I've probably spent the bulk of my time over almost the last year practicing with flash cards. They're cheap, easily-corrected, portable, and if you lose them it's not such a big deal to copy them out again. Some people have expressed surprise that I, a computer programmer, wouldn't use some kind of computer program instead of flash cards, but none of those programs are anywhere as convenient as cards, which you can scrawl corrections on, stick in your pocket, take out while you're waiting somewhere, etc. (Sure, there are programs that run on your cell phone, but I don't want to damage my hands with hours of playing with those tiny cell phone buttons.)
I've experimented with a number of different techniques. Initially I would make cards with English on one side, Spanish on the other, so I'd have something like
ver
to see
I found it quite difficult to retain words this way. Part of the problem is just that the words lack context, and I think the human brain is very attuned to context; we learn by creating associations between different memories, and those associations strengthen both memories. The other problem is that there are different senses of the word "ver" and there are different Spanish words that have the same translation in English. For example, both "por" and "para" can be translated as "for", so then on the English side you'd have to write something like
for (in exchange for, for a certain time...)
which got quite elaborate. Generally, words learned this way were quite hard to retain and not very helpful in conversation.
For all those reasons, and based on some things I read on the Internet, I started using flash cards with phrases instead of single words. I had already noticed that using phrases helped me retain the memories better, and in many cases the phrases were things that could be used directly in conversation, things like
Mucho gusto en concercerlo(la)
Pleased to meet you
After realizing this, I went much further in memorizing phrases, and found it tremendously helpful, so started trying to memorize longer and longer phrases until I ended up working with whole paragraphs from books and from newspaper articles. At this point I realized that there it a definite limit to the usefulness of this technique. For one thing, it's very hard to memorize a whole paragraph and get every single word correct. For another thing, there's a trick of memory where you can remember things in context, but you can't remember them by themselves; think of a song that you know, and then try to think of the words in the middle of the song without singing the first line. So I would sometimes find myself hearing a word, thinking it was a new word, and then realizing that it was one I'd memorized in the middle of a long paragraph. Finally, just as a practical matter, you want to focus on the parts that you're having trouble with, and when you have a whole paragraph you are spending time reviewing parts you already know, when you should be focusing on the one or two phrases that are most troublesome.
For all these reasons, I've recently moved back towards working with shorter phrases. The balance is probably somewhere between let's say at least two or three words, which might be OK if the words are pretty unusual, and maybe ten to fifteen words if the sentence isn't too challenging and has at most a couple of troublesome words. For instance, to memorize
Los pequeños socialistas
The little socialists
would be reasonable, because it's an unusual combination.
Now, based on my extremely positive impression of Pimsleur Spanish, I practiced with the flash cards using active recall, studying the English side and translating into Spanish. I would try to get the Spanish exactly correct, even down to the word order, use of articles like "el", "la", and "un", and the exact word choice. In some cases I would need to write hints on the English side that would help me remember the word choice; for instance, in Spanish you can use either "entender" or "comprender" to mean "understand", so in some cases I would write
I didn't understand (not "e")
to indicate that the Spanish should be
No comprendí
instead of
No entendí
The other feature of Pimsleur Spanish that I tried to emulate was to use a system where the cards would be reviewed at increasing intervals. Here, there's even an advantage over Pimsleur; when using a CD, it goes in a fixed order and if you have trouble with some parts, you have to repeat the entire CD. However, with flash cards you can pull out the specific cards you had trouble with and review them more intensively, focusing your time on the most troublesome parts. I also read about several people's own flash cards systems, and eventually after a great deal of refinement I've worked out what I think is the best system for myself. It has two basic modes, but you'll see that in both cases the same idea is used: troublesome cards are identified and reviewed more frequently.
Reviewing New or Troublesome Cards — The Short Stack Technique
Let's say you're just starting out and you make some cards that you want to learn, so you start out not knowing them at all. Or, let's say you've got a stack of cards you knew at one point, but recently had trouble with and so you want to review them intensively. In this case you should take a small stack of cards, maybe 40 or 50 at the most, and keep them with you for a day or so, reviewing them whenever you get a spare moment. If you review them twice a day for a couple of minutes, that will help you remember better than a single session that's twice as long; three times a day, four times a day would be even better, assuming you're spending the same amount of time in total. That's because the brain works by putting things into short-term memory, then throwing them away after some delay. You get things into your long-term memory by recalling them after some delay, the longer the better.
Now, as you go through the stack, check how well you do on each card. If you get the card wrong, even if you're just off by one word, review the card until you can repeat the answer without looking at the Spanish side. Then put it back in the stack underneath the next card. If on the other hand you get it completely right without hesitation, put it at the bottom of the stack. And for a card that you get right with a little bit of doubt or hesitation, put it in the middle of the stack; the more doubt you had, the closer to the top you should put it. You will find that some cards need a lot more practice than others; for those cards, stick them into the stack a little higher up and you'll have a better chance of remembering them the next time. As you slowly get better at them, stick them back in further and further from the top.
In some cases you'll find that cards are almost impossible to remember. In this case you have a couple of choices. You can split the phrase up into smaller phrases on two or more new cards; if you know enough grammar, you can modify the smaller phrases to put them into more context. For instance, I'm working on Lermontov's poem "Captive", which has the lines
Я красавицу младую
Прежде сладко поцелую,
The word-for-word meaning is something like
I youngest beauty
Before-everything sweetly will-kiss
so, because of the word order, it wouldn't make much sense to split it up into individual lines. However, I was able to split it up into
Я красавицу младую поцелую
I will kiss the youngest beauty
Я прежде сладко поцелую
I will before everything sweetly kiss
which are (hopefully) grammatical and are somewhat easier to remember.
