Do You Need Talent to Learn a Foreign Language?

1. Cognitive Abilities

Your cognitive abilities comprise everything we have been talking about so far. If you’re already good at learning, learning is something that you’ll want to do more often. When I was learning English or French, and I got complimented for my accent or my fluency, I got even more excited to achieve more with my skills. 

This is normal. As people, we tend to do things we find relatively easy and for which we get social recognition. So, in my language learning path, my cognitive abilities have surely played a role, but, again, I don’t think that they are the main reason why I have learned so many languages so successfully. 

2. Motivation

The second factor is motivation. Without motivation, you are not going to achieve anything, no matter how talented you are. The world, in fact, is full of talented people who haven’t accomplished much with their skills. 

In this way, your talent doesn’t define your success—your motivation does. Language learning is a long journey and the people who reach the end of it are those who know exactly why they strive to keep learning day in, and day out. 

Personally, I have discovered that I learn languages to fluency because I don’t treat them like any of the other skills I have. Instead, I treat them as a fundamental part of my life and my development as a person. Once I start learning a foreign language, there is no turning back. Motivation is the fuel that makes language learning happen. Without it, you’ll go nowhere. 

3. Emotional Intelligence

The third factor is your emotional intelligence. I learned about this concept from the book “Emotional Intelligence” (affiliate), written by Daniel Goleman. 

In the book, Goleman distinguishes “rational intelligence”, the kind of intelligence that can be measured by an IQ test (where they mainly test your logical and mathematical skills), from “emotional intelligence”, which is something that can’t be measured by a simple test. This kind of intelligence has to do with the capacity to understand yourself, to control yourself and your emotions, and to be able to understand others.

All of these factors, coincidentally, play a huge role in learning a foreign language, which is why I believe emotional intelligence is a core factor in language learning success.

Emotional intelligence is also connected with your mindset. The good news is that you can work on your mindset AND your emotional intelligence; like your cognitive abilities, they are not fixed.

I myself have worked a lot over the years on both my emotional intelligence and my mindset. My mindset has completely changed when it comes to language learning and life in general, and this is due to experiences, my attitude, people I met on my path, and many other things. 

All great language learners develop a positive mindset. They don’t speak languages to get praise, but rather they speak to communicate. When someone corrects them, they don’t take it as an insult, but as constructive feedback, When you develop a positive mindset, every moment of the language learning journey is a treasure—be they moments of success, or moments of failure.

4. Time on Task

The fourth factor  is time on task. Malcolm Gladwell introduced the popular concept of the 10,000 hours rule in his book “Outliers” (affiliate). The main idea of this rule is that in order to get good at a skill, you have to spend thousands and thousands of hours learning and honing it.

If you think about the average amount of time a native speaker has put into learning their own native language, you’ll realize that, as a learner, you have a long road ahead of you. Your capacity to understand, speak, read, and even write a foreign language depends heavily on how much time you invest in each of these activities. But time is NOT the only factor at hand here. In fact, there are a lot of learners who spend a lot of time learning languages, but don’t get much value from it. 

Honestly, I don’t think that the actual act of learning a language is hard per se. 

What is hard is putting in the time, discipline, and effort to actually get learning done. You need to spend a lot of time, know HOW to spend the time in a smart way to stretch your boundaries, and develop the discipline you need to make it happen again and again over the long term. 

5. Meta-Learning Awareness

The fifth factor is your Meta-Learning Awareness. Successful language learners spend an awful amount of time learning foreign languages, but on top of that, they know how to use their time, energy, and cognitive abilities efficiently. 

They have gone through a long and difficult trial-and-error process, learning to discard what does not work and refine and work on what does. Great language learners are conscious of their own learning process, and work to control and guide its development. 

The combination of quantity and quality of time makes them incredible language learning machines. 

Great language learners continually ask themselves: “What am I good at in language learning? Does the way I am learning play to my strengths?” 

Then, they use the answers to those questions to inform their strategies and progress. I have asked myself these questions (and more) time and time again over the course of the last 30 years, and I am proud to say I have started to think out of the box—THAT has given me the opportunity to learn as much as I have.

6. Life Circumstances

The sixth factor is your life circumstances. How you live counts, and counts a lot. The people you decide to spend time with, the experiences you have, the countries you visit, what you do in your free time.

In my life, I have chosen to live and breathe languages all day long, and that has led me to live a life that currently allows me to use at least 5-8 languages every day, and some for hours on end. 

Without cultivating life circumstances which allow you to use and communicate in one or more languages on a highly-frequent basis, it will be exceedingly difficult for you to reach a high-level of language learning success. 

The Six Keys Work Together to Create Success

Here’s how to make language learning “talent” work for you: every time you see a polyglot strut their stuff and wow you with their skills, use that to give yourself some extra energy and motivation—transform that inspiration into the motivation you need to take action.

Work on yourself, on your goals, your skills. Your success, in the end, is not actually defined by talent—neither yours or anyone else’s. It is defined by your thoughts, the people you meet, how you act and react to failures and successes. 

I truly believe that you can learn any language you set your mind to, and that you can do it faster and better than you think, by working on the six factors I’ve described in this article.

Though your genes may play a small part in your development as a language learner, all of the other factors are in your hands. You are ultimately responsible for your own language learning success.

So go for it! As they say, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” 
On a final note, I wanted to personally thank Dr. Gareth Popkins for his contribution to this  discussion, both in the form of a great article he wrote on the topic, and a great talk he gave at the Polyglot Gathering in 2018. His ideas have proved an invaluable inspiration to me on this very important topic within the language learning world.