One of the best ways to improve facility with a language is to learn whole phrases from native speakers, whether from speech or writing. Phrases give you words in context, which is critical because a dictionary translation rarely shows you how native speakers really use the word. Complete phrases also allow you to communicate a whole idea eloquently rather than spitting out nouns á la Tarzan while pointing and playing charades. (Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.)

But a problem comes up when you’re studying a less common language. You may not be able to find textbooks filled with good example phrases or easily access native speakers or material (books, radio, movies) locally. Maybe all you have is a basic phrasebook and a list of some newspapers online, or even less.

For some languages, Google Translate and Google search (or any other machine translator and search engine) can help you get around this. Like most machine translators, Google Translate is often wildly–and entertainingly–inaccurate, but still useful.

This “Phrase Search” method is most useful when you need to get to conversational fast and don’t have time to passively collect whatever phrases you happen to come across whenever come across them. The method has its flaws, it’s not meant to be “organic,” it won’t work with all languages, and it’s not enough to learn a whole language with, but it’s something I’ve been playing around with and having good luck with. Just a little something to add to add to your learning toolbox.

Here’s how it works:

For Beginners: Reinforcing Your Foundation

(Photo: Fountain in the park near Tbilisi’s Freedom Square) When you’re just starting out and only know a few words, you can enter a basic noun, like house or chair, into Google search and see what get. The goal at this stage is more to see the word in context than to grab “useful phrases.” Searching for phrases is a way to explore the language and practice your basic vocabulary, rather than memorize phrases.

For example, I typed the German “wand” (wall) into google.de and got the sentence, “Gestalten sie Ihre Wand mit Farben, Tapeten, Wandfliesen…” (Design your wall with paint, wallpaper, wall tiles…) Not the most useful sentence, but it does show you the word “wall” in context with some related words.

When you’re ready for something more challenging, you can move beyond simply exploring words in context and use this method to check your ability to form grammatically correct sentences. Go through some words (nouns, verbs, adjectives or anything else will do) you know and think of common ways you might use them, like “She went into the house.” or “He’s sitting in the chair.” If you don’t know enough of the language to compose your own sentences, but you’re trying to learn, put your chosen sentence in your own language into Google Translate and copy the resulting translation.

Then put the translation in your target language into Google search and see what you get. You may see that exact same sentence in several search results, in which case you’ll know it’s probably grammatically correct. Often, though, you’ll get sentences that are similar to, but not the same as yours. Those are still good examples.

I put in “We painted the wall” and got “Wir malten die Wand” in German from Google Translate. I put that into Google search and got, among other phrases, “In ersten drei Stunden malten wir ein ganze Wand fast fertig.” If I didn’t understant that, I could put it back into Google Translate and get “In the first three hours, we painted a whole wall almost finished,” which is clear enough. What you get from Google translate doesn’t have to be correct because what the search results give you, provided you take results from reliable websites like newspapers, probably will be.

That “probably” part is one of the flaws in this method. You’ll almost certainly need to go through several example phrases before you get example phrases that are really clear and helpful. When you’re not sure, cross reference what you get with your dictionary and, ideally, have a native speaker check your examples to make sure they’re correct.

For More Advanced Learners: Building Up

(Photo: Tree of lights made from the statue of St. George slaying the dragon in Freedom Square) As you gain more skill with your target language, Google becomes particularly handy for learning about prepositions, adjectives, adverbs of time, conjugated verbs, idioms (sometimes) and collocations, in addition to common phrases. Say you know the infinitive form “to tell,” but you don’t know how to use it in a sentence like, “He already told me about it.”

Using the above method of traslating and plugging the result into Google, you might get a phrase like, “He told her about the problem…,” but at least you now have the past tense of “to tell” and an example for “to tell someone about something.” With some knowledge of the language, you can work out the rest.

If you come across an idiomatic phrase while reading or listening, look it up in Google search to see more examples of how it’s used. If you hear a phrase you suspect is a collocation (words that typically go together, like “heavy rain” instead of “strong rain”), check with Google.

Then practice, practice, practice by using these example sentences and phrases as a basis for creating your own. From “He told us about…” you might make “I told him yesterday,” changing the verb conjugation (”He told” to “I told”) and the person in the accusative case (”us” to “him”). Plug your sentence or phrase into Google to see if you get any matches. If you don’t get much, provided the language isn’t extemely rare online, you’re grammar’s probably wrong. In that case, you’ll need to tweak the sentence until you get a match. Google sometimes “corrects” for grammar, but just as often gets it wrong, so I wouldnt trust it too far. From here, you can keep practising making up your own sentences and checking to see if native speakers have written it the same way.

