This Twitter thread really spoke to me. I wanted to share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it.
[ID: A twitter thread of 10 tweets by lhkuroda that read:
Tweet 1: I teach Japanese (language) and one thing I often hear students say is that they want to become “fluent” in Japanese. I don’t think this is a reasonable goal. Instead I ask: what do you want to talk about fluently? Who do you want to talk fluently with?
Tweet 2: No native speaker of any language is completely fluent in their language bc no language is singular. If I were hanging around a group of rocket scientists speaking in English I would have no idea what they were talking about.
Tweet 3: Any language is almost always fissured by class, race, region, profession, even time (!) and the illusion that it is a singular thing that can be mastered is a myth created by nationalism / nation states
Tweet 4: There’s also no reason why “native speakers” should be the only benchmark by which you measure your progress as a language learner. People who were born and raised in Tokyo speak a particular kind of Japanese bc that is what is useful for their life. Maybe it’s not for yours!
Tweet 5: This is especially relevant when it comes to heritage speakers who have grown up in countries other than Japan. Why would you expect your Japanese to be the same as someone who lived their whole life in Japan? That would not have been advantageous to you.
Tweet 6: When Japanese people migrated to other parts of the world in the early 20th century, the Japanese they spoke changed too. Language adapts to circumstance because it is a tool for doing something, and you will need to accomplish different things in different places.
Tweet 7: When we think critically about how a student will or wants to use Japanese, it often turns out they want to talk to their family, or talk about manga, or read the news. Those are attainable goals that allow us to spend our time and resources in better ways.
Tweet 8: Don’t have expectations for what you’ll be able to do in a language you’re learning that are higher than the expectations you have for the language you use most of the time!
Tweet 9: You’re also not going to progress if you live in a place where there’s no need for you to use the language you’re learning. You have to alter your environment by creating the need to use it.
Tweet 10: Anyway learning a heritage language or reconnecting with a heritage language is a daunting task but I love to help people with it. Always open to DMs from heritage learners of JP or if you have thoughts on heritage languages 💖
End ID]
I was literally just thinking about this thread the other day while thinking about my experience with Spanish. I took SIX continuous years of it before, and at this point, while I certainly could converse with a native speaker of my same age, it definitely wouldn’t be at the same level of skill. I’m familiar with all complex tenses and conjugation, but not off the top of my head. A vast majority of the vocab fell off as soon as lessons stopped. For a long while I largely considered all of that a failure.
But do you know who I recently could confidently speak with? The trilingual 3yo last school year who had spanish as her main home language. I knew and remembered a majority of the language equivalent to what we typically said to the children in english. What vocab i had forgotten was easily identified and studied (and it was way less than “every piece of Spanish ever spoken under the sun”). My spanish lessons were not a failure. They’re a perfect fit for me! I’m a preschool teacher!
That last response touches on something I see tons of people doing (myself included, in the past) without even realizing that they’re being massively unfair to themselves.
They compare themselves to native speakers of the same age, instead of the same experience level.
Say you’re 20 years old and you’ve been learning Japanese for 2 years. And you’re feeling down because you still can’t get anywhere near the skill level of a Japanese 20-year-old.
Now consider a 38-year-old American who has been learning Japanese for 20 years. You but 18 years in the future, basically. Should you, after 2 years, feel like a failure if that American speaks Japanese at a higher level than you? No? You think that’s an unreasonable comparison, since they’ve got literally 10 times more experience?
THEN WHY IS IT REASONABLE TO COMPARE YOURSELF TO A 20-YEAR-OLD WHO’S BEEN LEARNING JAPANESE FOR 20 YEARS?
Do you, year-2 learner, have a vocabulary of 50 or more words? Can you say sentences with 2-3 words in them? If yes, then congratulations! You speak at a native level! Those are the things a 2-year-old is expected to do!
Second-language learners learn FASTER than native speakers, by virtue of having one language and a bunch of life experience already. It takes a WHOLE YEAR for a baby to figure out that words are even a thing and start saying a few of them. They’re practicing this language every waking moment, and it’s going to take YEARS for them to catch up to you practicing part time. Over a decade, even, when it comes to reading.
Yes, they’ll have a native accent and they’ll probably converse more smoothly eventually and use the language in a wider variety of situations. But who cares? You can still communicate with a foreign accent. And by the time they actually reach your level, you’ll both have enough communication skills to meet your needs in the language, and it won’t really matter who does it “better.”
