How we confuse minor failure with genetic impossibility

There’s a problem that many people have, where they think that the only learning that occurs is explicit learning, where they consciously add little bits of knowledge into their brain one by one in a deliberate order. This is commonly the idea transmitted by our school systems, where it’s required that the teachers test the students on the topic. It’s easiest to test the results when the students have to explicitly learn certain well-defined concepts, and then regurgitate them in an exam.

The big problem with this, however, is that many of the really interesting things that we can do with our minds can not be explicitly learned or assembled like an architect in this fashion. We have to absorb them through experience, and our mind automatically adapts itself in order to succeed at them. This sort of learning is not encouraged in schools, and many people are unaware of it. In fact, most people are so opposed to this idea that when they encounter a skill that must be “absorbed” in this way and can’t be explicitly learned, then they will start to claim that they’re actually completely unable to do that skill.

One example of this is juggling. I love juggling, but when I started I was completely horrible at it. I’d throw the balls up, miss them, and they’d all drop to the ground. Every time. It took me a lot of practice to actually just do the basic 3-ball pattern correctly for more than a couple of throws. Now I’m fully confident in my 3-ball juggling, and I enjoy learning new tricks. To other people, it appears that I just do it naturally.

When I’ve tried to teach other people, though, I’ve found that a lot of them are ready to give up really early. When they see me do it effortlessly, and then they totally fail, they somehow jump to the illogical conclusion that they’re actually genetically predisposed to not be able to juggle. Even if I tell them emphatically that I started at the exact same place as them, they tend not to believe me.

What I think is happening, is that they’re trying to follow my step-by-step instructions (which are very simple to understand), but they can’t successfully complete the task I’ve given them, they decide that they will never be able to. They say things like “I just don’t have the talent”, or “I’ve never been coordinated anyway”. They don’t seem to realize that even though the instructions are simple, it takes practice before your brain will adapt and be able to perform the skill accurately. You can’t just “decide” to juggle and then it suddenly happens. Your brain must actually reconfigure itself in some way in order to succeed.

Another interesting example is riding a bike. This is an interesting case, because many people can do it, and most of those people are actually convinced that they explicitly know how they’re doing it, but it can be conclusively proven that most of the time they don’t. Bike riding is an unconscious, adapted skill, not an explicitly learned step-by-step conscious calculation, but many people don’t think this is the case.

When you ask someone how they’re riding a bike, they’ll say something like “you steer with your hands on the handlebars, and you pedal with your feet”. Then if you ask them how the bike stays up instead of tipping over sideways, most people will mumble something they’ve heard about the spinning wheels acting like gyroscopes to keep the bike upright.

This is actually wrong, and it can be proven by fixing the front wheel so it can’t turn. Give somebody a bike that can’t be steered, and they’re guaranteed to fall over. It just can’t be ridden. The reason is that what keeps the bike up is not the spinning of the wheels, but the tiny unconscious steering motions that we make. When you learn to ride a bike, what you’re doing is training your brain to make those tiny corrections, which act to keep the bike underneath your body. If you can’t steer, you can’t make those tiny corrections, and the bike will tip, guaranteed.

Unicyclists tend to know this, because they’ve actually been explicitly taught that they must steer the unicycle back underneath them in order to stay up. It becomes much more clear somehow when you only have one wheel, perhaps because those tiny corrections have been magnified, and you have to learn how to do rather large corrections.

Either way, the lesson learned here is that there are many things we take for granted that are actually unconscious skills, and can’t be learned through consciously following a sequence of steps written down on paper. Our minds must adapt to them through experience, but some of us have been fooled into thinking that everything must be doable purely by following explicit steps, or it’s not doable at all.

Now, if we come back to the topic of languages, I think the same principles apply. There are many people who try to memorize some explicit rules in a classroom, but then they still can’t read or understand or speak the language. They have been trained to think that the memorization of explicit rules IS language learning, when in fact what they need to do is supply their brain with enough understandable experiences that it will adapt itself to the new language. Sometimes this can happen to a small degree by accident because they’ve spent so much time doing pointless grammar drills, but the real action happens when they get exposed to the language over and over again in comprehensible ways. This supplies the experiential material that the brain needs in order to get familiar with this new skill.