A Few Tips

(Photo: Tbilisi’s City Hall) Avoid trying to memorize every example you find or collecting so many examples you’ll never have time to review them. The goal here is get a little more exposure to the language rather than do grammar drills. This method may not always provide you with prefectly grammatical examples or phrases you can use everyday. You’ll probably get some things wrong, but if you have little opportunity to experience the language, it can help.

Also, you can choose the phrases you might need in daily conversation instead of those typically odd textbook examples like “Please bring the cow to milk.” For common phrases the Phrasebook Starter that comes with Faster Foreign Language Learning is a good place to start, if I do say so myself. I collected these after during settling-in periods in four different countries so it’s a real-life-based selection of the phrases you’ll probably need if you’ll be living in the country and spending a lot of time with locals.

This post is not quite as concise as I’d like it to be, but I’m not sure more tinkering with it would have helped, so…there you have it.

Related posts:

1. How to Learn Foreign Language Vocabulary When You Have No Time to Study
2. Learning a Foreign Language: Tips for Learning Grammar
3. Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning: A More Efficient Way to Use Vocabulary Lists

All right, I know some teaching methods and teachers really do overemphasize grammar study—including memorizing tables of case endings or verb conjugation patterns—at the expense of actual communication. When you’re starting out, you really don’t need that much grammar practice.

For beginner and intermediate learners, I’m a huge fan of “reverse engineering” grammar whenever possible. This is a fast, highly effective, low-stress way to learn how the grammar of a foreign language works. It also helps you absorb complex information in a way that memorizing some chart, table or list of rules just can’t.

That method’s fine if you only want to reach an intermediate level in the language, but when you’re aiming for real fluency, you’re cheating yourself by not investigating and practicing grammar.

Reaching High-Level Fluency

If you want to learn to speak and write near the level of an educated native speaker, you’ll eventually need focused practice with grammar. After all, not too many of us managed to get through school without some grammar lessons in our native language. We generally write and speak better after post-secondary education than before. Even professional writers sometimes make grammar errors and syntax errors, which is why editors exist.

As foreign learners, we also get tripped up by the assumptions we make about a new language based what we know about our first language. This is known as linguistic interference or language transfer.

Unless you keep seeking and destroying your grammar errors, you risk getting complacent at a certain level—probably around high upper-intermediate—and not progressing further. Your grammar errors will not clear up on their own just because you’re constantly hearing correct grammar. Interference from your first language will see to that.

Drills? Not Necessarily.

Focused practice with grammar doesn’t always have to take the form of working through pages of fill-in-the-blank sentences with the correct preposition or a verb in the right tense. My favorite way to practice grammar is translation. (And before you run away, there are alternatives that, too.)

When you write or speak your own thoughts, you can work around any “difficult” grammar. When you have to translate whatever’s put in front of you, though, you’re forced to confront those grammar structures you might rather avoid.

For more common languages you can find books with complete sentences and their translations. I recommend having a native speaker around to check in with, though, because you may come up with translations that are different from the book’s, but just as correct. If you can’t find a book like this, translating any relatively high-level text from your native language into your target language will do.

Grammar Practice Alternatives

If you don’t particularly enjoy translation, though, try writing on a topic you enjoy and finding a native speaker you can correct your grammar. Pay close attention to the mistakes you make repeatedly (keep a list, too) and if you feel like you don’t understand a certain grammar feature, study up on it.

And if you hate writing, you can always hold conversations with someone ready to stop you and point out your grammar errors or awkward phrasing.

The point is that grammar study isn’t inherently useless. Not everyone can reach a high level just by reverse engineering everything. Once you’re at upper-intermediate level, if you want to improve, you’ll probably need at lease some with the grammar structures you’re making mistakes with.

What do you think? Have you been able to reach C2 or near-native level without really studying grammar? If you have, leave a comment and let me know how you managed that one. I’d love to know!

Related posts:

1. Learning a Foreign Language: Tips for Learning Grammar
2. Which is Better: A Native or Non-Native Teacher?
3. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”

1. Songs are enjoyable even when you don’t understand a word, so you listen to the same material again and again…and again. Try that with Pimseur.




2. With so much repetition and because of the slowish speed, you eventually notice a certain “sound patterns” (words, that is). You get curious and look the words up. Obviously, this is a lot easier with some languages than others.




