If you study the history of language teaching—which, I’m nerdy enough, I wrote my master’s thesis about—you’ll find that a lot of language teaching methods stem from the methods first used to teach Latin and ancient Greek. What both of those languages have in common is that they are “dead” languages—no longer spoken—and so people learned them as an academic subject to be mastered, rather than a life skill to be used. Unfortunately, a lot of language teaching methods, and, in turn, language learning methods, treat “language” as an academic subject to be mastered, rather than a skill to improve. Having a wrong fundamental view of language learning, though, creates a host of problems that I regularly see in language learners.
Today, I want to share a better way to think about language, a perspective shift which will alter every part of how you grow in language ability. This last week on Threads—which I’m increasingly using to “think out loud,” so it makes for a fun follow (shameless plug!)—I started to tease out this idea with a metaphor that I think is incredibly helpful.
Learning a language is like playing football (soccer), not studying math.1 Let me tell you why, and how fundamentally this shift in perspective will affect your learning.
Articles on The Prepared Expat may contain affiliate links that help support this site at no cost to you. The Prepared Expat articles do not constitute legal, medical, or financial advice and should not replace consultation with a qualified professional. See full disclosures & disclaimers.
Learning a language is like playing football, not studying math.
1. The best way to learn…is by playing
Imagine if you sign up for a football class and arrive the first day, not to a field or pitch but to a…classroom. And rather than going out and playing with a ball, you sit at a desk and the teacher tells you to memorize the names of positions (mid-fielder, sweeper, goalie), the dimensions of the goal and field, and the rules (including that one about offsides). Then, when you’ve mastered the “basics,” the teacher moves on to teaching you different ways to move the ball with your foot or body, common strategies for offense, techniques of defense, trick plays, and more.
At the end of the class, you pass a test, get a great score, and declare to your friends that you have now learned football. Yippee!
But we all know you haven’t. What you’ve done is learned a lot about football, including things you need to know in order to play the game. But you haven’t learned football. If you get out on the field, you’ll feel scared and useless, unable to play.
Yet a lot of people treat language learning the same way. You learn that a language is inflected, that it has seven cases, and learn how to conjugate and decline. You memorize a bunch of sentences and phrases, and you memorize a bunch of new vocabulary words. You take a test, ace it, and think you “know the language.”
You’ll learn far more from 30 minutes of playing the game than you will from an hour “studying” by yourself.
Then you get out into real life and you wonder why you can’t play the game.2
You can learn math in a classroom with a textbook, but you can’t learn basketball or language that way. You’ll learn far more from 30 minutes of playing the game or having a conversation than you will from twice as long “studying” by yourself.
Get out and play. Use it. Play around. Use your current ability to try to make a shot or buy something. Sure, you’ll make mistakes and be terrible at first. Just like you were when you first kicked a football.
2. The goal is winning, not perfection
A perfect football game has never existed. Never. In fact, if you ask what a “perfect football game” even is, the question doesn’t make sense. Is it one with 17 corner kicks or 0? With 200 throw-ins or 12? With 1700 passes or 200? With 50 shots on goal or 1? Where you beat your opponent by 3 or by 1? The question is non-sensical because there is only one way to define success in football: winning.
A perfect football game is one in which your team wins. That’s all that matters.
There is no such thing as a “perfect conversation” or one where you speak “perfectly.” All that matters is that you communicate in a way that others understand. Suppose you say, “I last day goed to big store. Buy much apples.” Sure, there are mistakes, but guess what? It communicates your meaning in a way that any native English speaker will understand. You communicated. You win, even though you weren’t perfect. That’s all that matters.
All that matters is that you communicate in a way that others understand.
See, if your goal is perfection, you won’t step out on the football pitch. Being perfect is too daunting, especially if you’re a beginner. If you freak out whenever you receive a pass because you don’t know if you can do a trick move, you won’t be able to handle the ball.
The same is true in language. If you want to be perfect, you’ll never open your mouth. If you don’t know how to say a sentence “right” and so you don’t answer a question someone asks you, you’ll never communicate.
Sure, you hope that with every game or conversation, you’ll get better. Sure, you work hard to make fewer mistakes over time. But there is no such thing as “perfect.” You’ll never be “perfect” in football or in language. Every native speaker gets a case wrong, misses a tone, uses the wrong word, forgets an inflection, has a stutter, misaligns person and number, etc.! Why should your goal be any different as a learner?3
You make mistakes in your native language, why would you expect to be perfect in your new language?
