defining “fluency”

(i was just discussing this over at how-to-learn-any-language.com and i figured i should post it here too)

I don’t think there’s much point in universally defining the term “fluent”, but for me it holds a useful purpose as a goal in my learning. I view “fluency” as that point where I can use the language without thinking about it consciously, and have a good conversation with someone about any topic that doesn’t require special education. Also, my accent should be good enough that I don’t have to repeat my words in order for native speakers to understand them.

When I try to apply these standards to some of the people I know, I think it fits quite well with my opinion of “who needs to study more” vs. “who is good enough”. For instance, I have two coworkers who are clearly not native speakers of English, but I would classify them as “fluent” as defined above. I never have to ask them to repeat their words, and they talk naturally without stopping, so it seems like they do it effortlessly. Sure, they make mistakes, and they don’t have a perfect accent, and there are some special topics that cause difficulties, but I can still easily classify their English as “good enough” in my eyes.

I have two other coworkers, however, who have trouble getting understood. They can talk about a lot of topics, sure, but people often have to ask them to say some words multiple times because they just can’t understand what word it was. Also, their grammar is noticeably weird, so I sometimes have to think about it a bit in order to get their meaning. For these two people, I would not call them “fluent” as I defined it, because I (as a native speaker) have to put in so much extra effort in order to get what they’re saying, and because it seems difficult for them to formulate things in the language.

Although they still manage to communicate quite well about many things, I would classify their skills as “needs more work”, and therefore as not yet fluent. In this sense, I see “fluency” as a worthwhile goal for myself. I want people to be able to understand everything I say without them putting in a lot of extra effort to figure out what I said. I want to effortlessly speak the language, and I want other people to effortlessly understand what I just said. Maybe I won’t be perfect in all ways, and maybe I won’t understand all sorts of obscure cultural references that they say, but all the stuff that I say will be clear, fluid, and easy to understand.

Becoming fluent is still a challenging and useful thing with this definition, but is clearly far below the level of a native speaker (linguistically and culturally). Right now, I understand almost everything I read in German, but my speaking ability would not pass this test, so I wouldn’t call myself “fluent”

october progress spreadsheet

October was an interesting month. At the start I had a small slump where I was just doing a small amount each day to keep up, but I managed to turn that around and increase again. I changed my balance slightly and did less tv, but more reading. This was partially due to getting a bit bored of star trek after over 100 episodes, so I have to change things around there if I want to keep watching more TV.

I learned that in this intermediate stage of my learning, it’s quite helpful to spend a week doing some hard vocab work (in which I added lots of example sentences to Anki from my “Mastering German Vocabulary” book). This extensive vocabulary work allowed me to push through to a stage where I understand most of the words on the page quite easily, and there are only a few words that I don’t know.

For the next month, I hope to continue increasing my vocabulary in some specific areas like science, economics, and politics. I also plan to start doing some basic speaking practice on my own, and I’m hoping to develop a better ability to think in German.

don’t just learn a giant list

Here’s a comment I recently made in a forum on how-to-learn-any-language.com. The thread was about whether or not it would be beneficial to try and memorize the 4000 most frequently used words in a language as a strategy for learning it.

I think what Parasitius was saying is that if you hope to learn a language through pure flashcards of important vocabulary, you will bore yourself to death, but if you combine it with reading enjoyable native materials, then it can be extremely helpful.

This has been my experience for sure. At different times I vary the percentages, but I like Parasitius’ estimates of 20% SRS and 80% reading. Also, Iverson has given some good advice on this too, saying that his wordlists are for giving him just a general sense of a word’s meaning, but it’s really reading that gives him all the multiple meanings and real usages of the words. Flashcards or wordlists will never teach you all the subtleties of usage.

Also, I recommend avoiding the idea that you can “scientifically” learn vocabulary “in order”, focusing on “completeness”. Although those things appeal to me, having a background in math and computers, I feel that this mindset is a bit of a dead end for language learning. Instead, I tell myself that I will need to experience each word multiple times in its “natural environment” before I’ll really understand it, and my flashcard work is merely “prep time” that will get me ready for the real thing.

