All sorts of myths, beliefs, truisms and what have you abound regarding the learning of a language.
- You need to speak from day 1
- Young children learn better than adults
- You study grammar and do exercises
- It will take lots of time and effort
- Some people are just gifted . . .
It may be that some of them have some truth, but certainly not all of them. They need to be tested out.
That's because when you believe that something is so, it becomes so. You create your own reality. Self-fulfilled prophesies.
Carry out an inventory to help you learn a new language.
What have you got that you could make use of?
There's the obvious school-type stuff: dictionaries, books, stationery, textbooks, pens and pencils.
There are the electronic gizmos that you own. Things you switch on and try not to spill coffee over.
There are the intangibles: skills, contacts, knowledge, membership of a library, Internet-knowhow (do you understand torrents?), magazine subscriptions etc.
If you notice gaps, then create a wish list.
Go shopping.
You want to be able to listen to things, so get the things (CDs, mp3s, DVDs) and make sure you have the equipment to play them on.
You want to have things to read, and not necessarily on paper. Think Kindles and the like. Consider comics. Kids stuff is often good, but it's often overlooked or looked down upon too.
The more complete and comprehensive you make your inventory, the more ideas you'll generate about how to go about learning your new language.
And the greater will be the odds that you'll succeed.
Instead of doing a lot at once, do a little often.
That's the best way to get used to a language.
Every time that you switch from from one language to another, you get better at it.
It's like training for the transitions in a triathlon.
So twelve 5-min periods of 'doing' your target language is better than one whole hour at a time.
Rock around the clock!
You beat your own path. No one else can walk it for you. You must bear the responsibility. You cannot expect anyone to know you better than you do, so you are the best (and only) person qualified to determine your particular way.
Liken the journey to learn another language to a journey, from wherever you happen to be now to anywhere else in the world.
We all start from a different place. We've each got different guidebooks, maps, gear, resources. We've got different destinations too; our intentions for our new language are not the same.
And so although we can get, and benefit from, other people's advice, it is general. It can only be rough and ready for us, no matter how precisely it was given.
We may share parts of the trip with other people, and even parallel much, or even most, of what others do, and yet the journey must be individual.
Learning a new language will take time. There's no getting around it. But that shouldn't be a cause for concern. There are plenty of things that you spend a lot of time on, but don't dread doing.
Sports. Hobbies. Music. Food. Travel. Sleep. Movies. Books. Dancing. Yoga.
A long time does not imply a lot of effort. A long time does not imply boredom. A long time does not imply a lot of expense.
You just need to get used to the sounds and the words and the word patterns of another language. That requires exposure. And for the exposure to be sufficient, it needs to be at a low-enough intensity.
But learning a language is up to you. No one else can do it for you. There's no one else whom you might rightfully blame if the results aren't what you want.
I've nothing against school.
I've even worked in them.
Nevertheless, I've come to the conclusion that languages don't belong at school. The teachers may be OK, and even inspirational, but the methods suck.
Also, no one can teach you a language, so the whole rationale for language learning is up the creek.
I used to say that only you can teach yourself another language, but now I disbelieve even that. But at least you need to take charge.
You don't learn a language at school. You learn it in your head--or, more precisely, you get used to it in your head.
You don't learn a language; you acquire it.
Because you'll spend a thousand hours or two in total to learn a new language, you can save yourself a sizable chunk.
Achieve that by applying The Pareto Principle.
It says that the effort that you put in doesn't always lead to a corresponding output.
Typically, 20% of the effort can give you 80% of the result.
(And 20% of that 20% can give you over 50% of the result.)
In non-mathematical language, you can get an A with a lot of effort.
You can get a B with a weekend's effort.
And you can get a passing C doing your work on the ride home in the bus!
So ask yourself: What is helping me the most?
Then do more of that!
You need to be clever here. Learn a language in line with your personality. That is, if you are shy then don't ignore that. Don't go against the grain and force yourself to speak out aloud and in front of others.
If you're a loner then work on your own.
If you hate to speak on the phone in English, then don't practice telephone conversations or visit Skype.
You don't need to. There are dozens of ways to learn apart from such methods.
Here's what's important for you (me) to know. In fact, it's crucial.
You don't need to study a language. You don't do it like other school subjects. You leave it up to your brain to sort out automatically.
Stay out of the brain's way! Just feed it with nice (enjoyable, understandable) input and sit back.
All those declension tables in Latin, and the grammar-translation method plus vocabulary lists in French put you completely onto the wrong track!
Remember how much better it went later with German and those 20-minute episodes?
When you learn another language, the more you are able to forget yourself the better. That's one of the psychological aspects of language-learning.
So aim to act out a role. (I've hears that someone dresses up in orange and kicks about a football when he does Dutch!)
Me, I want to speak like Takakura Ken, the Japanese Clint Eastwood!
