14 min
FLP13: Kick the Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language - Solocast with Polyglot Chapman Woodriff Free Language Podcast
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- Education
Aside from physical challenges, there is one main impediment to language learning: fear.
When you are afraid, your entire neurochemistry changes and you go into a state which is not at all conducive to learning and most definitely not helpful in squawking out strange noises in an unfamiliar tongue.
If you repeatedly experience fear or anything close to fear over and over in a given situation, you are likely to develop a conditioned response to those stimuli which will, unfortunately, rear its ugly head when you least want it to; for example right at the moment you actually need to speak the language in question!
My opinion is that this is exactly what happened to many people, maybe even you, in high school, or perhaps even earlier than that.
My goal here is to tease out hidden away fears, expose them for the nefarious devils they are and, ultimately, move past them into an entirely different kind of long-term potentiation; that of successfully speaking a foreign language.
Aside from physical challenges, there is one main impediment to language learning: fear.
When you are afraid, your entire neurochemistry changes and you go into a state which is not at all conducive to learning and most definitely not helpful in squawking out strange noises in an unfamiliar tongue.
If you repeatedly experience fear or anything close to fear over and over in a given situation, you are likely to develop a conditioned response to those stimuli which will, unfortunately, rear its ugly head when you least want it to; for example right at the moment you actually need to speak the language in question!
My opinion is that this is exactly what happened to many people, maybe even you, in high school, or perhaps even earlier than that.
My goal here is to tease out hidden away fears, expose them for the nefarious devils they are and, ultimately, move past them into an entirely different kind of long-term potentiation; that of successfully speaking a foreign language.
14 min