Thoughts on Immersion Language Learning
by Someone asked, “What to you call someone who speaks two languages?” The response, of course, is “You call him bilingual.” What do you call someone who speaks three languages? He is trilingual. Here is the tough question; what do you call someone who speaks only one language? You call him an average American.
Americans are not generally too keen on learning a second or third language. The reasons may vary from it is too expensive to it takes too much time. Most reasonable people are aware that a language cannot be learned within a week or even a month. It takes more time for our minds to begin thinking in the new lingo.
In high school, my only language-learning option was Latin. Our tiny school had no foreign language teachers back in the 1950s when I entered high school. I took one year of Latin and would have taken a second year, but no other students were interested so it was not offered again.
In college I studied French and got a degree in the language. I also studied Spanish but did not take enough for even a minor in the subject. In graduate school I took English linguistics and got a M.A. in that subject field.
One thing that I learned during all of my studies was that languages take significant amounts of time to become even slightly able to manipulate them in their natural realm, where the language is spoken as the national language. I studied French and Spanish in a university in the USA. Some other students in the same classes had lived in France or Mexico or Spain, and their progress was much faster than my own. This led me to believe that immersion programs would be better for really learning the second language.
There are problems with this “immersion” language learning, however. Let me list a few significant issues.
For one thing, it is natural for us to congregate with our own kind. The old saying that birds of a feather flock together is quite accurate. If we go to France to learn French, our natural tendency is to find an English-speaking roommate. It makes our frustrations more tolerable to unload them to a speaker of our own language. Frankly, in spite of our natural inclinations, we should avoid sharing our living space with another English-speaking person. It is harder, but more effective, to live with a French family, hopefully one in which English is not understood much at all. We are then forced to learn to communicate in their language, not our own.
Another issue is the type of language we will learn by living in the culture where the other language is the native tongue. There are degrees of formality and propriety in all languages. Do you want to learn to swear and use all of the less-than-polite terms? Would you prefer to learn the courtly language that surrounds the highest level of formality? Maybe you prefer a mixture of those, but in what section of the other language’s society would we need to live to get the “average” language usage?
It is also true that the financial side of immersion language learning can be problematic. Unless you have a goodly amount of funds stored or another source of income, living abroad is expensive. Rent, food, entertainment and travel to and from the other country are all expenses to consider. Will you have to pay someone to tutor you? Will you need to buy special books and some type of recording device?
If the language you intend to learn does not use the Roman alphabet, learning to read and write in the language are obstacles requiring much more of your time and energy.
Learning by immersing ourselves into a culture that speaks the new language seems ideal until we consider some of the negatives. In many cultures, you will be ignored as soon as the local people realize that you are a foreigner. In some cultures, you may become a prospective victim. A local person may try to take advantage of your ignorance about the culture and the language. Even the local taxi drivers quickly learn that angle. They take the longest route to your destination since they figure you do not know your way around.
Immersion, although it has negative aspects, is the better way to learn. It is far superior to buying recorded materials to listen to and mimic. You learn alternate ways of expressing thoughts besides one learned word or phrase. If possible, immerse yourself as you learn a language. It is the way you learned your native language many years ago.
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