In my mind there are several stages of “knowing” a word. At first, I might see a word a few times in books and I sort of recognize it in the sense of “hey, I’ve seen that before somewhere”. Next, I might look it up once, and get a general sense of the meaning, but I tend to forget it again soon unless I add it to Anki (my SRS of choice). As I keep reading my novels and seeing these new words several times, the word evolves from “huh?” to “oh ya, I recognize that”, to “I know the translation for that” to “I know the meaning without translating” and then to “I can use it with ease in speech”.

I’ve found that the key to moving along this path is just repeated exposure. If you’re really worried at the start that you need to collect 4000 common words and become an expert at all of them, I think you’re going in the wrong direction. Just consistently investigate words as you encounter them, and your vocabulary will grow over time. Curiousity and diligence, that’s all.

When reading, you don’t need to highlight EVERY word on the page that you don’t know. Just pick the two that are most interesting. You’ll see the other ones again eventually; you won’t “lose” them or anything, they’ll still be around later in another book or magazine or movie. As long as you’re somehow improving every day, then that’s enough.

the size of a language

i was just reading a post over at Global Maverick called the messy in-between, which i found quite enjoyable since it described one of my biggest problems with the process of learning a language.

When you start learning a language, you don’t know much about it, but you’ve probably heard native speakers chatting away easily, or maybe you’ve seen some books full of unknown words. In some sense, you can call that the “destination”, even though you don’t quite know where it is. I’m usually pretty sure that i’ll be able to identify when i’ve got there, because everything will magically be easy at that point (right?).

For me there’s also a tremendous thrill at the beginning because everything is so new, and because every time you sit down to study, you’re actually gaining a rather large percentage increase in your knowledge. After day 2, you know TWICE AS MUCH as after day 1.

Unfortunately, our perceptions of both of these time periods don’t actually help us much to comprehend the huge size of a language. the distance between “beginner” and “native” is huge and unknown, and it’s actually where you’re going to spend most of your time. As you progress, this is going to be a huge problem for your motivation unless you find ways to address it.

When you’re at the start and you can always see how much you’ve learned so far, then motivation usually isn’t much of a problem. With a little thought, you can comprehend exactly how much you’ve learned…you have a good sense for your “language-space”. It’s like being in a small room and easily being able to read the titles of the books on the shelf.

When you’re in the intermediate stage, as i am now with german, it can sometimes feel like a wide field at night, and you’ve only got a flashlight. you have no idea where you’re going or where you came from, and you can’t see the edges. How do you measure your progress when you can’t see the end? I think one of the best ways is to just keep counting up what you have in front of you. Count your footsteps, and pretty soon you’ll see them start to add up.

Personally, i use a spreadsheet to add up these “footsteps”, so i can easily look at it and go “holy shit, i’ve watched a lot of german TV already”. It helps when i make a game out of making those numbers go up, because then it takes my mind off the fact that i can’t just reach out and touch the other side. there’s no task i can do in a day that will make me fluent by the end of the day, so i can’t use fluency as my daily (or weekly or monthly) goal.

Another horrible side effect of this perceptual problem, is language wanderlust. I’ve personally studied probably 15 languages or so, and in most of them i’m still at a beginner stage. I think one of the reasons that i flip around so much is that when i’m starting to lose track of my progress in one language, and i’m unable to see the constant motion that’s happening, i start to itch for that thrill that comes with the seemingly rapid increase at the start of another language.

I glance over at another language, and i’m unable to comprehend the magnitude of the effort required to get good at that language, so i mistakenly perceive it as small. I’m doing this right now with Swedish, actually. It’s a classic scenario for me…i know someone who speaks swedish, so i start reading a little bit about the grammar of the language, listen to its sound, and i’m suddenly SUPER MOTIVATED to start learning it. I’m not thinking about the months and months that it will take to get good, i’m just overwhelmed by the thrill of it.

