The one-question survey

I can't get that movie out of my mind - Julie and Julia. I saw it, then saw it again, and it still sits with me in a comforting way. The movie itself is warm and entertaining, but the idea of blogging for a set purpose is what really entices me. So, I've decided to blog like Julie did. I'm not setting dates and all that, because, first of all, I haven't figured out how you do it, and second of all, I'm not sure how well I would come out on that, as I tend to let things slide (remember the tomatoes???).
But this blog-project is about the one-question survey I did during the last days of 2009. I'll start by setting the scene:
When I started studying German over 2 years ago, I got truly passionate about it (Deutsch ist noch meine Leidenshaft und ich möchte in der Zukunft ein Blog auf Deutsch schreiben, aber das ist eine andere Geschichte!).
One day, another teacher, our director in fact, expressed concern about the fact that a lot of students were getting poor grades on one of the big official German exams. She asked me why that was so... of course, she was just wondering out loud, and it wasn't like she expected an answer in that moment, but her question made me wonder too.
I mulled it over, thought about it from all angles, trying to settle on a single determining factor. I finally concluded that, in order to learn a language (learn anything for that matter) what one must basically have is the desire above all to learn it. Of course there are other important factors, but having the will to learn (or a need to learn which prompts the desire) drives the whole learning process itself.
The next morning, I stopped by the director's office to tell her my answer, not to her original question, but to what lies behind that question, and we ended up discussing the reasons people learn (and don't)... a very subjective discussion to be sure, but quite interesting and satisfying.
In fact, as I left her office a little while later, I felt that I now needed to know what other teachers thought. Since our school is a language center where Spanish, English, German and Portuguese are taught, there are teachers from different countries giving classes. The director herself is German and Mexican by birth, I come from a direct line of migrating ancestors, our kids - hers and mine - are bilingual or trilingual, so we have a definite preference for promoting multilingual (multicultural) living. I wondered what the other teachers in our school would answer if I asked them. So I did!

I approached each teacher asking them to please answer my one-question-survey. The original question was simply: "Why do some people learn a foreign language better than others?" But I quickly realized that it wasn't complete enough, so the final wording of the question was:

In your opinion, why do some people seem to learn a foreign language better, easier, and/or faster than other people?

Answers are coming... Stay tuned for the next blog entry.