November snowfall on Chavchavadzis

(First off, we had a rather unseasonable drop of at least 10 centimeters of snow last night. Pictures included! )

Worst Method Ever?

All right, it may not have been “the worst ever,” but it was pretty bad. Years ago, I did a few days of trial teaching at a private school–let’s call it School X–where the students were so miserable they complained to me, a total stranger, on my first day there. I would have thought I’d misunderstood the school’s teaching method had I not been introduced to the whole thing and heard students complaining about that same method. To this day, I still wonder how this school developed their method, but I thought I’d mention it to help clear up a certain myth.

The basis for School X’s teaching method seemed to be the belief that once you learn something “perfectly,” you’ll never forget it. That would be nice. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

“Learn Once, Remember Forever” Doesn’t Work

Nearly all cohesive language courses provide lessons that build on each other and continually review and reinforce the material learned. If they didn’t, students would quickly forget what they’d recently studied. School X’s method, however, was to focus on one topic at a time, completely “master” it, then move to something completely unconnected and never go back to what the student had recently “mastered.”

For vocabulary, a student at School X might learn a selection of words on a theme like “parts of the body” or “kitchen items,” or something more specific like “‘bring’ versus ‘take’.” For grammar, students studied specific functions like the present perfect or relative clauses. Once they learned the topic, they did no review. This was the tagline of the school’s advertising–no review! “Learn something once and never have to return to it.” Oh my.

Snow on a small palm tree. Yes, it's a live tree!

Even worse, students seemed to get almost no free practice like doing role-plays or writing on a general topic. Free practice naturally involves some review, so that would have helped. But unfortunately, it was all memorizing vocabulary and isolated grammar rules, then doing a few restrictive practice exercises like gap-fills, multiple choice questions, and sentence translations.

When a student could do enough practice exercises correctly, they were said to “know” the topic and they could move on to something else. In reality, they forgot what they learned because they had so little chance to 1) practice and 2) review. Some of the students told me so themselves. One said he was only staying with the school because he’d already paid for a full course. Poor guy.

This “learn once and for all” method might almost be acceptable with vocabulary because theoretically the students could review vocabulary on their own. With grammar, though, it’s utterly illogical. The idea that you can master a whole verb tense or some other bit of grammar in a week just doesn’t work. For instance, when you start out with English, you might learn how to use the past simple in some basic, common cases, but you can’t possibly learn everything there is to know about the past simple all at once while you’re still at beginner level.

Surprise! Review is Important

Learning grammar is more like a series of spirals that a straight line. You return to the essential grammar again and again, learning more about it each time. What’s more, it takes time to really assimilate the rules so you can use them more or less instinctively. That’s why many intermediate-level coursebooks cover the same topics as beginner/elementary-level course books. The higher level coursebook provides review and goes into each grammar function more deeply so you learn more about using it.

Snow on a side street.

It may be tempting to look at a list of grammar functions from your target language and think, for example, “Okay this week I’ll learn the accusative case, then next week I’ll learn the genitive case and I’ll know those.” The problem is if you try to master the accusative case before you learn anything else, you’ll end up trying to memorize a lot of abstract rules that may not really improve your communcation skills. It would be like trying to learn absolutely everything about flour before trying to bake some bread. After a few days, you’ll have lots of useless knowledge about flour…and no bread.

So my point is: practice and review. Instead of trying to memorize word lists and grammar rules, practice really using the words and grammar functions you’re studying. If you’re getting regular, real-life practice such as holding frequent conversations with fluent speakers, writing emails, and reading the daily newspaper, you may not need much other review. If you’re not using the language daily, though, regularly review what you’ve studied and actively look for ways to get more practice (in other word, start reading the daily paper).

Keeping a regular review schedule can help you stay on track. At the end of the week, review everything you studied that week. At the end of the month, review everything you studied that month. Eventually, you’ll reach a point at which you don’t need to review so often, but it’s still useful to practise often if you want to keep your skills sharp.

What about you? Have you had any encounters with strange, ineffective or just plain bad foreign languange teaching methods? If so, share your experience in the comments section below!

Related posts:

1. Foreign Language Learning for Introverts: Speaking Practice Tips for Immersion Situations
2. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”
3. How to Deal with Frustration When You’re Learning a Language

Unfortunately, getting frustrated and trying to “concentrate harder” is often counterproductive. As Stephen Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis suggests, emotions like anxiety and irritation can make it harder for you to understand and speak. (So you know it’s not just me saying this. ) If you tend to get frustrated, there are a few things you can do to help yourself stay calm, so you can learn better and enjoy your learning more.

