If you ask people, “Do you speak another language?,” as I’ve done hundreds of times, you’ll get some interesting answers. The most frequent is: “I wish I did!” This comes from English monolinguals, who constitute about 75% of the US population.
For the other 25%, people will light up when you ask if they speak another language. They smile, and report with pride their other language, or languages, which most often they speak at home.
For the 20 years since I’ve been asking this question to most everyone I meet, I can report this: I’ve never met a bilingual who didn’t love being bilingual. Conversely, I’ve never met a monolingual who was happy to be monolingual. I’ve encountered monolinguals who don’t think it’s worth the effort to learn another language, but nobody goes around saying, “Thank God I can’t speak another language!” That would be like saying, “Thank God I can’t play piano!”
Everyone recognizes that speaking another language is a skill, and it’s a skill most everyone wishes they had.
So why don’t they?
Lucky in languages
The answer reveals a simple truth: the easiest way to become bilingual is to be born of parents who speak another language at home. They raise you in that language, speaking it in the kitchen, living room, bedrooms and backyard, trusting that you will also quickly pick up English outside the home. This is how most American bilinguals became bilingual.
But what about the rest of us who grew up in English-speaking homes and got only a smattering of other languages in school, as one might get a taste of homemade orange marmalade or real maple syrup at a friend’s house? Some few of us do take enough language classes in school to get some traction, followed by study abroad, where we reach that marvelous escape velocity in that second language, drinking in the sweet elixir, and learning to perform that magic trick of switching tongues at will.
Of these lucky young people, a few will keep using their adopted language after graduation in their professions or avocations, continuing to live their lives in two languages. This is the second most common way Americans become bilingual. It’s not as easy as the first way, but it’s relatively easy compared with the third and final way.
And that final way is to become bilingual after your school years, as an adult with adult responsibilities and commitments that leave little time to gain the many hours necessary to become comfortable speaking another language. But it is still possible, and with new technology that has come on the scene in the last ten years—and especially in the last two—this third and hardest method has never been more doable. Many American adults are successfully learning languages today, and I’m excited to share with you just how they are doing it.
The biggest barriers to overcome are our own
I have great empathy for adults who embark on their language journeys after they have finished school. I’m one of them.
When you’re in school, it’s your job to learn and be rewarded by teachers; it’s your job to build your resume by listing study abroad in Spain, France, or wherever. When we become adults in America, where English surrounds us like water surrounds fish, nobody cares if we become proficient in another language—unless we do. Unlike children and students, we are not rewarded and praised by others when we learn and progress. Instead, we often face skepticism, at times even ridicule, for attempting such a folly as adults.
Some barriers are external, like the people who scoff at your efforts and say, “Why bother, the whole world speaks English.” Or “Why bother, technology will soon make language learning obsolete.” Or “The only way to learn a language is when you’re young.” Or “The only way to learn a language is total immersion.” It’s amazing how opinions about language learning flow so readily from people who have never been language teachers or learned a second language themselves. But external barriers are not the most challenging.
Even more daunting barriers arise from within us, starting with the pervasive cognitive bias known as planning fallacy. This is when we badly underestimate the time it takes to accomplish a task. When it comes to learning a second language, people think it takes hundreds of hours. They are mistaken.
It takes thousands of hours before you can truly feel comfortable describing yourself, are able to understand what strangers say to you, and can respond with a level of skill close to what you can do in your native English. The usual result of this widespread planning fallacy is that adults conclude that they ought to be much further along than they are after a few months or years of devoting an hour a day and conclude, with regret, that they just aren’t good at languages. (This dark alley is made darker yet by ads that promise, “Speak French fluently in 30 days!” or comparable nonsense.)
Given the spiky barriers, both external and internal, facing American adults, it’s no wonder that most give up after a relatively short period, abandoning their hopes to live their larger lives they feel is awaiting them if only they could break through and really enjoy themselves in another language.
What is to be done?
