Psychology and foreign languages

As our site has thousands of accesses per day and as many ask me about a career in psychology, today I would like to highlight an aspect that can make a lot of difference in professional success – not only in psychology, but in other areas as well. This aspect of the profession appears in the curriculum as Foreign Languages ​​or simply Languages.

Unfortunately, we don’t have at our disposal in schools (or in private ones), efficient language learning. We usually have one or two English classes a week, but with little progress over the years. So we ended up having to go after courses outside of school.

I was lucky to have had the opportunity to study English in language schools since I was 10 years old. I went through the CCAA, CNA, Number One and, during and after my master’s degree at the Faculty of Arts (I studied the concept of identity in the work of the Irish writer James Joyce), I taught English.

Learning English was fundamental to my career. Without having learned English, I would not have done scientific initiation – with the scholarship money I bought my first computer – nor would I have done a master’s and doctorate. This site probably wouldn’t exist either if I didn’t know English, because everything I learned about programming and WordPress was from lynda.com

But not only the site’s programming, hundreds of texts I wrote here were based on books that have not yet been translated into Portuguese.

This week, in particular, made me reflect on the importance of having a second (or third, fourth) language(s). I talked to the people at the Goalify App in English and learned a super tool to use with my Coaching and Online Psychological Guidance clients and patients. I’ll talk more about Goalify yet, in other posts. They are great. They are located in Austria.

And another fact is that I started to study German again. Now with private lessons on Italki. And, again, all this would not have been possible without English, I already talked Michal and Clara from Goalify in English – their native language is German, I can read it but I don’t speak it – and for the German lessons I also use English as this bridge since my teacher doesn’t speak Portuguese.

Anyway, I think it’s easy to visualize that a language broadens our horizons and can really represent a higher remuneration.

And, contrary to what many people say, it is not difficult to learn a second language. According to the calculations of the creator of the shorthand method, we use about 700 words on a daily basis. If we only learn 2 words a day, in just 2 years we will already know these basics.

So, we have:

– A bigger goal with a goal: learning a language

– And we can have smaller goals until we reach the bigger goal, that is, learning to read, listen, speak, write

– And, as a daily or weekly goal, we can divide it into number of words (learn 2 or 10 words per day) or per hour studied

Psychology and foreign languages

Speaking now specifically about psychology, the languages ​​that most help us to study the most important authors are:

• English (authors such as William James, Watson, Skinner, Rogers and many others in addition to the scientific articles being written in English or, at least, having the abstract in English)
• German (Wundt, Freud, Jung, Adler – just to name a few)
• French (Lacan, Wallon, Moscovici, Janet, etc.)

In addition to italki, see the complete list of Courses here

free language courses

Concomitantly or before going to college – if possible – it is extremely desirable to invest in learning a foreign language. The courses mentioned in the link above and the face-to-face courses help us because they were built as a logical and didactic step-by-step, but with the internet there is no longer any excuse for not learning another language.

With a great professor of behavioral psychology, I learned that the most important thing to learn a language is total immersion, that is, being with the chosen language close to us all the time. It can be listening to a song or a movie, changing the language of the cell phone or tablet to the language we are studying, finding people to talk to (on italki we can not only pay for classes but also exchange classes with other people, for example, teaching Portuguese and learning another thing).

When I talk about the importance of having at least one second language, I always remember a selection process for a company that was carried out by the HR consultancy where I worked. The big difference in the process was whether or not you had intermediate English. It was sad for me to see very capable and competent people losing their jobs because their English was basic or non-existent. I’ve also seen excellent students miss out on master’s and doctoral scholarships because they didn’t study the specific language of the program.

So it’s important to keep in mind: learning a language is easy. A 1-year-old child can already understand what the people around him say. But it is a process that requires dedication. Can you imagine 4, 5 years from now having fluency in a language and being able to open up to communication with people from other countries?

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