutes. This has been my frustrating experience time and again for every language I’ve tried to learn. To have a quality conversation in a new language, you either have to find someone who is incredibly patient with you, or trek out to some remote area where monolingual speakers don’t have the option of switching to English.

As for the dopamine-inducing compliments: Sorry but if someone compliments your language skills, your skill level is almost definitely not high. When was the last time someone complimented you on your English? It’s only once you’re say a C1 or C2 in the language, when you’re approaching fairly high levels of proficiency but not quite there as a native speaker, that the compliments may turn to derision and trash talk. If that happens, take heart. Reaching that level of competency is an incredible accomplishment for any English speaker learning a new language.

The exception might be for Modern Hebrew. Israelis are pretty honest from the get go. If you sound like a putz, they’ll let you know.

There are fewer language learning resources for other languages.

The teaching materials for learning another language are simply no match for the depth and sophistication of materials for learning English. Billions of people around the world have learned English (the British Council estimates that 1.5 billion people are currently learning it), and this demand has fueled a ton of English learning material. You can take your pick among all sorts of perspectives and language learning philosophies, have your needs addressed at any level of proficiency, and be drawn in with engaging audiovisual aids.

Turkish language learning? There are probably a dozen or two books at best, maybe a few audio CDs (who uses CDs anymore?). The rest you have to learn from practice — watching TV, reading novels, and chatting at work and on the street. And what about languages that are even less commonly studied by English speakers? Say you want to learn Basque? The pickings are even slimmer. And those tiny languages with only hundreds of speakers? You might only have someone’s field notes or a basic grammar.

Use cases and practice opportunities are rare.

Even if you put in the work, pour yourself into learning a language (say Turkish), and isolate yourself from bilingual conversation partners who may tempt you back into English, when you get back to the real world, chances are you’re still going to use English vastly more. English will be your language for communicating with friends from around the world, reviewing contracts, reading or listening to the news, and enjoying the latest books and movies. It’s challenging to keep that hard-won Turkish sharp!

There’s the old joke: what do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who only speaks one language? An American.

Maybe we can extend this to also be a Mainland Chinese person — the other large concentration of monolinguals that I know of.

Obviously, I’m speaking in generalizations, and there are exceptions. We’ve all met the European who claims to speak five languages — say Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, and English. (Sorry, that feels more like 2.3 languages to me.) Even if that’s the case, just ask them how many languages they’ve learned recently to a meaningful degree of proficiency, especially non-Indo-European ones, since learning English. Probably not too many.

But you can’t blame them, for the same reason you can’t blame many Americans for only knowing English. Their fluency in English already allows them to participate in the world’s vast business, education, and entertainment opportunities. What’s left to motivate most people to do the hard work to venture beyond their linguistic comfort zone?

But there is hope.

I’ve seen some incredibly motivated people who’ve stopped at nothing to acquire another language, even after they’ve learned English. They’ve participated in intensive immersion language programs, made language pledges, promising to forswear English in favor of the target language for months at a time, or become deeply invested with partners who are native speakers of the target language.

Yes, it is possible to learn languages to a high degree of proficiency, even if you already know English. Hope springs eternal. Millions of people have done it and so can you, if you really want to. There are some great techniques available to help. I’ll leave that discussion to another post.

A warning for parents.

What I’m suggesting in this post may have implications (and a warning) for parents wanting to raise their kids to be multilingual but are speaking English to them.

Main concern: Non-native English speaking parents trying to speak English to their kids instead of their native language with the intention of accelerating their children’s acquisition of English as the second (or nth) language.

I’ve run into a lot of these cases living in Vietnam. The kids not only acquire a non-standard variety of English (nice way to say they have a horrible accent, and one that may fossilize and be tough to undo later in life), but they also don’t advance command of their “mother” tongue. You end up with kids with “bad” English that will be hard to correct, and weak Vietnamese. Similar situation with second generation Latino Americans in the US and Spanglish. So don’t do it.

Just speak your native language with your kids, let native speakers teach your kids English if you have the access, and they will acquire both to a much higher level of proficiency in the long term.

If you only have access to non-native English speaker teachers, that’s okay, I would still let them do their jobs and you focus on doing what’s “natural” — letting your kids acquire your native language. The brain is an amazing organ, even more so a child’s brain, and it was built to acquire language. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how much it can handle.

Next post: So why learn a new language?

Footnotes

* Perhaps the second most common question you get as a linguist is “What’s the hardest language to learn?” The answer depends on what language(s) you already know. Hungarian is supposedly tough. But if you are a native Mansi speaker, you get Hungarian for ~70%+ off. You can probably achieve basic proficiency (A2 CEFR if you want to get technical) in less than a hundred hours of work. Add a couple hundred more hours if you’re an Estonian or Finnish speaker, and a couple hundred more if you’re a Turkish speaker. For native English speakers? A lot more on top of that! But it’s still going to seem “easy” compared to say Navajo.