How long does it take to learn another language? (Part 3)

Factor 3: The Individual Learner

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES – Differences in age, gender, personality, learning ability, motivation, etc. can all affect how quickly you learn. For example, younger learners seem to be better at learning pronunciation features of English compared to older learners. However, older learners are better at using skills and strategies to help them learn English compared to children. Motivation and personality are also factors that are likely to affect how quickly you learn, e.g. highly-motivated individuals who look for opportunities to communicate with other people in English are likely to learn faster.

BELIEFS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING – Learners who hold negative beliefs about their ability to communicate successfully in another language are likely to be slower in learning a language. Similarly, if the learner has negative feelings about the culture where English is spoken, this could also have a negative impact on how quickly a language can be learnt.

CLEAR LEARNING OBJECTIVES – Learners with clear goals and of their reasons for learning a language are likely to learn more quickly than those without clear goals and objectives. For example, learners studying for an exam such as the IELTS or TOEFL are likely to have a clearer goal and so may learn more quickly as a result.

FIRST LANGUAGE – The differences between English and the first language of a learner are likely to have quite a big impact. For examples, similarities in vocabulary can help many speakers of other European languages to learn English faster. On the other hand, learners whose first language is written in a different script to English (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korea, Arabic, Thai, etc.) are likely to learn English more slowly. As an example, the Foreign Service Institute (an American government department) put different languages into categories to show how easy or difficult they are to learn for native speakers of English. European languages such as Spanish, French and Italian are in the easiest group whereas Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic are in the most difficult group. Therefore, a native English speaker who is learning Spanish can make much more progress than if they are learning Chinese. The same is likely to be true in reverse, i.e. A native Chinese speaker will make more progress at learning Japanese than they would at learning English. However, there is some evidence that these differences are much more important at lower levels than at higher levels, so it’s not all bad news if you are learning English – you just need to be more patient when you are at a lower level!

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