Spanish Only

I always hear people talking and see people writing about trying to learn some freakin’ language or, when they’re serious, learning it.

The slogan of this blog is Learn How to Learn Spanish. Man, even I’m making this mistake. Learning a language… Ha! Officially, babies don’t learn a language, they acquire it. It’s thrown at them and they absord, that’s all they do. They don’t put effort in it, they don’t worry and are not even thinking about learning something. And they’re good. They end up speaking the language, even though it takes them several years. But again, that doesn’t matter, because they’re more fluent than most language learners will ever get.

I talk a lot about babies and language acquisition, but that’s because I think we’d make our lives easier if we’d all be “learning” a language like they do. I mean, people became fluent in a language without learning it. They understand and speak it because they acquired the darn language. They put no real effort in it, they just absorbed and had fun. Schools and colleges just destroyed that idea of absorbing a language. They think you have to learn it. Even when you try to just acquire a language, they come up will all kind of things to supplement your “learning”.

Lately I’ve been reading this blog of an ALG student. ALG stands for Automatic Language Growth, and like the name suggests it’s all about language “growing” inside you. You’re not learning it, but rather absorbing it, acquiring it, because of which it starts growing in you. Just read the blog and you’ll see how amazing the system is.

ALG pretty much works like this: a student enrolls in a course for which he has nothing to do except for attending class and listening. There’s no homework, no textbooks, no speaking. Just listening to some teachers for several hundreds of hours. And because of all that comprehensive listening (even though it’s not that comprehensive at first), the language starts growing in you.

Later on, the student learns (yes, as in studying a bit) how to read and write. Even speaking is covered, but only after more than 800 hours of listening. You see, after that many hours of listening the language has grown in you, making it an “adult”. You’ve acquired the language, but maybe not perfectly yet. There’s room for improvement, but that’s covered with more input and practice.

As this student proved, you don’t need to learn a language to actually speak it. Acquiring it is the goal, learning is just a way to do it. You see, the student in question had lived in Thailand for several years and learned some Thai, but didn’t speak it. So he decided to move from learning to acquiring it, and he succeeded.

Unfortunately, the ALG program is only available for a limited number of languages in Thailand. But we can replicate it and apply it to our own environment. Keith has been a great advocate of the TV method and has shown how far it can take you. But just as with ALG it takes diligence to keep going and to finally succeed.

I strongly believe we should stop talking about learning a language, because that implies that we use some kind of tool to learn it, and that’s not the most effective way to learn a language. Instead, just absorb and let the Spanish language grown in you. That’s how you learned your native tongue, and now that’s how you’re going to learn Spanish as well.