Congratulations, You’re Normal!

If you’re not used to language learning, it’s hard to know how much difficulty is really normal. You might feel you’re slower than other people, that you should be learning faster or that certain things shouldn’t be so difficult or confusing. In reality, though, you might be right on target.

And even if you do have language learning experience, it can help to remind yourself that you’re not alone with your struggles.

For example…

• It’s normal to understand more in written form than in spoken form. But that can also work in reverse if you spend a lot more time listening than reading or if you’re working with a different alphabet or writing system.
• It’s normal to have more difficulty understanding faster speech than slower speech.
• It’s normal to understand less and speak less fluently when you’re tired.
• It’s normal to have trouble switching back and forth between two languages.
• It is possible to understand every individual word in a sentence and still not understand the meaning of the sentence. It may seem impossible, but I promise you’re not the only one who’s experienced it.
• Just because you learned to understand one language well after three months doesn’t mean it will be the same with another language.

The point is there are countless things that can confuse you when you’re learning a foreign language. You can avoid a lot of frustration just by accepting that feeling confused, not understanding everything, and have trouble expressing yourself are all perfectly normal parts of the language learning process. And fortunately, they don’t last forever.

Set Realistic Goals

Frustration happens when you’re dissatisfied that you’re not meeting your goals and expectations. Challenging goals are great, but when you set unrealistically high goals, you set yourself up for frustration.

To get an idea of what you should know in your target language after a certain amount of study time, check out the learning goals and timelines of textbooks and programs for your target language. For example, a reputable language school might suggest you can reach lower intermediate (B1) level in two months with five hours of study daily, five days a week with a skilled teacher.

The wikipedia entry for the CEFR’s B1 level reads, in part, “Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc.” Not bad at all, but it still means you’re missing the majority of what’s being said even with familiar topics. But for that level, that’s perfectly normal.

SIL International’s online resource suggests that at intermediate level, you’ll undstand basic greetings, amounts of money when you’re shopping, basic directions to get somewhere, and “bits and pieces of radio or television announcements and news reports dealing with familiar topics or events.” Bits and pieces–not everything.

If you study only an hour or so a day and the language is very different from anything else you know, it can take half a year or more to get to intermediate level. That means depending on your study time, techniques, prior experience and target language you could be studying months and still only catch odd bits of news reports–and that’s normal. Just keep learning and practicing and you will improve.

“It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.” — Lech Walesa, Polish politician and human-rights activist

Focus On What’s Really Important

When you have a conversation, isn’t your primary goal communication? While it would be nice to communicate with complete ease and eloquence, that doesn’t always happen. If you’ve communicated what you wanted to, you’ve reached your primarily goal. Give yourself some credit!

When you watch a movie, is your ultimate goal to understand every word or is it to simply enjoy the movie? If you can follow the plot and enjoy the story, it really doesn’t matter if how many words you didn’t understand.

Sure, eventually you’ll want to be able to understand every word of what you hear. That will come. If you allow yourself to become frustrated because you’re not understanding everything and saying everthing perfectly, though, progress may come a lot more slowly and painfully.

Track Your Progress

Even if you feel like you’re not progressing, if you look closely, you’ll probably find that you are gaining more skill with your target language. Try keeping a log of your communication-based accomplishments. Instead of just tracking what you’ve studied (like “completed lesson five”), note what new things you can do with the language (like “successfully ordered pizza”).

This is a little harder with listening skills, but it can be done. Listen to a recording of something a little above your level and note how much you understand. Then don’t listen to that recording again for another month or more. When you do listen again, you’ll probably be surprised by how much more you can understand.

Take a Break…

If you’re getting so frustrated you want to give up or you’re starting to hate your target language, take some time away from what’s frustrating you. Are you getting irritated by the fact that you still can’t understand news broadcasts? Then stop listening to them for a while.

Try not to avoid the language completely, though, or you may fall out of the habit of using it. The longer you stay away from the language, the more you’ll forget. Instead of working with news broadcasts (or listening exercises or whatever’s irritating you), listen to songs, kids’ stories and other light material for your own enjoyment.

But Then Get Back to Work

After a break of a week or two, look for specific ways you can improve your skill in whatever is giving you trouble. If you think you can muster the patience and can find an equally (or perhaps more) patient native or fluent speaker to talk with, ordinary conversation will do wonders for increasing your ability to understand as well as speak for fluently.

