Most people have a romantic image of a successful language learner, someone having sophisticated conversations with native speakers and crafting essays with effortless clarity. Or some similar image.

While imagining success is easy, becoming a language master is difficult enough, for most people will drag you down by insisting on moderation (mediocrity). They may tell you that successful people are boring people without personality and while this is true for some people, there are just as many successful language learners who still manage to lead interesting lives.

Those who wish to become masters must go beyond moderation, but becoming a language master and avoiding the one dimensional trap at the same time is far more challenging, for there is only a thin line between you and the trap.

The tale of Dan is a cautionary tale for those who wish to achieve a high level. Dan became a language master but fell into the trap, which could have been avoided in hindsight.

Success at a Cost

Languages are fun things to learn, but terrible prisons. I’d never again want to go back to being unable to take a moment in silence and have a cup of tea. To read something in my own native language. To talk with old friends and people I grew up with.

The story begins with Dan, a monolingual American, whose motivation to learn Japanese was getting a scholarship at a prestigious Japanese university.

Although language learning has been seen as a difficult endeavor that requires talent, many blogs have been published in recent years showing you that reaching a high level is doable. The difficulty lies in knowing when to follow these rules and when to break them.

The first piece of advice: Engage in total immersion. Use every second. Forget about silence.

Immigrant children who come to America absorb English just by growing up in it. For adults who live in other countries, immersion requires conscious effort, otherwise they are trapped in a local bubble, unable to speak the local language even after living there for 10-15 years.

By using every second available, you no longer can you make the excuse “I don’t have enough time”. There is always time for language learning. For Dan, this meant spending every second of his life immersed in the language. Even while in the bathroom or waiting in line, he was always listening to Japanese material.

This was the cost of success as I saw it. Absolute dedication. Constant vigilance against sliding back into an English based life. And so, when I did talk to people in English there was a good chance that I had nothing really to talk to them about.

Using time well means acquiring language quickly, but giving yourself an occasional break to enjoy the peace of introspection. Without this break, you become trapped in the shallow depths of a foreign language, without any linguistic depth in your native language that helps make reflection possible.

Another piece of advice was to avoid native English speakers.

By forcing yourself into an environment where you can’t speak English, you develop proficiency out of necessity.

Dan also spent more time with his Japanese friends and made the effort to avoid his native English speaking friends. While interacting with native speakers gives you extra practice time, never abandon people such as old friends because they cannot help you improve in your target language.

Already we can see how this piece of advice will eventually isolate Dan from people that he knew extremely well from childhood and replace them with people who only dispense free practice, without any concern for personality.

There is no need to make every single interaction turn into a free practice session. You can always learn the language on your own, but you don’t always get the opportunity to meet interesting people. If some guy wants to practice his English with you, you could just give him a chance. You don’t need to engage in a power struggle to practice a different language. If you’re in a mixed language group, you could just get to know the people in whatever language is convenient for them, rather than trying to force language practice.

As long as you are getting input in your own time and practicing with yourself on your own terms, you can still improve.

For Dan, his Japanese improved dramatically within a single year, enough to land him a scholarship to study in Japan. Once he arrived there, he successfully wrote his dissertation in Japanese with very few mistakes. From struggling with the language a year ago to writing a dissertation at a prestigious university, Dan had achieved more than many learners could dream of.

If the story ended here, Dan’s story would be another language learning success story that would motivate more people to learn foreign languages and embark on self-improvement.

Unfortunately for Dan, he began to suffer from complete alienation from his environment.

I started to often feel light-headed and severely fatigued. Each day I’d walk along the cluttered hallway of my dormitory, down the end to the dirty unisex squat toilets. Inside the stall with the working door somebody had written a line of Robert Frost’s poem: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. I’d look at those words each day, and wonder what the hell I was doing.

What makes this unique is that in most language learning stories, the person failed to learn the language or encountered so much bad practice. But in Dan’s case, he had succeeded on all fronts, yet he was physically deteriorating, unprepared for his inevitable decline

Dan followed all the advice that had been given to him and while he ended up in the top 5%, he felt that he ended up losing too much. He knew how to follow the rules, but he did not know when to break the rules. At this point, he should have broke one of the rules to escape the one dimensional trap.

There is only a thin line between success and insanity. If you cross that line, you might end up sacrificing too much and regretting it all. That being said, I believe that most of you can reach success and still lead happy lives as long as you know when to stop. Focusing on health could easily improve productivity and prevent you from becoming depressed.

This insight could only be derived from someone who struggled so much in a foreign environment, not linguistically but culturally and socially. When you read this blog or any blog, you must know when to follow the advice and when to go against it.

Other Side Effects

The challenge of immersion brings you to a higher level than you imagined. You might even think you deserve automatic respect just because you speak the language extremely well. However, no matter how much time you invested, being at an advanced level doesn’t entitle you to anything.



Another problem is that you might feel the need to compete against others. Even if you meet someone better than you, you can still learn from them. Before you consider their advice, you should analyze their background to make sure they didn’t have any advantages that you don’t have. If they are a foreigner who started late, struggled a lot, and succeeded, their learning advice should be much more useful, for they did well despite all their disadvantages.



Conclusion

Avoiding the one dimensional trap does not mean that you should be mediocre, which itself is a different trap. If you aren’t doing well with language learning, it is better to focus on improving yourself. Only when you get closer to success do you need to pay attention to the one dimensional trap.