Some myths about learning foreign languages and being multilingual

Hi guys, I'm going to return to a topic that I have talked about a lot on my blog: learning foreign languages and being multilingual. I grew up in Singapore which did account for the fact that my brain is very adaptable to learning new languages. I studied English at school, spoke a mix of English, Mandarin and Hokkien at home, used Mandarin at gymnastics and also picked up Malay along the way from my Malay speaking friends. I also then started study French at the age of 18 and having been brought up in such a multilingual environment, I took to French very quickly and was able to then go on to learn many more languages. Today I speak 15 languages, 6 of them fluently (English, French, Mandarin, Welsh, Spanish and Hokkien). In today's post, I am going to deal with some myths about learning foreign languages and see just how much truth there are to these commonly held beliefs. I hope you will find this piece enlightening and helpful!

"I am too old to learn another language. Children pick up foreign languages faster than adults."
Verdict: Completely false.

Oh this is a very common myth, it is an excuse for adults not to learn another language - I found out recently that my colleague (let's call her Beth, not her real name) is dating a Frenchman and I asked her if her French was fluent. Well, she pulled this excuse and claimed that she was way too old to start learning another language; besides, her boyfriend was fluent in English so why should she bother? There are so many reasons why children learn faster than adults: children have the luxury of time, their parents send them to school to be taught languages by teachers - even as full time students, they are usually spared the burden of having to do housework. How many of you actually had to cook dinner for your entire family when you were say 7 years old? No, an adult in your family would do that for you whilst you were studying or doing homework. Beth works really long hours at the office, when she finally gets home she still has to cook, clean and do loads of household chores - she simply cannot find much time to do something like learn a foreign language. I am currently learning Hindi and really, the only time I have to study it properly is on the train on the way to work: it's not ideal but as working adults, we are just so much more busy than children who have the luxury of dedicating themselves to studying and the pursuit of knowledge. In short, Beth and I are often too busy and/or tired to do anything else after a long day in the office - children who are full time students don't have that problem.

Staying with Beth, I met her boyfriend last week and he told me that Beth actually spoke a little French. I switched from English to French and Beth just plain refused to speak any French - saying that she couldn't remember the words and even if she did, she was afraid that she would mispronounce the words so badly that I wouldn't understand her. In short, she was too self-conscious to try. This lack of self-confidence that holds us back doesn't affect all of us! I remember meeting a friend from gymnastics and she was with her son who has learnt a little Mandarin at school. He was keen to try to say a few words to me in Mandarin but unfortunately, I couldn't understand what he was trying to say as his pronunciation was so bad and he paid no regard whatsoever to the tones. I had to ask him what he was trying to say in English before teaching him how to say it properly and we all had a good laugh about it. You see, that boy has been encouraged by his Chinese teacher in school to use every opportunity to practice his Mandarin skills and he has been told not to be afraid to make mistakes - that's inevitable but to use that as an opportunity to be corrected by a native/fluent speaker of Mandarin. That boy will keep improving his Mandarin if he keeps up this level of effort to bravely practice and use it - contrast that with Beth, whose standard of French is going to stagnate if she is too afraid to even use it with friends and colleagues. The solution? Simple: Beth has got to find a group of French-speaking friends who she is so comfortable with that she will not be afraid to make mistakes in front of - she may not be ready to use it with strangers but at least she should create a 'safe space' for her to practice her imperfect French in order to build her confidence.

"White people from English-speaking countries are often monolingual." 
Verdict: Only partially true

This myth was quite common in Singapore when I was growing up and it is only partially true. English speaking countries like Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada and the UK tend to be mostly made of monolingual English speakers who do not speak another language or only have a very basic understanding of a second language - certainly not to a standard high enough to classify themselves as bilingual. This tends to be the case with the older generation - the older the person, the more likely they are to be monolingual because the quality of education sucked a generation ago but fortunately, young people have access to much better schools and teachers today. A lot of it depends on wealth and social class as well: if you're a rich family who sent your children to the best private schools and took your children on holidays abroad all the time , then amongst such richer families, making sure you teach your children a foreign language or three is very important because you're gearing them up for jobs that would involve international travel and dealing with international clients. If you are a working class family who sent your children to the local state school and never left the country, then you're at best gearing your children up for very local jobs like working in the supermarket where you won't need a second language. The latter thus have little incentive or motivation to bother with a second language: after all, it is hard to see the benefit of being bilingual if you're surrounded almost entirely by monolingual people all the time.