Shadow reading, or listening while following along with a written transcript, can also help. Take a closer look at any linguistic “details” your target language may offer, such as elisions, assimilations, linking, minimal pairs, and weak forms. Sometimes just knowing about these can help you better understand what you hear and reduce your accent.

Just realizing that it’s normal to feel confused, misunderstand, misspeak and otherwise stumble along as you learn helps you relax and avoid frustration. With less frustration in your way, you’ll not only learn faster, but also enjoy your language learning progress more.

Related posts:

1. How to Set Goals for Learning a Foreign Language
2. How to Cure Foreign Language Learning Burnout
3. Learning a Foreign Language: Tips for Learning Grammar

The question of how much to study every day goes hand in hand with the question of how long it takes to learn a language. And there’s no definitive answer to either, because the answer depends on your goals and the language you’re studying. Take into account your longer-term goals, target language and personal learning speed, though, and you can come up with a good estimate for how much time you should work with the language daily.

Little by Little

The impetus for this post was a daily language study schedule I recently came across at Kenneth Beare’s About.com ESL guide. This is for beginning English learners, but it’s relevant to any language. Beare suggests spending 10 minutes on listening, 10 minutes on reading, 5 minutes new vocabulary, 5 minutes on speaking, and 5 to 10 minutes on grammar.

That works out to about 40 minutes a day, which can fit into almost anyone’s schedule. If you want to learn as a hobby, this keeps you making progress and prevents you from losing what you’ve already learned.

Having the option of a mini-session like this also keeps you from breaking the habit of daily study. Even if you normally spend more time with the language each day, this half-hour plan gives you something to fall back on when you’re busy or tired and tempted to skip a day. Especially when you’re starting out, it’s easy to start skipping days and forgetting what you’ve learned. A 40-minute session is a lot better than nothing and maintains your momentum.

But at 40 minutes a day, it will be slow going. Especially if the language is very different from any other you know, it will be a while before you can understand or converse much. I suspect this is part of the reason people get frustrated with 4-hour-a-week language courses. You can end up taking these classes for years and never really getting the traction you need to become a confident, independent user of the language.

Serious Progress

If you need to get proficient in a language within a specific period of time not defined in years, you’ll need to put in a little more time each day. How much time depends, of course, on what level you’re hoping to reach in what timeframe.

According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the U.S. Department of State (based on the information I have. See below.), a native English speaker needs 575 to 600 hours of class time to gain General Professional Proficiency in a language similar to English, such as Spanish or French. The FSI classes are 25 hours a week, plus 3 or 4 hours independent study daily.

This works out to about 24 weeks, or 6 months, of class time. Adding in the independent study time, it’s about 8 hours of study on most days for those 6 months. Naturally, a less closely related language like Russian or Arabic will take longer for a native English speaker. General Professional Proficiency isn’t quite “fluent,” but it’s quite a high level (just below Advanced, the highest) and should let you do whatever you need to in the language.

Now, 6 months is no time at all, but 8 hours a day isn’t practical for most people. Assuming your life requires activities besides eating, sleeping and studying, you’ll probably need to modify this schedule. Based on the FSI’s estimates, though, you can get an idea of what your schedule should be. (Note: I’m taking this information from a page from the National Virtual Translation Center’s website that I have this saved on my computer, but I can’t find it online anymore.)

I’m just putting this out there as an example of what’s possible. You don’t need years of classes to learn to hold a basic conversation in another language. You don’t have to stumble along year after year in a foreign country without learning the language. There’s nothing wrong with going at your own pace, of course, but don’t let incorrect assumptions hold you back.

All-Out Craziness

It’s hard to beat 8 hours of study a day, but it can be done. Some intensive courses run 8 hours a day, as opposed to the FSI’s 6 hours. While I’ve never taken a course like this, I’ve taught on them and the students often comment on how much they’ve improved after just a week. In many cases, they were re-activating half-forgotten knowledge and gaining fluency with what they already knew more than learning new things, but that’s still improvement.

And then, of course, there’s real-life total immersion. You’ve just moved to another country. You’re with people who may not understand a word of your language. You don’t get to use your native language just because you’re having trouble phrasing something or because you’re tired. It is exhausting and frustrating at first, but you can get communative quickly this way.

