The psychology of learning

I often tell my clients about the fact that I have studied the Psychology of Acquiring a Second Language and the Psychology of Memory and I now understand that few people actually know that there is such a thing or that learning a new language is directly related to psychology.

How does psychology help us learn?

I like to think about our memory as a giant library in our mind. What is often misunderstood is that we don’t really have a file for each language but more of an entire “department” related to each language. When we want to speak fluently and with confidence, we need to go to this area, this department and pull information and knowledge only from there.

The issue comes when we try to “run between the Mother tongue department and the English Department” in hope to find the same things. The whole process becomes tiring and creates pauses in speech as well as a lot of frustration since we don’t have corresponding files in the Mother Tongue department and the English Department.

Psychologically, the frustration of not being able to find the right word, or not sounding as intelligent in English as we do in our mother tongue makes speaking in fluent English harder.

One of the hardest steps of English fluency is to let go of the idea that we need to sound as proficient in English as we do our mother tongue. The psychological effect of this line of thought will make us try to find exact specific word translations to our mother tongue vocabulary. There are not many exact translations to anything, but being able to explain ourselves and what we want to say is an other option to exact translation.

Professional English speaking, in my opinion, is about either knowing the exact words to use in the specific area of expertise, or being able to explain through definition or analogies the things we want to say.

If I had to give an example to explain this notion I would put it this way: Let’s take an HR manager explaining to a new English speaking employee about the first step they will go through when starting at the company. What the HR manager wants to say is that the new employee will go through the process of on-boarding either through a specific platform or with an employee. Now the word on-boarding is very specific to high tech companies and doesn’t fit every business. However, the HR manager who’ let’s say’ “forgets” about the term will get frustrated and pause to look for the word in her library. What I believe is better, is to just explain the term on-boarding instead - “you will go through the first process of getting to know your specific job requirements and explanation through a platform/program or with an other company employee”. Explanation in this case will provide the right flow of speech and will keep the manager from pausing to look for the word.

Now the question would be how do we “psych ourselves out” to be able to do this. Explanation as well as specific vocabulary is memorized every day through everything we hear and see. I believe that the acquisition of specific vocabulary and explanation happens when we learn it through enjoyable things.

I am a movie fan and I am always “on the hunt” for interesting movies to watch. Watching movies in English with English subtitles is a privilege we have in Israel and it is helpful.

Let’s take and other field for this example. Some of my clients work in politics and/or in municipality positions. Their vocabulary revolves around terms which are relevant to this field and it is very specific. The political vocabulary is hard to learn according to most of my clients not only because of the words themselves but also because the Israeli terms don’t always correspond to English ones. I recommend clients to watch movies about politics, listen to English podcasts about politics in foreign countries as well as here. There are series which have this kind of vocabulary too as well as songs and TedTalks.

Now, listening to those can in itself help with the vocabulary acquisition as well as expressions and idioms related to this field but it is not enough. Watching a movie in English will only get you this far. The psychology of the memory is about awareness of the process while it is happening. Let’s say I am watching a documentary about the Lincoln presidency. I will hear all of the vocabulary I need that is related to politics as well as military vocabulary. However, if I am not aware of the words and my goal, which is to remember those vocabulary words and expressions when I need them in the future, I will not be able to pull them out of my mind library when needed. We should watch movies, series, listen to music and podcasts purposefully to memorize the things we want and like so as to be able to reuse them when needed.

The way Psychology is deeply rooted into the learning process is mainly related to the purposefulness of the listening. We are mainly programmed to listen with the only purpose of answering and we should learn to "listen to listen" and "listen to remember". I believe that purposeful listening is one of the main sources of vocabulary, sentence structure, syntax and grammar we need to be able to speak fluently.