Faster Foreign Language Learning

10 Ways to Get Started Learning a Foreign Language Today

Amelia — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:01:30 +0000

A view of Budapest's Liberty Statue from Ménesi Road.

(Just a little reminder–there are still a few copies of Faster Foreign Language Learning left at the sale price of $19.95, so grab yours now if you want one. And now on with the post…)

You hear it all the time: “I’d like to learn Greek some day” or “I’ve always wanted to learn Japanese” or any other similarly phrased wistful comment on language learning. Some people keep saying something like this for years. If they’d invested as much time in learning as they had in dreaming, they’d at least be able to hold a simple conversation in that language they’ve “always” wanted to learn.

Sound familiar? If so, why not start now? As in, today. As in, right this minute (well, after you finish reading this post). Yes, I know you’re busy, but even so, there are ways to squeeze in a little learning. Sure, if you’re under an unusual amount of stress right now, it’s just not a good time to start something new. But otherwise…

Just Start for Crying Out Loud!

I’ll let you in on a little secret: when you’re having trouble getting started, what you learn doesn’t really matter. What matters is getting into the habit of working with the language every day.

Spend five to 10 minutes a day this week, then 10 to 15 minutes a day next week, and keep increasing little by little until you get up to 30 minutes or an hour. Take it slow, though. If you overdo it and try to spend an hour or two every day the first week you start, you’re likely to get sick of language learning and stop.

Super-Easy Ways to Build Serious Language Learning Momentum

If you’re not sure what to start with, I’ve listed 10 ideas in this post. Not all of these will work for every language, so you may have to modify them for yours. Most of these assume you’re at an absolute or near beginner level, too, but you can make them more challenging if you’re at a higher level.

These aren’t enough to learn a whole language with, but they can help you develop the habit of studying regularly, so you can move ahead.

Learn three letters if your target language uses a different alphabet. Find something in print (or print something from the internet) and scan the page looking for those three letters. When you find one, circle it. Next, try writing the letters.

Listen to song and look up the title (Google or ask someone). You don’t have to memorize it, just look it up so you understand what it means. This may sound simplistic, but over time, you really can learn vocabulary and even grammar this way.

Learn one basic phrase (”My name is…,” “How are you?,” etc.). Already know the basics? Create a short dialogue with some basic phrases.

Learn two nouns. Because they often represent things you can visualize, nouns are easy to remember. And food words are always useful!

Have a textbook available? Do one exercise in your textbook. Just one. Or even half of one.

Look up a conjugated verb in Google and collect the examples of how it’s used. (Be careful to take your examples from a reliable source)

If you know some basic vocabulary, find a picture and name things or make sentences to describe what you see.

Tune into an internet radio station and just listen. Look up some basic weather vocabulary–twenty bucks says you’ll be able to understand the weather report in no time! If you really hate listening to something you don’t understand at all, though, just skip this one.

Learn a phrase with a preposition. If you’re studying a language that uses cases, these “model phrases” can help you learn how to use the cases.

Grab a magazine or newspaper, or find a good webpage and read the ads. They’re usually short and simple. If you don’t know any of the words, choose two and look them up. If you can’t read the text, see suggestion #1

I tried to keep these suggestions short, so if anything’s unclear, just leave a comment and I’ll explain in more detail.

If you can get into the habit of doing something with your target language for at least 10 minutes a day, I guarantee you’ll know at least a tiny bit after a month.

You’ll have a better understanding of the writing system, you’ll know a few more words, or you may even be able to hold a simple conversation. From there, you can move on to a more organized plan of study and start making some real progress.

A Quick Spring Update from Faster Foreign Language Learning

Amelia — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:33:08 +0000

Cherry tree in bloom and the steeple of the church on Kálvin Tér, Budapest

I haven’t been posting much, but I’ve been working plenty behind the scenes. One of the things I’ve been working on is a guide I know will be useful to a lot of you. In fact, it’s information I wish I’d had about 20 years ago.

The other bit of news could save you some money, so read the second half of this post, too.

New Guide Out! Conquer Your Foreign Language Anxiety

Fear of speaking a foreign language is one of the most common problems foreign language learners face. Sure, when you’re speaking a language you don’t know well, it’s normal to feel a little shy and insecure. Minor nervousness like that goes away as you gain skill.

The real problem comes in when you’re so afraid to speak that you totally avoid conversation and have trouble even speaking at all in class. Nausea, sweating palms, and racing heart are all fairly common in this situation. Worse, you may find you get flustered and anxious when simply listening to a foreign languange you can’t understand well. You get stressed out when you can’t understand what someone’s saying to you.

This kind of anxiety not only makes you miserable, but it can also do serious harm to your ability to learn and rob you of the chance to develop, use, and enjoy your foreign language skills. The good news is that you can get rid of this anxiety. It will take some work and it won’t happen overnight, but it is possible.

Conquer Your Foreign Language Anxiety is a practical, experience-based, step-by-step guide to overcoming your fear of speaking a foreign language. If you’re tired of letting your anxiety hold you back, take a look at this guide. (And it’s only $7! You can at least give it a try, right?)

Recession-Buster Sale!

Just in case you haven’t noticed, the world economy sucks right now. Joblessness is rampant and there’s stiff competition for the jobs that are open. If you’re looking for a job, depending on your field, knowing another language can give you a significant advantage over monolingual job applicants.