Finally, in some cases even short phrases are really hard to remember because there are so many new words. In these cases, my response is simply to add more phrases that use the problematic words. If you have trouble with прежде, for instance, look it up and add 10 new phrases that use it in different contexts. Do this for every troublesome word and by the time you come back to the troublesome phrase you will be much more able to handle it as a whole.
Reviewing Known Cards — The Chinese Box Technique
When you've reviewed your stack of 40 or 50 for a day or two, you can start to use the "Chinese Box" technique, so named because it was used by people studying Chinese characters. It's also known as the Leitner System. The basic idea here is the same; cards you know go further back, cards you have trouble with go further up. However, instead of using a single stack we'll use a number of stacks. Ideally you should have a container that lets you separate cards into several different stacks; the original technique used a wooden box with compartments, but you can do it with shoe boxes or folders or really anything with some kind of slots or compartments. I myself used plastic coupon holders that look like accordion files.
Step one should start when you have reviewed your cards several times; you want to test yourself cold, so when you haven't reviewed them for a day or so, take out the stack and go through it, but this time instead of sticking cards back into the deck, make two piles, one of cards you got right and one of cards you got wrong. Put the "right" cards into your container in a different place than the "wrong" cards. Now go back to reviewing the "wrong" cards using the "short stack" technique. When you're ready to do it again in a day or so, repeat the testing process, again putting the cards you get right into the "right" stack.
Eventually you'll run out of "wrong" cards and all your cards will be in the "right" stack. Now you should go through the "right" stack, putting wrong cards into the "wrong" stack, and making a new stack for "twice right" cards. Now put the "twice right" cards back into the container, but move them one slot up from where the "right" cards would go. Now as you review the "wrong" cards, they will graduate into the "right" stack, so eventually you'll get three stacks, "wrong", "right", and "twice right".
As you review, always focus on the "wrongest" stack; as usual, use the short stack technique on the "wrong" stack. As above, when there are no "wrong" cards, review the "right" stack. When there are only "twice right" cards, review that stack; cards you get right will go into a "thrice right" stack.
You can continue this indefinitely, but at some point you should let cards graduate into a "well-known" stack; keep this in a separate place and review everything in it once in a while just to make sure you keep everything fresh in your memory.
Some Things To Watch Out For
Let's step back and see why this would be helpful. It's the same principle as in the short stack technique and as in Pimsleur, which is that items are repeated after intervals, with the intervals increasing; however, both of these techniques improve on Pimsleur by repeating the items you have had trouble with much more frequently. The short stack and Chinese box techniques are really the same thing, but the Chinese box technique is appropriate when you need to manage hundreds of cards in a reasonable way.
Now, there are some situations you can get into where the balance isn't quite right. First, you can add too many new cards at once, or too many hard ones; then you'll sit there forever reviewing your "wrong" stack. The solution to this is to break the "wrong" stack up; take out a short stack of less than 50 and put the rest away into a "to do" stack. Then continue using only that smaller set of "wrong" cards and you'll eventually be able to clear them out of the "wrong" stack. Then you can gradually add the "to do" cards, maybe 10 to 20 per day, into the "wrong" stack.
Another problem with adding lots and lots of new cards is that you may take a really long time between reviewing cards in one of your higher-level stacks. So, be sure to allow your "wrong" stack to clear on a regular basis so you can review the higher-level stacks. Ideally you should review your complete set of cards every couple of months.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
On Russian poetry and Argentine math professors
I recently got in touch with an Argentine man, a retired professor of mathematics, via Skype. He was already quite advanced in English and was interested in asking about some idiomatic phrases, so we had a long and interesting conversation, mostly in Spanish. With his permission, I recorded it, and then later went back over it and transcribed it with the help of SIL's Speech Analyzer program:
http://www.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm
You can hear the conversation and read a partial transcript here. (If you're wondering, yes, I did ask for permission to redistribute the audio, and he said "si".)
http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/spanish/rmartilotti/20070905/
It's really quite amazing how bad my accent is, and how many times I say "uhhhhh"; although it's painful to review, it's also amazingly helpful because I can see all sorts of errors that I wasn't aware of at the time. It's also helpful because I can review the professor's part of the conversation and start practicing some of his turns of phrase. I think he was trying to speak simply for my sake, but he's still a professor and so couldn't avoid using words I don't know and lots of constructions I'm still nowhere near being able to produce.
This was such an extraordinarily helpful exercise for all four of the skills — reading, writing, speaking, and listening — that I can't help but think that it's pretty close to an ideal technique for learning languages. In particular, I think the same technique will help me immensely in learning Russian.
I've been scratching my head about how best to study Russian, because its spelling and pronunciation present such a problem. The sounds are quite different from the sounds of English, and the rules that tell you how to pronounce words based on the letters are elaborate; I can read them in a book and understand them, but making them intuitive is another matter.
When I started with Spanish, I just had to learn a few rules of spelling, a couple of new sounds, and that was about it; Spanish spelling and pronunciation are extremely regular, and the sounds are pretty close to English. In retrospect, that opened up all written Spanish — from books, newspapers, the Internet, what have you — as potential sources to learn from, without much danger that I'd inadvertently be teaching myself an incorrect pronunciation. In the case of Russian, however, this is a serious, serious problem.