There aren’t really that many people who “just aren’t good at languages”, which I think should be obvious by the fact that everyone speaks one (certain extreme exceptions aside). The big problem is that people give up on learning a second one when they think that it must be done through explicit memorization of rules, which it just can’t. The real skill we need to learn is to let go of the feeling of control that those explicit rules give us. We need to trust our brain to do its job, which it does every day on many other things which sometimes escape our notice.

As I said in my previous article about breaking through plateaus, we need to find ways to expose ourselves to thing that are mostly comprehensible, but a little bit challenging…enough so that we’ll make some errors. With some correction or feedback, or just through experiencing the situation over and over, our brains will adapt to this new stimulus and we’ll get better.

Just like everyone sucks at juggling when they start, you have to realize that you’re going to suck at a new language when you start. In fact you might suck for a long time. You just need to keep exposing yourself to somewhat comprehensible bits of it that are a little bit challenging, and you’ll slowly adapt to it over time. It’ll become familiar.

The real process behind language learning is figuring out how to keep yourself exposed to it in various ways until it becomes familiar to you. You can’t know which parts will be familiar first. It’s an unconscious process, but you can consciously keep feeding yourself the material. That’s the job of the conscious mind in language learning…purely a logistical job. You arrange for various materials to be placed in front of your eyeballs and for sounds to enter your ears. You can choose what small distinctions to pay attention to, so that the unconscious can better train itself about those differences. Beyond this, most of the work is in reconfiguring neurons, and it’s not a conscious activity.

I’ll continue in a further article about those small things we can notice that will help us absorb the language and become familiar with it, but for now I’ll just leave you with a few thoughts. How many things did your brain unconsciously do for you today? Did you consciously walk to the kitchen by following an algorithm of “move left foot 45cm forward. Now move right foot 45cm forward”? No, you just walked. Did you talk to your friend by calculating the correct grammar order and conjugation of the words? No, you just talked.

Neither of these tasks were in-born…you had to learn them. But they still function unconsciously, similar to breathing or swallowing. And knowing this gives us a powerful understanding of how to teach ourselves a new language.

My first experiences studying Polish with parallel texts

Although my first brief foray into the Slavic languages was with Bulgarian, I basically only learned a few phrases to say to my friends, as it seemed too intimidating at the time to try and really learn it. Since then, I’ve become a lot more experienced at learning languages, but Bulgarian still suffers from a lack of decent materials; the opposite is true of Polish, though.

Polish draws me for several reasons. My father’s father spoke Polish as a boy, and his parents (my great-grandparents) immigrated to Canada from Poland in 1909. Although no living member of my family speaks Polish, it’s still part of the family history. Beyond that, I have several friends at home in Vancouver who are native Polish speakers, so I’ve thought about learning it several times.

So, here I am, starting something new. This month I’m planning to divide my time amongst several languages, and part of that will be a little bit of work on Polish. The internet is absolutely full of excellent Polish materials. There are dozens of interesting books that I want to read, some translated, and some native to Polish. A lot of them seem to have both audiobooks and ebooks available, which is perfect for me.

Today I’m starting with a translation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. I’ve given myself a vocabulary “pre-test” using another book, and I’ve discovered that I understand about 1% of the words on an average page of Polish. This is much different than Dutch, where I could at least figure out a bunch of them. Polish is pretty much opaque to me at this point, and I only recognize the obvious “international” words, such as those related to science.

Despite this, I’m diving right into real texts. No stupid textbook dialogs for me, thanks. In the first few minutes of listening to the audiobook as I read the parallel text (English/Polish), I’ve learned several things right away. First, I synch myself according to the capitalized words, which are usually place names. From those, I can recognize the other words that occur near them. What follows here is a running description of what I’m seeing and learning as I read a book like this in Polish.

In the case of Earthsea, I see the proper noun “Gont”, which is the name of an island. Nothing really learned from this, since it’s a made-up name. But it always occurs with “the island of” in English, and wyspa in Polish, so I guess that that’s “island”, perhaps with a possessive case. Shortly after that, I got confirmation when I saw “from isle to isle” corresponding with od wyspy do wyspy.