If fact, in some cases, you may be at a real real disadvantage if you don’t know a foreign language. I was recently talking with someone who’d just applied for a job as a cashier with the BKV (public transit authority) in Budapest. He said in order to stand a decent chance of being hired, you’d better know at least a little English and German. The job involves little more than selling tickets and passes, yet it still requires foreign language knowledge.

So, given the above facts, I’ve temporarily reduced the price of Faster Foreign Language Learning (yes, the whole thing) by over 50%. It’s on sale for the next 6 (it was 10) buyers for $19.97 so stop by and pick up your copy now.

If you don’t have plans for serious language study right now, but know someone who does, let them know about the sale so they can grab a copy.

How to Get the Most from Your Listening Material

Amelia — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:13:51 +0000

When you’re learning a foreign language, improving your listening skills takes lots of listening. Even if listening material for your target language is plentiful, it’s easy to find yourself without enough good material if you don’t make the most of what you have.

By listening to something just once or twice, working through any accompanying comprehension questions or practice exercises, and moving on to the next thing, you’ll go through a lot of material without getting much out of it. Worse yet, you may end up feeling like you’re working awfully hard at improving your listening skills, but not making much progress.

A More Efficient Way to Use Listening Material

Taking a step-by-step approach to working with your listening material helps you get as much as possible from each one. Planning a structured lesson–rather than just passively listening–helps you suck every last drop of usefulness out of every bit of listening material you have so you actually learn and improve your listening skills with all that work you’re doing. That means greater rewards and less frustration for you!

One note, though: the lesson-planning method I’ll describe below works best with material you could understand most of if it were written, but find somewhat more difficult to understand when you hear it spoken at a natural speed.

Of course, sometimes you might want to listen to any authentic material (material meant for native speakers) just to catch whatever you can or simply get used to the sound of the language. Doing this is helpful in its own way, but it’s hard to build a useful lesson around material you find extremely difficult to understand. To use this method, choose listening material that’s at or slightly above your current level.

Step 1: Global Comprehension

Before you listen the first time, set a “prediction task” for yourself. The goal with this is to prepare yourself for the kinds of vocabulary and grammar structures you might hear so you’ll recognize them more easily.

A teacher who’s already listened to the material has a wide variety of possible prediction tasks he or she can give you. When you’re doing this alone, you’re limited in the kinds of tasks you can set for yourself, but you still have a few options. For example:

If you’re going to listen to the day’s news, write down a few topics you think you might be discussed.

If you’re going to listen to material on a specific topic (grocery shopping, the state of the economy, puppy care, etc.), write down some words or phrases you expect to hear.

If it’s an interview, what questions might the interviewer ask?

If it’s an anecdote or short film, use the title and any accompanying pictures to predict what might happen in the story.

Listen once through and check your predictions. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, the goal is simply to warm up for more detailed listening. If you weren’t able to tell whether you were right or wrong, have another another listen. When you’re done, you should have the gist of the material and be able to give someone a brief overview of what the material’s about.

Step 2: Discrete Comprehension or Listening for Details

On your next (usually second or third) listening, listen for more detailed information. If your listening material comes with comprehension questions, they’re probably mostly the “listening for detail” kind.

So, when you listen to a news report the first time–aiming for a general overview–you might understand that a bank robbery happened that day. When you listen again for detail, you might try to hear what time it happened, how much money the robber stole, or whether or not the robber hurt anyone.

If you don’t have comprehension questions or other exercises available, focus on anything you didn’t understand. It may be individual words or short phrases. It may also be whole sentences in which you understand all the words, but still don’t quite understand the meaning of the whole sentence.

If you hear a word clearly, but don’t know what that word means, don’t just ignore it or wait until you see it written to look it up in your dictionary. Take your best guess at the spelling and look it up in your dictionary. Getting into that habit can go a long way towards helping you build your vocabulary from listening.

Once you think you’ve understood everything you can from listening, then look at the transcript, if you have. But don’t cheat yourself by checking the transcript after only two or three listenings!

Step 3: Work with Your New Vocabulary and Grammar

Add any new words and phrases from your listening to your vocabulary notebook, if you keep one. Be selective! Choose just a few of the new words you think you’ll be most likely to use, instead of overwhelming yourself with a dozen or more new words.

Then practice using them. Get them into your head and make them your own so you can use them whenever you want. Being able to recognize words isn’t enough if you want to speak and write, too!

Try making up a few sentences using each new word. Create a mind map starting with one of the words. Put a word or phrase into your favorite search engine to see if any good usage examples come up in the search results. (Just make sure the phrases are grammatically correct and acceptable (polite) usage before you bother to write them down and practice them!)

If you noticed a grammar structure you’ve never seen before, look it up in your grammar book, learn a little more about it, and try using it yourself.

Now go and give it a try! If you have a book-and-CD set of listening lessons, use the steps above to expand each lesson to get even more out of it. Don’t have any pre-made listening lessons? Make your own listening lesson out of a radio program, podcast, song, interview or any other recorded audio material you can find.

The Worst Language Learning Method Ever…Or “Why Review and Practice are Important”

Amelia — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:49:57 +0000

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!