Even within these English-speaking countries, you do have pockets of bilingual areas: Wales in the UK, the states of New Mexico, Florida, California and Texas in the US and Quebec in Canada are all bilingual areas where English is spoken along with Welsh, Spanish and French respectively. In fact in Quebec, French is often the first language for many of the locals and whilst they all speak English as well, it is definitely a second language for them. However, let's not forget the big cities like London, New York and Toronto where there is a younger generation of affluent people whose parents may have been monolingual, but they have been brought up to be bi or trilingual: take my friend Jack at gymnastics for example. He is as English as they come, but he did Spanish up till A levels, had the opportunity to travel and work extensively in Central and South America and today, his Spanish is as fluent as his English. He doesn't have any Spanish blood in him, he didn't date someone who is Spanish-speaking: he merely has a love for the Spanish language that desire was enough to make him effectively bilingual. It isn't uncommon to find people like Jack in places like London today but of course, Jack does fit the profile of the younger, cosmopolitan professional under 30 from a very rich family.

Children of immigrants in the West are usually effectively bilingual. 
Verdict: Again, not always true, only partially true

Oh this is an assumption that white people often make but it is not always true! I am currently studying Hindi and am keen to practice my Hindi with anyone who can help me - so I have approached my Indian friends who parents are migrants from India or Pakistan and their parents would have spoken Hindi or Urdu (which is mutually intelligible with Hindi, but written with a different script). I am amazed at just how little Hindi or Urdu they spoke - this was explained to me by my good friend Krishna. He explained that whether the children of immigrants from South Asia grew up speaking their parents' mother tongue depended on quite a few factors: there were some parents who were very keen for their children to assimilate when placed in British schools, they were afraid that they would be ostracized if they didn't speak English fluently and that could even affect their studies. So some parents deliberately chose to speak to their children only in English, whilst keeping Hindi or Urdu as the 'secret' language they would use to speak to each other if they didn't want the children to understand what they were saying. Other parents did try to make an effort to teach their children Hindi/Urdu, however, Hindi/Urdu is not part of the curriculum in most British schools where the second/foreign languages offered are usually French, Spanish, German or Italian. Just because you can speak a language doesn't mean that you are a great language teacher! Some parents simply didn't know how to impart that knowledge to their children, resulting in their kids barely being able to muster basic, conversational Hindi because they had been so poorly taught.

If you want to qualify as a language teacher and work in a school, getting paid work to teach a class a foreign language, well that takes years of training and you're also given the full support of teaching materials in a school environment: the kids have access to a library and other learning aids in the school. Furthermore, a classroom environment also gives the children a chance to practice the language with their classmates - contrast that to an Indian family who have moved into a neighbourhood where the kids are not learning Hindi at school, they don't have anyone apart from their parents to practice Hindi with and if the parents are not good teachers, then it is actually pretty hard to pass the language onto their kids who are being taught English and probably another language like Spanish or French properly in school. I think we fail to give enough credit to just how hard language teachers work and it is wrong to assume that parents can somehow perform that same difficult job without having had any training whatsoever. Some Indian parents do send their kids to Hindi classes on evenings and/or weekends for them to be taught the language properly, to ensure that the language is properly passed on to the next generation but that also depends on the availability of such classes and whether the parents can afford to pay for them. The exact same situation happens with children of Chinese immigrants here, thus a lot of my BBC (British-born Chinese) friends can barely string together a coherent sentence in Mandarin or Cantonese.

In fact I have a British-Indian friend who speaks very little Hindi but is totally fluent in French because he had a very good French teacher in school who motivated him to study that language: that goes to show just how important the role of the teacher is! What I have observed though is that if the parents' mother tongue is a European language, then the chances of their children growing up bilingual is much higher for a simple reason. Kids who grow up in the UK, who go to British schools and are educated in English are always, always going to end up speaking English as a first language; so when it comes to them learning a second language, they are always going to find a European language easier to pick up than an Asian or African language because a language like French or German is far closer to English than Hindi or Mandarin. Even then, it may or may not happy: one of my best friend's parents moved over from Poland when he was a baby, they speak Polish as a first language but he only knows a few words of Polish today. If the kids have a natural flair for languages, then sure they will be able to pick up whatever language they want to if that's what they want - but without that, well, you can't assume that the children of migrants will somehow just inherit the language from their parents.

I am not talented with languages, not like those who speak many languages - so there's no way I can learn another language. There's no point in even trying when I just don't have that ability or talent. 
Verdict: A lot of negativity there, mostly untrue but let's talk about it.

