[LOCUTOR]

Track twenty-three, unit ten, the world is your oyster

[LAURA]

Oh, hi, yeah. I'm Laura, I'm from Barcelona, originally. I've been living in Germany for ten years roughly. And I absolutely love languages, but I also, you know, love learning them like you said in a relaxed way, like we don't have to be perfectionist, we can have fun with it and, you know, also I don't like competitiveness so much, I prefer to just, you know, do your thing, right? Do what feels right for you and just have fun with it. Yeah.

[MARJOLEIN]

Great. But the interesting thing is that even though, or maybe because of that approach and that mindset, you're able to speak several languages, so it's not like, okay, we're either relax and don't speak any languages or a perfectionist and speak all of them. So that's really interesting that we can definitely achieve that. Hum, now, I have a really important question, which is a lot of people think that they don't have the language gene, okay? They don't have the language gift, and that's probably because it didn't work out for them at school, with languages, because there were a lot of language, like wordlists or literature, and stuff like that, or they were traumatized from, they had to do well an exam or whatever. So even I was actually good at languages at school, but I didn't know how to speak, so I still felt like I learned nothing. So my question is: do you think it's possible for people to get good at languages, to get fluent at foreign languages studying by themselves, even if they weren't good at them at school?

[LAURA]

Hum. I do think it's possible, for instance, I don't do if you know him, there's this guy who teaches Italian, Alberto, from Italiano Automatico. I was very much inspired by him, and he actually talks about the fact that he was terrible at school, in English, so he couldn't even communicate. And I think the problem is that we take a method at school and we say, like we unconsciously think this is the only way to learn languages, and if I didn't learn them through this method, I am not good at them, and I will never learn them. And you could apply this to any subject, really. Like I had a really great math teacher and I was good at math, but then when we changed teacher I was bad at it at once, you know, so the teacher can influence, the method can influence. So just because you didn't learn it in that moment of time, you know, you were maybe also, I don't know, you were a teenager, you had other priorities, and maybe the method wasn't the best. Yeah. So I don't think you should take that failure and say I'm not good at languages, I'm never going learn them.