What sort of expectations do you have? I still have some scrawling which I made in the margin of a page in Nida (1957) in the spring of 1967. They were my language learning goals for the summer. I expected to become a Blackfoot speaker during the five months available to me. Ignorance was bliss. If I had known what I was doing, I could probably have gained functional communication ability during five months. As it was, there was no chance I would get very far at all. I was overconfident. Over the years since, I have met people who were under-confident about their language learning prospects. Perhaps they were perfectly normal people going to live in a Spanish speaking country, and doubted their ability to learn Spanish at all. That too is unrealistic. Any normal person can learn any language, given enough contact with speakers of that language.
But it does help to be realistic. A simplistic view of a language learning challenge can lead to disappointment and discouragement. An unrealistically pessimistic view can lead to giving up before getting started. Some languages are much harder to learn than others. It is harder to learn languages in some situations than in other situations. Some people are better at it than others. If you face a colossally difficult challenge, you can still succeed, provided you have an effective strategy. If you face a relatively easy situation, you will probably succeed without worrying all that much about your strategy. Even in a relatively easy situation, you will get further faster with an effective strategy, but it probably won't mean the difference between success and failure. In the most difficult situations, success or failure will almost certainly depend on the effectiveness of your strategy. Most situations fall somewhere in between the two extremes.
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