I also easily found the word for wizard, which seems to be czarnoksiężnik, and it looks like the plural of that might be czarnoksiężników, and from this I could conclude that czarami was probably “magic”. I sort of stumbled upon the word braci for “brothers”, since it sounds similar. Then another thing from capitalization: Doliny Północnej for “Northern Vale”, although I’m not really sure which of those corresponds to northern and which to vale.

I’m not only looking for vocabulary. I’m also trying to get used to the phonetic inventory of Polish. Before starting to read, I read the wikipedia page on Polish phonetics. I found out that there are several sounds that English speakers usually perceive as the same, but which Poles consider distinct sounds (specifically, cz and ć, sz and ś, etc). So I’m paying very close attention to which sounds are where, and how they are different from the sounds I’m familiar with.

This relates back to the idea of plateaus. As babies listen to the language around them, they slowly adapt to which sounds are present in their developing native language, and they lose the ability to distinguish those from other similar sounds that might be distinct in other languages. In a sense, as they adapt they also create a plateau beyond which they can no longer reach. Automaticity allows them to learn to understand and speak their first language, but becomes a hindrance later if they want to learn another one.

Overcoming this is just like busting through the plateau of typing speed or whatever else, as I mentioned in a previous article. You need to learn how to notice those differences, perhaps by reading a description of them and where to find them. Then you need some exposure to them that challenges you. You need to seek them out, sometimes making mistakes, by listening to something that is not easy. Push yourself a bit. And then you need a way to get some feedback. I usually use a text transcript for this. I listen to audio to try and find the different sounds that I’m not used to, and I use the text transcript to give the answers of where they were. This allows me to train my perception of those sounds.

This is something I can do immediately with Polish, despite knowing basically zero vocabulary. Working on my perception (and then production) of sounds is something that will help me throughout my learning process, and will later be a great help when I want to read some books that no longer have a corresponding audiobook, so that I have the right “voice” in my head as I read. This is not only a matter of knowing the sounds, but also the orthography, so that I know what sounds go with the letters in something like wykrzyknął (which at this point looks like total gibberish to me, honestly).

I’ll leave it at that for today, but I’ll make some more notes about my discovery process as it develops. Basically I’m just trying to follow my curiousity wherever it takes me, and learn any polish words I can through any method that’s interesting. I need to make sure that I have a variety of source materials, so that I can switch to another one if I get bored of one of them, and I’ve installed a firefox plugin called “BabelFish” that does popup translations of words that I hold my mouse over. Other than that, I’m just doing whatever feels fun 🙂

January 2011 – 191 language hours

Well, the first month of the year is over already, and I’m pretty happy with my language-learning results. But first I want to briefly cover my sleep experiment.

This week, I’ve decided to drop off the Everyman schedule and go back to monophasic sleep. I’ve found that polyphasic sleep requires a lot of discipline during the adaptation phase, and that you can expect several weeks of being tired. At this point, I’m tired of being tired, and I don’t really like constantly constraining my sleep. I prefer to just wake up when it feels good to wake up.

I might try polyphasic again some time in the near future, now that I know what to expect. For now I just want to be well-rested for a little while. At the end of my experiment, I was mostly adapted, but there was still a lingering tiredness for 1 or two hours per day on average. If I made any mistakes in the schedule, then this would increase. Some days were better, some days were worse, but it seemed to only be slowly progressing.

When I try it again, I’m going to be much more exact with my sleeping times, and I’ll be sure not to switch programs in the middle. I’ll also make sure to be more vigilant about setting multiple alarms and getting up right away, to prevent oversleeps.

So, now on to language tasks. I’m rather happy with the amount of language work I accomplished this month, although I think it could be improved more. In total, I spent 191 hours on language activities, with 132.5 of that spent on Dutch. The remainder was mostly German reading and TV time. My personal best was January 19th where I reached 10 hours of Dutch time, and in that week I hit 49.5 worth of Dutch time altogether.

I’ve learned a couple important things. One is that the content of your learning material is really important; the more interest you have in the material, the easier it is to do it. Since Harry Potter was the only material I’ve had so far where the audiobook matches exactly with the Dutch ebook, and for which an English ebook was also present, then I felt constrained in my choices for beginner material. Sometimes it was a strain to get back to work. With German, on the other hand, I have DVDs of Star Trek: Voyager with German audio, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to just sit down and watch a couple hours of that with Chani (who’s spending her time learning German these days).

