John Fotheringham On Crafting Better Mental Tools For Language Mastery

Ever really stopped and thought about how language learning occurs?

When you’re a child the majority of the way learning occurs is listening and speaking, right? But what about when you progress in school and you are taught a second language as part of your curriculum? Is it the same process?

Or is the focus more on reading and writing?

Listening and speaking are innate, they’re organic, and it seems like they just happen “naturally” after much “natural” coaxing from parents and other people in the environment.

Or are they…?

Normally, we might say that reading and writing are human technology, an invention that differs from language itself. But learning these tools of representation language visually also involves a lot of coaxing and they are not any more or less invented than language. And when it comes to writing, it’s just a fact that some people go to school for decades, earn PhDs and still can’t write their way out of a cardboard box.

I know this from personal experience because I’m still struggling to de-academize my own writing after all those years of indoctrination!