The down side of learning very quickly in an unstructured environment and being forced to produce immediately is that it increases the likelihood of fossilized errors. This happens because although you may be speaking as well as you can, you’re still speaking incorrectly. The people you talk to may be too polite or indifferent to correct you. Through dint of repetition, your most common errors can become hard-to-break habits.

The upside is that you can gain working facility with the language very quickly, which boosts your confidence. If you’re shy about speaking a foreign language, this boost in confidence can be well worth any risk of fossilized errors.

And if you’re in the country where that language is spoken, it also makes your daily life a lot easier and more pleasant. I find another benefit of immersion situations is that they push you into the language mentally. You’re more likely to think or even dream in that language. Someone says something to you and you’re ready to answer instead of having to mentally switch languages and fumble for words.

Keep in mind, too, that just being engaged with the language is “studying.” It still “counts” if you’re reading a magazine, listening to songs or a news broadcast, watching a movie, or chatting with someone content to do the best you can without pondering grammar rules, looking anything up or writing down vocabulary words. In fact, if you do enough of this, you’ll probably find yourself digging into your dictionary and textbooks out of sheer curiosity.

So, why are you still here? Go read something in Spanish!

Related posts:

1. The Worst Language Learning Method Ever…Or “Why Review and Practice are Important”
2. How to Set Goals for Learning a Foreign Language
3. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”

I’ve just come back to my “home base” after about two and a half years away and I was surprised at how hard it was to get back into the flow of the language. While away, I listened to the radio and wrote emails in the language, but except for the odd phone call, I hardly ever spoke.

I’m used to being able to express whatever I need to in this language without thinking much (which has its own hazards!), so it was a shock to find myself unable to say the simplest things sometimes. I could communicate fine, but not fluently. Most of it was that “tip of the tongue” feeling, but some was also strange grammatical errors that felt like somebody else talking. Meanwhile, I could understand with no trouble at all. Very frustrating.

It’s taken me almost two weeks to really get back up to speed again. Below, I’ve listed a few things that have helped me. If you have any suggestions for anyone trying wake up their hibernating language skills, please leave a comment, because I’d love to hear about them.

Here are a few tips I can pass on for reviving speaking skills…

Listen a Lot

Load up on auditory input. By “load up,” I mean get as much as possible and preferably all in your target language. You’re not trying to learn anything new, just bring up things that are already firmly planted in your memory. Reading helps, too, but listening lets you review more words faster. Chatty friends come in handy here. Ideally, talk with people who know you understand and used to speak better, so they aren’t tempted to slow down or simplify too much.

Adjust Your Thinking

Until you get your language skills back to where they were, try to think only in the language you’re re-activating. It’s probably impossible to do 100 percent of the time, but aim for as much as possible. This helps re-set your “first reaction” language so you’re ready to answer in the local language when someone speaks to you. I’d spent several months speaking a lot of Russian and based on the grammatical errors I was making in Hungarian, I realized I was trying to make Hungarian fit Russian grammar. That situation quickly improved once I stopped thinking in Russian so much.

Talk Anyway

If you mispronounce things and stumble over grammar, it’s only natural that multilingual people are going offer another language to try to help you (or themselves) out. I got this a couple times in the last few weeks and my tactic was to completely ignore the fact that they switched languages and continue in the local language. I wouldn’t try it with airport security, but talking to a cashier or taxi driver, you’re probably fine.

Of course, this works best when you’re fairly sure all you need is a few seconds to remember a word or arrange a sentence and then you can continue. If you’re having trouble saying anything at all, you might want to accept the offer of an easier language and save your practice for friends. It depends on your tolerance for trying other people’s patience.

If you feel uncomfortable because of your tongue-tied-ness and don’t have another language to use, try mentioning that you used to speak better, but haven’t had a chance to use the language in X-amount of time. It seems to reassure people that you can understand them and will manage to get your thoughts out if they give you a second.

Lean on Another Language

When you’re trying to learn a language, giving yourself time to remember a word or construct grammically correct sentences is good practice. Taking time to work things out for yourself helps you build mental connections so you’re more likely to remember the next time. When you already know, though, just asking will save you from a lot of frustration. If you’re talking to a friend you have another language in common with and you can’t remember a word or can’t remember how to phrase something, asking them to translate will get you back up to speed faster.

Ever been in this situation yourself? If so, what helped you recover your language skills?

Related posts:

1. Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language? Consider This When You Travel
2. The Communicative Approach is Bad?
3. Learning a Language in a Bilingual Culture: Getting the Locals to Talk with You