For that reason, I've started to focus more on Russian audio for which I also have the text (which means Pimsleur Russian should wait for a while). As an experiment, I asked my friend Alex (who's a native Russian speaker) to record a couple of poems, and then give me the Russian text and an English translation. He obliged, with a couple of poems by Lermontov, one of his favorite poets. (I'm not sure what that might say about Alex, as, according to Wikipedia, Lermontov described his own poetry as "iron verse steeped in bitterness and hatred".)
I then cut one of the shorter recordings up into snippets, recorded myself saying the English text of the translation, and put them into a playlist structured so that the English audio is followed by a couple of seconds of silence, then the Russian audio of the same phrase. I used a system similar to Pimsleur's to repeat the phrases at expanding intervals. At the same time that I was hearing Alex say the Russian phrase, I would review the Russian text for that phrase.
After a fairly large number of repetitions spread out over a couple of days, my pronunciation of the Russian version was pretty good (according to Alex) so I started to use flash cards to study the phrases when I was away from the computer.
To be a little more formal, I followed this process:
1. Break up the audio into phrases
2. Record an English version of each phrase
3. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
4. Once the pronunciation is good, start using flash cards
Here's the text of the poem and my recording of it.
http://feb-web.ru/feb/lermont/texts/fvers/l22/l22-041-.htm
http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/RU/Lermontov/Bored and Sad - JWW 20070911.mp3
So, I think the experiment was a qualified success, and I plan to use the same techniques with other audio for which I have the text and the translation. I've downloaded a number of audio books and stories in Russian and Spanish from various web sites and will go through and cut them up in a similar way.
I say it's a qualified success because this first iteration uncovered some problems with the process.
First, cutting up the audio is pretty laborious, so I may end up having to write some software to help me do it.
Second, there are many phrases which form a logical unit, so should be known in their complete form, but are just too complicated to learn all at once, and so have to be built up piecemeal. For example, I was having a lot of trouble with the line
ведь рано иль поздно их сладкий недуг
which Alex translated as "at some point their sweet suffering"; I didn't understand the internal structure or what the individual words meant, so it was just too long to learn by itself even after many repetitions. However, when I looked up the individual words and found that
рано иль поздно
meant "sooner or later" and
их сладкий недуг
meant "their sweet disease" or "their sweet ailment", I added those sub-phrases to the playlist, so they would come before the whole phrase; after practicing and learning these shorter phrases, which was much more doable, it was a piece of cake to learn the entire phrase.
Third, learning this way doesn't give you the individual meanings of the words or their grammatical roles. This makes it harder to learn to adapt the phrases and use them in other contexts.
So, I think when I work on the next poem (Lermontov's "Captive") I'll follow a somewhat different process:
1. Look up the words, learn their definitions, and figure out their grammatical roles
2. Break the audio up into phrases
3. Break the longer phrases up into sub-phrases which can be more easily learned
4. Record English versions of each phrases and sub-phrase
4. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
5. Start working on the flash cards
http://www.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm
You can hear the conversation and read a partial transcript here. (If you're wondering, yes, I did ask for permission to redistribute the audio, and he said "si".)
http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/spanish/rmartilotti/20070905/
It's really quite amazing how bad my accent is, and how many times I say "uhhhhh"; although it's painful to review, it's also amazingly helpful because I can see all sorts of errors that I wasn't aware of at the time. It's also helpful because I can review the professor's part of the conversation and start practicing some of his turns of phrase. I think he was trying to speak simply for my sake, but he's still a professor and so couldn't avoid using words I don't know and lots of constructions I'm still nowhere near being able to produce.
This was such an extraordinarily helpful exercise for all four of the skills — reading, writing, speaking, and listening — that I can't help but think that it's pretty close to an ideal technique for learning languages. In particular, I think the same technique will help me immensely in learning Russian.
I've been scratching my head about how best to study Russian, because its spelling and pronunciation present such a problem. The sounds are quite different from the sounds of English, and the rules that tell you how to pronounce words based on the letters are elaborate; I can read them in a book and understand them, but making them intuitive is another matter.
When I started with Spanish, I just had to learn a few rules of spelling, a couple of new sounds, and that was about it; Spanish spelling and pronunciation are extremely regular, and the sounds are pretty close to English. In retrospect, that opened up all written Spanish — from books, newspapers, the Internet, what have you — as potential sources to learn from, without much danger that I'd inadvertently be teaching myself an incorrect pronunciation. In the case of Russian, however, this is a serious, serious problem.
For that reason, I've started to focus more on Russian audio for which I also have the text (which means Pimsleur Russian should wait for a while). As an experiment, I asked my friend Alex (who's a native Russian speaker) to record a couple of poems, and then give me the Russian text and an English translation. He obliged, with a couple of poems by Lermontov, one of his favorite poets. (I'm not sure what that might say about Alex, as, according to Wikipedia, Lermontov described his own poetry as "iron verse steeped in bitterness and hatred".)
I then cut one of the shorter recordings up into snippets, recorded myself saying the English text of the translation, and put them into a playlist structured so that the English audio is followed by a couple of seconds of silence, then the Russian audio of the same phrase. I used a system similar to Pimsleur's to repeat the phrases at expanding intervals. At the same time that I was hearing Alex say the Russian phrase, I would review the Russian text for that phrase.
After a fairly large number of repetitions spread out over a couple of days, my pronunciation of the Russian version was pretty good (according to Alex) so I started to use flash cards to study the phrases when I was away from the computer.
