Some People Believe That The Best Way To Learn Anything Is Learning By Doing

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According to some people, practice is essential to learn any skill. Others insist that reading books and listening to lectures is sufficient. In my opinion, when it comes to learning a language, the only way to achieve perfection is to keep practicing it.

Language learning has several components. Natives first learn to speak and then learn to read and write. Learning to speak our mother tongue requires hardly any effort. We hear the language all the time and pick it up with little effort. However, learning to read and write does require some effort. We need books or teachers to acquire those skills.

Non-natives need help with learning all aspects of the language. They first learn to read and write and it takes them years of practice to achieve fluency in a foreign language. Just like natives, non-natives also need the help of a book or teacher to master the art of reading and writing. Speaking is different. It is not a skill that you can learn from a teacher. Of course, a teacher can help you learn the grammar and acquire sufficient vocabulary. Still, in order to speak fluently, you need practice. Otherwise, you will struggle with speaking. This is actually a problem that is commonly seen among educated Indians. They are quite good at reading and writing English because they have learned the necessary grammar and vocabulary at school and university. However, many of them have no real opportunities to converse in English on a day to day basis. Hence, these people stumble when they have to express their ideas in English.

To sum up, there are certainly some skills that we can master from books or teachers. However, language learning is not one of them. In order to achieve fluency in a language, one has to speak it at every available opportunity. In other words, this is a skill that we need to learn by doing.