イギリス英会話ブログ

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Everyone understands this common sense saying because everyone understands the fear of losing some skill that they have worked hard to attain. The problem it raises is relevant for Japanese students of English - or any student’s of any foreign languages - who are unable to spend some time living and studying in a country where English, or their language of choice, is spoken.

For children, total immersion is perhaps the most effective way to develop good communication skills in English, but it is debatable whether the same is true for adults. Research suggests that adults need some formal grammatical induction as well as just exposure to the language in order to develop workable skills in speaking and writing. So, students should not feel it is pointless to study English in Japan. However, what I would like to suggest in this post is that they do need to develop special techniques and a certain frame of mind in order to achieve their goals.

The reason that children can learn languages with such apparent ease is because they have an acute sense of the need to belong - and they are quick to recognize what is necessary in order to achieve this. So, if a young Japanese child is taken to America they quickly absorb the English that their contemporaries are using - because, in short, they have to, in order to survive. Adults manage to be much more equivocal about what they consider ‘necessary’. Or rather, their focus inevitably narrows to certain practical, achievable, usually economic aims.

I would like to propose that creating a sense of the necessity of English (or any language you wish to learn) is a prerequisite for success in your linguistic projects. The brain has to be fooled into believing that all this apparently irrelevant vocabulary and esoteric grammatical knowledge is of vital necessity to your future well-being. Or to put it in other words, you need to be really interested in your target language if you want to master it. I would wager that people who sit through an English lesson thinking that half of the language being presented to them is ‘not useful’ will never become highly-competent in the language. People who are not interested in words do not tend to become very good speakers. You need a positive attitude and a frame of mind that is both relaxed and focussed to help you absorb the language.

For people learning a foreign language, enthusiasm and an active imagination are the key ingredients for success. Sitting at a desk and learning vocabulary is not so interesting, but you have to imagine that at some point in the future the words in front of you will be useful and will enrich your life. You need to be able to picture in your mind possible encounters in the future where this language will be useful for you. Of course, people studying English in Japan do not have very many opportunities to use what they learn and this is why imagination is important.

I believe that learning another language is just one of many ways that you can change your life; this is because the process of imagining new encounters and new situations that you go through with studying actually create the possibility of these encounters occuring in the future. Language is a tool for changing situations - creating new possibilities. Language brings people together and pushes them apart. Perhaps with this positive frame of mind people can start to enjoy studying and recognize it as a form of self-improvement.

Don’t just learn English - change your life!