I’m doing a few things to try and avoid flipflopping. Firstly, i’m trying to channel that newfound swedish enthusiasm into my german studies. When i imagine myself sitting down and learning 100 swedish words in a day, i turn that around and remind myself that there are still at least 100 german words that i don’t know yet (haha). Then i remind myself that if i learn 100 german words per day for 10 days, I’d know 1000 more words and i would have made huge progress in german, but if i pissed away a bunch of time being a beginner at swedish then my german would stay the same. By switching to swedish, i’m throwing away that opportunity for progress in german.

Another new strategy that I’m trying, is imagining what it would be like to learn swedish in german: use only swedish-german dictionaries, use german textbooks about swedish, etc. I started thinking about this after i found out that the famous Assimil language learning series doesn’t have an edition about learning swedish based on english. You have to go through either french or german to get to swedish using Assimil.

This gives me renewed motivation for german, because i can then use it as a tool for something else; firstly, there are tons of common or related words in swedish and german, and secondly because of the available learning materials in german that don’t exist in english. What would happen if i looked up a swedish word, and i didn’t understand the german words used to explain it? well that just means i need to make sure i learn more german words right now. This also sorta fits with the stuff that i like to read, since i obviously like to read language-learning books. If I’m reading in german, then i want to read stuff that i like

Now, on the flipside of this, in some ways languages can be small. You just need to look at them in the right light. For instance, some people are remarkably effective at communicating when they have a vocabulary of only 1000-2000 words…they just really really know how to say all the everyday stuff, and have a highly active knowledge so that the words just flow out. Also, in some ways 10000 words also isn’t really that much in the grand scheme of things, but with 10000 words you can be highly fluent. For example, the number of unique words used in Harry Potter book 1 is about 10000, so with a vocab of that size you could probably understand almost every single word in an easy novel.

Having a number like 10000 somehow makes the language seem a little more feasible. I can then make an estimate based on how many words i learn per day, etc. It’s something that i can work towards, and judge how far away I am. It’s a little bit tricky to try to count how many words you know, but i just look at how many unique words i have in my Anki flashcard deck.

Having a number like that also lets you know approximately what your learning pace is, and what you can aim at. If you’re aiming for fluent reading in 6 months, then you need to have a schedule that involves about 1600 new words per month, or around 50 per day. This can be practical, with a lot of hard work, and if you’re in the right frame of mind then you can classify 6 months as a “short” period of time.

Ok, i think this post is rambling on a bit too long, so i’m going to go back to working on some actual german. Harry and Ron just found out about das Trimagische Turnier, and i want to see what happens next.

input based learning

I just wanted to quickly write about this great post on Steve Kaufmann’s blog: seven principles of input-based language learning. The principles in there are very valuable, especially for those who are new to language learning and may not have thought about it this way before.

On the topic of input, i’ve hit a few milestones lately. I’ve passed 300 hours of listening and TV content in german, and I’m over 550000 words of reading in german. Right now i’m working on Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch (book 4 of the series). I really enjoy listening to the audiobook while i read, which matches Kaufmann’s recommendation of both listening and reading at the same time. For some languages (like chinese) i find it difficult to get audio with transcripts, but there seems to be a wealth of german audiobooks available.

Anyway, i’m halfway on my way to reading 1 million words, and i certainly won’t stop at 1 million because i’m enjoying it so much. I’m going to try to increase my pace in reading this month, since reading has more language content in it than tv, and i haven’t yet picked a new tv series to get obsessed with. I should be finished season 7 of DS9 this week.

intensity and optimism

In the last two weeks I’ve toned back my intensity a bit, but I’ve really seen that it’s hindered my progress. Half as intense does not mean you accomplish half as much. It’s worse.

I went from 20+ hours of tv per week down to about 8, but i found that it was harder to watch. Each episode seemed harder to understand than before, and i could only focus on all the words i didn’t know. When i was watching more, and listening to audiobooks more, i could really “get into the groove” and everything seemed easier as i got lost in it.

