The marathon of language learning

The fastest way to learn a language is probably to immerse yourself in a country amid native speakers. While it may be crazy difficult at the beginning, within just a few months your language skills will have improved out of sight simply because of the necessity of having to use it day in, day out.

Unfortunately, not all of us have the capacity to take six or twelve months out to go an live in the south of Spain to learn Spanish (as idyllic as that may sound!). So instead, learning another language from the comfort of our own homes tends to be more akin to a long hard marathon.

I have a love/hate relationship with this reality. It is always tempting to want to speed things up – I want to speak and understand now! But on the other hand, there are few things in life now that take so long, and such a concerted effort to master as learning another language. I must admit that there is something about the zen-nature of that that appeals to me.

At the moment I am taking three language classes a week, but am thinking about adding a fourth. With homework, this means that I am effectively practicing the language, even if it’s just for an hour nearly every day. Even though the it’s still hard going but if I measure my improvements over time I can see that I have improved dramatically in the last six months, and that does give me some hope for the language marathon I’m in!