Part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you’re going to be less than perfect. That means you’re going to speak with mistakes. Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this sense of achievement and the intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world, yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another language, then the people of that language come alive, the history comes alive.
Language learning as we know is about motivation. That’s the driver. That’s the smart plug that triggers your interest, your curiosity. Content, which feeds that curiosity and those interests, is extremely important. Content that you like, content that has resonance for you.
I think very often in the standard classroom there’s a tremendous emphasis placed on producing the language, speaking the language, which is fine because that’s what people want to do. But what I think is more important is what will I be able to do with the language in a year from now? And from that perspective, I’m not tremendously motivated to speak.
First of all, obviously when you start in a language, whatever you’re listening to is not comprehensible. So you can’t begin with comprehensible input. You’ll begin with input, which is not comprehensible, but which gradually becomes more and more comprehensible. However, if you have access to the text, so you can look up words, then you have a chance. And if you can use LingQ for example, and you can review the words, then you have a chance, or even if you’re using Teach Yourself or some other starter book you can gradually get to where material that is initially not comprehensible becomes comprehensible.
Reading helps you acquire more words, but listening gets your brain used to the language. And of course listening comprehension is a tremendously important skill because if you’re speaking to someone, and we all want to speak in the language, if you can’t understand what the other person is saying, then it’s very uncomfortable and you can’t have a very meaningful conversation.
What the language school provides is instruction in the language. In other words, explanations of how the language works. The language school provides the materials, the textbooks, the content from which we learn, the language schools can provide encouragement and motivation also. The language school provides a social context where you meet not only your teacher, but other students. The language school can keep you going. So it is possible that for many people a language school is an ideal learning environment. Why is that not the case for me?
What I would call being a lazy language learner doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t being a successful language learner, it just means that you’re being lazy the way I’m being lazy. And so there are seven habits I think that we need to acquire if we’re going to be effective, successful, lazy language learners.
Grammar basically describes usage. So since languages evolve over time, sounds in languages evolve over time, usage patterns evolve over time. Therefore the grammar which describes the usage will evolve over time. So how useful is it to attempt to teach people what the rules of usage are before the learner has had enough experience with the language?
*** This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel. Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ. We regularly see blog…
First of all, the first thing I think we need to do to study effectively is to improve our reading skills. If we aren’t good readers, we need to become good readers, to read faster, to get better at acquiring information through reading, because reading is very effective, very efficient. It enables us to access so much information, whether in a traditional book or an ebook where we can look things up if we’re on an iPad or on a computer, being careful to avoid the distractions granted. So reading is super powerful.