I’ve also found that it can be very tempting to spend too much time on the English half of my parallel texts rather than focusing on the Dutch. There were many moments where I caught myself reading ahead in the English and ignoring the Dutch audio. For this and other reasons, my recognition of printed Dutch is much higher than my ability to listen to it. I’ve had some gains in the past week, but I still need to work on it more.

Another thing I noticed sharply was the Pareto principle, where 20% of my time got me 80% of my comprehension in reading. I was able to get to recognition of more than 80% of the words on each page after less than about 30 hours of work, and ever since then I’ve been trudging through the “long tail”, trying to acquire that very important last 20% of the words. This means that for the first little while, you feel a great sense of progress as you zoom through the most frequent vocabulary, but then it feels like your progress is slowing to a crawl as you struggle to add a few more percent here and there.

The struggle is worth it, though. You’ll get a magnificent feeling of accomplishment once you get up to the high 90s, where you’ll be able to just sit down with a novel in your new language and enjoy reading it for fun. This should happen by the time you’ve already read 1 million words in your target language, which is about 10 regular sized novels, but you might get there with only half of that, depending on what other language activities you’re doing, and how much the language differs from what you know already.

So, ahead of me is the month of February. This is where I’ll be starting the active phase of my Dutch project. I’ve got a lot more work to do in the first week and a half to prepare. Then I’ve invited a couple of Belgian Couchsurfers to come stay with me for a few days, so it’ll be “sink or swim” time. After that, I’ve booked a plane ticket to Belgium to go to Talenfestival Leuven, which is a “language festival” for one day which includes short seminars on many different languages (all conducted in Dutch). Interestingly, the talk on Irish will be given in Esperanto, with Dutch translation.

I’m still continuing my reading and listening, but I’ll be spending some time practicing output on my own before the couchsurfers get here to put me to the test. I’ve got a phrasebook that I can run through to practice a lot of common phrases, and then I’ll work on some writing exercises to help me with coming up with my own Dutch ideas from scratch.

Just one more month of concentrated Dutch studying, and then I’ll be switching my main project to something else. At that point I hope to have good understanding of spoken and written Dutch, so it should be easy to put it on the backburner and just read the occasional novel or watch the TV news in order to keep things fresh. I’m looking forward to it!

Dutch update: 85hrs

So, at the end of 3 weeks of studying Dutch full-time, I’m at 85.5 hours total (split 9.5 / 33 / 43 by week), and I’ve read somewhere around 400000 words. Currently I’m in that nebulous “intermediate” area, where it’s hard to judge progress, so I just have to keep pushing. My sense is that my vocabulary is still increasing, but I’m not yet at that nice pleasant “easy reading” phase, which probably occurs when you know over 98% of the words on the page. Those last few percent take a lot longer to get, but they’re pretty important if you want to feel really comfortable when reading.

I’ve ramped up my study hours greatly over the past few days. Yesterday I put in 8 hours, and had 10 hours the day before, and I plan to do the same again today still. It’s definitely a new skill to learn, getting in that many hours in the day. I try to split them up throughout the day, aiming at 2hrs out of every block of 4 (since my day is divided into 4hr segments by my nap schedule). So far, though, I’ve had several small chunks and one or two much larger chunks of consecutive study time.

Currently, I still get somewhat lost when listening to something without reading along. Harry Potter is easier than other things, because I’m used to it and I know the story, but in other things I only get a rough impression of what’s going on if it’s something totally new.

Despite my complaints above, about not being totally perfect at reading yet, I’m actually pretty decent at reading Dutch now. The impatience is probably due to my extensive German reading skills that create a large contrast. When I honestly evaluate my Dutch skills though, I have to feel pretty good. For example, I can read Wikipedia pretty well in Dutch now. I just read the article on Paleontology without too many problems. Definitely enough to get informed about a topic, although like I said, still not with the ease that I can read German. There are still many words per page that I don’t know.

My goal for the coming week is to get 10 hours of study time every day, devoted to Listening-Reading. Currently I’m going over each chapter at least twice, trying to recognize as many new words as I can, and I’m trying hard to focus on the sounds of the words as I hear them, so that I don’t get too stuck on just reading off the page. I’m hoping to build more intuitive familiarity with the language, and get those last few stubborn percent of vocabulary words.

