Optimum exposure

What is exposure? What do we expose ourselves to? Why is exposure important to learning a language?

Those are useful questions to ask, but I’ll start with another: How does anyone learn a language? The answer is that you get used to it. Simply that. You don’t need a degree. You don’t need any form of education. You don’t need to be an adult, or even a child!

You get used to it, because it is all around you. You are exposed to it. Gradually you pick out more and more meaning. 

Language appears to be a meaningful thing, so that is why you pay attention to it. It gets you what you want: company, milk, a toy, your wet clothes changed, and if you are lucky a ride on someone’s shoulders.

It’s a long-term this, getting used to it through exposure. It makes no sense to rush it, because you can’t. That doesn’t work. So you don’t over expose yourself. You take naps. You switch off when you need to.

So, just as a little UV is good, you don’t overdo it with vitamin D. You go for a walk in the mountains, but you wear your woolens. You protect your ears when you mow the lawn. You put on safety glasses in the lab. You don’t sleep in the room where you broke the thermometer. You slap on sunscreen.

To learn a language you expose yourself by listening and reading to material that you enjoy and that is not too difficult. Go for low intensity  and a maximum of hours.

Remember the comics you were into? Do you recall those first few episodes of Sesame Street? Tunes and rhymes and ditties and puns. Jokes that you copied down to retell. Picture books that you valued and treasured and kept. Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. Early Disney cartoons.

All of it magic!