{"id":3443,"date":"2015-06-24T08:03:07","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T12:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=3443"},"modified":"2020-10-01T14:52:05","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T18:52:05","slug":"how-i-became-trilingual-in-three-years-and-how-you-can-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2015\/06\/24\/how-i-became-trilingual-in-three-years-and-how-you-can-too\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Became Trilingual in Three Years (and How You Can Too)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2012 I was your typical monolingual English-speaking American. Now, almost exactly three years after picking up my first Teach Yourself Dutch<\/em> book, I\u2019m a functional trilingual backpacking my way through Latin America<\/a>. I didn\u2019t do it through expensive courses or an auspicious blow to the head, but instead by learning about how the brain naturally acquires languages <\/em>and using it to my advantage.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year I wrote the Trilingual in Three Years <\/em>series on my blog Globalect, and now I\u2019m sharing here the method that I elaborated there. The basic psycholinguistic formula for language learning can be broken up into two parts: statistical learning and social learning. Putting the cherry on top with witty sarcasm and slang and graceful communication is the third.<\/p>\n

Statistical learning: it\u2019s child\u2019s play<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyone who knows a little bit about language learning knows that babies are little geniuses at it. They\u2019re not really putting in that many focused study hours; they\u2019re just born with a gift.<\/p>\n

That gift is their sponge-like ultra-language-absorbant brains that soak up not only speech sounds but grammatical patterns, sentence structures, and associations between words and meanings at a rate that the most advanced adult language learner could never hope to compete with. Leave a baby in any random country for a year or two and, while you\u2019d be a horribly neglectful parent and international criminal, that kid would learn the language.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because the infant brain is hard-wired for statistical learning <\/em>of patterns, especially linguistic patterns. Statistical learning means that you present the language learning centers of your brain with massive amounts of data \u2013 words, sounds, sentences, grammatical structures, social cues \u2013 until your brain has decided it has a large enough statistical sample to start making sense of it all and organizing it into rules.<\/p>\n

The learner of English as a second language will \u2014 regardless of being taught or not \u2014 eventually realize (most likely subconsciously) that people just do not say she goed<\/em> in the past tense in English. After weeks or months or years of exposure to sentences constructed in English, the learner will have thousands upon thousands of examples of she went<\/em> stored up in their mental repository, but only maybe a couple erroneous instances of she goed<\/em>. Eventually, the thousands of examples of she went<\/em> become the clear winner over she goed<\/em>. The speaker\u2019s brain has used all this data to sort out a rule.<\/p>\n

While it comes naturally for babies, your adult brain will need some more structure and encouragement. But fear not: there are plenty of ways to soak your head in statistical language data via listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Watching television and joining conversation clubs are just some of the more obvious ones, but you probably haven\u2019t thought of things like eavesdropping on conversations or reading Wikitravel<\/a> pages in other languages. For actionable strategies like these, check out the full article on Globalect on Learning Language Like a Baby<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Social learning: it takes a village<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second foundation of language learning is using language for its intended purpose: interacting with other humans. It\u2019s the more important and more enjoyable half of the language learning equation, and ideally you should do it from the beginning, even while you\u2019re busy running all those statistics.<\/p>\n

If statistical learning is about compiling and organizing language data, social learning is about putting it to use and learning through doing. Even despite their linguistic genius, babies will never become proficient in a language without social interaction<\/em>, which means you won\u2019t either. In other words: use it or lose it!<\/p>\n

Once a baby has spent around a year devouring linguistic data from their environment, they start to associate mama <\/em>with the woman who miraculously disappears and reappears during suspenseful rounds of peek-a-boo. Likewise, milk <\/em>isn\u2019t just a meaningless noise: it\u2019s somehow tied to making that gnawing hungry feeling go away. These realizations are significant because the child can then use <\/strong>it to say milk <\/em>to mama <\/em>and accomplish a social task. This is what language is all about.<\/p>\n

\"In

In the hostel in Mexico City where I’m currently living, having dinner at a table with seven nationalities and as many languages. Most of us are practicing Spanish, and many of us have improved our language abilities by making Spanish-speaking friends here in the hostel.<\/p><\/div>\n

What this all means is that you need to form meaningful social relationships in your target language<\/em>, just like babies do, to truly master it and assign useable meaning to your masses of linguistic data.<\/p>\n

In the 21st<\/sup> century with its World Wide Web and cheap travel opportunities, there is no shortage of opportunities to socialize in a new language. Check out websites like conversationexchange.com, go to a Couchsurfing or expat meetup, or spend a summer backpacking or volunteering on a farm in a country where your target language is spoken.<\/p>\n

Just be sure that you\u2019re going beyond ritual practice and forming real social bonds<\/em>, making new friends and learning about cultures as you go. I\u2019ve shared plenty about how you can do all this, along with a whole list of other practical tips, in Globalect\u2019s original post on Social Language Learning<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bonus round: talking like a native<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a vane language learner like most of us, you probably live for those \u201coh I didn\u2019t realize you were foreign\u201d moments. While the language professional in me wants to caution you that it\u2019s silly to focus on superfluous things like accent or passing for native, the language learner in me knows it\u2019s just really really cool when you can.<\/p>\n

If you want to take the more scientific route to superficial perfection, you should follow the earlier series I wrote here on Transparent Language on \u2018Hacking Pronunciation in any Language with the IPA\u2019 (Parts 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, and 3<\/a>.) The International Phonetic Alphabet is the systematic transcription of every speech sound in human language, and learning it empowers you to recognize new sounds in other languages, measure the difference between your target sound and the one that\u2019s currently giving you that accent, and with enough practice, close that gap.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big fan of the IPA for learning pronunciation, but I\u2019m an even bigger fan of the social approach, in which immitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Keep soaking your statistics-hungry brain in social data: engage in conversations with people. When you can\u2019t find someone to chat with, watch television. And imitate<\/em>. Try to sound how the native speaker sounds. Listen actively, closely \u2013 they sound different than you, but why<\/em>? Strive to put your finger on it and use the IPA to help you.<\/p>\n

\"Ipa-chart-consonants-pulmonic\"<\/a>

Image by the International Phonetic Association on Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/p><\/div>\n

For the IPA method, check out my earlier series on Transparent Language linked above. For more practicable tips on how to get the ultimate compliment, being mistaken for native, take a look at my original post on Globalect: Talking Like a Native<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In just three years\u2019 time I\u2019ve gone from monolingual to polyglot-in-progress. I didn\u2019t dump out thousands of dollars or get bitten by a radioactive spider, but instead I just learned how to learn<\/a>. Now, three years later, I\u2019m a totally confident and expressive speaker of English and Dutch, and my fluent Spanish is inching closer and closer to social grace and (hopefully) being mistaken for native every day.<\/p>\n

To read my followup on three years of language learning using this method and how I\u2019ve used it to learn Spanish while backpacking in Latin America, check out my latest post on Globalect: Trilingual in Three Years: Three Years Later<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

In 2012 I was your typical monolingual English-speaking American. Now, almost exactly three years after picking up my first Teach Yourself Dutch book, I\u2019m a functional trilingual backpacking my way through Latin America. I didn\u2019t do it through expensive courses or an auspicious blow to the head, but instead by learning about how the brain…<\/p>\n

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