Learning to speak a Spanish can be daunting, especially for people who start learning after the sensitive period, the time of life (generally) before puberty, when humans are hardwired to acquire language.
NON-NATIVENESS IS THE NORM
Most people who pick up a new language won't reach native-level proficiency. Ask any language teacher and you'll find that, although we believe that anyone can become fluent in another language, we acknowledge that most will fall short of becoming a native speaker. Those that do reach such heights are few and far between, and are extremely dedicated in their pursuit of fluency.
That's not to say that you can't make incredible progress toward that end. If you are willing and able to put in the time and effort consistently, day after day, you can make substantial progress in a relatively short amount of time.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE
Noam Chomsky, often called the father of modern linguistics, posited that we are born with what he termed a 'Language Acquisition Device'. That is, our brains are equiped from birth with a way to pick up langauges. This 'device' takes the language that we are around and uses it to build up a mental representation of the language.
INPUT
The fuel the language acquisition device uses is 'input'. Input, simply, is the stream of language that we hear or read. Right now, you have a stream of language that you are consuming - it is this English text that you are reading.
If your native language is English, you probably understand every word. If not, then your comprehension is likely lower. Whatever the case, this text is the language stream that your language acquisition device is currently processing.
Input is the key ingredient your brain uses to make a mental model of the language.
COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT
Not all input is created equally. Hard to understand messages are often filtered out as "garbled" and are not available for acquisition. In fact, a bit of language must be comprehensible for you to pick it up.
INTAKE
Input that you have heard or read, mentally processed and understood is called intake. This is language that is ready for acquisition. This is the phase where you actually pick up the language. You won't automatically acquire every bit of langauge that gets to the intake phase, but all the language you pick up will be intake.
You want to live in the intake phase of acquisition. To achieve this, you want to hear and read as much of the language as possible. This will give you the most opportunities to mentally process the language and convert as much input to intake as possible.
AFFECTIVE FILTER
Sometimes things can get in the way of our input stream, which can hinder the conversion of input to intake. Anything that gets in the way of acquisition raises the affective filter. This can take many forms. Maybe you are uncomfortable. That is, you are tired, hungry, have to go to the bathroom, etc. Maybe you are distracted by a fight you had last night with your significant other.
Maybe you are listening to a podcast in one ear and trying to understand the langauge in the other (
Or perhaps the language is incomprehensible. Language that is hard to understand is stressful for most people, especially if you are required to respond. In general, stress is the enemy of acquisition, since stress raises the acquisition filter.
IMMERSION VS. SUBMERSION
We want to get as much input as we can get, process that input to convert it to intake, and do this over and over again in a low stress environment. In this way, we give ourselves the best chance to pick up the language over time. To me, that leaves us two choices. We can use Immersion or Submersion as ways to pick up the language.
I liken this to learning how to swim. You can learn to swim by being dropped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here you are submerged in the water and left to sink or swim. Similarly, submersion as a method for language acquisition is a high stress environment. While it is possible to succeed at this, it is more likely that the high stress environment raises the affective filter and prevents acquisition from taking place.
While the name is similar, immersion is like learning to swim in the shallow end of the pool with an experienced instructor. You are still totally immersed in the water, but you are able to touch bottom in case of emergency. Furthermore, you are taught to swim with the help of an experienced instructor that can help you if you start to sink. Which way do you think is more effective for picking up a new language?
My money is on the low stress, high success environment that immersion provides.
STORYTELLING AS INPUT
We are storytelling creatures. For thousands of years, our ancestors have passed down stories as part of oral and written traditions. For most of human history, it was our way of transmitting important information beyond our current generation. Stories resonate with us.
You can see this clearly with small children. A child will sit and listen to stories for hours. They'll watch the same movie a thousand times until they know it by heart. Learning something by heart is different than rote memorization (although rote can be a useful strategy in the beginning stages of acquisition). Learning something by heart requires no effort, or at least the effort isn't perceived as difficult because the learner is delighted by the mere process of learning.
For me there is no better way to learn a language than through stories. If the story is good enough, you will forget that you are listening or reading in a new language. At that point you will be living in a state of flow, a state of perpetual intake.
OUTPUT
What is the role of output (i.e., speaking and writing) in language acquisition? In my view, there are two main functions of output:
1) Output is a way of testing hypothesis about the language.
This output is our subconscious testing hypotheses about how the language works. For example, you may hear a small child say something like "I goed to the store." With enough input and hypothesis testing, the child's mental model will automatically correct itself to "I went to the store."
2) Output solidifies what we've already acquired
Over time, given that the input we receive is consistent with the output we produce, our brains begin to solidify what we have picked up until now. Our brains remain plastic, so as our mental model evolves, so will our output. But it may take more effort to change something once it's begun to solidify.
Honorable Mention: The Monitor
Dr. Stephen Krashen hypothesizes that our brains keep track of our output as a "monitor". It uses this monitor to make conscious corrections as we speak or write. Krashen argues that this is useful, but limited in utility.
Pareto's Principle
You may have heard of something called the 80/20 rule. It comes from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who, as legend has it, noticed that 80 percent of the peas in his garden came from just 20 percent of the pods. This is true for a remarkable number of things in nature. Famously, you likely have heard that 99 percent of the world's wealth is controlled by just one percent of the population.
The takeaway from Pareto's Principle is that roughly 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the effort. In my experience, learning a language through input yields even more than 80 percent of the results. Actually, I believe it be even more skewed. In my experience, input generates something like 99 percent of language acquisition in learners, while output was responsible for just one percent. Those are numbers I just made up. Maybe input is responsible for 95 percent of acquisition and output five percent. Maybe it's 90-10. The point is that input is responsible for most of acquisition, while output is evidence acquisition has occured.