To be a little more formal, I followed this process:
1. Break up the audio into phrases
2. Record an English version of each phrase
3. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
4. Once the pronunciation is good, start using flash cards
Here's the text of the poem and my recording of it.
http://feb-web.ru/feb/lermont/texts/fvers/l22/l22-041-.htm
http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/RU/Lermontov/Bored and Sad - JWW 20070911.mp3
So, I think the experiment was a qualified success, and I plan to use the same techniques with other audio for which I have the text and the translation. I've downloaded a number of audio books and stories in Russian and Spanish from various web sites and will go through and cut them up in a similar way.
I say it's a qualified success because this first iteration uncovered some problems with the process.
First, cutting up the audio is pretty laborious, so I may end up having to write some software to help me do it.
Second, there are many phrases which form a logical unit, so should be known in their complete form, but are just too complicated to learn all at once, and so have to be built up piecemeal. For example, I was having a lot of trouble with the line
ведь рано иль поздно их сладкий недуг
which Alex translated as "at some point their sweet suffering"; I didn't understand the internal structure or what the individual words meant, so it was just too long to learn by itself even after many repetitions. However, when I looked up the individual words and found that
рано иль поздно
meant "sooner or later" and
их сладкий недуг
meant "their sweet disease" or "their sweet ailment", I added those sub-phrases to the playlist, so they would come before the whole phrase; after practicing and learning these shorter phrases, which was much more doable, it was a piece of cake to learn the entire phrase.
Third, learning this way doesn't give you the individual meanings of the words or their grammatical roles. This makes it harder to learn to adapt the phrases and use them in other contexts.
So, I think when I work on the next poem (Lermontov's "Captive") I'll follow a somewhat different process:
1. Look up the words, learn their definitions, and figure out their grammatical roles
2. Break the audio up into phrases
3. Break the longer phrases up into sub-phrases which can be more easily learned
4. Record English versions of each phrases and sub-phrase
4. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
5. Start working on the flash cards
Thursday, September 6, 2007
On repetition
I've mentioned previously that I am not one of those people who can hear a word once or twice and then repeat it. I have to hear things several times, sometimes an absurd number of times, and even then it sometimes doesn't stick. Although in my previous post I sang the praises of learning through conversation, I can also point to any number of examples where someone taught me a new word, I didn't write it down, it wasn't repeated, and so I almost immediately forgot it. However, if I wrote it down and reviewed it, or if the word was repeated some time later, I would remember it easily.
So, let's refine the previous post a little bit. If you learn something in conversation, and you feel some strong emotion at the same time, you have a good chance of remembering it even without repetition. But if you don't feel any heightened emotion, you will need some repetition to reinforce the memory.
This is a well known effect in psychology; there's a great deal of research on memory, short- and long-term, reinforcement, and so on with which I won't bore you. Instead I'll share an old saying, "Repetition is the mother of learning".
When I started learning Spanish, I did some reading on the Internet and found that a lot of people recommended a particular CD course called Pimsleur. They have lessons for various languages, so I got the Spanish one out of my library and started using it, and was immediately struck by its effectiveness; I made a huge amount of progress in what seemed like no time. So, I started thinking about why it was so effective.
Its two distinctive features, as opposed to other audio courses, are these:
1. It trains you using active recall rather than passive recall
2. Words, phrases, and structures are repeated using graduated intervals
"Active recall" means that they prompt you to say something, and then you say it. The prompt might be in English, or in the language that you're learning. After you say it, you hear the correct answer. Active recall is contrasted with passive recall, which would involve you hearing the foreign language and trying to understand it.
The repetition using "graduated intervals" just means that, when you first learn something, it's repeated a lot; then there's a little delay during which you study something else, but then you go back to the new thing. This keeps happening, with longer and longer delays between repetitions.
So, I did some reading on the subject and found a great deal of interesting research. In a nutshell, unless you are in some special emotional state when you first learn something, you'll only remember it for a short while, but if you repeat it, you'll start to remember it for longer and longer intervals. As this happens, you can space out the repetitions more and more until you can remember it for months at a time without any repetitions.
Now, Pimsleur has some pretty significant limitations. (I've only used the Latin American Spanish course and the Russian course, so maybe other courses are different.) First, there's no written component, it's pure audio, so you will remain completely illiterate. In the case of Russian, this is a huge problem because the Cyrillic alphabet is so different. You can try to guess at how the words they're using are spelled, and go look them up, but this is at the least labor-intensive and at the worst extremely difficult. Another problem with Pimsleur is that it doesn't explicitly teach grammar, and the amount of vocabulary you learn in the whole course is quite small (although you learn the hell out of it).
For all these reasons, I decided I would try to supplement Pimsleur by using flash cards for vocabulary and grammar, but I would try to emulate its strong points: active recall and graduated intervals. So I set about studying the flash cards, prompting myself with the English side, translating to Spanish, and using the same general graduated recall system as the Pimsleur lessons did, and, lo and behold, I was able to absorb a great number of flash cards, and the words and phrases I learned from them, after many repetitions, were retained. To this day I can recite the opening lines of Isabel Allende's "La casa de los espíritus", which I learned from flash cards:
Barrabás llegó a la familia por vía marítima, anotó la niña Clara con su delicada caligrafía...
Now, a critical reader will object that, while memorizing and repeating in response to a prompt will certainly build memory, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can use what you memorized in writing or in conversation. And that is absolutely correct. However, you have a much better chance of being able to use that word or phrase in conversation than someone who never learned it so thoroughly, and once you use it in conversation the first time, you will find that it springs quickly to the tongue the second and third and subsequent times you need it.
