Shortly after moving to Barcelona, I met an English woman at a book exchange who confessed that even after living here three years, she was still taking beginning Spanish. A woman listening in said that her goal, after living here two years, was to master one past tense. She felt that was all she could manage.

I went home and pronounced them pathetic. How lazy they were, locked away in their expat bubble! I, on the other hand, would surely be fluent within a couple of years.

Fast forward seven years and although I have managed to claw myself to a fairly high level of Spanish, I am far from fluent. It’s embarrassing. What happened to my grand plan of quickly tipping to fluency?

Barcelona, it turns out, had other plans.

Environment matters

Although I didn’t know it when we moved, Barcelona is a notoriously bad place to learn Spanish. The large expat community here means that you are as likely to hear English, Italian, or Chinese on the street as you are Spanish. Locals switch to English at your first linguistic stumble. And because Barcelona is in Catalunya, everything from billboards to the programs at the concert hall are in Catalan – a language that more closely resembles French and Italian than Spanish.

Barcelona doesn’t exactly thwart Spanish learning, it’s just that it doesn't particularly help.

Environment matters. It’s easier to get daily exercise in a city that is designed for walking than one that is designed for driving. It’s easier to eat a healthy diet if that is what’s on the menu. It’s easier to do the right thing when everyone else is doing it.

Even when we think that we are in the driver’s seat and making conscious decisions about how to behave, it is actually a complex series of largely hidden interactions between mind and environment that determines where we go. As James Clear sums up in his book Atomic Habits, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”

The role of the environment in influencing mind and behavior is especially easy to see when we look at babies. Babies are a bundle of ready-made cognitive systems including an innate capacity for learning language. They also come with built-in psychological drivers, including a strong desire to communicate and socially connect. But language acquisition doesn’t happen on its own. It is fueled by the environment.

Luckily, the immersive language environment into which babies are born is a match made in heaven – and the richer the better. Babies get all the information, structure, and feedback they need to learn how to communicate and connect. In the process, their brains are forever changed as a primary language — or occasionally two or three — takes hold, shaping not only their language center but also the way they perceive the world.

A supportive language-learning environment doesn't necessarily make things easy for these little humans. If you have ever watched a baby learn to do anything — including finding their own feet — you know that learning can be hard. But a rich language environment does make language learning easier.

Adult language learners rarely have such an ideal mind-environment alignment as your average baby. But for the expats I know who have become truly fluent in Spanish, there are some similarities. Most of them came to Spain alone instead of arriving with their English-speaking families. Many of them moved initially to parts of Spain where English was not widely spoken and thus had no option but to use Spanish to figure things out. Many have Spanish speaking partners, giving them entry to Spanish speaking community.

Their environment didn’t make learning Spanish easy, but it did make it easier.

Barcelona doesn’t make it easy

I know that some of my fluent friends not so secretly think that non-fluent expats are lazy. After all, they didn’t have too much trouble learning Spanish. I have also felt that I must be lazy, or that I don’t have a head for languages, or that I’m just not disciplined enough. And while there may be some truth to that, it is only part of the story.

Not only is Spanish immersion near impossible to achieve in Barcelona for reasons I’ve already mentioned, but the city offers up a wide array of ways for me to meet my needs without speaking Spanish. Navigating health care, renting an apartment, getting a haircut? I could try and stumble through those things in Spanish, but in Barcelona I can easily do them in English. Finding a school for my child who is two years away from college? It made sense to optimize academics over language acquisition by putting him in an English-speaking school. Building community? The locals speak Catalan and aren’t necessarily looking to expand their social group. The expat community, on the other hand, is welcoming and easy to access.

Choosing the easy English way out in these contexts is not lazy, it is cognitively efficient. Why risk medical miscommunication? Why feel socially out of place when community is readily available? Why not avoid the cognitive pain that comes from feeling like an idiot?

But taking the easy way out in terms of meeting one’s needs means having to go the hard road in terms of learning Spanish. Without help from our environment, we put a heavier burden on ourselves. We must make do with the artificial structure of grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and flashcards. We need to consciously and continually choose to sustain the work of language learning.

It’s no wonder our motivation flags and we end up in what my former Spanish teacher called, “intermediate hell.” It’s no surprise we find ourselves thinking that one past tense really is enough. 

Riding the environmental wave

If we understand language learning – or whatever else we are trying to do – as an integrated effort between mind and environment, it gives us another way to think about change.

And this is why, when faced with the verb conjugation app that was recently recommended to me, I find myself wondering if I could make my environment work harder for me instead of placing the learning burden entirely on my own waning willpower.

Big changes aren’t always possible. I’m not about to leave my partner in order to immerse myself for several months somewhere in non-Catalunya Spain. I’m not going to drop my English-speaking friends or quit my English-speaking work.

But there are some small tweaks that might make my environment more supportive of my efforts. For the next couple months, I’ve decided to put the flashcards aside and focus on making small decisions that open up immersive opportunities. I want to see how far I can get by consciously deciding to jump and then letting the current pull me along.

Today I began my conversation with my dentist in Spanish even though his English is excellent. Last week I started reading a new murder mystery in Spanish. Mysteries are not necessarily my favorite genre but they are inherently cognitively engaging — I want to know what happens next and so the story drags me along. I am going to try and get over my aversion to watching TV during the day and regularly schedule in some Spanish Netflix — maybe something slightly trashy that appeals to my base interests.

None of these strategies will make bumping up my Spanish easy. But I am hoping that they will make it easier.

Environment matters.

What are you trying to learn, or do, or change? How could you tweak your environment to make it easier?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.