A Response to Terry the polyglot’s speech

Terry’s talk opened us with another perspective to look at multilanguage learning. He emphasized that language learning should be implicit, which just like learning how to ride a bicycle; we acquire the ability in a natural way that we do not possess the knowledge of how to learn it. He believes that the most successful way to master a language is to immerse ourselves in the environment which people speak a particular language; during the process, we’ll be able to learn the target language subconsciously when trying to communicate with others. I agree with him that the language environment is one of the most important criteria while learning a new language; however, I personally cannot buy everything he said.

 

According to him, learners of language immersion will be able to speak a language without having to memorize any vocabulary or phrase; and this phenomenon works on everyone, including the very beginners. To be honest, as a person who hasn’t tried it before, I doubt it very much. (I may change my mind in the future, but for now I cannot approve this point.) First of all, if the learner doesn’t possess any fundamental knowledge of the target language, the language barrier will appear. I think they’ll have difficulty communicating with each other because one simply has trouble understanding another. Under this situation, the improvement of language ability is very limited. From my experience, people must learn something first so that they can present them. When I talk to my foreign teacher in English for the first time, I’m surprised that I’m able to communicate in English, and thus, I felt I had great improvement on oral performance. Nevertheless, when I look back, it’s because I had already learned lots of vocabulary and sentence; so that I’m able to use them when I need them. In my opinion, what language immersion provide is the incentive for us to awake our inner language ability, but not the principle to master a language.

 

In addition, from my perspective, language immersion may work; nevertheless, it’s under the circumstance that the learner has a strong desire to improve the language so that he or she intends to make efforts on achieving the goal. In other words, language learning is not learned naturally. If you mean to improve it, you have to make effort on it. For instance, by memorizing words, we’re able to express ourselves more precisely. Another important thing is that learners of language immersion have to be very positive in order to improve their language skill. I think language immersion is more suitable for extroverts because they’re better at interacting with others; thus, they’re guaranteed more opportunity to talk. For introvert people like me who tends to listen rather than talk in front of strangers especially when I’m not confident with my fluency of foreign languages, I think it may not work very effectively.    

 

Though I do not agree with Terry very much about language immersion, personally considering many of what he said affiliated to his propaganda; I do approve the fact he mentioned－attitude is much more crucial than method. If you want to master a language, enthusiasm and persistence can take you any place you want. It’s also something that I’ve been struggling with my Spanish because I barely have extra time to work on it; hence, after Terry’s talk, I would consider using learning application like Hello talk in order to make myself connected with Spanish environment without taking a lot of time.