Once my intensity fell, and then my ability to easily listen fell with it, then i became too focused on the unknown words. This had a detrimental effect on my self-esteem and my mental outlook. I began to think that i wasn’t making any progress at all, and that german would be hard forever. The solution to this is clearly to ramp back up. I’m making new goals based on items instead of raw numbers. I just finished watching season 6 of DS9, and i want to finish season 7 this week. I watched 4 hours yesterday and it started to feel better again.

The interesting part of this for me, is thinking about how this effect scales up as i intensify. If i watch twice as much again, can i learn 3x as much? I’ll see if i can find out.

Lessons for this week: Keep going, add more native content. Fill up your time with immersion materials. Part-time study just means you’re going to drag it out forever. Go big, or go home. Doing more makes it easier to do more. Doing less makes it easier to do less.

september is over

September seemed to go by super fast. At the start, i had just started using a spreadsheet to track my progress, and i remember thinking that it looked pretty empty. I wondered if i would be consistent in my filling of the spaces.

After a month of doing it, i must say that i love the process. Every day has 4 categories (tv, listening, reading, and anki). Whenever i do ANY work on one of those categories, i colour the box blue and put in the amount. If i exceed the day’s goal for that category, then i change the colour again up to green. If i don’t do anything, that box gets a zero and is coloured bright yellow. This gives me a sense of filling up the month, and i can look back and easily see how i’m doing in each category. I’ve been highly motivated to try to fill up each box with at least a little bit of work so that it doesn’t get coloured yellow.

I also included some of my motivational phrases so i can see them every day, and i included an expression of my overall goals. I have percentages for every week, and every month. I also have some 2-month amounts in there so that i can try to make up for any slack that i had in the previous month. The weekly percentages encourage me to work ahead and get more of the whole month’s goal done in that week.

I want to start October with a new push for intensity, getting a lot more done each day and removing some of the distractions (like surfing the web) that have distracted me. I want to exceed my anki goal for this month, as well as my reading goal. I’m really enjoying reading a lot lately, but i have to make more time for it instead of just doing it in little pieces. I need to fit more TV in, but I’ll probably get some of that in later this month when i start back on night shifts at work.

Looking ahead, I’m really curious what my skills will be like by the end of my 6-month self-study period, at the end of january. Lately i’m feeling a lot of urges to add another language in, such as Italian or Swedish, but i know that this is just the part of me that likes new shiny things. I need to find more new shiny *German* things instead, and i also need to remember that Swedish will be much easier to learn if i have a high level of German on which to base it.

I’ve thought of using Italian as a reward for myself, upon completion of 6 months of German. Or maybe a redo of Spanish, since i haven’t revisited Spanish for many years, and I’d like to make some progress there. If i did this, I’d have to figure out how much German study i could combine with the other language. Maybe keep my German reading goal throughout that period, but also add in some intensive Spanish study. That’s all just dreaming about the future though, and the primary goal right now is to get significantly good at German first. I’ve done enough bouncing around in the past that i don’t need to do any more of it now (and hopefully writing this will help me convince myself of that

Oh, and before i forget, i want to link an interesting article i just read. It was an article about the collected experience of the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), and what they had learned over the past 50 years of teaching languages to diplomats. The article is called Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching. Enjoy!

sticking to one topic

As I’ve mentioned before, i have a strong tendency to hop from topic to topic, sampling a little bit of everything. “Jack of all trades, master of none”, as the saying goes. Lately, as I’ve been reading these language forums and hearing about people who’ve learned a dozen languages, i start to get eager to try something new because there’s so much out there that’s fascinating to read about.

Specifically, I’d really love to eventually go off down the road of germanic languages and learn dutch, afrikaans, and the scandinavian languages. As I learn more german, it becomes easier and easier to puzzle out people’s blogs written in these other germanic languages, and i become more curious about it.

I have a few strategies to bring myself back, though. I’ve got my long-term goals for german written down, and some general motivational phrases to help me stick to it. “Nobody is talented enough not to have to work hard” is one of my favourites right now, and i have it written at the top of my progress spreadsheet along with several others. Also on there is “discipline is remembering what you want”.

