Big Think – Stephen Johnson
When I visited Buenos Aires last year, I thought the six semesters of Spanish I took in school would pay dividends. The fast flow of Spanish from Argentinians quickly killed that delusion. I realized I had forgotten most conjugation rules and vocabulary, and I was able to formulate only simple, stilted sentences: “I can have a beer?”
So it was admittedly encouraging to hear that Arieh Smith, a New York City-based polyglot who runs the popular language-learning YouTube channel Xiaomanyc, didn’t leave his first foreign language classes with much proficiency either.
“In high school, I was actually terrible at learning languages,” he said. “I spent years learning Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and it just never clicked. I would be just very confused why, year in and year out, I would have no understanding of this material despite pretty good grades and, you know, continually doing the work.”
It finally clicked when he entered a one-year immersion program, through Princeton University, to learn Chinese in Beijing. Students had to sign a pledge: If you speak English at any time during the program, you get kicked out (a policy that had been enforced at least once, he said). Smith eventually became fluent in Chinese, partly through the constant immersion in a Chinese-speaking environment, and partly through language-learning software that utilizes spaced repetition, a technique where review intervals are progressively increased to enhance long-term retention.