I have a very strong memory of talking with a friend, who spoke some Spanish and with whom I had some intellectual rivalry. He challenged me to think of the Spanish word for "blanket"; I thought for a minute, and got a little embarrassed because I couldn't think of it right away, but then a phrase from a flash card popped into my head and I was able to tell him it was "la frazada". That whole sequence — challenge, embarrassment, recall after a delay — perfectly crystallized my memory of that word, and I never had trouble remembering it ever again, to the point where reviewing it on a flash card would be superfluous.
Your initial exposure and the repetitions are laying the groundwork for the final stage, which is using the word in conversation. You can think of there being three stages. The first stage is when you can understand a word, phrase, or grammatical structure. The second stage is when you can produce it when prompted (in Pimsleur, or using flash cards, or what have you). But the final stage is when you can use it extemporaneously, that is, in writing without consulting your books, or, hardest of all, in live conversation. But once you have used a word extemporaneously — once you have been challenged to think of it, then successfully hauled it out of whatever dusty corner it was lodged in — it will remain much, much longer in that final stage.
So, let's refine the previous post a little bit. If you learn something in conversation, and you feel some strong emotion at the same time, you have a good chance of remembering it even without repetition. But if you don't feel any heightened emotion, you will need some repetition to reinforce the memory.
This is a well known effect in psychology; there's a great deal of research on memory, short- and long-term, reinforcement, and so on with which I won't bore you. Instead I'll share an old saying, "Repetition is the mother of learning".
When I started learning Spanish, I did some reading on the Internet and found that a lot of people recommended a particular CD course called Pimsleur. They have lessons for various languages, so I got the Spanish one out of my library and started using it, and was immediately struck by its effectiveness; I made a huge amount of progress in what seemed like no time. So, I started thinking about why it was so effective.
Its two distinctive features, as opposed to other audio courses, are these:
1. It trains you using active recall rather than passive recall
2. Words, phrases, and structures are repeated using graduated intervals
"Active recall" means that they prompt you to say something, and then you say it. The prompt might be in English, or in the language that you're learning. After you say it, you hear the correct answer. Active recall is contrasted with passive recall, which would involve you hearing the foreign language and trying to understand it.
The repetition using "graduated intervals" just means that, when you first learn something, it's repeated a lot; then there's a little delay during which you study something else, but then you go back to the new thing. This keeps happening, with longer and longer delays between repetitions.
So, I did some reading on the subject and found a great deal of interesting research. In a nutshell, unless you are in some special emotional state when you first learn something, you'll only remember it for a short while, but if you repeat it, you'll start to remember it for longer and longer intervals. As this happens, you can space out the repetitions more and more until you can remember it for months at a time without any repetitions.
Now, Pimsleur has some pretty significant limitations. (I've only used the Latin American Spanish course and the Russian course, so maybe other courses are different.) First, there's no written component, it's pure audio, so you will remain completely illiterate. In the case of Russian, this is a huge problem because the Cyrillic alphabet is so different. You can try to guess at how the words they're using are spelled, and go look them up, but this is at the least labor-intensive and at the worst extremely difficult. Another problem with Pimsleur is that it doesn't explicitly teach grammar, and the amount of vocabulary you learn in the whole course is quite small (although you learn the hell out of it).
For all these reasons, I decided I would try to supplement Pimsleur by using flash cards for vocabulary and grammar, but I would try to emulate its strong points: active recall and graduated intervals. So I set about studying the flash cards, prompting myself with the English side, translating to Spanish, and using the same general graduated recall system as the Pimsleur lessons did, and, lo and behold, I was able to absorb a great number of flash cards, and the words and phrases I learned from them, after many repetitions, were retained. To this day I can recite the opening lines of Isabel Allende's "La casa de los espíritus", which I learned from flash cards:
Barrabás llegó a la familia por vía marítima, anotó la niña Clara con su delicada caligrafía...
Now, a critical reader will object that, while memorizing and repeating in response to a prompt will certainly build memory, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can use what you memorized in writing or in conversation. And that is absolutely correct. However, you have a much better chance of being able to use that word or phrase in conversation than someone who never learned it so thoroughly, and once you use it in conversation the first time, you will find that it springs quickly to the tongue the second and third and subsequent times you need it.
I have a very strong memory of talking with a friend, who spoke some Spanish and with whom I had some intellectual rivalry. He challenged me to think of the Spanish word for "blanket"; I thought for a minute, and got a little embarrassed because I couldn't think of it right away, but then a phrase from a flash card popped into my head and I was able to tell him it was "la frazada". That whole sequence — challenge, embarrassment, recall after a delay — perfectly crystallized my memory of that word, and I never had trouble remembering it ever again, to the point where reviewing it on a flash card would be superfluous.
Your initial exposure and the repetitions are laying the groundwork for the final stage, which is using the word in conversation. You can think of there being three stages. The first stage is when you can understand a word, phrase, or grammatical structure. The second stage is when you can produce it when prompted (in Pimsleur, or using flash cards, or what have you). But the final stage is when you can use it extemporaneously, that is, in writing without consulting your books, or, hardest of all, in live conversation. But once you have used a word extemporaneously — once you have been challenged to think of it, then successfully hauled it out of whatever dusty corner it was lodged in — it will remain much, much longer in that final stage.
On conversation
I've used a number of techniques for learning Spanish and Russian; different audio lessons, different language software, all sorts of flashcard techniques, etc. Some of them help and some don't. However, by far the most useful way to learn, the number one most effective thing you can do if you have it as an option, is through conversation with a native speaker.
