Got a question for you.
Do you live in the country that speaks the language you're trying to learn?
And if not, do you think it's hindering you from learning that language?
It's Saturday again and I wanted to share some of my personal language learning experiences
with you guys that has to do with living in the country and learning the language in that
country versus learning the language here in the United States.
A lot of people have told me that in order to learn a language have to move to that country
where they speak the language, and you have to be immersed in the language and then you're
just gonna learn it, and it's just gonna come to you and supposedly that's the only way
to learn this language.
Well I'm here to tell you guys today that this is not true.
You can learn a language no matter what country you live in, and moving to the country that
speaks that language is definitely not a guarantee for learning that language.
And I'm telling you guys this from personal experience because in the year 2012 I lived
in country called Djibouti which is a very tiny country in Africa that speaks Arabic
and French.
Back then I was younger and I was stupid and I just didn't have any interest in learning
languages.
I sort of had a little bit of an interest in learning Spanish when I was in high school,
and I had taken a few classes and didn't really try that hard and didn't really learn a lot
but as far as learning French or Arabic I had no interest in it, and I just thought
it was useless I thought "When am I ever going to use this skill?"
It's not worth my time.
It's not worth my investment so I put no effort into learning French while I was in the country
that spoke French.
I lived there for six months.
I could've learned a lot during that time but I didn't.
I didn't learn anything.
I hung out with American friends.
I basically avoided contact with the natives that lived in the area that didn't speak English
and the majority of the signs and everything that were in the country were in French and
English so I basically have no motivation for learning French.
I just sluffed it off and it wasn't something that I was interested in.
And after spending six months in the country that speaks French, I left the country without
knowing a single word in French.
I had been surrounded by French speakers every day I had seen signs and all kinds of stuff
they were in French and I had every opportunity to be exposed to language and I learned nothing.
I learned no French.
Fast forward a few years from there, I am now back in the United States in the state
of Wisconsin and this was during the summer and I just decided out of the blue that I
was in the start learning French.
I guess I was a little smarter and wiser and I just realized that learning languages is
a valuable life skill and so I decided I was gonna do it.
And I didn't take any classes.
I didn't move to a French speaking country.
I stayed right here in Wisconsin and I used Duolingo.
I used online resources.
Several apps and stuff, and I found friends online that speak French.
I know maybe two people here in the United States that are fluent in French and I didn't
talk to them hardly at all.
I found people online that are living in France, living in Canada, living in Haiti, people
in Belgium.
I started speaking with them and I just made friends online.
I found on Interpals, on shared lingo and Duolingo.
I made friends on Facebook, and on Instagram, and I started chatting with these people in
French.
I barely knew anything, like I said, I didn't learn anything in the six months that I lived
in Djibouti.
But then when I started learning and I got motivated for my own personal benefit to start
learning French, that's when it all started to sink in.
And I surrounded myself.
I immersed myself in the French language here in the United States.
So I made a rule for myself that I was never gonna listen to English music.
When I was in the car it was always French music.
It wasn't Spanish music, it wasn't Esperanto, it was French.
So every time I'm in the car I'm immersing myself in French and I'm getting exposure
to the French language and whenever I would watch movies, preferably I would watch the
movies with the French dub or if I was watching with other people I would just ask, can we
at least put the French subtitles on so I'm getting exposure to French language through
that.
I changed my Facebook to French I changed the language of my computer to French, I changed
my phone to French, I wrote notes to myself on my calendar in French, I got a bunch of
little sticky note and put them all around my house and I wrote French words on the objects
that I was sticking them to so that way I can learn the French words in context when
I'm using those objects and I would pronounce them when I was using those objects that would
give me a little bit of a pronunciation practice too.
So here I was in the United States, learning French by myself, immersed in the French language
because I had built this French bubble all around me and everything that I was doing
all day long was French.
And even though I was in the United States and no longer in the country that actually
spoke French I learned way more here in the United States in my own little French immersion
program that I had created for myself here than I ever did in the country that spoke
French when I was surrounded by native French speakers and signs in French and all kinds
of french things in that country, but I didn't put any effort into learning it, so all that
was useless to me.
Now, I'm not gonna make the claim that moving to the country is useless for your language
learning.
I mean obviously that makes it really easy to submit yourself submerge yourself and immerse
yourself in the language if that's what you're gonna do, and if you're motivated and dedicated
enough to do it.
But if you're not, if you're like me, and you don't put in the effort to learning the
language then it's gonna do you no good whatsoever.
And if you stay in the country that you grew up in, it's still not possible to create yourself
and immersion environment in that country because it all comes down to motivation and
dedication and consistency.
Are you willing to put in the time effort and energy to learn that language?
Are you willing to make sacrifices like giving up all your English music or changing your
phone and your Facebook to friends or to whatever language you're learning?
If you're willing to make these kind of sacrifices, then you have an immersion environment and
you're gonna be learning that language a lot faster than if you're just in the other country
when you're surrounded by French speakers, but you're not actually speaking to any of
them because you're too addicted to your native language and you're too scared to speak up.
And maybe you say, "Well Aaron, I've been learning French in school," or "I've been
learning Spanish or German or whatever in school for four years and I can still barely
speak any of it."
Yeah, how's your motivation?
Are you just learning the language because you want to get a good grade?
Because that's not gonna cut it.
You gotta start meeting people.
speak the language into start talking to them in that language and if you're too scared
to speak up then you're not gonna learn anything.
So I encourage you, go on interpals.com, download the hellotalk app, try to find people that
speak that language on Facebook or twitter or tumbler or Instagram or whatever social
media that you use, and start speaking in French.
Start commenting on their stuff in the language that you're learning, and then this language
is gonna come alive to you and it's gonna start making sense because you're actually
using in context.
You're not just memorizing charts, and you're not just memorizing verb conjugations, and
noun declensions and all these things you're actually putting this into use and you actually
have a reason to learn that language.
So all in all, my reason for creating this video is because I don't want you to be discouraged
that you can't learn the language because you can't move to the country.
That's not true.
You can learn this language to fluency from your house and you can create an immersion
environment for yourself in your home country.
So I hope this video has been encouraging to you and has given you some ideas for how
you can make an immersion environment for yourself in your home country.
If you're learning a language then I encourage you to subscribe to my channel because you're
gonna be getting videos every week that are gonna help you learn how to learn your language.
You're not only gonna be learning your language, you're gonna be learning HOW to learn that
language.
And we're gonna make language learning fun, fast, and easy.
You can also follow me on Twitter at @FingtamLangs So feel free to talk to me on Twitter.
Talk to me on the comments below here on YouTube.
So until then, thanks for watching my video, and we'll see you guys next time.