How Quickly Can You Learn a Language? Mat’s Adventures Learning Spanish.

Moving to a country without being able to speak hardly anything – is this the best way to learn a language, or just a terrible idea? My boyfriend Mat did something I would not have been brave enough to do, deciding to come with me to Spain even though he only knew the very basics. According to Benny the Irish Polyglot (my new idol) the best way to learn a language is to be speaking from day-one. So we were both curious; just how quickly would Mat learn? Would he be fluent in months? Or would it be a total disaster?

Mat was speaking as soon as his plane landed. Our friendly neighbours had taken me to the airport to collect him.

‘How long have you been travelling?’ They asked.

Mat paused.

‘Twenty-four years,’ he said eventually.

This was going to be a steep learning curve.

It’s best to be thrown in the deep end - then you’ll have no choice but to learn very quickly. This was my philosophy. In a small Spanish town Mat would have endless opportunities to effortlessly soak up new language, just by buying bread and ordering drinks and chatting to our new friends. What on Earth could go wrong? Or so we had thought.

One day, Mat is approached by a shop-assistant in the supermarket.

‘Sorry,’ Mat replies to a sentence he doesn’t understand. ‘My Spanish is bad.’

This might not sound like improvement – but in the first few weeks Mat would just stare blankly and blink at anything anyone said. At least now he could communicate the fact that he couldn’t communicate very well.

‘English?’

Mat nods.

‘Anyone speaks English here? There is an English guy! MARIA? You speak English? DOES ANYONE SPEAK ENGLISH-’

Mat tries to explain that he is fine, and that all he wants is to buy his bread in peace. But the shop assistant is shouting down the shop, desperately trying to find him help. He ditches the bread and makes a quick exit.

Being immersed in the language is absolutely terrifying at first. Before you get to a certain level of fluency it will just sound like noise, a totally incomprehensible wave of words where people chatter away to you at full speed, and then stare at you waiting for an answer. This is language overload, and it will take weeks and weeks, maybe months, before you can even begin to have a hope of understanding what they are saying. Or at least in a room full of thirty people all talking at once and shouting at each other across from the room, like at our favourite bustling breakfast place.

But a crucial part of language learning is making mistakes. Perfectionism has no place in learning a language – if you’re too afraid of making mistakes you’ll be too terrified to even open your mouth. But Mat has absolutely no choice about making mistakes, which is a good thing.

‘Your car my house,’ Mat says, smiling. He is trying to say that he likes the car. ‘Bastard Cheese,’ he says, another day, when trying to ask for goat’s cheese. It’s easily done.

We are lucky to be in an environment where everyone is very sympathetic to our struggles and try and make it as easy for us as possible. The first few weeks the Friendly Bread Shop Lady took great care with Mat, pointing and nodding and smiling and holding up fingers to communicate numbers with him. When her mother tried to talk to Mat, she apologised to me.

‘Oh, I told her not to speak to him,’ she shook her head. ‘I could see he couldn’t understand a word she was saying and it was really stressing him out. It made me feel bad seeing him feel bad! Poor thing.’

I am touched that she worries so much. Not everyone, not everywhere, would be so sympathetic to new immigrants trying to learn a new language. In many ways we have found an ideal place to learn in our dinky Spanish town: kind neighbours, lessons much cheaper that we could ever have found at home, and plenty of chance to practice.

Mat’s Spanish is at his best with a glass of beer in his hands, because this is when he is most at ease and stops worrying about making mistakes. His vocabulary is limited, but he gets by and he’s even learnt a few jokes which always go down a treat with our neighbours (‘My Spanish is perfect’.) Learning a language abroad is fraught with hazards of awkward social encounters, frustration, and running the risk of being chased out of a supermarket by shop assistants eager to help find you a translator – but we are learning things we never would have found out at home. And people are kind to Mat – it is only really me that laughs at him (lovingly.)

So, in summary: Mat has definitely made progress, but he feels this only really started after he begun lessons. Living abroad, we are surrounded by language – but this is perhaps not as important as the fact that when at home, we still speak English to each other. Still, we watch TV in Spanish, go out and talk to our friends in Spanish, order food in Spanish, go to Spanish shops, etc, etc.

The main difference between learning a language here and learning a language at home is that now Mat is actually motivated to learn. In England, it was basically me bashing him over the head with a book and telling him to study. Now, Spanish means being able to have a conversation more complex than ‘I like beer, beer is good, drink drink, party party.’

Living in a country definitely helps you to learn. But the good and bad news is that what matters most is the amount of time you can put in each day and how much you want to learn, not where you live. And living in the country reminds you that language is not a subject to be studied like any other; it is a tool to communicate, it is the opportunity to live an entirely different lifestyle. It is not best learnt out of textbooks, but drinking beer in the Spanish sunshine. Still, we would recommend learning as much as you possibly can before coming to a country – it will make your life a lot easier later! And living in a country still requires active learning (memorising vocab, speaking, reading) not just floating about hoping one day fluency will come to you. It still requires work, whenever you are – but this way is definitely a lot more fun.

If you want to read more about language-learning, here are some of my favourite blogs:

https://www.fluentin3months.com/

http://www.thepolyglotdream.com/

https://pau.ninja/ (spanish)