I understand that this is something that many people feel uncomfortable about, because they might make a mistake. For that reason, maybe you should start out by practicing with a tutor; if you pay the person, then you won't feel as embarrassed when you make a mistake. A potentially cheaper alternative is to set up a language exchange, where you help the person with English and they help you with their native language. There are a number of web sites that help you find such people for online conversations; I've had good luck with http://www.language-exchanges.org but there are many others. Or you could even try an advertisement.
Early on in my Spanish experience I was learning mostly through flash cards and audio CDs. I would go to a restaurant in my neighborhood, where most of the waiters and busboys were Spanish-speakers, and I would practice with them. Now, I had practiced the past perfect tense quite a bit, but it never really sank in until one day when I was speaking with one of the busboys and I wanted to ask him where he had learned English, so I said
¿Dónde aprendí Ud. inglés?
When he looked at me blankly, I got kind of nervous, so I said it again more slowly, and then he laughed and corrected me:
¿Dónde aprendió Ud. inglés?
because "aprendí" means "I learned", so when I put it together with "Usted", it didn't make any sense. Now, this exchange was embarrassing for me, because I had been so proud of my book knowledge and so sure that I actually knew the past tense, and so it formed a very strong memory; to this day I can remember the look on his face while he was trying to figure out what I was trying to say. And never afterwards did I forget that the polite form of "you learned" is "aprendió", and, even better, I finally got a good grasp on the past perfect tense.
I have several other stories that illustrate the same point; in each story I have a strong memory of a moment when a conversation partner taught me something, and in all those cases, I also have a strong memory of the thing that they taught me. However, I have almost no specific memories like that where I'm learning specific facts from books, CDs, and flash cards, although I know I must have learned quite a bit that way. So, from that, I take the lesson that, if you have a choice between the different methods of learning, always choose the one that involves more social interaction.
This extra embarrassment that we feel in conversation is completely natural, and is actively helpful, as long as it doesn't paralyze us and keep us from participating. The reason it's so helpful is that, when we form memories, the strength of the emotion we're feeling will add to the force of the memory. If you're learning from a book, from a CD, from the television, from flash cards, there's no other person that you are worried about, there's no social pressure, there's no social interaction going on. When you are involved in a real, significant, worrisome social interaction — asking someone out on a date, getting yelled at by your boss, explaining something to a suspicious policeman — you are going to retain the memory far, far better than if you are safe at home with your book or your computer or your television.
Another great benefit of learning through conversation is that you will be learning about the social context, not just the language. When you read a dictionary or a grammar book, it will mark certain words as "colloquial", "familiar", "offensive", and so on, but that doesn't really communicate all the little shades of cultural meaning and appropriateness that inform our unconscious usage of our mother tongue. Imagine that you're at an informal party with some friends and are introduced to a foreigner, who greets you with "Good evening, gentlemen"; while it's not wrong, and maybe none of you would even say anything about it, it's clearly far too formal for the context. However, by noting what your conversation partner says and emulating it, you can learn how a native speaker, and a native to that culture, might act.
Now, some people might be reading this and thinking that by "conversation partner" I mean a teacher. The only time I have made progress with teachers has been when we worked one-on-one in what was very much a conversation (albeit often more structured, as the teacher might be trying to teach a particular point of grammar) When I studied in Guatemala, we spent five hours a day in one-on-one instruction, and it was tremendously helpful. However, in group classes, there is much less pressure on you to participate, because you can always hope that some other student will say something, and that means that you can pay less attention to what the teacher is saying; if she says something you don't understand, you can just ignore it and hope you didn't really need to know it. I also think the large number of Americans who studied a language for years in high school and in college, but still can't speak it, shows that group classes can often be a waste of time and money. Let me be sure to add a disclaimer that I am talking about group classes in the abstract; in the hands of a really good teacher, I'm sure that some students will flourish.
You should always remember that, unless you're paying the other person, a conversation is first and foremost a social encounter and only secondarily an educational event. If you don't engage the other person, ask him about himself, talk about things he wants to talk about, then you may end up boring him, and then he may not be inclined to work with you again. And, really, your goal is to get him to talk in an engaging way, to want to respond to what he says, to try to say something, to fail, and to be corrected.
If you can remember, always try to keep a pen and paper handy so you can write down whatever words and phrases are new for you or that you don't understand completely. If your partner is willing, and if you have a recorder, it's even better to record your conversation so you can review it later. Don't distract your partner too much by constantly asking for definitions, as it will disrupt the conversational flow; instead, wait for an appropriate pause, then maybe ask for clarifications, or guess at the meanings and try to restate them in your own words. In any event, always look the words and phrases up later and make sure your guesses were correct. If you made a recording, you can review it multiple times and even make a word-for-word transcription to make sure you understood everything.
Another extremely helpful technique is to repeat words and phrases after the partner says them. This is something that young children love to do, and which is generally considered pretty annoying, so don't do it too frequently, or too loudly, but for new or difficult-to-pronounce phrases it can be a great help. It helps you practice pronunciation, it reinforces your memory of the phrase, and if you make a mistake your partner may choose to correct you. You shouldn't assume that they will, however; each correction represents a little bit of effort, and they will often pick and choose what to correct based on whether they think it's worth it.
There are other techniques which I haven't tried, such as Total Physical Response, in which your partner gives you orders like "Stand up! Turn five times clockwise! Invert the salt shaker!", but which seem like they would probably be helpful. But I think the mere fact of interacting with a live human being, and the extra meaning that that imparts to the experience, are what really make conversation practice so helpful.