There is actually a lot of similarity amongst the learning of anything from languages to playing a new musical instrument to a new sport. I am involved in the adult gymnastics programme at my local gymnastics club and I often get asked the questions like, "how long would it take for me to learn how to do a back flip?" And the answer to that question is, "well, how talented are you?" I remember when I was a teenager, my friend Mark brought his brother Matthew to the gym and Matthew managed to do a back flip on his like second attempt because he was simply copying his older brother. Needless to say, people like Matthew are insanely talented and learn super quickly. Then on the other end of the spectrum are people who are quite the opposite who will never ever be able to do a back flip no matter how much training they put in. So on a scale of 0 to 10, if we put Matthew at ten and the person with absolutely no talent at 0, then most normal people are around a 5. However, many people totally underestimate their ability and talent and would place themselves at a 0 or 1 when really, they are probably somewhere in the middle of the range between 4 and 6. What tends to happen is that they see someone like Matthew and get intimidated, they give up on themselves and tell themselves that they are incapable. Unfortunately, that kind of defeatist mindset is quite common and not very healthy.

So the more talented you are, the less help you need. Those who are super talented at foreign languages often just figure it out for themselves: it almost becomes a subconscious process. They soak up a new language simply by interacting with locals, watching TV and listening to music whilst others who are less talented need the help of a structured lesson to help them understand the complexity of the grammar and be given tools to memorize the vocabulary. This once again boils down to getting the help you need - trying to teach yourself a new language is a very difficult challenge, but allowing a highly experienced language teacher to hold your hand and simply take the role of the student is a lot easier. And guess what? The end result is pretty much the same, whether you got help from a language teacher or if you are completely self-taught. It's just that those who are more talented are going to get to your destination faster than you - but hey, that's life: if you were to take part in a marathon for example, do you give up even trying knowing that there will be runners who will be faster than you, that you won't be the first person to cross the finish line? No, your aim is to cross that finish line on your own terms and how long others take to do the same task is quite frankly, irrelevant. Okay so you'll take longer than the others, so what? As long as you get to the finish line eventually, that's all that matters.

I'm Asian, my tongue can't do make certain sounds. 
Verdict: Bullshit, stop making excuses.

Let me give you some context for this: this was a Thai person who struggled with English as a foreign and second language. He struggled with pronouncing English words and thought that perhaps he would have more luck with an Asian language closer to home, like Malay or Vietnamese. He also observed that many people around him in Thailand also really struggled with English - even those who can read and write well in English still have a remarkably strong Thai accent. By that same token, he also observed that white people struggled with the Thai language and even if they have studied it for a long time, they mispronounce words and have a strong accent: thus his theory about white and Thai tongues being shaped differently. Well as you have guessed, his excuse is complete bullshit because whether you're black, white or Asian, there is really very little difference in the way your tongue or mouth is shaped. A Thai and a European person are from the same species, there may be superficial difference in the shape of one's eyes, nose, the colour of one's eyes, skin or hair but when it comes to the shape of our tongues or mouths, there is no difference. Asian people who are born and raised in the West usually have no problems whatsoever with European languages and as discussed previously, many in the West in fact end up speaking these European languages as a first language and have limited ability in their parents' Asian languages. That totally disproves any theory about 'Asian tongues' being different.

So what causes this difference then? Actually it is all about listening, rather than speaking: a lot of Asian people end up having a really strong accent in English because their native languages simply do not have certain sounds that are used in English. The same problem occurs with white people trying to learn Mandarin - they simply cannot tell the difference between the different tones because they don't hear the subtle differences between say a second and third tone. Some people are very talented in terms of picking up those very subtle differences whilst others will need the help of a good teacher to teach them how to recognize those differences. That is the first step: you need to know what you are hearing first, before you can even start to mimic the sounds of another language accurately. Now this may seem really difficult when you're learning a foreign language - that's when teachers come in: a good teacher will tell you exactly what sound to make and how to make it. When I was learning Welsh, there are a few consonant sounds in Welsh not found in English. My Welsh teachers told me very specifically where to place my tongue, lips and teeth in order to replicate the sound exactly as it should sound and trained me to recognize the sound I was striving to recreate, so I knew exactly what my target was. The problem with learning English places like Thailand and Singapore is that you're likely to pick up the accent and mistakes of your teacher. This is massively unfair on the student of course, because they feel like they are doing everything right but still sound quite different from native speakers - hence they start finding excuses like the shape of their tongues but really, the blame does fall on the bad teachers. So you can put the blame on those bad teachers!

Smart people pick up languages really quickly. 
Verdict: Don't assume that. That's not always true.

