Language Personalities (some thoughts)

in #language7 years ago (edited)

A language teacher isn't a teacher at all. At least not the good ones. Rather, a language teacher is an interpreter between person A (the student) and person B (the language). And when I say a language is a person, of course I'm not being literal, but I am being completely serious. Each language has its personality (literally) and its own way of looking at the world, almost as if it were independent of its speakers. Like all things, this changes (usually) (very) slowly over time, just as any given person does over the course of their lifetime. Understand the personality and make it your own, just as an actor takes on the personality and character traits of the role they're playing. In this way, a foreign language is no longer foreign, but intimate - a part of your very own soul. This is what more or less happened with your native language and there's absolutely no reason you can't repeat the process (and much faster, at that). This is perhaps the single greatest "hack" of language learning.