Majoring in the minor

Stop doing things that move the needle the least

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! There are a lot of ways to learn a new language. In fact, with how many free resource there are around the internet I am honored to have you here. A major issue many people run into, however, is their resources choosing to focus on minor tweaks. Yes, there are some concepts that are small tweaks and will change the way you approach your second language acquisition, but few of them truly move the needle.

Becoming bilingual is already difficult enough. The last thing you need is a mountain made from a molehill standing before you. Many teachers love to major in the minor in that they love to spend the most time on the things you will use the least. That is not my approach. Use these strategies to avoid the same pitfalls as your peers. Focus on the things that matter the most, everything else will come with time.

Unnecessary tenses

In many languages there are verb tenses that are exclusively used when writing. While it will eventually be important to learn them, you will likely speak more than you write. If you do write, it will likely be with someone you know making those extra verb tenses irrelevant. Several of these are going to spend more time holding you back than pushing you forward. Eventually, when you are working to move from B2 to C2 you can come back and learn all of these.

Chances are, if you are truly immersing yourself in your target language, and you should be, you are seeing new verb tenses all the time. In my courses we usually tackle one verb tense per week, but only for the first six weeks. As many of you know, there are far more than six verb tenses. The reason we hold off is because there are verb tenses that work with each other and establishing a strong base will ensure that learning minor alterations in the future is easier.

Another thing that most people who speak one language don’t consider is that there are multiple versions of the past tense in just about every language. This goes back to knowing your native language. The better you know the intricacies of your native language the easier it will be for you to conceptualize different things you are learning in your target language. As far as past tense goes, there are 3 things you can do to maximize the time you are putting into your studying.

1. Learn them all

From my perspective, you should be giving yourself every possible advantage when learning a language. That means learning how to say and do things in multiple different ways. Eventually you will remember them all, but that is not going to be your goal at first. All you are trying to do at first is give yourself the best chance at remembering any way of saying something. When you have 3 options to pull from, the chances of you remembering at least one is higher.

2. The process of elimination

A fear of making mistakes is what holds most people back. Sometimes you can find the best way forward through knowing what not to do. Learning the rules is great, but there are usually so many rules that if you go explicitly off of those you may be prone to confounding the grammatical construction. Whereas looking at disqualifying factors is often far more simple. Yes, ask yourself, “is this right?” But don’t forget to take time to ask “is this wrong?” when you are stuck.

3. Listen to native speakers

This is the most difficult part of learning a new language because it involves an inordinate amount of patience. As an adult it can be endlessly frustrating to be incapable of communicating. However, everyone starts somewhere and if you don’t start that is as far as you will ever get. Listening to native speakers will give you a window into the lives of the people who speak your target language natively.

Doing this consistently over a period of months will give you all of the tools to know the feel of different verb tenses rather than the translations. At the end of the day, learning a new language is all about exposure and time. If you get enough exposure to native speakers over enough time you will inevitably become bilingual. The goal is to learn all of the tenses, yes, but moreover the goal is to perfect their use over time with experience.

Gendered words

Gendered words are the next biggest hang up and it is largely superficial. In the grand majority of cases you can screw up the gender of the word and your sentence will still make complete sense. Yes, it will be slightly off, but native speakers do it all the time so you can as well. Over time you will get a feel for most of them. More importantly, however, you will learn over time which ones you absolutely must get correctly.

You need to learn to layer the words. Focus on the gender to different degrees depending on what the sentence you are trying to create looks like. If there are more adjectives that need to have an accord with your nouns, then put more effort into getting it right. On the other hand, if you are working with a standalone noun, the chances are you don’t need to get it right and if you don’t no one will notice.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. As an aspiring polyglot, you are much like a master musician or an elite athlete. The only way someone is going to know what you are doing is incorrect is if you stop long enough for them to notice. In a normal conversation you are likely going to be speaking so quickly, or at the very least so fluidly, that by the time anyone has a chance to realize you messed up the gender of a word you are already several sentences further along in your dialogue.

Not only that, but you will be amazed how often the article is simply skated over. In French you do have the masculine (le), the feminine(la), and the plural(les). The only one that you have to remember is the plural because when speaking the only thing people will hear is the “L” followed by the noun. The same is true in Spanish, Portuguese, and German as well to name a few. Of course it is important to fight for perfect, but not at the expense of progress.

Conclusion

Some of the most intimidating portions of foreign languages can be overcome simply from ignoring them. Yes, there are 15 tenses. You only need 3-5 to speak. Yes, words do have genders in other languages. You don’t need to get them right to be understood. Yes, formality is important in many other languages. No one will ever fault you for speaking more formally than expected. All of these things are worth learning, but they should never stand in the way of you speaking.

Focusing on the wrong things can stall your language acquisition indefinitely. One of the most frustrating thing in the world is trying to be perfect while speaking a language with gendered words. The sooner you realize how little perfection matters in that realm the better. You will quickly find that you are able to self correct, but in order to get to that point you have to get moving. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great.

Requests

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