Comments on: Can Everybody Learn a New Language?

By: Antonio Bonifati

Antonio Bonifati — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:35:18 +0000

Christine,
I promise to teach you 10 hours of my mother tongue, Italian, absolutely for free on Skype, just to disprove what those very bad teachers told you, which I think it is rather offensive. Do not listen to them! Even short-memory illiterates speak their own mother tongue much better than university students who have studied the same language as a foreign language for years. How do your college experts explain that?

So again, let me teach you 10 hours of Italian in your free time. A mini intensive course I offer for free, but only to you. I doesn’t matter if you don’t know a word of Italian, on the contrary, that’s better. I don’t want a penny and it’s perfectly fine if you don’t want to continue taking lessons with me afterwords. There is nothing to memorize. I don’t rely on rote learning at all. The only think I ask you, should I be successful and demonstrate that you can easily learn another language, I want you to get back to that school and yell to those “teachers”, in Italian, that they better change their job. You will be able to reply to their complaints in Italian too, with confidence.

By: Christine

Christine — Fri, 20 May 2011 03:15:18 +0000

Very basic brain chemistry/function is a huge factor when determining if a person even has ANY ability to learn a new language. I am a college student who tried (and failed) to complete the college foreign language requirement. While everyone else in class was able to make some success in learning I was not able to make any…none…zero progress. Despite hours a night studying, practice and a private tutor I could not learn anything at all. Luckily I was able to take a VERY comprehensive test through my college’s testing department that proved that my brain was just not capeable of aquiring a new language because I have absolutly NO rote memorization ability (which is vital to learning a new language). Long story short, the school board ruled that they could not expect me to complete a class that my I was mentally incapeable of doing and they waived it completely.

The moral of the story here is that although it is widely accepted that “everyone can learn a foreign language”, that is simply not the case. For most people hard work and practice will help them learn but for some people it is literally impossible no matter how hard they try.

By: Beth Butler

Beth Butler — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:41:51 +0000

Love what Chelsea has to say about learning and second language and to what level in order to speak in it! It’s all about the second language journey being fun for me and for my family. The moment our son told me he ‘hated’ his tutoring sessions on Skype is the moment I stopped them and found another way to maintain his fluency in Spanish.

Never lose the passion or the love of learning strictly for fluency – good lesson for us all!

By: Chelsea Kyle

Chelsea Kyle — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:57:35 +0000

As a tutor who assesses learning styles, I have concluded that language learning is like sports or music: some people have a natural gift, but anyone can develop the skills required to pursue it. Auditory learning skills — particularly, the ability to repeat sounds exactly as one hears them — are essential in acquiring native-like fluency, but communication doesn’t require native-like fluency. People are intimidated by the idea that they must learn a language and learn it perfectly before using it, but this is the best way to psych yourself out.

Just like anything else, you have to really want to go through the process, not just know the language.