• What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
• What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
• What do you call someone who speaks one language? American!

It’s meant to be a joke, of course! But isn’t it funny because it reflects a sad truth?

People the world over are studying English with determination, and great success in many cases. Ever traveled to the Netherlands or Sweden? You can speak to almost anyone on the street without even asking if they speak English. Even in France, famous for its tenacious loyalty to the French language, it is commonplace to approach a Parisian with a question in French, only to be answered in quite good English.

In China, 200 million elementary school children are studying English, which is a required subject. In America, on the other hand, “Oh, I studied it in high school,” is most often used as an excuse for complete inability to carry on a basic conversation in the language studied. Only a quarter of American elementary schools even offer a foreign language, and the majority of those have as their goal “familiarity” rather than any kind of proficiency.

Ironically, the demand for employees with language skills and cultural awareness and flexibility is perhaps greater than it’s ever been. The June 14, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine reported that “Thirty per cent of employers across the globe continue to struggle to fill positions available,” positions for which the “core job description” includes “soft skills such as adaptability, foreign language skills, and ease in other cultures.”

“But learning a language requires lots of work,” you may say. What if newly discovered tools and awareness about what language is and how it works could make learning a language easy and fun, instead of a dreadful, frustrating chore?

Gary Douglas, founder of Access Consciousness, an organization that provides seminars and other educational materials that promote greater awareness in all areas of life, has made some major discoveries about the nature of language. Participants in his seminars are putting his discoveries into practice all over the globe, with the result that all languages are actually becoming easy for those who learn his methods.

The first step in clearing up our language learning difficulties is to identify some common misconceptions about language that are holding us back. As Douglas notes in many of his seminars, any time we have a situation we cannot change, we have to have bought something as true that is actually a lie. Once the lie, which is often a misidentification or misapplication of something as something it is not, is identified, significantly more clarity becomes possible.

One of the lies Douglas has identified is that the language we are born into is our first language. Whatever it is – English, Spanish, Russian, or Urdu – none of these is our first native language. “Our first language is energy,” observes Douglas. “All of the named languages are actually our second language. So all of us are already at least bilingual! The difficulty is that most of us have been ignoring the language of energy our entire lives.”

One of Douglas’s great talents is to take what he observes occurring energetically, and describe it so that others can recognize the awareness of energy they also have. He has developed a wide variety of ways for people to create even more awareness for them selves. One of his discoveries using this talent is that it is actually the language of energy that makes it possible to translate from one language to another. Douglas describes that translating process as being aware of the energy of a given word in the first language, then finding the word in the second language that matches the energy of the word in the first language. It may or may not be the traditionally translated word, yet when the energy matches, true communication becomes possible.

Our ignorance of this first language of energy leads us to make false conclusions about what is possible and not possible to “understand” or “communicate” when we don’t speak or know a language. Douglas discovered this the first time he did a presentation in Mexico. By chance, the native English speakers in the class were seated on one side of the room, with the native Spanish speakers on the other.

Douglas, who is very tuned in to his audience and how they are actually receiving the information he’s presenting, noticed that when he presented information in English, it actually had a deeper effect on the native Spanish speakers, including those who did not “speak” or “understand” English. Conversely, when the material was translated, it was received more deeply by the native English speakers, whether they “knew” Spanish or not.

While this was nothing Douglas had expected, its effect was clear and undeniable. The attendees were receiving more change from the energy when they couldn’t understand the words, than when they cognitively understood the words spoken. Douglas found speaking to the energy of something creates far more clarity and change than proper grammar, knowing the meaning of every word, or exact translation of words. It is actually the energy that conveys the most awareness.

A further discovery about the nature of languages occurred when Douglas was working with a 10-year-old boy. He was attending a Jewish day school where he was required to take Hebrew language and religious classes. He was getting straight A’s in all the classes in Hebrew, while everything concerned with studying the subject of English was a struggle. As his mother recalls, “He had no interest in reading English, he thought it was THE most boring subject, and he hated the subject and all the assignments in English.” She became curious of why it would be so easy for her son when his native language of English was so difficult. The mother consulted Douglas.

Famous for asking questions that yield often-unexpected answers, Douglas asked the boy, “Is English your native language?” The answer was a resounding “No!”

Ever curious, Douglas asked him what his native language was. “Hebrew!” was the definite reply. This answer, while seemingly bizarre, certainly explained the A’s in Hebrew and the struggles with studying English.

This discovery opened the door to asking the same question of others, children and adults alike, who are having difficulties with English, or whatever their purported native language is. Asking this question is a great first step for anyone having difficulty in written or spoken fluency with his/her native language. Recognizing that the language with which they are struggling is not their first or native language is often the first step to creating a different result. A great second step is to ask them to tune into all the times they as an infinite being have spoken with fluency the language they’re currently struggling with.

The lie that our first language is the named one, like English, Spanish or Hebrew, rather than energy, is the first misconception that we need to clear to get a different result in language learning with ease. And what if, as Douglas’s experience with the seminar in Mexico demonstrates, what is required to learn things and understand what’s being conveyed in a language were much different and much easier than you thought? Would you be willing to have languages be that much easier?

Would you be willing to destroy that lie that languages are difficult and incomprehensible right now? It’s easy; just ask the universe to destroy everything that created that difficulty and incomprehension, right now please. That’s all you have to do.

Access processes work with some surprising non-linear results as well. One man in his 50’s, who was invited by his high school French teacher NOT to continue his studies after he scored 17 per cent on the final in his first year, recently went to France. He was astonished to notice himself picking up, understanding, and even speaking words of French he never expected to hear from his own mouth.

His wife, who had a life-long love of the French language and studied it for four years in high school, abandoned further studies in it her first year in college due to a negative comment about her accent made by her college professor. With no further study of the language, she noticed an amazing fluidity and comprehension of most conversations in French which she had never experienced prior to doing Access. She surprised herself by being interviewed on a French radio station and answering the interviewer’s questions herself, instead of relying on her interpreter. The host congratulated her on her French after the show – something that had definitely never happened on trips to France prior to using the Access tools of the Bars and processing.

“We are infinite beings,” Douglas asserts, “and as such, we have lived everywhere and spoken every language at some time or other.” His job, which he accomplishes with a distinctive and simple process unique to Access Consciousness, is merely to remove the blocks that keep us from remembering when we spoke that language fluently. It was these processes that made the turnaround in the English grades of the 10 year old mentioned above. Following Douglas’s discovery with the 10-year-old boy, now any facilitator of Access Consciousness can perform these clearings for you, usually with great success in just one session.

What if all Americans and anyone studying language in any country had access to these amazing tools? What if America could be changed from one that’s a laughing stock for being so linguistically challenged to one that could welcome our fellow inhabitants of the world – whether they spoke English or not? What could happen to the prospects for world peace and international understanding if all countries had more ease with languages in addition to their own? What are the infinite possibilities?

Facilitators of Access Consciousness who can demonstrate and teach the tools discussed above, including the Bars and many others, can be found on the website, www.accessconsciousness.com. Information about seminars, live and by telephone, with Access Consciousness Founder Gary Douglas can also be found there.

Article written by Kacie Crisp and edited by Heather Smith – thank you for their support!