I think this mindset is quite prevalent in Asia where students are under a lot of pressure to excel academically. So in Singapore, students had to do English along with their Asian mother tongue at school and nobody gave a shit if you liked learning languages or if you had any talent for it. All students were expected to study hard and deliver those straight As regardless. This then created a situation where a lot of the students who struggled with those languages had to go for extra tuition and with enough rote learning and coaching, they were eventually dragged up to the standard where they could deliver the desired result. Hence students from good schools who were considered 'smart' or 'clever' usually scored As for their languages in Singapore, but let's contrast this with the situation in the UK. In the UK, most schools do not insist that you do a second language: you're free to do it if that's what you like but you're equally free to say, "no thanks, I will stick with English and be monolingual. If I took a language like French or Spanish, I'd really struggle with it - I won't enjoy it and will probably just end up with rather poor grades for it. I'd rather spend all that time and effort studying something like physics or maths which I am good at." Thus I have met plenty of highly successful British professionals who are woefully monolingual - they're not stupid of course, they wouldn't be successful at all if they were really stupid.

By the same token, just because you're good at one language doesn't mean you're good at all languages. I never studied for a single English language exam whilst in school in Singapore (including for GP at A levels) and always scored As for English - I genuinely found English easy. However, I struggled with Chinese and whilst I somehow managed to usually get the As demanded of me: I had to put in a lot more hard work, get a lot more help from my sister or father with my Chinese homework and I'll be the first to tell you that my Chinese is no where as good as my English. If you gave me two versions of the same article: one in English and one in Chinese, I would take two or three times longer to try to read the one in Chinese. You can't look at my results and say, oh Alex managed to get As for both Chinese and English, so he must be good at languages: no, I am not. I am good at English and I sucked at Chinese. Ironically, I experienced this with many other languages I have tried learning: I found some really easy and others very difficult. I breezed through French, Spanish and Welsh with ease but never got very far with German,The devil is in the detail - I think I'm smart, but even I would qualify that and say that I am good at some languages but not all languages. I well and truly suck at Chinese. This is because each language is so unique and different, it would be silly to make sweeping statements about being 'good at languages' and trying to draw any correlation between one's intelligence and being 'good at languages'.

You must be some kind of geek who likes studying languages when you could be out socializing, partying. 
Verdict: Somewhat true, but let's talk about this.

If you want to become fluent in any language, you will have to invest many hours of studying. You can't run away from that, there are many hours of studying involved before you actually become fluent enough to reap the benefits of being able to speak another language with some degree of confidence. But not everyone wants to go out to a wine bar or a noisy pub after a long day at work, it can be quite relaxing just to settle down with your language learning material, turn off your phone and just focus on something that has nothing to do with work. And remember, if you are actually interested in the language and the culture(s) associated with the language, then this learning can be a really fun process - but if you associate studying or learning with boredom and tedium at school, then may I suggest that you had been forced to studying subjects you weren't really that interested in. Besides, if you do attend a language class, then it can be a very social experience. I remember how I enjoyed meeting a wide range of people from different social backgrounds, different countries when I studied French at l'Alliance Française in Singapore back in the 1990s - I made loads of friends there and I am actually still good friends with one of my classmates from there today, after over 20 years. We all have a shared interest in French culture and used to do things like go watch French movies together. We may be geeks who like studying French, but we enjoy hanging out with other geeks and we all have different ideas of what it means to be sociable.

Once you have put in all the hard work to become confident in the new language, then you are able to reap the fruits of your labour! Going to Italy armed with a working knowledge of Italian is going to give you a completely different experience there compared to being an English speaking tourist who is hoping that the next waiter or ticket vendor will speak some English. The primary reason we language geeks want to spend so much effort learning a new language is to be able to use it - perhaps there are a few geeks who are quite content to watch an Italian film without subtitles but for the rest of us, being able to socialize with people from another country in their language rather than English is one of our key goals and you can't get more social than that. You may party with people who speak your language every night of the week, but that can hardly be compared to making new friends in a city halfway around the world without using a word of English and discovering a brand new culture - now that's taking socializing to a whole new level when you do it in a foreign language. This is why I love the AirBNB experience, because it gives me a chance to interact with locals in their language, when I am staying in their house. It is just like learning a new sport or musical instrument: imagine you're learning how to play a guitar. The first few months of lesson would be hard work and not a lot of fun, but when you finally get to the stage when you can just strum a tune in front of your friends by the campfire, then you can truly have fun with your new skills. Are you the kind of person who is willing to invest some time and energy to become a better person?

Okay that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? What are the myths and misconceptions you have encountered about learning a foreign language? Are you currently learning a foreign language? What have your experiences been? What are some of the weirder myths you have encountered about foreign learning languages? Many thanks for reading.