Mathematical Certainty and Emotional Fluency
A few years ago, something about language learning started bothering me.
I noticed that most people who try to learn a language never actually reach the fluency goals they have. Maybe they want to become conversational. Maybe they want to become fully bilingual. Maybe they just want to stop feeling nervous when they speak. Who knows. Everyone has different goals.
At first, I thought the answer would be to develop better teaching hacks.
What if I taught languages this way? What if I cut the learning time down like this? What if I optimized this? What if I changed that? So I experimented with everything. And honestly, almost every “shortcut” I tried completely flopped.
Thankfully, the failed experiments still left behind valuable information.
I have this weird analogy I think about frequently when tackling a difficult problem. I imagine myself cutting down a giant tree made of gold. Halfway through, I realize the tree is too big to cut down. While I feel disappointed, I am also happy because the pile of golden sawdust from my efforts is still worth something.
That’s exactly how I felt while developing my current teaching methodology.
Even though most of my original ideas failed, every failure left behind golden sawdust. Eventually, I learned there are two parts to fluency. The first part is mathematical certainty. The second part is emotional fluency.
Let’s begin with mathematical certainty.
How can you create a reliable pathway toward fluency if you can’t even clearly define what fluency is? At first, I thought maybe I would require my students to take an official proficiency exam (e.g., DELF for French. DELE for Spanish. HSK for Mandarin, etc), but I realized a lot of language learners don’t actually care about exams. So I changed gears and, gradually, developed ways to quantify fluency using numbers. I figured out what categories of language proficiency exist and how to objectively monitor progress.
For example…
I recently assessed a student whose grammar score was 89%. I then broke down what types of mistakes she made, the grammar structures she used naturally, and how much grammatical variety existed in her speech. I can now use that data to create a learning plan that has a high probability of being effective.
For a while, I thought the mathematical side was all that mattered.
That belief hurt my business. Despite the fact that students were objectively improving more than ever before, I was getting fewer positive reviews and more negative feedback. I also had this this strange feeling that people were emotionally disconnecting from the learning process and fleeing my business, even though the math was working and students were progressing on paper.
It was at that point I realized fluency is emotional too.
People don’t just want to be more fluent on paper. They want to feel more fluent. As a result, I now ask students a very different question: “How would you know, in your own eyes, that you’ve reached your fluency goals?”
The answers are usually emotional:
“I can talk to my partner’s parents without panicking.”
“I stop sweating when I speak.”
“I stop second-guessing myself.”
“I finally feel confident.”
“I can understand fast speech.”
“I can carry day-to-day conversations.”
On another note…
The emotional struggle someone experiences usually points toward a measurable root cause. Once you identify the measurable root cause, you can usually fix it with surprisingly simple strategies. When the measurable problem improves, the emotional problem usually improves too because the underlying cause is fixed.
For example, if someone says, “native speakers talk too fast,” usually the real issue is vocabulary size. If your vocabulary is too small, your brain can’t process speech quickly enough. So native speakers sound impossibly fast.
Today, my goal is very simple.
I want people to both feel more fluent and be more fluent. I want language learners to understand why they’re struggling, what measurable factor is causing the struggle, how to improve it, and how to emotionally connect with the process.
Thanks for reading 😊
Azren
Calgary Language Nerds owner
Hire me here: https://azrenthelanguagenerd.com