Once my recognition is higher, I’m going to move on to the activating stage of L-R, where I listen and try to repeat any recognized phrases. In this stage, you don’t want to read those phrases out of the book; the goal is to repeat the ones that you heard, and fully understood.

Before I attempt this, I’ll spend some time working on specific aspects of pronunciation. To do this, I’ll cut out single sentences from some recordings, and then listen to them about 50 times until they’re stuck in my head like a Michael Jackson song. Then I’ll start repeating along with the recording, repeating up to 50 times each in order to really cement the sounds in my mind.

Anyway, that’s still another week away at least, so I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The next week is still strongly devoted to listening and reading recognition skills, hopefully getting my reading skills up near C1 if I can.

Next update at 120 hours 🙂

Curiosity, complexity, and appreciation

A big part of what makes me me, is curiosity. Following my sense of curiosity has led me down many new paths, and each of those paths has changed who I am. When you’re curious, you learn to see that each thing has its own uniqueness, and its own complexities. You learn to appreciate more things, because you know that beneath the surface, there’s something complex waiting to be discovered. Curiosity, for me, is about wanting to dive into that complexity and see all of it.

If you want to complete some big project, perhaps because of some end goal like a job, money, etc, then it can be hard to find the continuing motivation to complete the whole thing just by thinking about that end result. When you do this, it’s really just the end thing that you want, not the long process of getting there. Accomplishing great things is much easier when you cultivate a sense of wonder. Learn to see your chosen subject as an intricate and complex thing that is worthy of study just by itself.

By choosing to see all the internal and external connections and structures, you start to see the beauty of your topic. Something that may have previously seemed like a chaotic mess starts to become beautiful as you discover the patterns in it. Even as you see more and more patterns, there will still be areas that seem too complicated or too difficult, but this just means that there’s more left to discover.

In the case of languages, each language is its own landscape. There are historical relationships with other languages (as hinted in my previous post showing the similarities between English, German, and Dutch). There are many levels of structure in languages, and each of them can be interesting…from pronunciation to spelling to word morphology, sentence structure, sentence meaning, discourse, etc. Some people write their whole PhD thesis on tiny subsets of these things, so there’s a lot in there to investigate. There are also the many past accomplishments and creations by users of the language. There are many levels of meaning behind the great poets and novelists in each language. There’s no reason to ever get bored while learning a language, because there’s just so much to see.

When you view it this way, the end goal becomes somewhat secondary. You don’t see it every day because it’s in the far future. What you encounter every day is the neat little patterns that form the bits of the language. As you read a book, you might notice words that are related to some other word in another language…like Swedish “nog” that roughly corresponds to German “genug” and English “enough”. Finding little things like that is what interests me about a language, and it keeps me going.

Another example of interesting complexity is the world of birds. When I tell people that I like to go bird-watching, sometimes they ask something like “oh, so you like to count how many crows and pigeons you see?” What’s happening is that they’re failing to see the complexity of life, which allows it to be interesting. If all there was to birds was just crows and pigeons, then it’d obviously be boring. With only two things to see, you’d exhaust the space of possibilities pretty fast.

In fact, at most times of the year in my home town of Vancouver, there are over 150 types of birds that you can find in the surrounding area. In both Winter and Summer, I can take you to some of the parks within the city and show you 30 different types of birds within a half hour. Each one has its own preferred habitat and food, and its own unique behaviours. I can tell them apart sometimes just by seeing their silhouette or the way they fly and the shape of their wings, or just a short sound that they make. Each bird has its own story to tell, and the more you learn about them, the more interesting the whole topic becomes. You can continue studying them your entire life and always learn new things. Who needs to go to a zoo, when you can see more variety out in the world just by keeping your eyes and ears open!

When I meet a new person, I ask them what they’re passionate about. This usually leads me to a complex topic that they have learned to appreciate the details of. Instead of dismissing it based on what I’ve heard previously, I ask them to elaborate and tell me about their favourite parts of that topic. I want to discover what makes them love it so much, and the reasons why they can spend so much time doing it. Almost always, their motivation stems from an appreciation for the complex patterns they find in it…they ways that the complexity is made simple by seeing the patterns. As they continue learning about it, chaos turns to order, strangeness becomes familiarity, and complexity has its base in simple patterns.

