How to learn a foreign language very quickly, understanding how the brain works

For a native English speaker, it is very difficult to find the motivation and consistency to learn a foreign language. That is because we are born into a language of “privilege”. English is the hegemonic global mode of language which dominates culture. Outside of Britain, America, Australia, etc everyone else is forced to learn English as a second language, which makes overseas people more prominent in learning languages out of necessity. Sometimes, some Brits even go to foreign countries impolitely expecting others to speak English, and get surprised if they don’t!

However, learning another language is ultimately a rewarding, exciting and constructive experience because you are attaining a new skillset and dipping into a world which previously you were locked out of, opening your horizons. But even if we want to, many of us struggle to find the time, resources and consistency to keep going? While we do not deny your personal motivation must be high, and invested in the language you choose to learn, in this article we offer you a very effective set of techniques for learning and studying another language in a rapid amount of time.

A Theory of how the brain works and learns: Conditioning

At the end of the 19th century, a Russian scientist known as Ivan Pavlov made a critical breakthrough in what would become a theory of educational psychology. This theory, known as classical conditioning, hypothesizes that how a human “learns” and therefore remembers things, is shaped by the pathways of electrical signals moving through the neurons in our brains. In other words, these signals configure and associate our brains with certain experiences, we become “conditioned” to recall and remember certain things. This helps us understand why trauma, or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) pose lifelong complications for how a person thinks.

So as you probably know, Pavlov conducted a famous experiment to prove his theory. He had several dogs and every time he fed the dogs, he would ring a little bell. Over time, the dogs began to associate the sound of this bell with the timing of getting fed. Therefore, whenever they heard the sound of a bell in future, they salivated and became hungry. This experiment revealed an educational method that if we repeat something to someone over and over again in certain circumstances, their brains will be “conditioned” to learn it. Some of us, for example, are able to recall the lyrics of a song when we’ve heard it so many times? This might give us a hint as to how to absorb a language…

Audio memorisation technique

So how does this relate to language learning? Well memorisation is the obvious answer, one might ask how do you find time to memorise a language? The answer is by programming it into your brain by listening to a recording of it over, and over, and over, and over again. Of course, that is provided you understand what is being said. As an example, we’d like to point you to this Youtube video. This video is 7 hours of 25 basic phrases in the language Cantonese, with translations, repeated over and over, as a calm ambient plays in the background.

The goal of this kind of video is not to sit and “watch it” but to simply play it endlessly (if needs be downloaded) again and again as you go about your day and do other things. It might not happen the first time round, but eventually it will stick and soon you will have a little voice in your head which recalls that tract of dialogue. The objective of this technique is to listen to the same phrases and dialogue so many times that it comes permanently conditioned, or entrenched in your brain. There are many more of these videos on Youtube in a variety of languages.

It is worth noting that videos about phrases are more effective and useful than ones containing individual words. That’s because it is difficult to memorise an overwhelming amount of information in the form of many different words, but phrases on the other hand are compact and create patterns in our brain that can be more easily recalled, as well as give us incentive as to why they are used. We for example, are less likely to use a random word in a given language, but we probably will use a phrase when needed.

The power of this technique is that it allows you to learn a spoken language while your time is still constrained. This is of course most effective for Latin script European languages than those where you have to learn another complicated writing system, such as Chinese, Arabic, etc. Of course this still requires your own persistency, discipline and habit. But the answer is clear, hardwire your brain.