| It's a common question: why am I not fluent in | | | | learned our first language through a natural process |
| Spanish, French or Japanese ever having suffered | | | | of immersion: Before we started speaking, we had |
| through two to four years of it during high school? | | | | exposure to thousands of hours of conversation |
| As you probably know from your own experience | | | | around us. |
| and that of your friends, high school language | | | | When beginning to speak, we were strongly |
| education helpful for ordering in restaurants, useful | | | | encouraged and not punished for small errors. |
| for getting into a good college, and perhaps makes a | | | | Learning your first language wasn't something that |
| vacation seem slightly more authentic, but very rarely | | | | you did for 50 minutes four times per week with |
| leads to a truly fluent level of speaking, writing and | | | | some boring homework thrown in. Instead, it was our |
| comprehension. | | | | lifeline to the people, objects and culture around us. |
| There are a few reasons for this. First, the human | | | | Compared to this organic experience, learning a |
| brain is a language learning machine during its younger | | | | language from a book is dramatically different. Even if |
| years and becomes less receptive to languages | | | | language classes cannot reproduce the immersion |
| starting at puberty. Second, we were never really | | | | that we all had growing up, it's still starting too late: |
| meant to learn a language in a class room like | | | | language classes that began in elementary school or |
| something such as history or calculus. Instead, we all | | | | even before would be dramatically more effective. |