The Problem
Most language learners fail to reach even a modicum of f!uency despite years of formal study.
The Supposed Cause
If an adult fails to learn a foreign language (and most do),most of us assume they simply don’t study hard enough or just aren’t good at languages. It’s certainly true that some learners are lazy, and given the same methods, certain folks tend to pick up languages faster than others. But neither of these is the real issue; both are but symptoms of the underlying problem...
The Real Cause
The real root cause is not laziness or a lack of language aptitude, but rather the “crappy triumvirate” of traditional language learning:
Crappy Methods
Despite their poor track record and the widespread availabilityof far better options, most language study is still focused on 3 highly ineffective, inefficient, and painful methods:
Grammar-Translations
This academic approach focuses on memorizing grammar rules and vocab lists, and translating written passages to and from one’s native language. It was originally used for studying “dead languages” like Latin, but came to be applied to modern spoken languages as well. It’s a highly inefficient means to reach oral f!uency as shown by the vast majority of students who emerge from ten plus years of grammar-based formal instruction unable to speak the language well if at all.
Grammar-translation fails because it treats languages as a set of facts to memorize, not the innate biological system it truly is. Nobody learns to drive by reading the car’s owner’s manual, yet that is precisely the way most people try to learn foreign languages.
Rote Memory
Trying to commit a new word to memory by writing it out hundreds of times is not only boring, but also highly ineffective. It may work to memorize a set of facts or figures for tomorrow’s test, but this approach does not lead to long-term retention. Moreover, rote memory only works—if it works at all—for explicit information, not the tacit knowledge required to understand and speak a language.
Grammar-translation and rote memory approaches attempt to force feed language facts into declarative memory. This can work for memorizing the capital of Namibia or a list of Spanish words out of context, but it does not work for building procedural memories, the kind that allows you to actually use words in context or produce grammatical sentences. Dr. Stephen Krashen defnes this distinction well in his Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis.
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