Finding this inner beauty and simplicity is something that spans all disciplines. Our mind seeks out these patterns automatically, and as we grow accustomed to them, our mind adapts itself to recognize the patterns at a glance. This process is what takes us from confused to fluent, whether the topic is birds, languages, or physics. If you want to get good at something, then don’t focus on the end goal, but just keep looking for the patterns that make it interesting, and find ways to grow accustomed to it through massive exposure. Exposure is easy to get when you’re an explorer looking into each nook and cranny, trying to figure out what makes everything tick.

As you explore, learn to enjoy the pleasure of discovering some new pattern or detail. This feeling of satisfaction will be repeated over and over as you learn, and it will become your internal motivation to keep going. Internal motivation (that feeling of incremental satisfaction as you proceed) is always far more important than any external motivators that may be present (such as money, parental pressure, grades, goals and deadlines). Your internal satisfaction will lead you to become an expert by squeezing out that last little bit of efficiency, by repeating a difficult phrase or practicing your basketball jump-shot to perfection.

Feeding your sense of appreciation of beauty and complexity will mean that you no longer need the external motivators. You’ll be able to continue your project in the long term, and one day you’ll have become an expert without noticing.

methods vs. activities

I find that people are quick to describe things as “methods” these days, as if the only way to learn a language is to follow a fully detailed algorithmic description of what to do. I just wanted to mention that my previous post about parallel texts does not describe such a “method”.

I prefer to have many different language activities that I can do. What you really need, when pursuing a language, is lots of different ways to gain exposure. You need them to be fun and interesting, so that you’ll pay attention while doing them and so that you’ll keep coming back for more. You probably also need multiple resources so that if you eventually get tired of one, then you can just switch to another one without hesitating.

If you like textbooks, then find more than one textbook…preferably at least 3. If you like watching TV in another language, then find more than one show. Same with novels. The idea here is that it’s usually unreasonable to expect that you’ll do the exact same thing over and over again until you’re fluent. You need something else beside you that you can pick up when you put the first one down, in order to continue your exposure.

This applies across activities too. You might have 1 TV show, 1 audio book, and 1 more difficult novel, or some other arrangement. You might also have more than one activity that you can do with the same resource, such as Intensive and Extensive reading. Having more activities is beneficial because each can seem like a break from the others. For instance, right now I have two easy Swedish audiobooks, several harder books with audiobooks, and some TV shows to watch. I try to use the harder books to figure out some vocabulary, but when I get tired then I just watch some TV to relax.

Be cautious of setting up anything too rigid, because then it might start to seem like “work”, and you may be demotivated because you feel like you have to do some boring activity over and over and over. Remember that different things can be “interesting” to different people at different times. Sometimes I really like to do some “dictionary surfing” where I look up successive words in the dictionary and write down a whole bunch of example phrases, but I wouldn’t want to make that my complete “method” for learning. It’s just one activity that I occasionally enjoy.

My hope here on this blog is to illustrate many different possible activities to people who might not have heard of them or thought them possible. Try them out, if you like, but they’re not the only way to do things.

The magic of words

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series of novels, magic power can be gained over something by discovering it’s true name in the ancient language of the dragons. Young wizards who are training in the magical arts have to spend significant time memorizing many of these ancient words, and it can be hard to keep going. To help them along, their teacher gives a little speech about the ancient language.

In his speech, he explains to them that because their language is related to the ancient language, they can find clues within their words. Some of their words are made of bits of the older words. By investigating the older language, they can learn new things about their own. Also, the more words they learn, the more things they can precisely describe and thus have power over. This motivates them to keep going in their long task.

So, as an illustration of how to learn from parallel texts, I’d like you to take a look at the parallels between the different language versions of some of this speech. I’ll lay out 3 sentences along with their corresponding sentences in the other languages. First is English, then German, then Dutch, and finally Polish to give some contrast. These are from the official translations, not google translate.

• But magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, or the Old Speech from which it grew.
• Aber Magie, wahre Magie, wird nur von denen ausgeübt, die das Hardisch der Erdsee sprechen oder die Ursprache, aus der es stammt.
• En magie, ware magie wordt alleen gewrocht door hen die de Hardische taal van Aardzee spreken, of de Oude Spraak waaruit deze is voortgekomen.
• Ale magia, prawdziwa magia, jest dziełem tylko tych istot, które mówią hardyckim narzeczem Światomorza albo też Dawną Mową, z której to narzecze wyrosło.

