Is your attitude holding you back in learning a language?

How past experiences, beliefs, pride, and a whole host of other things can all conspire against you...and what to do about it!

If you caught the last issue of our newsletter, you’ll know that this month we’re exploring how to develop a good relationship with language learning, and how we feel about a language impacts how well we learn. 

Before we continue, we’d like to point out that, in our opinion, the research on these topics is fuzzier and more controversial than we’d normally like to present to you – but we think it’s important to talk about factors such as motivation, mindset, and emotion, because these are things you can experiment with without spending huge amounts of time or money. With that caveat out of the way, let’s continue.

Last week we delved into issues of motivation, and how your reasons for learning a language affect your results. This week we’re going to add to that, and explore how your attitudes and beliefs can help you – or hold you back. 

It turns out that your mindset – your beliefs about your target language and even about your own personal identity – can have an impact on your progress.

With that in mind, we’re going to take some time today to talk about helpful and not-so-helpful mindsets in language learning, and how we can harness them to make our language learning lives just that much easier. 

Let’s start with your attitude towards your target language. 

It makes a certain amount of sense that how you feel about the language you’re learning has an impact on your ability to learn that language. 

Think back to our discussion of motivation: we talked about integrative motivation, the motivation to become closer to – if not a part of – the speech community of your target language. 

But it’s hard to access this motivation if you’ve got some lingering negative attitudes towards the target language.

A negative attitude needn’t be anything sinister: it may be slight resentment at having to learn the language, or frustration with past bad experiences learning the language that you now associate with the language itself.

These negative experiences can hold you back, and not only for the obvious reason that you’re unlikely to stick to studying a language that you have some negative attitudes about.

It can also be harmful in more specific ways, like preventing you from attaining your goals in pronunciation. Although the research that shows this has mostly been done among people who have moved to a new country and are learning the language spoken there, the findings also make sense in the context of learning a language not spoken around you.

When we have negative attitudes towards a language, it creates a psychological distance – even though it might be subconscious – between us and that language. As a result, we may resist doing things that bring us closer to that language, such as attaining a more native-like pronunciation.

If you’ve had negative experiences learning your target language in the past, one of the best ways to shake any lingering bad associations is to replace them with good associations. A really quick way to do this is to find a sympathetic social group that uses your target language – in other words, make friends! You can crowd out any bad memories related to the language with a whole host of good ones.

Another source of psychological distance can come from your beliefs about your own personal identity. Think of how it would feel to switch your accent in your first language – maybe you already do this, in which case you’d know better than anyone! If you’re anything like us, it would feel strange to start speaking so differently, not “in character” but as yourself. This is because what it means to be you is often so closely related to how you speak and how you sound.

When we’re learning a second language, these feelings can come up again, just as strongly. If you can’t imagine a version of yourself that feels “at home” in your target language, it will likely be difficult for you to acquire native-like pronunciation. There are actually some cases where people have reported feeling more at home, or more themselves, in their target language than in their first language! And, of course, there are many cases where the opposite is true.

Another reason we know our sense of self plays a big role in pronunciation comes from the effects of alcohol. Some research has shown that altered ego states such as the lowered inhibitions brought on by intoxication do appear to improve pronunciation ability, despite the numerous negative effects of alcohol on things like memory and reaction time. By the way, please don’t take this as a recommendation to get drunk to help your target language pronunciation – take it as more evidence that our ego can get in the way.

As we’ve seen, if you’re having trouble finding an identity that works for you as a speaker of your target language, this may be holding you back, particularly at the higher levels. 

How can you solve this? 

You can try to find a language role model! Where would you go looking for this role model? This will vary tremendously based on who you are and what language you’re learning, but YouTube is likely a good place to start. 

Can you find any vloggers or livestreamers that talk about things you’re interested in? Maybe you’re really into history, and you find a scholar whose lectures have been uploaded to YouTube. 

Bam, there’s a potential role model! 

Maybe you’re really into skincare, and you find someone with loads of product reviews uploaded – pow, another potential role model.

This is the basis of the “language parent” approach advocated by language learning methodologies like Refold. A language parent is simply someone whose language – including pronunciation, phrasing, intonation, etc. – you try to imitate. The idea behind this is that you can more easily imitate a specific person than a whole class of people.

Another bit of trouble can come from our pride – whenever you learn another language, your proficiency in that language will be lower than your proficiency in your first language. This is inevitable. 

At the same time, no one wants to feel like an incompetent language user. The trick here is to remind yourself: you’re not an incompetent user of your target language; you’re a multicompetent user of two (or more) languages. In other words, you’re awesome and you’re only going to get more so. Give yourself a break!

It can also help to develop a new identity around being a language learner – not just a learner of your target language, but a language learner in general. After all, you’re part of a cool club now, a club every other reader of this newsletter is a member of as well. You’re all multilinguals! 

Maybe you wouldn’t go so far as to call yourself a polyglot (someone who speaks many languages), but if there’s the difference between you and them, it’s only one of degree: you’ve already taken the first step on a journey full of experiences, joys, and frustrations that monolinguals can’t understand. So own it!

On that note, we’ll leave you for now – next week we’ll return to talk to you about the role emotional factors play in language learning.

Until then, how do you say goodbye in Marshallese?

Io̧kwe,

Colin and Natasha