I understand that this is something that many people feel uncomfortable about, because they might make a mistake. For that reason, maybe you should start out by practicing with a tutor; if you pay the person, then you won't feel as embarrassed when you make a mistake. A potentially cheaper alternative is to set up a language exchange, where you help the person with English and they help you with their native language. There are a number of web sites that help you find such people for online conversations; I've had good luck with http://www.language-exchanges.org but there are many others. Or you could even try an advertisement.
Early on in my Spanish experience I was learning mostly through flash cards and audio CDs. I would go to a restaurant in my neighborhood, where most of the waiters and busboys were Spanish-speakers, and I would practice with them. Now, I had practiced the past perfect tense quite a bit, but it never really sank in until one day when I was speaking with one of the busboys and I wanted to ask him where he had learned English, so I said
¿Dónde aprendí Ud. inglés?
When he looked at me blankly, I got kind of nervous, so I said it again more slowly, and then he laughed and corrected me:
¿Dónde aprendió Ud. inglés?
because "aprendí" means "I learned", so when I put it together with "Usted", it didn't make any sense. Now, this exchange was embarrassing for me, because I had been so proud of my book knowledge and so sure that I actually knew the past tense, and so it formed a very strong memory; to this day I can remember the look on his face while he was trying to figure out what I was trying to say. And never afterwards did I forget that the polite form of "you learned" is "aprendió", and, even better, I finally got a good grasp on the past perfect tense.
I have several other stories that illustrate the same point; in each story I have a strong memory of a moment when a conversation partner taught me something, and in all those cases, I also have a strong memory of the thing that they taught me. However, I have almost no specific memories like that where I'm learning specific facts from books, CDs, and flash cards, although I know I must have learned quite a bit that way. So, from that, I take the lesson that, if you have a choice between the different methods of learning, always choose the one that involves more social interaction.
This extra embarrassment that we feel in conversation is completely natural, and is actively helpful, as long as it doesn't paralyze us and keep us from participating. The reason it's so helpful is that, when we form memories, the strength of the emotion we're feeling will add to the force of the memory. If you're learning from a book, from a CD, from the television, from flash cards, there's no other person that you are worried about, there's no social pressure, there's no social interaction going on. When you are involved in a real, significant, worrisome social interaction — asking someone out on a date, getting yelled at by your boss, explaining something to a suspicious policeman — you are going to retain the memory far, far better than if you are safe at home with your book or your computer or your television.
Another great benefit of learning through conversation is that you will be learning about the social context, not just the language. When you read a dictionary or a grammar book, it will mark certain words as "colloquial", "familiar", "offensive", and so on, but that doesn't really communicate all the little shades of cultural meaning and appropriateness that inform our unconscious usage of our mother tongue. Imagine that you're at an informal party with some friends and are introduced to a foreigner, who greets you with "Good evening, gentlemen"; while it's not wrong, and maybe none of you would even say anything about it, it's clearly far too formal for the context. However, by noting what your conversation partner says and emulating it, you can learn how a native speaker, and a native to that culture, might act.
Now, some people might be reading this and thinking that by "conversation partner" I mean a teacher. The only time I have made progress with teachers has been when we worked one-on-one in what was very much a conversation (albeit often more structured, as the teacher might be trying to teach a particular point of grammar) When I studied in Guatemala, we spent five hours a day in one-on-one instruction, and it was tremendously helpful. However, in group classes, there is much less pressure on you to participate, because you can always hope that some other student will say something, and that means that you can pay less attention to what the teacher is saying; if she says something you don't understand, you can just ignore it and hope you didn't really need to know it. I also think the large number of Americans who studied a language for years in high school and in college, but still can't speak it, shows that group classes can often be a waste of time and money. Let me be sure to add a disclaimer that I am talking about group classes in the abstract; in the hands of a really good teacher, I'm sure that some students will flourish.
You should always remember that, unless you're paying the other person, a conversation is first and foremost a social encounter and only secondarily an educational event. If you don't engage the other person, ask him about himself, talk about things he wants to talk about, then you may end up boring him, and then he may not be inclined to work with you again. And, really, your goal is to get him to talk in an engaging way, to want to respond to what he says, to try to say something, to fail, and to be corrected.
If you can remember, always try to keep a pen and paper handy so you can write down whatever words and phrases are new for you or that you don't understand completely. If your partner is willing, and if you have a recorder, it's even better to record your conversation so you can review it later. Don't distract your partner too much by constantly asking for definitions, as it will disrupt the conversational flow; instead, wait for an appropriate pause, then maybe ask for clarifications, or guess at the meanings and try to restate them in your own words. In any event, always look the words and phrases up later and make sure your guesses were correct. If you made a recording, you can review it multiple times and even make a word-for-word transcription to make sure you understood everything.
Another extremely helpful technique is to repeat words and phrases after the partner says them. This is something that young children love to do, and which is generally considered pretty annoying, so don't do it too frequently, or too loudly, but for new or difficult-to-pronounce phrases it can be a great help. It helps you practice pronunciation, it reinforces your memory of the phrase, and if you make a mistake your partner may choose to correct you. You shouldn't assume that they will, however; each correction represents a little bit of effort, and they will often pick and choose what to correct based on whether they think it's worth it.
There are other techniques which I haven't tried, such as Total Physical Response, in which your partner gives you orders like "Stand up! Turn five times clockwise! Invert the salt shaker!", but which seem like they would probably be helpful. But I think the mere fact of interacting with a live human being, and the extra meaning that that imparts to the experience, are what really make conversation practice so helpful.
