How Can Your Anxiety Help You Learn a Second Language
And other skills your anxiety can teach you
Have you ever tried to learn a second language?
Are you one of those people who is good at it?
Then I’m not talking to you.
I’m talking to those people who tried to learn a second language and failed or, maybe tried and tried and tried and failed.
You may think anxiety is the problem, your fear of foreign languages. We can blame anxiety, but really that was just the transmission of the problem. It’s like blaming the faucet when no water comes out.
It’s not the anxiety itself that stops you. It’s the thing the anxiety keeps you from doing. And when you figure that out, not only can you learn a second language, but you can perform on stage and you can draw and you can carry on a conversation without being drunk.
Oh my gosh. What could the magic word be? Tellmetellmetellme!
I’d like you to imagine you’re standing on a huge sign (in your native language). I mean HUGE. I mean the letter A is one-hundred feet long.
Your job is to figure out what that sign says.
Yes, even if it’s in your native language, you’re going to have a hard time reading that sign. And the reason is obvious. You’re way too close to the letters.
Get into a helicopter, fly up a hundred feet, no problem. There the words are.
If you’re listening to someone speaking another language and you have enough knowledge to recognize at least 40% of the words, you should be able to get the gist. Especially if the words you know are the important ones: verbs, conjunctions. What’s stopping you?
Your anxiety. It’s making you grasp at every single word you’re hearing, hold it close to your face, suck out the meaning. You’re terrified to let a bunch of words go by without knowing what they mean.
But comprehension has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a second language. Did it ever occur to you that you can be listening to a news story on the radio and five minutes goes by and you don’t have any idea what you just heard? In that case, you weren’t anxious, but you weren’t paying attention, so you didn’t even understand your own language.
When you look for meaning in something spoken, you adjust your mental focus to take in a collection of related words that convey a concept. Focus on too few words and you don’t have enough information to make meaning. Widen your focus to take in five minutes of words without chopping them off into meaning-bites, it will all go in and out of your head.
The skill you require to understand a second language is the active ability to adjust your focus to match the task at hand. In this case, the task is to identify how many words in that language you need to take in to get each concept. It can’t be too many, and it can’t be too few.
It’s a moving target. Sometimes you’ll have to take in more, sometimes less. Just like the first sentence in this paragraph had four words and the second had nine.
Because there’s no punctuation, no visual cues, to help you in audio, you have to chop up what you’re hearing yourself. When you succeed in understanding a five-minute podcast in Italian, you’re actually letting ten or twenty words go by at a time without actually worrying about them. If you’ve got enough vocabulary and grammar, and if you’ve practiced with the language and know how it lays, and if you widen your focus to take in the right number of words, the meaning comes to you the same way it comes to you in your native language.
Anxiety kills this remarkable process. But you don’t have to stop your anxiety to get it back.
All you have to do is get better at this skill, this focus-changing skill, this moving target of widening and narrowing your focus depending on the task at hand. As you start to understand, your anxiety may go away by itself. And if it doesn’t, you’re still understanding, just while you’re anxious!
I promised you a lot of other things too: performing, drawing, having a conversation. Are these things going to magically happen for you?
In order to perform, you have to be able to get past the minutiae of your performance. Every second doesn’t live by itself. You have to pay attention to the task at hand, playing, singing, breathing, for however long each thing lasts.
In order to draw, you have to be able to take in the right amount of visual information in front of you, something recognizable that you want to draw. Too much (“I’ll draw that tree!”) and you can’t represent the way the pieces come together. Too little and it’s hard to make all the tiny squiggles come together.
In order to have a conversation, you have to widen your focus to take in the other person, what they’re saying, so you can respond meaningfully. Again, too much detail and you’re staring at their nose, and too little and you wonder what they’ve been saying all this time. The moving target of attention, changing your focus to match the task at hand, is the skill you need.
And how cool: If you can get good at it in one area, you can get better at it in all of them! So you can pick your favorite, the one you want to do the most, or the one that’s easiest for you, and use it as your opportunity to increase that skill.
Anxiety can hamper your ability to change your focus, but anxiety isn’t the problem you have to solve. Having flexible focus is, and you can either ignore your anxiety, find some way to ease it, or just take it along for the ride while you work on that skill. Pay attention to the task at hand and you’re on your way to being able to do anything you want.