You Just Have to Talk

There's a crazy dude out there who claims to have become fluent in an inordinate number of languages simply by talking. No classes, some self-study, and a jovial attitude seems to be what he brings to the table.

The crazy part is: he's right.

I don't know enough about any of the languages he claims to speak to tell you if he's doing it right. But I know plenty about language learning and basically, on every account, the dude has it nailed.

The only difference between a fluent speaker of a foreign language and someone who does not speak a foreign language is the speaking part. If you spend every day making a conscious effort to speak only your target language, you will acquire it. End of story. Now, it may take some people a long time to do this and it may take others a short time to feel comfortable or even minimally functional in their target language, but the fact is, if you expend the effort on speaking, you will learn to speak a different language.

This is something the Japanese may never fully understand.

I don't have to go back over all the excuses I have been given for why Japanese people can't speak English (or other foreign languages). The reasons are many and varied, imaginative and mundane, logical and completely absurd. As are the Japanese, if you get them one-on-one (every Japanese person does not like rice, contrary to popular belief perpetuated by those Japanese people who do like rice).

While the teachers constantly tell you (and their students) that their students cannot speak a foreign language without suffering a stroke, you can see the obvious falsification of this theory right in front of your own eyes.

Yesterday, my third-year students at the Jr High played fruit basket - a seat substitution game in which one person in the middle of a circle of chairs says something and the people who have a matching element to that statement must switch chairs, including the speaker - a game they love because they get to run around and push each other over. Shy students who will not look at me in class were speaking loudly and clearly with decent accents. Tougher kids, already interested in English to varying degrees, were successful as well. They obviously can speak, when you provide a fun environment.

But why would they even try when the only person who speaks English is me? The teachers won't speak in front of the students for fear of making mistakes. They stare at me in bewilderment when I ask questions or seek clarification. They quarantine English speaking time by calling it my "corner" as though this is the only appropriate time for speaking English: for fifteen minutes twice a week. They continually praise my acquisition of Japanese and tell the students they could do the same if they only study harder in class.

And then they shake their heads and lament Japanese students' sad and perpetual failure at acquiring communication skills, a failure that is no doubt intrinsically linked to being Japanese.

It is an unfortunate and expensive waste to hire a foreign language speaker to stand at the back of your classroom and listen to a lecture in Japanese about how hard you must study to learn English.

The only reason they don't speak English is because they won't.