If you’re not learning language as fast as you think you should, it’s usually a signal that you’re doing something incorrectly. Unfortunately, most of us tend to blame the wrong factors when trying to figure why our actual results fail to reach our expectations.
When tasked to list down the possible reasons for your inadequate results, do you attribute it to any of these?
- natural language skills
- inadequate learning materials
- difficulty of the language
- bad instructors
While I won’t trivialize issues that you notice in any of those areas, most of those reasons play second fiddle to the real cause of most language learning problems: the lack of practice. Truth is, if you put in a lot of time to learn a language, you’ll be good at it, regardless of how difficult it is or how bad your materials are.
If you read the book Outliers, the author claims that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach professional level at any endeavor. Have you put in your 10,000 hours? If you haven’t, then you really can’t complain about not reaching expert status yet.
Mastery of any language, for the most part, just requires plenty of time spent with it, whether actively studying its rules or just immersing yourself in its use. Listen to Japanese radio for over 10,000 hours and let’s see if your vocabulary doesn’t measure up to those of local speakers. Work with a language learning software for the same amount of time and prove me wrong.
The moral? Don’t be frustrated with your language learning. A strong grasp of any skill takes time so be prepared to invest it.