by M. Es Torrens

Created on: May 01, 2008

A native English speaker, I've now started learning my fourth foreign language: Russian. While grammatically Russian is the most complex language of the four, I must side with the experts and say that your second language, in my case Spanish, is the hardest language to learn.

Why is the second language, no matter which, the hardest? First, because the language must actually be learned, rather than absorbed. Children from bi and tri lingual homes will have no problem understanding and even chattering way in multiple languages. Their brains had two years of just listening to the thousands of words before they were expected to come up with complete sentences. However, for the majority of us growing up in a single language home, our brain has to discover how to "learn" and study a language.

In the process of learning the foreign language, our brain will first rebel. "That's ridiculous how can there not be a word for adorable?" or "Why do I need two sentences to say four English words?" It is only as the brain adapts to the language and learns to accept the differences as keys into constructing and understanding language, will language acquisition occur.

While studying your second language, your brain has to learn how to willfully memorize words and put them into logical forms for easy recall. Gibberish in your second language may be funny at times (I once said told a woman that I loved eating Hungarians when I meant to say I liked eating cake), but mostly it's frustrating because you can't make yourself understood. The merging of language knowledge (words and grammar) with the sense of language (how ideas are actually expressed) takes more time for some people than for others, but the process is longest when acquiring your second language because your native language wants to dominate and your brain hasn't yet grasped how to accept the new language on its own merits.

After attaining you first foreign language, your brain has already begun to figure out that it needs to embrace the language, to listen to it, to read it, to play with it, and to savor the differences rather than ridicule them. It is only by embracing the language's differences that the learner will begin to understand the sense of language and communicate confidently and correctly. Once it has mastered the first language, all future languages follow the same pattern, but this time learning builds upon the new language and applies the lessons learned in its acquisition, this make all future languages easier, despite complications in grammar, pronunciation, and syntax.

Learn more about this author, M. Es Torrens.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.