Learning a Second Language is Hard

I once thought that if you live in a place for 2 or three months you'd just acquire the language. When I was 19 during a break in college, I decided to travel to Nicaragua and stay there fore a number of months to learn the language and to understand their political history. I figured, hey, I have two months, I should be able to become perfectly fluent in that time, right?

So I have basic fluency now. But as for speaking in complex sentences, or understanding a movie in Spanish, it's not happening. I realize now that it is much harder to learn a language, and my goal of speaking like a native speaker in 2 months was a little, um optimistic.

Nonetheless the experience was really wonderful and I did soak up language. I think it really helped to have individual tutors for 2 weeks, 5 days a week. Living with a family that had experience hosting foreigners also made learning a lot easier. THey knew how to teach me and foster me somewhat.

So what makes learning a language easier is having patient people to teach you and education. Living with a family is advantageous because you feel comfortable enough to ask questions and try things out. For whatever reason, I was rarely shy about speaking imperfect spanish. I was never ostracized or anything. In fact many people inserted me into their social structure and treated me as they treated wealthy people in their society. Some individuals wanted to confide with me in their distrust of poor lazy people, others assumed that I was super rich back home. At any rate I generally feel I had social capital to burn. Perhaps that is why I rarely felt stigmatized for not speaking spanish. Boy it's really different here though.

Not speaking the language, no matter how rich you are, is stigmatized. Which I imagine makes it really hard to actually learn the language.

I have found that even when you do start to learn a language, the cultural barrier is still there. Speaking spanish to a young person i relate to is much easier than an older adult with really different life experiences.