When we take up the project of learning a language as adults, most of the resources we find and use are designed to help us develop propositional knowing. Gato means cat, lluvia means rain, and cerveza means beer.
Well thought of language programs today will help you develop the listening and speaking (pronunciation) skills to properly hear or produce the sounds of the language. This is the procedural or physical skill-building part of it.
But almost no language programs focus on the perspectival and participatory layers of knowing.
We like to keep language as a propositional and abstract thing forgetting that language is alive and real.
When we talk about “Spanish” we are taking a freeze frame photo of part of communication and separating it from many other things that are going on. The eyes, the body language, the pitch, the speed, the tone, the hand gestures, and the particular words we are choosing to use.
It is comfortable to sit in the position of learning the propositional aspects of a language and not feel the discomfort that comes from growth and change.
I’d say that 95% of adults learning a language never get past the Duolingo or other app stage of learning a language because, for them, the goal is being someone who is learning a language or not becoming a new version of themselves. But that ultimately doesn’t work.
To learn a language and be able to put it to use you have to learn communication and culture. You have to understand people, the environments they operate in, and the contexts in which you’ll need the language.
If the end goal is having a sense of belonging among a group of people from Mexico or from France, you need a lot more than textbook knowledge of abstract language rules. You need to know a good amount of that stuff, but you also have to have the speaking and hearing skills and you need to have the ability to understand what they care about, how they communicate in different situations, and how they build trust with others, and the ability to put all of the knowledge into action without really thinking about it.
When you reframe language learning in that way it changes the types of practice that will help you get there. Instead of apps that help you memorize you need to focus on building connections with people, learning from them, mining their experiences, and learning the full picture of how communication for them is different than it is for you where you come from.
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