Moktor, and its implications for language learning

If you can take the time to watch a few minutes from the video below, watch from 7:30 on for Gabriel's story on learning the word Moktor in Scandinavia (which I'm afraid might not actually exist as a drink, he might have meant Akvavit) vs. learning the word for camera in Hungarian. It may be the most beautifully well-presented example of how languages are actually learnt that I've ever heard, and it rings so true to me with my own similar travelling stories. I'm sure many of you will find truth in it as well.

This video is a good opportunity to revisit the very foundation of all language learning. Yes, that's right, we're going to go deep, my fellow 'teachers' - see how I put teachers in inverted commas there? That's a clever way to show my scepticism that you can even call yourself a teacher. You're more like a facilitator or a pancake 🥞 or something.

We're going to dig down and dredge up some truth-bombs about our industry, and it may make us feel a bit uncomfortable, at times even nauseous - airsick bags have been provided for your convenience 🤢.

We can so easily get lost today in a fog of dos and don'ts. Since the 70s / 80s everybody and their dog has had some grand idea about how to learn languages faster or more efficiently, mostly at the suggestion that the way you teach sucks and if you don't adopt their method your learners will silently revolt and overthrow you in a classroom coup. Sounds an awful lot like religion doesn't it? Think about it... (Illuminati)

Anyway, from Suggestopedia, to Berlitz, to Total Physical Response, to The Silent Way, to Tomatis, to Neurolanguage Coaching, to Language Bridge, and on and on (and so on, click each name for more information if you've not heard of them before), you're spoilt for choice in terms of how many people want to tell you their way is the way to teach and learn a language at the maximum possible speed. How did we get here?

There are several obvious reasons, namely monetary and fame-seeking (which is why I'm not famous, of course, by choice... 😭), but these are not the only reasons, and these methods are not based on nonsense, far from it. Each one of them basically touches on one or more of the fundamental things that makes language learning successful, while at the same time very conveniently ignoring the very foundation of language learning I spoke about earlier - the very element their approach lacks and is trying to compensate for.

So what is this foundation, this secret ingredient, this holy grail I keep mentioning, I hear you ask? Did you manage to skip the article to this point to avoid my rambling and grab the truth nugget? Well done, my young Jedi. Have you actually read to this point? Close your computer and go outside, there's a whole world to see, stop wasting time listening to my bloody stories!

Ok, here goes: Language learning is bullshit.

"Wait, whaaaaat?"

Yeah, I got you with that one, didn't I? You didn't see that one coming. Richard Osborne, capable of saying ridiculous and inflammatory phrases, you heard it here first.

No, wait, did I say language learning is bullshit? Sorry, I meant to say the very phrase language learning is a misnomer, due to the impossible to quantify number of variables involved in the phenomenon of speaking more than one language and the relatively vast possible spectrum of definitions of the word 'learn' in the context of languages. I get a bit too excited when I type, and my delete key is broken. Anyway, let me elaborate:

Jenny, the beginning English language learner from France, exists in infinite parallel universes. Let’s compare just three of them:

Universe #1: Jenny is an 8-year-old school child in public education. She 'learns' English (I'm rocking the inverted commas today) in class with her Francophone teacher. At the end of the year, the teacher marks in her book that Jenny has 'learned' English very well, with a green smiley-face ink stamper thing ☺︎ because Jenny successfully said "I have a cat. His name is Whiskers," in her end-of-year summative test.

"Oh, oh 🙋🏾‍♀️, but she hasn't 'learned' at all has she? She can't effectively communicate in English. That teacher’s approach failed," you proudly proclaim.

Ok, I'll feed the troll... She has 'learned' in terms of the definition that someone taught her a set of English words which she could replicate under exam conditions. She will likely forget these words a full 2 days after the end of the test, but hey, for a second she will have bloody-well learned them, won't she? One definition of learning is simply rote memorisation. For Jenny's purposes of passing the school year with lots of green smiley faces on her report card, not giving a single solitary shit about speaking English, she's learned her English quite successfully.

Universe #2: Jenny is a 30-year-old professional working in a fois gras packing company in a rural village in the south of France. All her family, friends and beloved colleagues live within a short driving distance. Her whole life revolves around France - she works here, holidays here, studied here, will probably die here a very happy old woman surrounded by French-speaking grandchildren, not having ever given a single solitary shit about speaking English.

But wait... One day Jenny's boss tells her she needs to 'learn' some English to answer emails from a new foreign supplier of preservatives. The emails she'll receive will be updated stock information, which she will have to transfer on to her boss to adjust weekly production quotas. She'll have to reply to each email saying "Thanks for the information. Best regards, Jenny."

