Let’s look at a familiar scenario for many of us:
You’re talking to your language teacher who is kind (or cruel) enough to point out your mistakes. You feel quite happy with yourself during the conversation...
- You express all of your ideas quite well, your teacher understands you, you don’t hesitate too much. It’s a good, enjoyable conversation.
But afterwards, when you see the long list of mistakes you made your heart sinks.
”#$%&!”
Just when you thought you were finally making progress, your ego shrivels into a corner like a forgotten birthday balloon.
“How did I make all those mistakes!?”
And you know what the worst part is?
You know how to correct most of your errors.
So why does this happen?
Here’s the short answer:
You haven't ACQUIRED that language yet
Ennio (not his real name) was a student of mine from Rome back in 2015. We used to meet once a week on Skype when meeting online was still an unusual thing. Ennio was brilliant at grammar exercises and any kind of test I could throw at him. His ability to produce grammatically correct sentences was impressive too.
A model student in many ways.
The problem was that it took him AGES to say a single sentence. Literally 30 seconds or longer to express a thought!
Fine for our 1-1 classes, but completely impractical in the real world.
Ennio had only ever learned English consciously - with grammar exercises and memorisation techniques - so every word and sentence he uttered had to first pass through his conscious brain’s monitor. He might use the monitor before or after he spoke, but it was always present.
When he arrived at a verb in a sentence I could almost read his thoughts as he scanned slowly…
…methodically…
…down a mental list of conjugations…
eat
ate
eaten
fly
flew
flown
write
wrote
written
The price Ennio paid for his accuracy was a lack of fluency.
He couldn’t retrieve English words from his rapid-access memory the same way he could with Italian.
Almost 10 years later the solution to Ennio’s problem seems obvious to me now:
More subconscious acquisition (through hundreds and hundreds of hours of input).
Less conscious learning.
Conscious learning has its place of course. It’s great for subjects like mathematics and the sciences when you have lots of time to retrieve information from your memory. But if you actually want to communicate with people, it’s much MUCH less useful for languages.
So…we were speaking about mistakes…
Why You Keep Making the Same Mistakes
Subconscious language emerges quickly and automatically.
When we haven’t fully acquired a piece of language in English we use the nearest equivalent in our first language.
It appears to escape from our subconscious.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
SPANISH | INCORRECT ENGLISH | CORRECT ENGLISH |
Estaba pensando en ti. | I was thinking in you. | I was thinking about you. |
Éramos tres en el restaurante. | We were three in the restaurant. | There were three of us in the restaurant. |
Quiero que mi jefe me deje en paz. | I want that my boss leaves me alone. | I want my boss to leave me alone. |
If conscious learning is like a dangerous shortcut - you might arrive at your destination, you might not - acquisition is the longer, tried and true path to communicative ability.
Consider this question:
Do we humans owe our incredible ability to speak to word lists and grammar exercises, or to communication with other human beings?
In my next post I'll show you how to identify optimal input (listening and reading) and reveal how much you REALLY need to progress to each level.