How to Learn a Foreign Language: On Curiosity, Talent, and Noticing a Language

A short story about why some language students learn much faster than others and what to do about it.

Coming from a family with a few Spanish speakers, I have always had a natural interest in the Spanish language. And later on, languages at large. I’m not sure why I have this interest, but my first guess would be from exposure to languages through family members, books, TV, and travels. Anyhow, I feel that I have a certain connection to learning languages, and what some might call a “talent”. More on that later.

Because of this particular and life-long interest in the Spanish language, I went to Granada, Spain as part of my Spanish-oriented education in Business Communications. There, I attended classes at the university in which I was enrolled for one semester, and additionally, I followed a Spanish class at a language school a few times a week.

This Spanish class consisted of me, three of my fellow students from my home university in Denmark, and about ten other international students from all over Europe.

I gained a lot from these Spanish classes. Linguistically and socially. They were, of course, hard work at times but usually entertaining and fun because we were a bunch of people with somewhat different cultural backgrounds from different countries but also with a lot in common. Our teacher, being used to this situation, was great at navigating this cultural and linguistic “mess” and making everyone feel comfortable.

However, as one could expect, some students progressed quicker than others during these months of biweekly Spanish classes. There could be a lot of reasons why some would improve their Spanish skills quicker than others.

The head of class Sardinian

Mother tongue and its similarity with the Spanish language could be one of those reasons. One of the students was Italian, and with the proximity of Italian to Spanish, he was especially quick at picking up the neighboring Romance language. And hailing from Sardinia, which was heavily influenced by Spain, he had a significant advantage which was definitely telling during class.

Nonetheless, other students from other countries progressed quickly as well, and linguistic background is probably not the only indication of quick and efficient language acquisition. Other elements are at play.

To notice a language

Recently, I read an article on the skill of noticing in language learning. According to the author, noticing is a fundamental skill in the ability to learn and progress in a (foreign) language. Every language works in different ways but as you might know, there are patterns and similarities to be noticed. This is no more true than with the Indo-European languages.

It’s a common debate whether you can have a talent for learning languages or if everyone has an equal point of departure. The reality is, either way, that some pick up languages faster than others. But why is that?

I think it has something to do with your ability of noticing. And your willingness to notice, that is, your curiosity of the target language. This, I believe, is often being confused with “talent”. In my opinion, the best starting point for learning a new language is willingness to learn and without it, it will be much harder to notice the little things that will make you progress in a language. To me, this is paramount and has more to do with attitude than with predisposed talent.

Your ability to think creatively has a say here as well. To be able to notice (and to want to notice) often requires some amount of creativity but again, I think volition is a main driver of this.

Practice makes practiced

Besides the evening hours spent in the Spanish class, some of us would occasionally go out and get ourselves into situations of speaking Spanish with native speakers. This would often be at some language practicing event with the objective to become better at speaking and understanding Spanish — and to have fun, of course!

Now, I don’t know what all of my classmates from the Spanish class did in their spare time, but I’m guessing not all were taking the opportunity and turning up at those language practicing events. I simply deduce this from their progress in Spanish, which was usually much slower than that of the students I met practicing their language skills with native speakers and more fluent Spanish speakers.

All else being equal, sitting at home in your room and mostly speaking your native language won’t get you far in learning to speak a new language. In other words, you have to get out there and try speaking in order to really improve your speaking skills and to pick up the real language of the locals.

The students I met who did this regularly progressed much faster than the students who didn’t. I think one of the reasons for this is that they became able to notice a lot more in their target language; patterns, irregularities, pronunciation, emphasis, accents, etc. Real life stuff.

These discoveries of their target language, of course, must have been fueled by some curiosity, to begin with, but I think, in turn, they are fueling a lot more curiosity and willingness to learn the language.

So, maybe you sometimes just have to fake an initial curiosity for something if you don’t already possess it. Fake it till you make it and this will lead you to a higher appreciation of, say, a language and, in turn, make you able to notice the little things that separate a beginner from an advanced speaker.

It will spark your linguistic creativity and make you learn at a totally different pace — and most importantly, you will be able to have fun while doing it. So, go out there and speak, listen and speak some more!

How do you go about learning a new language? What do you think is essential for learning a language?

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