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• That is the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke who made the islands of the world, and the language of our lays and songs, spells, enchantments, and invocations.
• Das sind die Sprache der Drachen und die Sprache Segoys, der die Inseln dieser Welt schuf, und es ist auch die Sprache unserer Lieder und Epen und unserer Zauber- und Bannsprüche.
• Dat is de taaldie de draken spreken, en de taal die Segoy sprak toen hij de eilanden van de wereld schiep, en de taal van onzwijzen en zangen, onze spreuken, oproepingen en bezweringen.
• Dawna Mowa to język, którym mówią smoki, język, którym mówił Segoy, ten, co stworzył wyspy świata, język naszych ballad i pieśni, zaklęć, czarów i wezwań.

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• Its words lie hidden and changed among our Hardic words.
• Die Worte dieser Sprache sind versteckt in unserem Hardisch.
• Haar woorden liggen nauwelijks herkenbaar verscholen tussen de woorden van ons Hardisch.
• Jego słowa spoczywają, ukryte i zmienione, pomiędzy naszymi hardyckimi słowami.

For those of you who already speak some German or Dutch, you’ll notice right away that the translations are not exactly literal. There are some words that have been removed or added. Also, even for those who don’t know any of these languages, you might have noticed that there are some changes in word order.

If I were starting these languages completely from scratch (which I sort of am with Dutch and Polish, although I have a background in germanic languages to help me with Dutch), then the first thing I’d look for is some “anchor” words. Typically these are proper nouns for people and places, and they tend to stay roughly the same between translations. This will help you even with unrelated languages like Chinese, where the foreign names are usually spelled out somewhat, using rarer characters as phonetic approximations.

In this case, the words that are going to transfer across all translations are “Hardic” and “Segoy”. Due to their connections as indo-european languages, you’ll also see Magic / Magie / magie / magia corresponding. And then among the germanic ones you’ll see more words corresponding like dragon / Drachen / draken (which amusingly seems to be “smoki” in Polish, as far as I can tell). I also guess “ballad” as the Polish word for song. If words were chosen differently by the translators, the different versions could be made to correspond even more closely.

The next thing you can try, is finding a passage that repeats itself with only a slight change, and then see what changed. A good candidate for this is “the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke”. Looking at the polish, you’ll see “język, którym mówią smoki” and “język, którym mówił Segoy”. Without looking at any dictionaries, I would guess that mówi- is a stem for “to speak”, with -ą added for present and -ł added for past. I would also guess that język is the word for language, which is somewhat confirmed by looking at the sentence after that too. I could be wrong, but I would be aided by reading along further in the story.

This is basically the first time I’ve ever looked at Polish in this detail, yet I can still find patterns and start working things out. This is only with 3 sentences. By finding slight hints at patterns, and then seeing those patterns represented in hundreds or thousands of different sentences, you can learn a lot of the language without ever looking at a dictionary. It would take ridiculously long to look up every single unknown word in the unknown sentences.

So, this is why I suggest that learning with books can be really productive, even from the very start. It’s made much easier by having a translated version of the text to make it comprehensible, and you should probably limit your dictionary lookups to those words that you’ve already seen many times (the “high frequency” words). By seeing many many somewhat-comprehensible examples, you can learn a lot very quickly.

Another thing that might help make things more comprehensible, is to do a quick browse through a bunch of grammar examples, just to see what’s possible. No need to try and memorize any tables or do any “exercises” from textbooks, because you’ll pick up their workings naturally as you read through your novel. Looking at a bunch of clear examples is helpful though, because it lets you see what’s possible in the language…to see what’s out there for you to discover. This helps you notice it when it comes up for real in your novel.

Just remember that Exposure comes before Knowledge, not the other way around. Don’t wait until you’re “ready” to expose yourself to the language, because then you never will be. Also, go out and buy some real books. As Khatsumoto has said, you have to own before you pwn. If you have no books on your shelf, you will have limited access to the language.

Have fun reading!

