You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.

Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.

You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s a very easy series of difficult steps.

1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.

2. Speak Spanish badly.

3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.

Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.

The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.

There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.

A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.

All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.

This is a language spoken by many many human beings on the planet earth that were not born and raised in Milwaukee, WI.  To be fair, I’m sure there are several such people who can contradict that generalization (I am not one of them…. yet).  It is Bengali (Bangla).  It’s the other mother-tongue of my household and the one I don’t know.  I have been teaching myself this language using the Teach Yourself Bengali book and CD set.  At this point, it’s been years.  I can repeat the same phrases and understand or misunderstand or not understand the same vast expanse of human communication in Bengali as before.  So I’m stuck – but that’s not very interesting nor is it the point of this post.  Every language student gets stuck and the solution to that problem is always the same – talk more.  Listen more.  That’s an easy problem to solve with hard work.  (Side note: if you know of a good Bengali class in the NYC area, please let me know).  The real point of this post is about the neural realignment that is slowly taking place deep inside my brain.  The Bengali neurons are clearing brush somewhere in my brain; cutting down trees, digging trenches, laying pipe for what ostensibly will be a new thought-center.  This foundation is coming at some destructive expense.  Before these foundations are complete, I’m working at half-speed.  There’s a bottle-neck in my brain and when it hits me hardest, I start to feel homesick.

I’m still here (here is not there and there is where Bengali speaking non-Milwaukeans live and work).  Homesickness is probably not the right word because it connotes geographical displacement.  What about mental displacement?  I can’t process thoughts the same way, so I can’t react to predictable circumstances in familiar ways.  The familiar is now unfamiliar.  I blame the grammar.

I’m not educated enough to explain Bengali grammar.  If you happen to speak that language (and English) you will notice that quickly.  But the grammar breaks my thoughts before I can finish them.  Quick example: Bangla does not specify gender in subjective personal pronouns.  There is no ‘he’ ’she.’  It’s all relative.  This makes things interesting in my mind when I consider notions such as God (”He” in English and “Or” in Bangla).  But my Bangla level is not deep enough for theology.  I also had to look up ‘pronouns’ before I could identify my point as specifically: subjective personal pronouns.

The point is this: each successive thought requires strenuous deliberation to complete.  There are no more reactions to things – there are contemplations of grammar rules, vocabulary restrictions, and speed.  By the time a thought is generated, it dies before it can go anywhere.  When I’m robbed of my internal monologue (robbed is too strong a word, I realize), I lose a sense of self.  Then I become unfamiliar to myself.  That’s when I feel homesick.  Is this why it’s harder for adults to pick up new languages?