Help! My brain will burst! – Doubts and anxieties of a language learner.

When you start learning a second language, you often approach the task with a certain degree of anxiety. You may feel uneasy about mastering a new language, even believing that „there is no room in your brain for a second language”. You might find that when you try to speak in your new language, bizarre and unidentifiable sounds come out of your mouth while your tongue, lips, jaws, palate and throat twist, turn, squeeze and relax in all directions and intensity. Perhaps you feel like a stranger to yourself when speaking another language. However, there is nothing wrong with all these feelings.

It’s normal to feel afraid, especially if you haven’t had the experience of being bilingual. Entering a classroom or an online lesson for the first time can be intimidating, as you don’t know the teacher, the students, or how the lessons will be conducted. This fear is more than common during the first classes with a new teacher. You need to accept the fact that you will make mistakes and that acquiring a language involves stumbling, falling, getting up and going forward and repeating this process again and again. Your success will depend on how good you are at waiting patiently for the delayed reward of e.g. communicating proficiently with a native speaker.

How do we learn a new language?

Learning a new language is taxing. It’s important to understand that your brain’s plasticity allows it to adapt while learning to speak a foreign language. This flexibility is the key to learning a second language. The process of learning, acquiring and internalizing a new language can breed anxiety due to the belief that your brain won’t be able to cope with this daunting task. But how does your brain find room for a new language? The answer lies in the brain’s ability to build new connections related to vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and conversation skills.

For example, let’s take English, first we establish connections between this little animal and various aspects:

• A word: A label for the group of (a group of dogs).
• Pronunciation: The individual sounds in the word (d + o + g) and the mouth movements needed to produce them.
• Writing: The unique scribbles that represent the word.
• Related words: „Dog” and „cat” are related because they are both common pets, while „dog” and „wolf” are linked because a dog is a domesticated wolf.
• Similar-sounding words: The word „dog” and “bog” might not have much in common, but they are phonetically connected.
• Visually similar words: Words that look similar in writing, even if pronounced differently, are also connected. Take for example such words as „chore” and „choir,” which are pronounced differently despite the similar „ch.”

Practice makes perfect

The more you practise a connection, the stronger it gets. You could practise by seeing the word written out, using it in conversation, writing it down, reading all about dogs, or listening to a podcast about them. You make some connections at an early age when you learn to speak your own language and these connections are strong, but other which you learn later on in life may be weaker.

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The role of connections

There are words you are very well familiar with—particularly those in your first language which you use frequently—the neural connections are incredibly strong. These connections have been reinforced over years, or even decades. So, when you come across a new word in a new language, it’s natural to rely on those strong existing connections first: We tend to translate in our heads, moving from the image (concept) of a dog → word in the first language → word in the second language, instead of directly linking the image (concept) to the meaning. Consequently, the goal of language learning is to create, through consistent practice, stronger and more direct connections.

Because the knowledge of and skill to use a language is built by creating connections in your brain, the link between a word in your first language and its equivalent in a second language remains intact—and that’s beneficial! This connection helps you to make quick translations and allows you to do such intriguing linguistic feats like code-switching.

The same principles apply to grammar. Although grammatical concepts are often more abstract than concrete nouns (such as „past tense” or „expressing affection”),the connections in your brain for different verb tenses can be stronger or weaker depending on how well you have learnt the rules for using grammatical concepts. You might also notice yourself mentally translating grammatical structures.

Why do you transfer grammar from your first language?

With the strong connections you’ve built in your first language, let’s look at the core question: Why do we apply the rules of our first language to new languages we’re learning?

When you want to express something in a language, your brain starts by „activating” the idea or concept you want to convey. If you know multiple languages, this means that multiple words or phrases also light up. For recently learned words or grammar, your brain finds it easier to choose the stronger language connection and transfer that information from your first language to the second. This is often referred to as L1 (first language) transfer. It takes significant mental effort to deactivate your first language connection so that you can use a second language.

If you’re a Polish speaker and you’re learning English, you might encounter situations where your Polish word order connection is stronger than your English word order connection, even if you’ve built strong connections with the individual English words you’re using. That is how the English words would come out in Polish order.

Language links and influence

This phenomenon is particularly true when there are other connections between the languages coexisting in your brain. For example, Spanish and Portuguese are closely related Romance languages that share many cognates—words with similar pronunciations and meanings. These cognates form strong connections in both languages! Spanish and Portuguese also share a lot of grammar, making it a challenge to choose the right structure depending on which language you need.

As you can see, mental translation from one language to another is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than eliminating translation altogether you should embrace it and use the knowledge of your native language for recognizing patterns in the use of vocabulary, grammar etc. in your new language. Moreover, discovering analogies between languages can help you make good guesses about their grammar, vocabulary and language usage.

Conclusion

To sum up, when learning vocabulary, your brain connects the image or concept of an object with the word that it represents, as well as its pronunciation, spelling, and grammatical category. These multiple connections illustrate how our brain builds links at different times in our lives. Recent research shows that the ability to create connections and acquire knowledge makes it easier to learn new languages, regardless of age. When learning a new language as an adult, you rely on your native language or other languages you’ve already acquired to make new connections related to the meaning, pronunciation, grammar, and spelling of words.

There is nothing wrong with transferring grammar from your first language to another language. It may seem that our native language makes learning a second language more difficult, however the more languages you know, the more connections you can build, facilitating the learning process. It’s perfectly normal to sound different from a native speaker at times. The question is whether we need to make an effort to sound like a monolingual native speaker. Perhaps our goal should be successful communication and the skill of expressing ourselves efficiently and effectively in our target language.

Let me know what you think about this!

Image by Freepik

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