The crazy thing is, by making mistakes, you’ll get better. You can’t start perfectly as a football player, but as you play and make mistakes, you’ll grow and learn. The exact thing is true of language. It’s by getting out and communicating, with mistakes, that you’ll slowly learn to make fewer and fewer mistakes. This takes humility to talk like a child at times, but embrace it, for it’s the only way you’ll learn.
You can get math perfect. An equation is either right or wrong. But language is like football, not math.
So don’t try to be perfect. Start playing and focus on getting better, not becoming perfect.
3. You can’t play (or win) by yourself
You can’t win a football game by yourself. Even if you’re the best player in the world, you can’t win by yourself. Football is a team sport and it takes a team to win.
Language is the same, and that’s why I chose football as the metaphor rather than, say, golf or singles tennis.
This may strike you as an odd notion—that language is a team effort—but have you ever had to clarify what a native speaker of your native language said? They said it right, no errors, you just didn’t “get it” and had to ask for clarification. Together, you worked to ensure that you communicated rightly. It’s a team effort.
Or have you ever had a moment in your native language where you couldn’t think of a word and the person to whom you were speaking said the word you needed? Ever have someone finish your sentence when you couldn’t? Ever have someone help you remember your train of thought? Ever have someone fix your grammar for you?
See, language is relational. You can’t win on your own, studying by yourself in your room with a textbook and flashcards. You win by successfully communicating, by negotiating your meaning with other people. You can’t do that alone. In fact, if you’re not communicating with other people, there’s no point to your learning (other than fake polyglot points for saying “I know x number of languages)!
Language is relational. You can’t learn to use it effectively alone.
Sure, you can practice some things on your own. You can take shots on goal, you can practice ball juggling, you can work on traps. You can study vocabulary or grammar or read practice sentences.
But you can’t learn the skill of passing a ball back and forth on your own. You can’t learn the ebb-and-flow of a conversation by yourself. There are some things, many things, most things, that you can only learn and practice with others.
There’s a lot of math that you can learn with just a textbook. But you can’t with language.
So get out and play with others. That’s the only way you can learn how to win and how to get better.
4. Rules matter less than you think
If you wanted to play football but I told you that, before you step on the pitch, you should memorize the rulebook…well, then I would be an idiot. In fact, it would be poor advice to memorize almost any of the rules before you started to play. You may need to know a couple rules (try to get the ball in the net, you can’t use your hands, keep the ball between the lines, etc.), but there’s probably not many that you need to know before you start playing.
The better way to learn the rules is to play—and as you do things that break the rules, other people will tell you and help you learn. Some rules will matter immensely—like not using your hands unless you’re the goalie—but in a game with your friends, other rules won’t matter at all. You may play without boundaries, with a ball that’s the wrong psi, or a goal that isn’t regulation size. That’s fine, because some rules matter more than others. You may even completely ignore some rules because you know it doesn’t matter if a goalie holds the ball for 8 seconds rather than 6 seconds. Yes, that is a rule, and if that’s surprising to you, then that’s the point!
Language is the exact same way. There are some rules that matter immensely, so much so that you can’t play without knowing them. There are other rules that don’t matter one whit. There are some grammar rules that native speakers just plain ignore.4 Which rules matter and which don’t isn’t best learned through a textbook, but by accidentally breaking them. People around you will tell you if your sentence broke rules that matter or not.5
Not all grammar rules matter, not all have to be learned, and none need to be memorized.
Now, if a referee is there—a teacher, a test, etc.—then the rules matter and will be enforced to the smallest minutiae. But guess what? Life isn’t a test. And guess what? You could memorize all the rules, get them right on a test, and still stink at playing the game. There are even studies demonstrating this—that knowledge of grammar rules doesn’t actually translate into better speaking ability. So don’t worry about the test (and don’t be the referee yourself by checking if you’re keeping the rules!)—just get out and play.
You need to know rules to study math, of course. You need to know order of operations, the commutative property, etc. in order to “do” math. Math works because of rules and, if you break a rule, it stops working. Language works because it enables you to communicate, even if you break a rule while doing so.
So stop focusing on the rules. Start playing—and pay attention to the rules that people remind you to follow.