3. If you’re studying, you’re also learning more words from your course book, phrase book or other learning material. You start to pick out those words in songs, too. You might see the names of songs translated and pick up words and phrases that way, too.




4. You keep listening for pleasure, so you’re getting lots of review. You don’t forget the words you’ve looked up. This is the value of the limited vocabulary. You’re also hearing the words in a natural, native context with native pronunciation.




5. Eventually you know enough words that you can pick out whole phrases.




6. Listen some more and you have those phrases memorized. Heck, you may even have whole songs down pat. You can even sing along and work on your pronunciation.




7. By this time, you probably know little chucks of grammar like “for you” (pronoun in the dative case), “your eyes” (possessive), or “I love you” (present tense verb and a pronoun in the accusative case). The form and correct, native usage is well ingrained in your mind.
   
   When you do crack open your grammar book and look at the part on “pronouns in the dative case,” you already know how to use “for you.” Dative schmative–you know what it really means. The grammar book is just providing clarification of something you already instinctively know.

But Songs Can’t do it All

First of all, you need music you genuinely like, not just tolerate. Otherwise, you’re not going to get enough repetition. Depending on your taste for the culture’s music, finding those songs may be an uphill battle.

Even if you find them, you won’t learn from passive listening. It takes curiosity and at least a little effort. At the very least, you have to actually look up those words you pick out. It’s hard to overstate this: be curious!

Another problem is that we don’t speak the way we sing. The intonation is different and singers sometimes shift the stress on words to fit them into a rhythm. Just because you can understand songs doesn’t mean you can understand speech at a natural speed.

And, of course, if you stick with pop music, your vocabulary will be pretty much limited to romance. Despite these drawbacks, because songs make such and easy and enjoyable way to memorized chucks of language, though, they make a handy way to start.

If you haven’t yet found songs you like in the language you’re learning, keep looking. Browse YouTube, listen to online radio and note the singer of each song you like, and ask around for suggestions.

Related posts:

1. How to Learn Foreign Language Vocabulary When You Have No Time to Study
2. Learning a Foreign Language: Tips for Learning Grammar
3. Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning: Which Words to Learn First

While you will, at some point need focused work on grammar, there’s no reason grammar drills should take up the bulk of your study time. To get communicative fast and save your sanity, focus on what you need for communication and then learn the rules of why you’re supposed to say something a certain way.

Work Backwards

All too many foreign language learning courses present learners with grammar rules before they’ve really had a chance to hear and see those rules in action. This is the exact opposite of the way we learn grammar in our native language. First we learn to say something like, “I want some cake!” and much later we learn that there’s a thing called the “first person present tense” (I want, I like, etc.).

When you’re first starting a new language, learn whole phrases that will be useful in your every day life and add words that can be used which those phrases. For example, “I’d like some…” and “water,” “tissues” and “more time.” Do this instead of just memorizing lists of words and facts about the grammar.

Which brings us to…

Memorize Examples

Instead of trying to memorize charts of verb conjugations and case endings, learn each one in the context of a phrase. If you’re having trouble understanding how to use a particular grammar feature, collect examples of the grammar in use until you get the hang of it.

Quality phrasebooks and text books (those that aren’t filled with grammar errors) are great resources for this, but don’t over look authentic (native) sources, either.

One way to collect grammar examples that works well with common grammar features is to open up a book or newspaper and scan the pages looking for examples.

For less common ones, choose part of the grammar feature you want to use, plug that into your favorite online search engine, and see what examples you come up with. For instance, if you’re trying to learn how to use the Russian preposition “k,” (to/for) type just that letter into google.ru and you can pick up examples like “k prazdniku” (for the holiday). [Apologies for the Latin letters. Wordpress would take the Cyrillic.]

Songs are another great way to collect example phrases in general. We tend to listen to songs we live over and over and eventually memorize the words with no effort at all. In fact, it’s fun! Take advantage to free online resources like youtube.com and live365.com to find singers and bands you like to help build your vocab and grammar skills.

If you struggle with foreign language grammar and can’t stand tedious grammar drills, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong or you’re “just not good at languages.” In Faster Foreign Language Learning, I outline specific ways to reach working fluency in another language without memorizing charts or spending hours on grammar drills.

Related posts:

1. Grammar: Now for the (Kind of) Bad News
2. Foreign Language Learning for Introverts: Speaking Practice Tips for Immersion Situations
3. Using Songs to Learn a Foreign Language: Get More From Your Pop Music