On motivation
First of all, I have no particular talent for languages. I studied Latin in high school, and I was pretty good at it, but when I studied Russian in college I crashed and burned and for years afterwards thought it was because I was bad at languages and that that meant I couldn't learn them as an adult; I thought that I was good at Latin in high school only because I was younger, and that adults couldn't learn. Well, my experience with Spanish has completely revised that theory: it wasn't that I was bad at languages, exactly, it was just that I was lazy.
To put it in a more positive light, not only can adults learn a second or third language, I would even say it's not particularly complicated and requires no special talents, although of course it helps if you're one of those people who can hear a word once and repeat it perfectly, which I am definitely not. The thing that is lacking in most adults is a deep motivation to speak the language and the willingness or the opportunity or the obligation to work on it every single day.
So, the reason I failed at Russian in college was because I didn't really spend any time working on it outside of class, and I thought it would come easily or not at all. I thought that some people were "good at languages" and they would just absorb things without work, while other people were "bad at languages" and studying was futile. I never stated this to myself explicitly, but this is how I rationalized my failure to lift a finger. Now, on the contrary, I think that anyone of normal abilities who works on it every day will make progress, and, conversely, without regular work, it will never come to anyone, even those who have a knack.
Now, I said above that it's not particularly complicated. That's somewhat of a lie. It is somewhat complicated, and I'll go into that in later posts. However, if you are highly motivated, everything else is just a detail; you're already on your way to succeed. Now you just need to maintain your motivation, do some things right, and give yourself the right amount of time.
The reason I say this so definitively is that I have read a great deal of research on language learning, along with a number of informal accounts by experienced language teachers, and one of the main conclusions I have drawn from all this reading is that a student's progress is mostly dependent on the total amount of time they spend working on the language. That's not to say that students don't have different talents, or that different teachers or different teaching techniques don't make a difference — of course they do — but, for a given student, the main question is just how much time they are putting in on a weekly, daily, and yearly basis. If you can work every day for 20 minutes, there is no doubt that you will make progress. If you can work every day for an hour, or two hours, then you will make more progress. The rest is important, but not as important as the fact that you are working on it diligently.
The main reason I would point to for why I have made progress in Spanish is that I have worked hard on it; even excluding the month I was in Guatemala, I've been putting in probably on average at least an hour a day and sometimes more. I say that I've made progress because, at the moment, I can express pretty much whatever I want to in Spanish, either writing or speaking, without making too many horrible errors; if I have access to a dictionary I can write pretty well, and Spanish speakers tell me that my spoken Spanish is, while far from fluent, quite understandable.
This gives me a great deal of confidence that, even though Russian is supposed to be much more of a challenge for English-speakers to learn, and though it might take two or three years to get to the same point, I will make progress in proportion to the effort I put into it, and that makes even such a steep mountain seem surmountable.
So, my single most important piece of advice for anyone wanting to learn a language is to figure out some way to motivate yourself. Book a one-way ticket for someplace they don't speak English, get a job that requires you to speak the language all the time, start dating a native speaker, do whatever you need to do to force yourself to learn it.
To put it in a more positive light, not only can adults learn a second or third language, I would even say it's not particularly complicated and requires no special talents, although of course it helps if you're one of those people who can hear a word once and repeat it perfectly, which I am definitely not. The thing that is lacking in most adults is a deep motivation to speak the language and the willingness or the opportunity or the obligation to work on it every single day.
So, the reason I failed at Russian in college was because I didn't really spend any time working on it outside of class, and I thought it would come easily or not at all. I thought that some people were "good at languages" and they would just absorb things without work, while other people were "bad at languages" and studying was futile. I never stated this to myself explicitly, but this is how I rationalized my failure to lift a finger. Now, on the contrary, I think that anyone of normal abilities who works on it every day will make progress, and, conversely, without regular work, it will never come to anyone, even those who have a knack.
Now, I said above that it's not particularly complicated. That's somewhat of a lie. It is somewhat complicated, and I'll go into that in later posts. However, if you are highly motivated, everything else is just a detail; you're already on your way to succeed. Now you just need to maintain your motivation, do some things right, and give yourself the right amount of time.
The reason I say this so definitively is that I have read a great deal of research on language learning, along with a number of informal accounts by experienced language teachers, and one of the main conclusions I have drawn from all this reading is that a student's progress is mostly dependent on the total amount of time they spend working on the language. That's not to say that students don't have different talents, or that different teachers or different teaching techniques don't make a difference — of course they do — but, for a given student, the main question is just how much time they are putting in on a weekly, daily, and yearly basis. If you can work every day for 20 minutes, there is no doubt that you will make progress. If you can work every day for an hour, or two hours, then you will make more progress. The rest is important, but not as important as the fact that you are working on it diligently.
The main reason I would point to for why I have made progress in Spanish is that I have worked hard on it; even excluding the month I was in Guatemala, I've been putting in probably on average at least an hour a day and sometimes more. I say that I've made progress because, at the moment, I can express pretty much whatever I want to in Spanish, either writing or speaking, without making too many horrible errors; if I have access to a dictionary I can write pretty well, and Spanish speakers tell me that my spoken Spanish is, while far from fluent, quite understandable.
This gives me a great deal of confidence that, even though Russian is supposed to be much more of a challenge for English-speakers to learn, and though it might take two or three years to get to the same point, I will make progress in proportion to the effort I put into it, and that makes even such a steep mountain seem surmountable.
So, my single most important piece of advice for anyone wanting to learn a language is to figure out some way to motivate yourself. Book a one-way ticket for someplace they don't speak English, get a job that requires you to speak the language all the time, start dating a native speaker, do whatever you need to do to force yourself to learn it.
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