5. Sometimes you score in weird ways
In football, a goal is a goal, no matter how badly scored. It doesn’t matter if you accidentally headed it off your chin or if your opponent actually kicked it in, if it was a direct shot or hit the crossbars and ricocheted off someone’s bottom. A goal is a goal.
The same is true for language. In your own native language, you’ve produced ugly sentences that got your point across. You’ve spoken in ways that were inelegant and muddled, but communicated. You’ve forgotten a word and so talked around it to say your meaning in three times the time it would’ve taken if you had remembered. If you get your point across—if you communicate, that is—then you scored, even if the process was ugly or weird.
Do you want your goals to be beautiful and worthy of ESPN’s Top Ten? Sure, that would be nice, but only ten goals make it to that list. I’d rather have 50 ugly goals than one beautiful one. And you know what the crazy thing is about language? The more you score in an ugly way, the more beautiful your skills will become. If you forget a word and plow ahead anyway, you’ll probably remember the word better the next time. If you utterly mangle a sentence, but it gets your idea across, you’ll remember the correction the other person gave to you.
Fifty ugly goals beats one beautiful goal every time.
And, like in football, sometimes you have to take several shots to score. Sometimes it’s not the direct or the cross, but the rebound that makes it into the net.
Now, your handwriting of a math equation may be ugly or sloppy, but the process has to be correct or else you’ll get the wrong answer. Mix up your order of operations and you’re wrong. But language isn’t that way at all.
So, go out and play. Take shots, even ugly ones. Try multiple times. Don’t worry about the beauty of it—that will come in time—worry about communicating, even if it’s ugly.
What else?
I’m sure I haven’t even captured all of the ways that language is a skill like football, not a subject like math. I actually really want your creativity to help me think of other ways the metaphor can be used. So, hit me up on social media (especially Threads, where I’m most active), via email, or in the comments. Let’s extend the metaphor a bit further together!
Conclusion
When you view language as a sport rather than a science, it shifts the focus from perfection to practice, from rules to real-world use. Just like playing football, learning a language requires you to be brave and step out, be humble and make mistakes, and grow by continuing to play. By embracing the process of trial and error, you develop fluency not by memorizing rules or vocabulary but by actively engaging in communication, learning with others, and growing over time.
Remember that language is a skill to improve, not a subject to master! The goal isn’t about achieving perfect grammar or flawless pronunciation, but rather about connecting with others and communicating in a dynamic, interactive way between people.
Get out there and play.
Sign up to my newsletter and never miss another tip!
I write about language learning at least once a month, plus everything else that an expat needs to survive and thrive.
Sign up for my spam-free newsletter and I’ll give you a free chapter of my book!
Follow The Prepared Expat!
Footnotes
- Sorry, my American friends, I’m going with worldwide usage on this one 😉. However, you MAY be able to think of American football each time I say “football,” though I haven’t checked if each usage could apply to both games. ↩︎
- Or you look like Leonard after he “learned” American football for Penny. ↩︎
- In fact, I accidentally published this article’s title as Play to Learn: Language Like Sport, Not Science. What an OBVIOUS mistake that I missed. Oh well, I can fix it and give myself a Spelling Bee Dropout Award. But guess what? It’s ok. You probably would understand my meaning even with that error. If you did, we both win, even though I’m obviously not perfect in my own native language. ↩︎
- I split infinitives all the time, on purpose, and even in my writing. I just think that rule is dumb and so I ignore it. I also start sentences with “and” because I like the “real-life” tone it produces. ↩︎
- I experienced a great example of this recently when I was speaking and made two errors. One was using the literary word for “later” instead of the informal one–everyone knew what I meant and ignored it. But what NO ONE let me ignore was when I said the wrong word for “part.” I said “part” (like part of a hospital) instead of “part” (like part of a tool). As soon as I did, all my staff interrupted me to fix it even though they knew what I meant enough to tell me the right word. One mistake mattered enough that they interrupted me, the other one didn’t. ↩︎
I always thought of language learning like tennis, decide tonplay the game, then attempt to serve a sentence, see if it was understood and returned by the opponent. Then play as long a tally as you can
Absolutely! I almost chose tennis for my analogy, but you can play singles tennis and I liked the “team” nature of football. But you are ABSOLUTELY right of the back-and-forth nature of tennis! That’s a really helpful analogy.