I have updated a couple of the references for this Internet version of the article. The next time you look at an airline's in-flight magazine, you will almost certainly find at least one advertisement for a foreign language course on cassettes, promising amazing progress with minimal effort. But the skepticism you may feel when reading such claims is well-founded. At professional meetings of ESL or foreign language teachers, just mentioning these ads is a good way for a speaker to get a rueful laugh.
Language learning is a time consuming process requiring hard work and lots of patience.
Beginning learners who believe it is possible to master a language easily in a matter of months are likely to become discouraged and blame themselves for slow progress, when their progress is, in fact, quite normal. If students learning a new language need to be patient with themselves, it is equally true that we, their teachers, need to learn to be patient with them. But for many of us, faced with increasing numbers of non-native speakers in our classrooms, this is not an easy task. Language students repeated model sentences containing all of the significant grammatical structures of English over and over in classroom drills. Errors were to be avoided at all costs, because they might become bad habits.