One day you're going to walk the length of the country (of course not in 1 day!) the way that A.H. Reed did. (Remember him? He came into your classroom to give us kids a talk when you were 11 and he was in his 90s.) What's more, you're going to do it barefoot. I'm not kidding.
It won't be easy, but you'll do it. It will hurt, but it'll be right up there among the best experiences of your life.
Along the way, you'll learn a hell of a lot about yourself, and about life.
For example, you'll understand the importance of focusing on one step at a time.
It's crazy to look at the endpoint of some l o n g project and decide to be satisfied only when you get there, because that will make you hate every step that you take except for the last one.
It's like: "not there yet, not there yet, not there yet, not there yet . . ." instead of "great progress, great progress, great progress . . ."
Learning a language is going to take time, irrespective of how you do it. May as well enjoy every bit of progress instead of beating yourself up.
And besides, there's no actual 'last step' in a language-learning journey.
80% of learning an language is psychology. Only 20% is to do with method. (Where exactly I got that, I forget, but I believe it.)
That figure is the average. For some cultures--Japanese, for example--the psychological issue is even greater. And it depends on the individual as well. Me, for example. I've had a HUGE psychological language-learning issue with Japanese.
I won't go into that here.
But you know yourself the issue that you had with French. You felt it sounded feminine. You and your mates called it a "poofy" language. To a lesser extent you had an issue with Latin too. You'd heard it was a 'dead' language. And you were frustrated by the fact that even after learning its grammar rules it would behave like a 'proper' subject such as Maths or Science.
Bringing such an attitude to any language guarantees that you'll never learn it.
Listen, you first try your hand at Japanese (in 1993) you'll make very little progress for 20 years. Then, when you finally change your attitude, you'll streak ahead and feel comfortable with it in a year or two. Simple as that.
Moral of the story: Deal with your attitude first!
This blog addresses the question of how to learn another language, i.e. a
language not one's mother tongue. Basically, this is where I want to
collect my ideas. You'll need to understand English to read it,
obviously. In terms of audience, anyone is free to make use of it, but
I'm going to imagine that I'm talking to myself at the age of 15. I'm
going to speak at that level and in that tone.
You're 15. To me, at 58, that's the youngest age at which you're approximately an adult. You're mature enough to think, in other words (even though you've been philosophically-minded for over a decade already).
This is the age at which I want to catch you. I think that you're ready. Listen to me; don't let this opportunity go by.
You're smart enough to understand what I'm saying. You're doing well at school and in the next few years you'll achieve a number of academic 'honors'. You won't let that go to your head, I'm happy to say. You'll realize that they're not worth much.
Instead, I want to get you thinking about languages.
Listen, Maths and Science are child's play for you. You handle English and History well. Heck, you'll even pass Art. But you've already had some problems with language.
Now, it's not that you haven't the experience of knowing a language other than English. After all, you grew up with anuda muvva tongue. You switched between Dutch and English according to which school you had to attend, and in which country you happened to be. (How many people can say they've sailed around the world via the Suez and Panama Canals under the age of eight?)
So you know what it feels like to know another language well, to the degree of slipping along from one into the other, rather than clumsily 'switching'. You know what another language is about. You remember activating one or the other by reading, always reading: fairy tales, comics, library books . . .
But then you got French and Latin.
'Cause when you started high school you were placed in the academic stream. You were made topmost of the top. 3A1 above 3A2 above 3G1, 3G2, 3G3, 3G4, 3G5, 3G6, 3G7 & 3G8, and God how horrible it would be to admit to being in 3G8! But it was almost as bad having to admit that you were in the highest class.
So anyway, you were duly served up French and Latin.
Short story: you had issues with French. The teachers were female. The language itself sounded feminine. The Latin teacher was a manly man. I imagined him as a Roman warrior. (He died years later in his 50s climbing mountains, I heard.) True, Latin was nicely Mathematical, but I couldn't see the point in memorizing and applying the rules on a language that was dead.
Now, tt the age of 15 you're about to throw languages out with the bathwater. With the benefit of hindsight, I've come here to urge you not to do that.
You see, you're going to spend several years living and working overseas. You're going to have two wives (not at the same time) whose first language isn't English. You're going to have four children all of whom will speak languages that you don't understand.
You're going to mingle with hundreds of people from dozens of other countries, helping them to master English. This will enrich your life to an incredible degree. In fact, you'll feel more at home with people from other lands than the country in which you were born (New Zealand).
Learning another language is easy if you do it right. However, very, very few people know how to do it right. I do, but it has taken me several decades to get to that point.
Let us short-circuit that process. Take a look at what I've got to give you. Trust me. Within a year or two (of being fifteen) you're going to be exposed to German, and you'll love it. You'll make good use of it when you go cycle-touring through Europe.
Get a language, get a life!
That's the message of this blog.
As Johan Wolfgang von Goethe put it:
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.
(He who doesn't know foreign languages knows nothing about his own.)