As French professional training is often 100% subsidised by the state, Jenny gets assigned to an English teacher for 20 hours of one-on-one face-to-face training sessions. The teacher is a TPR / Tomatis / Language Bridge / [insert religious teaching approach here] specialist. Although Jenny's objectives are clear, both she and the teacher know she'd be bored senseless attending 20 hours of training talking about writing and understanding fixed email phrases. She asks the teacher if they can secretly just chat and watch English videos about current affairs topics.

Her spoken level is low, but she manages to have fun with her teacher. At the end of the course, Jenny is a little more conversational than she was at the beginning, her confidence has improved, and she performs well in the summative assessment of the vocabulary and skills she's picked up during the training.

The teacher / coach / pancake gives him/herself a big pat on the back at the end of the course, thinking Jenny has successfully 'learned' at a much higher rate thanks to their wonderfully scientific teaching approach.

Six months pass, and the teacher happens to be passing by the fois gras packing plant, and decides to call in on his/her old buddy Jenny to see how she's doing. Has she finished that remodelling project in her conservatory? How's things going for little Jimmy in school this year?

To his/her surprise, upon launching into an English conversation with Jenny, she's incapable of doing 90% of the things that she 'learned' during her course. It's as if she's forgotten almost everything she was successfully evaluated on at the end of her training. What the hell happened?

This brings us back to Moktar and our video at the beginning of the article. Trying to force your brain to learn something because you feel like you need it eliminates a catastrophic amount of the elements that contribute to strong, long-lasting memories of newly learned information. Sitting in a bar and being taunted to drink a terrifying shot of a strange green alcohol that stinks of burning dead fish puts the word Moktar practically at the top of the spectrum of potential memory strength, save holding a gun to Gabriel's head at the same time.

Hearing the translation of "paintbrush" in the context of your teacher asking you about your recent remodelling project during a class where you’re just trying to kill time or prepare for some imaginary future need engages such a small percentage of the possible stimuli available for memorisation that is suffers the same fate as any rote memorisation - the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

Jenny won't practise this word, she won't go out and talk to someone about her paintbrush. Her interlocutors are Francophone, and so this word, with its very limited strength of connection in her memory, will be summarily disposed of. The next time she sees a paintbrush, her context will incite her to leverage the French word ‘pinceau’, as there is no immediate reason to try the more difficult task of recalling the French word, and without good reason the brain will always choose the easier route.

Moktar, however, is something new, something that has no easy equivalent in English, and so occupies a monopolistic place in the language memory. Perhaps when Gabriel drinks the same drink in Iceland, where it has a very different name, this time with the aforementioned gun to his head, the Scandinavian word Moktar will risk being superseded by an eventually stronger connection to the new Icelandic word for this deadly cocktail.

To cut this monster short, in Universe #3, Jenny is 25 and goes to live in London and marries her English boyfriend / girlfriend and gets a job in an art gallery and buys a lovely apartment and has enough money to buy her parents a house in some lovely green Greater London suburb and has English-speaking kids and grandkids and NOT ONE F&%#ING PERSON TEACHERS HER SH#T and she becomes a fully bilingual English speaker.

Why? Because everything she hears in this new language is filled with environmental, emotional, social and physical stimuli. She 'learns' because her brain is programmed to do so in exactly this kind of cross-cultural survival situation.

She'll come back to live in France when she retires at 65 when she decides she misses the green hills and slightly higher temperatures of the Dordogne, and you can bet your bottom dollar she'll be capable of speaking English until the day she dies, even if she barely ever uses it anymore.

Where is the Silent Way or the Blended eLearning approach in this story? Nowhere to be found. Because that's the fundamental truth of language learning. That's why I said language learning is bullshit. Because all we're doing is putting lipstick on a pig.

So many needs to learn a language are based on sad, emotionally-devoid, real-world intended uses that we try to make the best of a hopeless situation by saying our method will make it all ok, but it can never be as good as the real thing, the real way to ‘learn’.

So many learners who need to learn another language are destined to fail in every attempt to do so, with no hope of a miracle solution.

The only way to develop language at maximum speed, with long-term results that don’t require frequent, laborious and unrealistic maintenance, is to put yourself into an environment where you physically have no choice but to communicate in that language on every single level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Anything else and you’re just a bullshitting snake-oil salesperson.

You can bet your ass that I can drop you in the freaking Amazon rainforest with a parachute and a bag full of gifts so that you end up with some uncontacted tribe and the only way out is to learn their language and negotiate your way out, you'll bloody-well come out speaking Pirahã like a German milk-maid.

Ok, I'm not making any sense anymore. So what's the conclusion? All your learners should just go parachute into a rainforest. Mic drop...