What Will Happen to Your Mind

The silent period and other things you'll observe your brain doing

When you are on site, immersed in your new language and trying to learn to function with it, a lot of things will probably happen to your mind and emotions that you aren’t used to in your daily life at home. Not everybody will go through all of these things — a lot depends on how much language preparation you have had before you get to the new country — but everybody is bound to go through some of them.

Some people may have interior experiences that I have never heard of. What I want you to know, however, is that there will be some challenging times for you mentally, and that if you weaken, give in to loneliness or start avoiding any situation where you’re not absolutely comfortable, you won’t achieve optimum learning. The next few posts will give a sample of what you may go through.

A silent period

It’s pretty much agreed on by language researchers and teachers that people go through a time of barely talking at all when they first take up a new language. They just walk the earth absorbing whatever language input comes their way, whether from study or from the environment. Even if you have studied a lot of the language in school, or taught yourself, there will still be an enormous number of conversations and situations that you are not prepared for, and you are liable to spend a lot of time just being quiet. As long as this silence involves you absorbing language and not avoiding the language, this period is healthy!

Don’t think that just because you are silent the time is not productive. If you remain alert — and even if you’re concentrating on something other than what people say — you are picking up a lot of things that will later be invaluable for your understanding and communication. For one thing, you start to learn the music of the language. The melody of a typical question, a flirty remark or an angry complaint may be much different from the way you hear them back home. You need to learn them, and you can do this even at the stage where words fail you. (In fact, there’s one classic self-instruction program for Spanish, put out by the US government, that spends at least the first two chapters on melody even before it’s taught you to understand anything.)

Another thing you will notice during this silent time, if you handle it right, is that you will start to see in new ways. As most of us walk the earth, there is a certain amount of chatter going on in our heads, and we boil a lot of what our eyes see down to words that our minds store. When this brain blabbing shuts down because we don’t have or don’t use the words, we start to perceive the world differently. I’ll give you some nonlinguistic examples as to how this can work.

Some people get trained in this brain-blab-bypass if they go to a good art school. One time a painting professor of mine showed us a storyboard he had made from pictures he had found. Even though the images had come from completely unrelated sources, if you looked at the board as a whole, you got a story. At one point, the professor told us that the photo of a horse that was centered at the top of the board was the title. Newer students automatically assumed that the title of this work, then, was “A Horse” or “The Horse”. This showed that they still had that habit of converting everything to words. What the prof was telling us, though, was that specific exact physical picture, cut out and pasted on the board, was the title of the story, not words. This will sound like a stupid idea to some people, but this and many other ideas trained us novice artists to look at the world and store in our minds what we saw, rather than words about what we saw.

Another example occurred during my silent time in Eastern Europe. Most Americans arrive there with preconceived notions about gender roles and social equality or the lack thereof, and in the beginning they interpret most of what they see in terms of their own internal chatter. One thing people quickly notice about families in that part of the world is that there comes a point (maybe around the age of 55) where the father turns on the TV, sits down, lights a cigarette, and seemingly never gets up again. (I did see such men get up to make coffee from time to time, and of course, to go to the bathroom. I understand that some of them also went to work when I didn’t see them.) This flows into the chatter stream of the typical American in such a way that he or she automatically takes this in as “Typical Old World Male Dominance and Exploitation of Women; The Man Just Comes Home and Sits, While the Woman Has Her Job and All the Housework on Her Shoulders”. While there is some truth to this, it’s not the whole story. By the time my silent period had ended, I started to realize that these men acted more depressed than anything else, and that they had basically handed over all power and decision-making in the household to their wives. Some of the wives complained about the extra work and stress, but at the same time they liked being in charge. Had my silent period not trained me to see, rather than to listen to my brain chatter about what I saw, I’d have missed this and other things that were vital to my understanding of what went on around me.

Because you will be forced to interpret situations without the benefit of language, all this silent seeing can make you much more intuitive about the things you see and hear. It can even reach the point where people mistake you for being psychic. In my English classes for foreigners, students occasionally began to think I understood languages that I didn’t. One day, when I wasn’t really paying attention, I heard one student ask another a question about the lesson, so I butted in and answered it. All three of the students in that particular huddle suddenly stared at me with their mouths hanging open. I said, “What?” They asked, “How did you understand her?” “Whataya mean?” I said, and I repeated what she wanted to know. They replied, “But she was speaking Albanian!” Consciously I was completely unaware that she wasn’t speaking English — the question had just wafted into my ear while I was paying attention to something else — but evidently, during my silent period overseas, I learned to read situations and people’s body language enough that I often know what people are saying even if I don’t understand their language. It can make students quite paranoid, and a few of them believe that I speak and understand languages that I don’t know a word of.

One tremendous benefit of that intuition developed during the silent period is that you no longer think that whenever people speak a foreign language near you they are talking about you, if you ever did think that before.

The mother of a friend of mine seemed to have developed similar intuition. She had recently arrived from Iraq and could not read or write in any language. I’d bet her English vocabulary didn’t exceed 100 words, and most of those were related to food, playing with her grandson, and his diaper changes. Nonetheless, she has developed very accurate intuition as to what people were conversing about, and she would often interject Arabic comments into my friend’s and my political conversations in English, and what she told me turned out to be completely relevant to what we were saying. I don’t know how she did it.

Along with all this watching, your silent period will put you into a state of hyper-vigilance, when it comes to language. When you don’t understand most of what’s going on around you, each new word you can make out becomes very precious. Pretty soon your vocabulary is growing enormously every day, even if you’ve never looked anything up in a dictionary. You pick the words out from the context of the situations you’re in.

My friend Wendy unwittingly demonstrated this to me. She had been transferred to Japan by a Japanese company she worked for, and she’d already spent two or three years there when she came to visit me in the Czech Republic, on the way home to the US for Christmas. At the end of two days, I was absolutely startled at the number of words of Czech she’d picked up. A few of the words weren’t even for concrete things that you could see or touch! I just couldn’t understand it, and I thought she must have been a genius. But then I took a trip to Hungary for a few days. At the end of the first day, I knew how to say “pasteurized,” homogenized,” “NEW!” and a load of other things I’d picked up when my eyes riveted themselves to every product container in sight. More words got added from my environment, and I realized I was doing what Wendy had done on her visit to me. Your eyes and ears get super receptive; your mind gets super perceptive. Words even flood in when you think you’re not paying attention.

The most important thing to remember during this silent period — and about other tough experiences I’ll describe — is this:

Do not flee!

There’s a tendency among some people to run away from situations where they don’t understand what is being said, and to seek comfort among people of their own nationality, or who speak their own language. Do not do this! While it’s okay, and helpful to know where you can go to unwind with your own compatriots, and it’s good to know where to find someone who will understand you in case of emergency, it is severely damaging to your progress in the new language if you make these people your main or only social contact! Try to make most of your friends among the native speakers of your new language, and don’t even worry if you can’t get everything said that you want to. Just listen, watch and do what you can to communicate, but tough it out and don’t climb back into the womb of your native language every time you get woozy.