Hola! I am an English teacher and I am learning Spanish on Duolingo, a great app which has motivated me to study Spanish for about 40 minutes, every day, for nearly two years. I have missed only two days of class during this period. According to Duolingo’s statistics, this makes me a good student of the language. Still, I haven’t learned to speak Spanish with any degree of fluency. But, I have grasped something else from my inability to learn how to speak Spanish fluently using just Duolingo — how hard it is for students of English in India to learn English, and why.
Tricky languages
Spanish may well be one of the easiest languages on earth to learn. Unlike most other languages, it is spoken exactly the way it is written. Few other languages are like this. In French, often, what you write is not what you say. The same goes for English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and Tamil. Languages that are spoken exactly the way they are written are easier to learn to speak. But it takes more than this for a learner to become fluent in a language. Many English words like, for instance, ‘many’ are not spoken the way they are written. That is why, English is such a tricky language to learn. Spanish is not as maddening. That said, even if you learn Spanish for many years, you will not be able to speak it with any degree of fluency, unless you have a few Spanish speakers around to speak it with. Learning how to speak a language well has everything to do with having people to converse with you in the language than the fact that it is easy to read and write and utter.
This means that if learners have to attain fluency in English, it is imperative that they are placed in an English-speaking environment. If not, they may learn the rules of the language, but will not have much success speaking it. Put simply, you will learn more French if you stay for a year in a predominantly French-speaking environment, than if you went for several years to a daily, hour-long class in, say, Bengaluru. This is a reality English teachers in India have to grapple with, when evaluating how to help their English students learn the language faster and better.
Even the greatest English teacher in the world will not be able to deliver students who can speak English well if those students don’t have the opportunity to speak it with others who can speak the language with some degree of fluency. If they step out into a non-English speaking world as soon as they’re done with English class, much of what has been taught in English class is diminished or lost. As an English teacher and language learner, this is what I have discovered from trying to learn to speak French, first, in India, and then in Montreal, Canada, and Spanish without having anyone who speaks it well to speak it with. Merci and Gracias.
