The Psychology of Language learning

Hi language lovers,

I'll be dealing on the psychology of learning a language because as we all know and agree there is a psychology to everything in life, even if not all, at least most things in life.

What does it take to learn a foreign language? At first glance, it might seem straight forward: with hard work, consistent study, and lots of time, you’ll eventually master the complexities of another tongue. However, in terms of psychology, it’s not so simple. There are many psychological factors such as your reasons for learning the language, as well as the methods you use to learn new words that can drastically affect the languages learning process. Additionally, learning a language confers several practical and cognitive benefits that you might not expect.

Here, we’ll take a look at the underlying psychology of language learning by examining the 3 Ms of foreign languages: Motivation, Memory, and the Mind.

Why falling in love is the best way to learn. It’s no secret that you need to be motivated to learn a language: without motivation, you’ll never find the drive to go to class or pick up your course book. But motivation comes in many different forms. For example, if you’re studying Japanese, you may be motivated to learn the language because you love anime and want to experience it in its original language. Alternatively, you may be motivated because your job is offering a big raise to employees who can communicate with Japanese clients in their mother tongue.

There are two types of language motivation:
i) Intrinsic language motivation comes from within (inside); it’s borne out of personal interest (such as loving anime). As it turns out, intrinsic motivation is the much more powerful of the two: when we’re genuinely interested in learning a language for the sake of learning it, we learn faster and more efficiently. Intrinsic motivation; maximising your ability to remember If we could flawlessly memorise everything we see after looking at it only once, learning a foreign language would be a much faster and easier process.

ii) Extrinsic language motivation comes from outide; it’s a response to our desire to achieve some sort of unrelated goal (such as getting a raise at work). This distinction also explains why language classes often produce lacklustre results. If students are forced to learn a language that doesn’t interest them solely for the sake of passing a test, they are operating entirely on extrinsic motivation, and are unlikely to retain any real language skills.

Unfortunately, we still haven’t figured out how to make our memories perfect. But there are some measures we can take to optimise our ability to remember words and phrases, and speed up the language learning process as much as possible.

Probably the best known memory strategy in the language learning world is spaced repetition, which has become something of a buzzword among foreign language learners. Spaced repetition refers to the presentation of vocabulary items throughout long-term intervals. This has been proven to help us remember vocabulary much more robustly than cramming words into a short period of time.

Without complex computer generated algorithms, it’s not easy to take advantage of spaced repetition by yourself. But luckily, digital flashcards like Anki and online language courses like LinguaLift utilise spaced repetition, and thus constitute great tools for the everyday language learner.

Another simple and actionable way to improve our retention of words is to take advantage of what is known as context-dependent learning. When we remember a given piece of information, our brains also store a lot of extraneous information such as our environment and surroundings when the memory was formed.

Have you ever had the experience where you remember a certain word or phrase because you can visualise where it was located on the page of your course book? This is because of context-dependent learning: your brain stored irrelevant information (the word’s location on the page), and recalling that information helped you remember the word.
Keep your language-learning context as consistent as possible to maximise the rate at which you retrieve and consolidate memories.

The take-home point here is that you should keep your language learning context as consistent as possible to maximise the rate at which you retrieve and consolidate memories. For instance, if you’re studying Spanish vocabulary, do so (to the extent that you can) in the same place, at the same time of day, and with the same materials.

What is the point you are going to try out in your language learning process, Leave a comment below.

To your learning
of Languages,

FrenchLadyDisi
Your Language Tutor.