Extroverts and Introverts: Lessons for Language Learners

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Konnichiwa. Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Today I wanted to talk about extroversion and introversion in language learning. So I’ve been a teacher for a long time. And one thing that it has really surprised me, I didn’t expect to be a teacher this long that’s for sure. I didn’t expect to see people in such a different way, working with so many of them. You work with hundreds of people every year to include your parents and colleagues and students add that up over a few years. And it doesn’t take a few years to get into the thousands. And I’ve come to the conclusion that people are so much more… we’re very simple in many ways, we all want the same things, right? I think as humans, we all just want to feel safe. We want to feel accepted. We want to laugh. We want to feel loved. I think it’s really simple.

And how we express that of course is in different ways. We’re all the same in that way. But then we’re also unique, very obviously. And as a language teacher, I always think about personality traits and how I can maximize the personality traits of the people I work with, particularly students, of course, to help them get the best results that don’t feel unnatural to them. One challenge that I found as a language teacher is perfectionism. And a lot of really high achieving students have a lot of perfectionist tendencies, as you can well imagine. They want to do things well. They want to do things really well and they work hard and they try at it.

And that’s fantastic. An effort is amazing and they’re wonderful people to work with, but languages can become a challenge because it’s something that you have to accept that you’re going to do. You’re going to just keep stumbling through for a really long time and you have to get comfortable with that, or else you’ll quit. You have to really manage your expectations, that this is new and I’m just going to get through it. And that of course doesn’t seem to fit well with those of us with perfectionist tendencies, right? And a lot of perfectionist would rather not do something if they don’t think that they’re going to do it really well, in my experience.

Extrovert or Introvert?

So it got me thinking about extroversion and introversion. And extroversion is one of the big five personality traits. And you’re going to have to forgive me if some of my verbiage is incorrect, because I’m not a personality researcher. I’m not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I’m not… I studied these things really for the practical side of it. And of course, extroversion is one of these and it’s one of the five core traits. And it’s characterized by being talkative and open and being excitable, being warrant, being assertive, being cheerful, loving being the center of attention, being really friendly, being really engaging.

And then it’s a continuum, right? So we have people who tend to be a lot more extroverted or high in extroversion. I believe they call it. Introverts are low in that, right? They tend to be quiet and they tend to be reserved and they tend to be less involved and they tend to be… Or seem less involved rather. And I think about this with language learning. So Benny Lewis, is super extroverted. He loves talking to people. So it’s no surprise that once he figured out how to get the language that...