From CRYING in Latin Class to Speaking Chinese

🌟 Episode Highlights

• classroom language learning vs real-world language learning
• finding the method that works for you
• the impact of goals

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Episode Transcript

Want to read along? 📖 Download the full transcript here

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Transcript

Hello, hello! Welcome to English Extras! I’m Jean, your guide to making your English sound natural and authentic.

This podcast is all about helping intermediate and advanced learners move beyond textbook phrases so you can express yourself with confidence.

If you want to follow along with today’s episode, I put a link to the transcript in the description for you. It’s full of key vocabulary, definitions, example sentences, as well as additional resources to help you take your learning to the next level. And the best part? It’s completely free.

Ready? Let’s learn some English.

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I don’t have a lesson for you today–I’m sorry. But if you want to hear more about my language journey, then stay for a while. If you have followed me for a while, you may already know some of this, but if you don’t know: I don’t just teach a language, I also learn languages. In fact, I am a huge language learning nerd. My husband teases me about how I buy linguistics textbooks to read for fun.

But I wasn’t always fascinated by languages. In fact, I used to believe I was a bad language learner. I’ll explain.

Let’s take it back to when I was about twelve years old. I was in the seventh grade. Now, something you should know real quick is that I was homeschooled for seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. I was taught at home; I didn’t go to a “real school.” This was because the middle schools in my city at that time were terrible and my dad didn’t want school to have a bad influence on me.

So part of my homeschool education was learning Spanish with Rosetta Stone and let me tell you…I was not a fan. In fact, I hated it.

If you’re not familiar with Rosetta Stone, it’s a language learning program that teaches you a language with a method that I like to call “guided immersion.” There’s zero translation; all you see and hear is the target language. I say “guided” because the material is separated by topic and each lesson is clearly trying to teach you a specific grammar structure and vocabulary.

Well, when there’s zero translation, learning becomes trial and error, and while now I think that’s a really good method, I didn’t think that when I was twelve. When I was twelve years old, I absolutely hated getting the wrong answer, and there was a lot of that with that particular method.

Needless to say, I didn’t stick with Spanish for very long.

Then I went to high school, and my high school required every student to take a foreign language. After my limited experience with Spanish, I was absolutely terrified of being forced to speak another language.

Thankfully, my high school offered Latin.

Long story short: I loved my classmates–I made a lifelong friend in that class–but I hated learning Latin. I was bad at it. I passed those classes with a good grade simply because I’m pretty good at taking tests, but believe me, I did not understand a single thing I was learning. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

In fact, on the very first day of Latin 4, I took one look at my first assignment and started crying because I didn’t understand anything and the very next day, I transferred to a different course entirely.

My experience with Latin convinced me that I was bad at learning languages.

I graduated high school and in 2013, I started my first year at college. Like my high school, my university also required that every student take a foreign language. This time, I was a little bit older, a little bit “wiser,” so I thought to myself: If I have to take another foreign language, then by God, it was going to be a useful one.

So I registered for Chinese 101.

In hindsight, I’m very grateful that I did, because, like my Latin class, I met some lifelong friends there. 

But I’m also grateful because it was in that class that I realized I’m not a “bad” language learner.

I took Chinese classes every semester for two and a half years. Then, in the spring of 2016, I went with a classmate all the way to Taipei, Taiwan. There, I had what we call a rude awakening. 

There, I realized the vast difference between learning a language in a classroom in order to pass an exam and using that language in the real world. They are two entirely different things and contrary to popular belief, one does not necessarily lead to the other.

I discovered this when I arrived in Taiwan late at night, got in the taxi to take me to my apartment, and failed to understand a single thing the taxi driver said to me. Which sucked, because he didn’t have his glasses and couldn’t read the address I’d written down for him in Chinese. All I could say to him, in Chinese, was “I don’t understand.”

Then, a few days later, I started my first class at the Mandarin Training Center and faced yet another harsh reminder that my time studying at my home university hadn’t prepared me for the real world at all. Even having two and a half years of study under my belt, I was placed in a class with four other students who had been learning Chinese for only three months. 

And when they tried chatting with me during our breaks, they were forced to switch to English because I couldn’t understand anything they asked me in Chinese. 

It was, quite frankly, humiliating. 

Now, I don’t want you to think that I had a terrible time in Taiwan, because Taiwan was amazing and I would take the first opportunity to go back there, but I had a rough start to my studies. 

The difference between studying Chinese in America versus Taiwan was night and day. So after just three months, I was able to chat with locals, including the lovely couple who had a small restaurant near my apartment. They made amazing fried rice and I ate there so often that they memorized my order. And I was able to tell them that I was going back home to America and thank them for their kindness and great food. 

Unfortunately, I never studied Chinese again after I left Taiwan.

I graduated from university the following year and forgot all about languages. I got a job at a bookstore, met a guy and fell in love, got a different job as an online English teacher, and moved from Kentucky to Florida. A few months after I moved here to Florida, the pandemic hit. 

During the pandemic, I discovered a whole new side of language learning. I stumbled upon a lot of language learners on YouTube and I was just… struck by this desire to try it myself. 

I wanted to take a crack at a European language. I decided on French because I liked the sound of the language, and it was at that point that I was truly bitten by the language bug because I started experimenting with every language learning method I could find. I bought books, courses, classes, apps… I watched countless YouTube videos. I was obsessed. 

After I got engaged in 2021, my then-fiancé and I decided we wanted to go to France on our honeymoon. So I started studying in earnest. I had a very solid goal that I wanted to achieve. 

Unfortunately, the pandemic wasn’t going away fast enough and made our plans to go to France impossible, so we went to New York instead. And when I lost that goal, I lost my motivation, and I dropped French. 

But I was still interested in learning languages. I dabbled in some other languages like Brazilian Portuguese, German, a teeny tiny bit of Japanese, and then eventually landed on Spanish because I live in south Florida and a ton of people in south Florida are native Spanish speakers. 

When I started learning Spanish, my language learning journey took a big turn. Like starting a new chapter.

On YouTube, I discovered a concept called CrossTalk, which led me to discover the concept of Automatic Language Growth, which in turn led me to discover comprehensible input.

I’ve realized that what works for me is listening: listening to comprehensible input and not forcing myself to speak. In fact, I think that speaking should be much farther down the list of priorities than we currently make it. 

I spend the majority of my learning time watching comprehensible input in Spanish and it keeps the language active in my brain in a way that passive apps can’t.

It’s 2025 now and I have two main goals for this year: have a 60-minute conversation in Spanish and another 60-minute conversation in Chinese. I want to refresh my Chinese because it holds a special place in my heart: it was the first language that felt alive to me.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my language learning journey so far. Don’t forget to check out the transcript in the description and as always, thanks for listening! 

Until next time!

Bye!