In order to really remember what i want, i have to define what i want. I’ve phrased this generally as “i want to be able to speak german clearly and confidently about any reasonable topic”. Since this is still a bit hard to quantify, I’ve narrowed it down to “i will read one million words of german and watch 500 hours of german language TV”. This may not be enough to get me the level that i want, but i can change it once i reach it. Having any number like this allows me to break it down into weekly and monthly goals that move me towards the big goal, which is much more practical than just saying “i want to be awesome”. Also, having those weekly goals allows me to focus on just being better each day, rather than obsessing about not being awesome yet.

Besides a numerical goal like this, i also have a time goal to keep me on track. My spreadsheet is divided into 1-month segments, one per page, so every time i look at it i can see down at the bottom where it has my next six months outlined. August, September, Oktober, November, Dezember, Januar (in german, of course). I’ve made a commitment to myself that i will keep german as my major project for each of those months. So far I’ve done two solid months, which is actually quite good for me. 6 weeks is usually where i bail out and start something new.

Sometimes when i think about doing german for 6 months (or more), then it starts to feel like a long time. To solve this, i remind myself of other things that i’ve done for multiple months. The most common is school courses. I took many semesters of university classes that all lasted about 4 months. Those semesters felt long at the start, but really really short by the end. I vividly remember several semesters where i suddenly realized it was “week 12″, where “week 13″ was the final week of classes, with exams coming afterward. It was shocking to believe that i’d already completed 12 weeks of classes when it (at that point) felt like such a short amount of time.

To apply this to my current situation, i sit down in a quiet room surrounded by my german learning materials, and i try intensely to recall that previous situation. I remember the hallways of the university, the books that i was studying from, my backpack, my study partners, the food in the cafeteria. And then i recall the classrooms and the teachers. Finally i mentally flip open my calendar and look at “week 12″ and remember thinking “oh shit, exams are soon”. That point in time is firmly in my mind, so then i can look at my current spreadsheet and see that i’m only on “week 7″ right now. clearly it hasn’t been that long at all, and i need to keep going.

I do this visualization sometimes for re-feeling the motivation i once felt for something else, and applying that motivation to the current subject. Earlier this year i was really obsessed with learning navigation at sea, and i remember being REALLY interested in it. So i try to vividly recall that feeling, and redirect it at german to make myself REALLY interested in german again.

Sometimes I try to imagine what it will be like in the future, once i’ve reached my german goals. I think of myself walking german streets, going into german bars, talking to real germans over a pint of german beer, and understanding everything they say. This works fantastically for me, because i have actual past experiences of being in a bar with germans and TOTALLY FAILING to understand what they were saying. It would be really gratifying to me to be in the opposite situation where i understand them completely, so working towards that is motivational.

So, getting my south african roommate to speak to me in Afrikaans would be extremely interesting, but it will not move me towards my german goal. Reading danish websites is fun to try, but it will not move me towards my german goal. Using my written goals and timelines, i can decide for myself that if i want to do those things, i need to find a german friend to talk to, and some german blogs to read. I can switch to Danish or Afrikaans next year or the year after, and it’ll actually be much easier then because i’ll have more of a german base to build from. Being good at german will give me the confidence to tackle those other projects more effectively too.

Write down your goals, and work towards them. Try to vividly recall your past motivation to create present motivation. Make a visual representation of your time goals, so that you can see where you have to get to before you’re allowed to quit. I’m sure other people have their own ideas about how to stay on track, and I’d love to hear more. Please share any suggestions you may have

intensive and extensive reading

Yesterday i was reading some fantastic posts on the How To Learn Any Language forums by a fellow named Iverson, who is well known on those forums as he has apparently learned many languages to a high degree of skill (with 11 that he knows well, and several others that are in progress). Here are the links to his five posts, entitled “Guide to learning languages”: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

One concept that i had an intuition of on my own, but never really explicitly thought about, was the difference between “intensive” and “extensive” reading, as Iverson calls them.

