Seth Godin is a very clever guy. If you own your own business you should read all his books or at least his free blog.

When it comes to languages though, like many, many people all over the world he doesn’t quite get it. For example in today’s post he talks about the ‘Two kinds of “don’t know”‘. One is a more factual thing that you haven’t been taught yet, and the other is based on “fear or lack of interest.” and he has the great line “You don’t learn how to cook from a cookbook.”

But he includes speaking French and playing the piano in the first category, not the second!

I also noticed this the other week in an interview he did for UXPioneers ( I’m a big Seth Godin fan!).

Here’s the thing. I failed Spanish in high school. It was the only course I ever came close to failing.

If I have to learn the lingo of CB radio, or the Internet, for example, I start with a construct I’m familiar with, and then piece-by-piece I can add stuff. I can figure out the difference between “10/20” or “10/4”, or the difference between IRC and AIM.

In Spanish, all bets are off. You don’t know anything. There’s no foundation to start with and it’s almost impossible to bootstrap it.

You see how he misunderstands what languages are all about? How he described the lingo of CD radio is exactly how you learn foreign languages! It doesn’t matter if you aren’t perfect straight away, you start with a simple “hello” then work up from there.

Plus if you speak English then you already know several hundred (or thousand) words of Spanish, this is the whole beginning of the Michel Thomas method, if you speak English you even already understand several hundred words of Japanese ( and vice versa).

Languages belong in Seth’s second group of “don’t know”:

The answer lies in trial and error and motivation and in overcoming the fear that makes us avoid the topic in the first place.