Welcome to Español a la lata Podcasts. Today with another interesting topic for you to practice listening to.

How do I know if I am learning a foreign language?

There could be many answers to this question, however, from linguistic science there would only be one. But first of all, let's start with the most common responses to it:

For those who have not grown up in a plurilingual environment, as in the case with citizens of European countries such as Luxembourg or Switzerland; or in the case of members of ethnic groups that still retain their ancestral languages, the most common is to approach that language through the educational system. Where that language is part of the curriculum; that is, it is a subject among the others.

There, individuals face a grading system that seems more like "disqualifications", which aims to measure the knowledge of that language with numbers or letters. If the rating is high, it is because I know a lot, if it is low, probably nothing. And generally it depends on that, the measurement of the grade point average in college or university.

In other cases, the teacher will measure this knowledge, which I do not know exactly if it is communicative or linguistic competence, by the "ability" the student has to use the vocabulary words with a more or less correct syntax. In general, he would be measuring his language production capacity. The better your grammar and vocabulary performance, the better the grade will be.

The truth is that students arrive at a learning environment in which it is posed petitio principii, that in it, all the conditions are given to learn a language. Without even the slightest suspicion that the methods are outdated, in accordance with the latest research on the matter.

The obsolescence of traditional methods has been exposed for many years starting from the obligatory referent, embodied in the Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb and in those who nowadays apply some of her principles. Among the hyperpolyglots who always cite her, we have Luca Lampariello, Steve Kaufmann and others very prominent. But among all of them, the name of the North American linguist Stephen Krashen and his hypotheses about the acquisition of the language emerges.

For the sake of brevity and thanks to the advantages of hypertext I will not mention all the hypotheses put forward by Stephen Krashen. I will limit myself to the most probable: the hypothesis of the understandable input. Which states that one is learning a language, yes and only yes, can understand messages, whether oral or written. And hence one of the most important implications for the learning process: "Talking is not practicing". Fluency is not obtained through the production of the language (speaking), but through listening.

From this it follows that the only way to know if we are learning to converse in a language is to be aware that we understand what they are saying in that language.

This was another episode of Español a la lata podcasts. Practise your  listening with our podcasts.