Many foreign language learners tend to believe that living in a country of the language origin and socialising with native speakers may guarantee rapid language acquisition. As a matter of fact, very few think of all the conditions to be observed and inconvenience to overcome on the way to fluency within a short time. Let’s delve into this argument.

Learning a language in the country of its origin sounds great: whatever you refer to is written or pronounced in that language. However, can it be of use when it comes to speaking?

Imagine you are in that country because of work and spending months continually interacting with your foreign colleagues, and moreover, hanging out with them after work.  Will you see a substantial result over a short time? Surely.

Or maybe you started a three-year bachelor’s degree programme at university and your daily activity comes down to studying and interacting with your peers. Will you make any progress after a while? Undoubtedly.

What if you are there for a two-week training course or even residing for a prolonged time, but without really exposing yourself to this language, without connecting with native speakers and constantly seeking to steer clear of social life? In this case you will probably see very little progress over time, less than that you can achieve by doing a series of daily activities at home using right methods of language learning.

As to practising it with native speakers, most of us expect to be able to speak as fluently and accurately as mother tongue speakers do. Instead, we listen to them passively like television and when it is our turn to speak, we might feel self-conscious, insecure and judged because our abilities are not nearly as good as theirs.

Secondly, it is the wrong impression that native speakers are going to correct you whenever you talk, as they are more interested in your ideas than mistakes you are making and, more importantly, interrupting constantly is supposed to be impolite and discourage the interlocutor from speaking.

Thirdly, the hope of losing a foreign accent cannot be fulfilled immediately or even over time because it requires a change of the habitual tongue position in the mouth and understanding sounds of the target language. Therefore, a lot of listening and pronunciation practice is to be done.

Finally, native speakers might use sophisticated words that could be replaced with more simple ones in a dialogue with a non-native speaker providing a language learner with ease and convenience rather than the feeling of inadequacy.