S3E14: Let go of the idea of the “proper order”
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Thursday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And if you are stuck in not knowing where to start or what to do next, today I’m just popping in with a huge permission slip to do whatever feels right for you.
For most of us, our first experiences of deliberately learning a foreign language were at school, where all the schools in the whole country were probably following one of only a few mandated curricula. We’d start the school year and for every subject, we’d quickly fall into the routine of looking at a syllabus and working through a textbook, in order, alongside everybody else. And even the way the textbook had been constructed, every chapter built on the chapters that came before it, so if you skipped one, you knew you’d probably miss something important.
But then we get into adult language learning world, and especially if we’re studying by ourselves, we don’t automatically have a syllabus, we aren’t necessarily trying to pass a specific exam, and yet we still have this nagging feeling that we should do things in the right order. That there is a natural order of things, everyone else knows it even if we don’t, and if we unwittingly break that rule, we risk stalling our own progress or causing ourselves shame and embarrassment down the line.
But what if, there were no rules? What if you could pretty much… start anywhere?
It’s true that most people start with the greetings and the colours and numbers and the days of the week and the months of the year. They learn how to introduce themselves. They might learn the 100 most commonly used verbs and some grammar that tells them what to do with them. And everyone needs question words. But once you’ve got those most basic foundations, what then? Do you really need to download a syllabus and follow the path of myself, my family, my school, my city, in that order?
And you might look at your circumstances and your goals and the answer might well be yes for you. But if you’re not so sure, I would really urge you to look to what you actually need as a guide.
What are the topics and conversations that are going to come up the most for you? If you’re learning your language to make friends, what do you and your ideal friends have in common? What do you do together? What sorts of things do you talk about? Start there.
If it’s for work, it’s okay to skim over the fruits and the animals and head straight for the sorts of language you’re actually going to use on a daily basis. Even if that subject never appears as a chapter in any textbook, that doesn’t mean it’s a no-go area that you should avoid until you’re already at an advanced level.
And if you already understand the concepts behind the jargon in a highly technical field in your native language, in most cases, it’s not that the words are intrinsically any harder to learn than the everyday furniture vocabulary. In some cases, it’s actually easier to learn technical vocabulary than everyday household words… for example if English is your native language and you’re learning a Romance language like French or Spanish, higher register vocabulary, or, vocabulary that’s more formal, technical or academic, is more likely to look very similar or sometimes even identical in the two languages. So don’t be put off diving into certain topics early. It might surprise you how approachable they are.
Remember, you are learning this language to serve you and your needs. You’re carving your own path because you know that by doing that, you get to put the most time and the most energy into the things that are actually going to get you to where you want to be. Because you know that the easiest vocabulary to remember is the stuff you actually use. So don’t worry about unwritten rules. Start with the things that matter to you. Have a wonderful day and I will see you back here at 7am UK time tomorrow.