There are a lot of destructive myths about mastering a foreign language, but one of the most dangerous, especially for teenagers, is the idea of the Natural Born Linguist.

An individual with superhuman capabilities and some god-given talent to learn and express themselves in another language.

“I'm just not good at languages”.

I hear teenagers say this all the time. They say it like it’s a fact about who they are.

Belief in this myth turns the ability to communicate in another language into something that only a few special people can do. For everyone else, all they can do is look on in amazement thinking, “There's no way I could do that”.

But there's another way for teenagers to think about this. Through their environment.

Thinking about it in this way opens up a space for mastery in everyone. Mastering a language doesn’t necessarily depend on how smart they are or how much talent they have. Instead, it’s about the conversations they’re brave enough to start, how okay they are with being a foreigner, and trying to communicate before they’ve perfected pronunciation and grammatical structures.

This isn’t about reducing the achievements of people who’ve mastered a foreign language. It’s about helping teenagers realise that language learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Last week in Barcelona, I watched 30 UK students prove this.

One came running up to me: “Sir, I used my Spanish to buy something in the shop!” Maybe just five words for a €3 purchase, but he was thrilled.

Another student went out of her way to give an opinion about the food to our waiter and thank him even when nobody told her to.

Their environment changed. Not their talent. Not their grammatical knowledge.

They followed their curiosity and discovered they could do more than they previously thought.

They just needed an environment that revealed it.