Most language learners will probably agree that one of the most demoralizing parts of the whole language learning process is attempting to speak your target language with a native speaker, only for that speaker to then switch to English on you.
This situation is so common in fact, that I’ve even heard some language learners refer to it as “getting English’d”.
To new learners, getting English’d sorta feels like receiving an insult. You’ve put hundreds of hours into learning their language and are genuinely trying your best, only to have a native speaker invalidate all that effort by switching to English.
And while getting English’d may feel insulting at first, one should keep in mind that native speakers aren’t actually trying to be rude when they do this.
For example,
“Great”, you might be thinking. “Native speakers aren’t trying to be rude, but how do I stop getting English’d?”
With the exception of number 2., the only real way to prevent getting English’d in the future is to become better at your target language than the native speaker is at English. I’m calling this the “English Threshold” - the level of language ability past which native speakers will prefer to speak to you in their language rather than in English.
In my personal opinion, the minimum goal of any serious language learner should be to surpass the English threshold. After all, what’s the point of learning a language if all the native speakers will just end up refusing to speak it with you?
To reach the English threshold, however, we’re left with a bit of a chicken and egg problem. How are you supposed to get better at speaking your target language if native speakers keep refusing to speak it with you?
The answer might sound a bit counter-intuitive, but your first job should be to get better at listening. When you develop your listening skills first, you eliminate the possibility of native speakers switching to English because you didn’t understand them. Also, from my experience, learners who put speaking on hold for the first couple of months (or years), and instead focused on listening, ended up with much better pronunciation and accents than those who spoke a lot early on. If you can speak the language with a good accent and good pronunciation, you’re a lot more likely to be understood by the native speaker, thus giving them one fewer reason to switch to English.
You will eventually have to get out there and practice speaking though. Being a good listener will only get you so far. And, besides, in today’s English-speaking world, I don’t think any language learner is truly immune to getting English’d anyways.
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Now before concluding this post, I want to touch on one more interesting consequence of the English threshold, which is that some language groups have lower English thresholds than others.
For instance, it’s pretty common knowledge that the Japanese struggle more with English than the Swedish. And so, another way to think of the two language groups is that Japanese has an overall lower English threshold than Swedish does. To surpass the English threshold in Japanese, you only need mediocre Japanese, but to surpass the English threshold in Swedish, you have to be really fluent.
As a consequence, if we maintain that the minimum goal of any serious language learner should be to surpass the English threshold, this may actually imply that Japanese could be easier to learn than Swedish.
Or instead, to take a much less extreme example, suppose we were to imagine an American learning French in order to move to Quebec vs learning Spanish to move to Mexico. For an English-speaking American, French and Spanish are about equally distant languages so they should be about equally challenging in theory. But if we take into account the very high levels of English proficiency among French speakers in Quebec vs the very low levels of English among Mexicans, it becomes fairly obvious that, in this situation, French would be the harder language to learn.
Relating the above to my personal experience as a Canadian learning French, I can say that there definitely is a much higher bar in this country. Because francophones here are so good at English, for them to prefer speaking French with us instead of English, we have to meet them at their level of ability and that level is high! I’ve personally heard at least a dozen stories of people who did all their schooling from grades 1-12 in French immersion schools, only to later visit Montreal and get English'd by the locals.
Now that I’m learning Japanese, the pressure to be really good at the language seems to have mostly faded away. I still intend to become good at Japanese though, it’s just that now I don’t have to.