Adopt these three new perspectives…and adopt your language
To overcome the barriers to language learning that American adults face, we need three new perspectives—three new ways of viewing our situation and our opportunities.
First: Take a long view of your journey. It’s not about getting ready for your trip to Italy next summer with some Italian phrases. Nor is it about getting your proficiency up to some ideal level where you’ll finally no longer have to fret about getting things right. (That view is a mirage, by the way. You’ll always have more to learn.) By long view, I mean for the rest of your life.
That’s why, at the America the Bilingual project, which I founded after I retired as CEO of Levenger, we created the Adopted Language Method. Adopting your second language for the rest of your life may sound like too much commitment, but it’s actually liberating.
It takes some of the sting out of the inevitable mistakes, setbacks and even embarrassments you’ll face along the way. It’s easy to become impatient with yourself for not remembering something you already learned. It’s frustrating to stumble through a sentence, knowing you’ve already made a mistake. It’s maddening to get that deer-in-the-headlights feeling as you hesitate, trying to think of how to begin.
But if you know these lapses are a necessary part of your journey, that forgetting something you already learned once, and then learning it again—and again—is a natural part of anyone’s journey into a new language, and if you accept that the whole idea of language learning is saying things wrong until you begin to say them right, this takes a huge amount of pressure off. It’s like saying, “Hey, I’ll practice a bit more and maybe get it right the next time!”
When your time frame is for the rest of your life—since you have, after all, adopted your language—it’s easier to keep plugging away. You understand that the journey is the goal.
Second: Set two expectations for yourself. The first expectation is grand: you’re going to pass through being a beginning speaker, and then you’ll pass through a much longer period of being an intermediate speaker, and then you’ll become what others and yourself consider conversational. You’ll have satisfying conversations with a variety of people, you’ll begin reading with pleasure, you’ll understand conversations in the street and in elevators. Then finally, you’ll pass into what you and others consider to be fluent, including having a grasp of idiom and some nuance in your adopted language. This evolution of yourself into two selves is one of the best experiences we humans can have.
The second expectation may seem counterintuitive to the first, but it’s not. It is this: Do not expect to be mistaken for a native speaker.
Some people think that the gold standard for truly being able to speak a second language is to have a native speaker ask what part of their country you are from. This can happen in certain situations, especially if that native speaker is trying to be polite, but the more you speak your adopted language, the more native speakers will realize that while you may be fluent, it’s not your first language. Why?
Yes, your accent is part of it, but it’s not actually the biggest part. It’s other subtleties that come up in your choice of words, expressions, conjugations, cultural references, or lack of them. It’s a question of hours on task.
After several thousand hours, you’ll be comfortable in your adopted language talking about most general topics and understand most conversations, but you’ll be conversing with people who have 10 times, 20 times or even 40 times more hours using their language than you have. Will there be a difference? Absolutely! There will be cultural references, jokes, contractions, rapid-fire speech, all kinds of things that a native speaker will get and you won’t.
Also, we humans use language for two distinct purposes—the first to communicate, but the second to discriminate. Not necessarily in a negative way, but to distinguish subtleties. We absolutely love making these distinctions—about accents, word choices, figures of speech. Native speakers mock one another. Think of a Maine accent: “It’s fawty miles from hee-uh!” Or a Southern twang: “Whatever suits y’all, ma’am!” We humans are fine-tuned speech distinguishing machines, and we love to identify the kinds of people who make such sounds.
To understand the importance of this perspective, think about the English speakers you know who speak English perfectly well but for whom English is not their native language. Can you tell? Most likely yes. Does it matter? Not at all. In fact, you might well find their accent and their occasional misuse of a word or rule of grammar quite charming. This is how you will be perceived in your adopted language when you are newly fluent, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Enjoy it! It’s part of living a truly different life in your adopted language, being a different you that people find charming for different reasons than they find you charming in English.
