Consumer advocate Clark Howard was talking about dieting last year on his radio program. He said Americans are generally too hurried, too short-sighted, too unrealistic for reaching the goals they want. He explained that he lost a lot of pounds by taking a steady view of weight loss, the way people need to do with money. He said Americans want everything fast and easy.

Then he took a commercial break and on came a software company advertising fast, fun and easy foreign language. Why, anybody could do it. Fast. Fun. Easy. I think it was indeed made for Americans! You could probably learn it while you lose weight and get rich. Multitasking like a productive American!

I agree with Clark. We don’t want to lose weight; we want to have lost it. We don’t want to save and plan; we want to have saved and planned. We don’t want to learn language; we want to have learned it.

If Americans stop to think this over, I believe they have it in them to approach language learning with a new attitude. They would make language a daily matter, not a fast and easy thing, but a daily thing. Ordinary. Practical. Daily. Encouraged in class. Spoken and sung around home, at play, in the car, on the bus, at the games, at bedtime. That is exactly the kind of feedback we get with Max and Max Spanish, and that’s why people who follow our lead do well. Anyone really can do this.

(Note: Clark Howard does not choose the radio commercials.)

Supervised pacing is one of the smartest things you can build into instruction. A certain amount of self-pacing is good at the right time, but students need guidance, and instructors should have the kind of credentials that make them necessary to optimal learning.

As time goes by, students who are faithful to the supervised learning process are able to tell when they need to pace themselves in certain areas. However, the farther they go into the learning, the more new things they run into that require a supervised pace. Students need both a supervised pace and a self pace.

Designing supervised pacing requires a lot of skill, but most people think self-pacing is a glorious indication of high quality. A well designed supervised pace will yield wonderful results that self-pacing can never deliver.

Software producer Rosetta Stone has an ad, Act Like A Baby, that encourages people to get back to the natural way of learning language.

I love the phrase, but babies actually learn reeeeeeally slowly compared to when they’re older. I have demonstrated the advantage of age to children themselves about a zillion times. It’s easy to do. So what is it that babies do that IS good to keep in mind?

1. They don’t ask unnecessary questions that slow things down. We’re always told there are no stupid questions, but we all know there are lots of stupid questions. There are also lots of unnecessary questions. That’s actually what babies do. I mean, they do not ask unnecessary questions. They just take everything on the chin, so to speak, and absorb the environment, like a diaper.

2. They absorb the language around them for a long, long time before being required to talk in understandable native language. It’s a great idea to absorb language for a long time before trying to create your own spoken sentences, unless you have time for both. If your time is strictly limited, I advise holding off on trying to construct your own sentences until they practically pop out of your mouth on their own. Nothing is lost, much is gained.

Nevertheless, if you compare how much time a baby is around language to how much a school kid is around a new language if such a course is offered, the student would appear to have practically zero exposure to the language. Yet the student can be taught to understand and speak far more quickly than the baby, who has to wait up to two years and even then is frequently indistinct, sloppy and inaccurate. School courses are superior in this sense. Throw students of any age into a good immersion experience and they’ll outlearn a baby by a long shot when you compare time and outcomes. People learn how to learn as they get older, and this advantage is easily seen when comparing grade 1 to grade 3 or grade 8 to grade 10, though increasingly less as those students age.

I’ve always been a fan of Rosetta Stone’s photography. They use such great pictures. Our Max and Max stuff is based on totally different ideas about language, but we encourage people to use any learning materials they can get their hands on. Whatever you use, acting like a baby is a very good thing when it means you don’t interfere with learning by acting like a fussy high school student or adult who has to have everything figured out every step of the way. That slows the learning. A word to the wise: act like a baby, act like you’re older than a baby.

I heard it again today: “children learn so fast.” People who say this usually mean that kids learn faster than adults. They mean that the younger you are, the faster you learn.

One of the great advantages to getting one year older each year is that, if you are gaining the usual academic and life skills, you get better at managing your brain. You do this by learning how it works, where to put things and how to get them back out of there. You learn strategies from other people for organizing information before it goes into your brain and while it’s going in. You accumulate experience and knowledge from more and more areas of life that help you quickly get a handle on new concepts such as a crucial grammatical concept or appropriate greetings.

A whole lot of beautiful things about language can be learned only after a certain amount of life has been lived. Some researchers have unintentionally contributed to the fables about how fast kids learn. As I said before, adults slow their own learning by asking unnecessary questions that should wait. Adults also have more to juggle in their head and schedule. Working another language in is tough, as many immigrants discover to the ultimate degree. But people–humans–are wired to learn vast amounts in a relatively short time. The main thing to remember is that humans are tailor-made for learning, whether you are very young or not so very young.