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Camila Neme is a student of modern languages at La Universidad EAN in Bogota Colombia. She has been studying for three years and she thinks that “Acquiring a new language is a process full of discipline, patience and persistence. There are different cases. Some of them successful and other ones not so”

How did you decide to start learning a second language?

“I basically loved English classes at school. I had always excellent teachers and they motivated me to be like them. My parents also encouraged me to study English because they considered I was going to have big possibilities in terms of work”

How many languages do you know?

Currently, I am capable of speaking English and French. I am also learning German and of course my mother tongue Spanish.

What has been the most difficult to learn a language?

Language learners tend to think that learning a language is a process but once we start manage basic grammatical structures and enlarge our vocabulary we want to advance towards our objective and we usually practice with different resources, such as internet, movies, podcast etc. It is good but in many cases as mine, we do not have an organized process. For instance, in my case I wanted to be C1 as soon as possible and I affected my learning process because I did not pay attention to the input I was receiving, its quality and the pertinence of it for my learning stage. I mean, I did not even know the simple past and was practicing with listening exercises for C1 level.

The problem was that I could only comprehend words but about meaning I did not. It did not work as I wanted. Without any doubts I must accept that understanding the order of the acquisition of a language was the most difficult for me. Regardless of the level learners are it is also important to advance but in a neat way. The input we receive must be contextualized to the proper level in order to be comprehensible for learners.

Why are there people who cannot learn a language?

Of course, there can be physical, cognitive and mental impediments which can delay or impeding it. IT Is impossible to fight against those kinds of conditions.  On the other hand, I must say that many people have not had a good process of acquisition. Academics do not design their courses for acquisition but for learning. That´s a big problem because people are tired of memorizing.  If there are not good extrinsic and intrinsic motivation the acquiring process will be abandoned promptly.

How Does motivation work in your Language Acquisition process?

Well, I am a person who tries to establish long-term goals in my processes. I consider that it is remarkably useful to have a destination. Many people only pay attention to small things such as grades or passing exams but It can be tricky for a good acquisition process. When a person has clear goals must be focused on achieving them. That is what I call motivation.

What can you suggest to the people who are trying to acquire a new language?

Well, I tell them that they must be organized and My only suggestion is to have a comprehensible input in order to be able to produce new output that is how acquisition fundamentally works.