Third: Delight in knowing that you will transition from learning to living your adopted language. This process will happen gradually. At first it’s almost all learning and very little living, but little by little, over the months and years, less of your time will be in dedicated learning per se, and more in living in and through your adopted language. You’re going to love this transition!
The good news—in fact, the stupendous news—is that we are now living in the best of times in terms of being able to live in our adopted language, thanks to technological changes that have occurred in the last few years.
The better question about machine translation
Hardly a day goes by when we don’t see another headline about machine translation. The breathless question behind these reports is, “Won’t it be miraculous when AI whispers in our ears and we can instantly communicate with someone who doesn’t speak our language?”
It’s a popular question, but not the most useful one. The better question is: how can we seize upon this technology to help us learn our adopted language faster, more thoroughly, and more enjoyably? That’s a more realistic question, too, because our rapidly advancing machine translation technology, no matter how good it becomes, will absolutely not make human language learning obsolete.
In fact, it will do the opposite.
The advent of pedal-operated player pianos a century ago led to more people learning piano, even though player pianos abounded in homes and bars. The advent of chess computers that could beat humans a generation ago led to more people learning chess, even though computers could play better. The same will be true for machine translation and chatbots able to have useful conversations in our adopted language. Monolingual humans will use this technology to help them become bilingual, and what a great help it will be.
To be sure, we will also use computers to help us communicate in languages we have no intention of learning, and this is a boon to human progress. But the software’s ability to help ourselves learn our adopted languages is at least as important, if not more so.
Going analog to leverage digital
Part of the challenge in learning a new language today is the overwhelming number of methods to pursue. Beyond conventional in-person classes are a nearly unlimited font of online courses, YouTube tutorials, virtual tutors, as well as dedicated language learning software like Duolingo, Mango, Shabaash and hundreds of others. Adding to these riches, there are now online and electronic means for living in your adopted language beyond the dreams of language learners only a few years ago.
But despite all this new digital technology, we remain physical beings and learn best when we use our whole bodies—our minds, our ears, our mouths, our fingers, hands and arms. This is the idea behind the Levenger Master Class Circa workbooks. Learning and living your adopted language are ideally suited to the advantages of this paper notebook system, in which you are both the driver and your best teacher.
Language learning is what you make it; this workbook makes it yours
The Levenger Master Class How to Learn a Language for Life helps you navigate through the plethora of opportunities to sample those that will be most rewarding for you at different points along your journey.
Within the 14 tabbed sections you’ll find guidance for how to set discrete goals and measure your progress, how to begin reading in your adopted language and get the most from what you read, how to harvest the best YouTube and other video tutoring, how to sample classes (both in-person and virtual), how to use tutors (AI versions and human ones), and how to weave your adopted language into your life by listening to news, enjoying movies and streaming programs.
It’s important to record, with your own hand, the delights you find along your journey—your milestones and achievements, like the first time you helped translate for someone, or actually understood people on the street, and the first novel you read for pleasure, being pulled along by the plot and characters. Noting your progress will motivate you to make more progress.
Many language learners spend a lot of time trying to find that one best method for language learning—that coveted silver bullet. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that there is no such thing. The good news is that there are countless perfectly good arrows you can load into your quiver to hit your desired targets. The secret is not in finding that one right method, but sampling many, in a systematic way. The How to Learn a Language for Life workbook helps you do exactly that.
Your language learning journey is long and at times difficult, but the rewards outweigh the difficulties. All you need is a bit of guidance along the way. How to Learn a Language for Life won’t teach you French or Spanish or Japanese, but it will help you teach yourself those and any other spoken language, with more confidence, more enjoyment and more success.
I’ve written this workbook with the help of my coauthor, Akshay Swaminathan, a brilliant and accomplished language learner who is as passionate as I am about helping others acquire the gift of bilingualism.
For the cost of just one private language lesson, you can see for yourself how this thoughtful use of paper technology can be the key to unlocking the larger life waiting for you as a bilingual.
Steve Leveen, Cofounder