Extensive is when you try to cover vast amounts of materials, but just skip over the parts you don’t know and try to get the general gist of things. It’s all about context and the big picture. Once you get awesome, you can just sit down and read a book and understand everything, and you’re doing an extensive exercise still.

Intensive is about studying minute details and trying to wring absolutely every drop of information out of a section of text. The easy way to compare these two types is reading the same paragraph 100 times (intensive) vs. reading 100 different paragraphs (extensive).

These two aspects of reading can play off each other. Extensive reading gives you a sense of familiarity, and can help you get curious about the language. You see things many times in different places, and start to wonder about how they work, and you get a mild sense of how they work. You slowly pick up the meanings of hundreds of words in parallel. When you then do some intensive work, you can connect each new word to a lot of dots already from your experience. There’s an existing web in which to place that new word.

Alternately, when you’ve done some intensive work and have a very precise meaning for certain words, but not much connection in the web, then extensive reading will provide a place for that intensive word to live, and will also help you understand the rest of the context when you see it out in the field.

One problem that can come up for a lot of people, is that they read extensively but have stopped making progress on a number of fronts. They make the same grammatical mistakes all the time, or get certain words wrong. This can be remedied by reading more intensively. Pay attention to each of the words, and how they fit together. Compare the patterns to others that you’ve seen. Play some mental word games. Just keep doing anything you can to deepen your exposure, in order to break yourself out of the false patterns that have developed.

Another problem that is common to those who do language classes at school is that all of their reading is intensive. This results in a sloooowww reading speed, and an obsession with always knowing the precise meaning of every single word. This leads a lot of people to spend too much time looking up things in dictionaries, and living too much in their native language rather than the new language. This is the land of perfectionism, and it will keep you from advancing. You need to practice letting go, and letting the language flow over you so you can develop more of an automatic feel for it. You need to practice picking up more words from the context (which may feel impossible at the start, but it’s not).

The way that i usually put these two forms into practice is by doing my extensive reading with a highlighter beside me. Whenever a sentence is somehow interesting or difficult, then i highlight it for later intensive work. When i flip back through and look at all the sentences i highlighted, then i add them to my Anki flashcard deck and i make sure i fully understand the full meaning of the sentence. Then i let Anki reinforce it for me over the coming days and weeks.

reading a million words: 300000

One of my ongoing projects is to read one million words in german. At the start i had severe problems understanding anything, despite having taken german classes in highschool for several years. I barely got any of the plot, and most of the words on the page were new to me.

I’ve passed 300000 words of reading in german so far, and i’m still going strong. Right now I’m reading Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Askaban, and i’ve finished the first two harry potter books. I read the first two while listening to the german audiobook at the same time, but with the current book i’m already on page 63 and i haven’t used the audiobook yet.

I’m able to read at a reasonable speed now, and the book is very enjoyable. I know the majority of the words on every page, and i almost never feel lost. There are still words that i don’t know, but missing them usually doesn’t affect my understanding of the plot. I’m able to guess a lot of words from the context because i already know so many of the words.

There are still some spots, however, where a bunch of confusing things happen all together, usually at some really vital plot point when something surprising happens. In those situations, i might mark a few words for later lookup in a dictionary, but i try to keep reading.

My habit lately has been to read with a highlighter felt pen beside me so that i can highlight sentences that i like, or sentences that i had trouble with. Later on, i can flip through and put all of those into Anki (my flashcard program) so that i can review them later. This means that i’m constantly stretching my vocabulary powers by getting the harder sentences reinforced many times. New words tend to stick better this way.

At this stage, reading is very enjoyable, and not a chore at all. I’m really much more focused on finding out what happens next in the plot than with meeting my weekly goals for words read, and as a result i’m exceeding all of my goals by quite a lot. I have the rest of the german Harry Potter books up to book 6, and if i complete all of those then i’ll be at around 1.5 million words read total. Whereas before it felt like i’d never reach 1 million, it seems like it’ll be quite easy now, and i should hit that before the end of the year hopefully.