Learn by reading, personal example: Swedish

First I want to share this tweet with you:

"No matter what the methods are, language acquisition boils down to this: keep going." http://bit.ly/eN6QtZ

— Official AJATT | Khatzumoto (@ajatt) December 6, 2010

Lately I’ve been trying hard to revive my Swedish skills, which I’ve somewhat neglected since coming to Germany. I’m trying now to make a concerted push to improve my Swedish literacy before the end of the year, but it’s been difficult. I really want to be able to read Stieg Larsson’s books in the original Swedish, but they’re over my level right now. I’m used to being able to read effortlessly in German, but with a difficult Swedish book like this it’s the opposite.

It’s taken a lot of effort, but I know that I just have to keep going and it’ll get easier. Literacy in another language follows the Pareto (aka 80/20) principle: 80% of the results are gained with just 20% of the effort. To get to that place of seemingly effortless reading, however, you have to be somewhere around 95% recognition, and that extra 15% takes at least as long as the first 80%.

When you keep on putting in the time, however, it actually will feel like you got there sooner than expected. Sometimes in the middle, you might feel down, but just keep on going. So, here’s what’s been going on for me lately…maybe some of you can relate.

I picked up Män som hatar kvinnor again some time last week (my first time reading Swedish since early september), turned on the audiobook, and promptly realized that I understood nothing at all. This worried me, because I had thought I had made some decent progress in Swedish. I decided that instead of the audiobook, I should spend some intensive time reviewing the vocab…by reading, of course.

So, with renewed enthusiasm, I grabbed the English version of the book, “The girl with the dragon tattoo”, and started working back and forth with the Swedish. I had to do a lot of work to figure out the Swedish sentences, and tried things like reading 1 chapter of English first, and then tried to read that chapter in Swedish, but it took too long. So I switched to 1 page of English, and then reading the equivalent page in Swedish, but it also took too long, so I moved down to paragraphs and sentences.

Slowly, my memory of some of the words started to come back, and I learned a lot of new ones. I remembered, though, that part of the slooowww speed was caused by my need to know absolutely every word precisely. This is unnecessary and harmful at the beginning, because you’re avoiding the benefits of the 80/20 rule! You’re trying to get all 100% of the words, which takes enormous time. Try instead to just worry about the more frequent words, or at least spend less time on the harder words. If you get the general idea, that’s enough for now, and you’ll quickly race up to the 80% level. From there, you can get more of the harder words.

My progress has been ramping up. Now I’m able to read more fluidly, and faster. Speed is important, because you have to read at a reasonable speed in order to enjoy the story. If you go too slowly, it gets really boring and you get tempted to give up. You should sacrifice accuracy for speed until you reach the pace that keeps the story enjoyable. Accuracy will catch up after that.

Remember that it often only takes just a little bit more effort to make that breakthrough you’ve been waiting for. Sometimes you might feel down because it’s taking too long, but you need to somehow make up some reasons to keep going for one more week, one more day, one more hour. All that matters is that you keep trying again. Keep starting over, try one more time. All that time adds up, and at some point it’ll “click”.

For extra fun, go back to one of your easier books after you’ve tried a hard one for a while. You’ll see that it’s actually gotten much easier due to your efforts. Any way that you can demonstrate your progress to yourself is helpful. Another way is to keep a hard book around, and every once in a while do a “test” where you pick a random page from the middle and count up what percentage of the words you recognize. You could even do this every day and make yourself a graph, if you like. You’ll see that the amount you recognize goes steadily upward over time, as long as you keep on trying to read.

Keep starting, keep trying, keep going, keep reading. It works.

Making progress with your accent

There are many ways to work on your accent, and I’d like to touch on a few of them today. To learn pronunciation, you necessarily have to do a lot of listening, but there are some varying ideas about what you should listen to.

Recently, I’ve heard some people suggest that you can listen to speakers of your target language when they try to speak your own language. Find some recordings (perhaps on youtube) of some people with a heavy accent in English, and learn to imitate their English accent.

If you listen to beginners in English who are native speakers of your target language, you’ll hear which sounds they consistently have trouble with, and you’ll be able to hear how that sort of sound differs from a familiar English sound. You can also look for hints about the rhythm and intonation that they use in their sentences.

When listening in the L2, you may not always hear how it is different from what you’re attempting to say, because you’re not yet familiar with how it sounds. That said, you really need to become familiar with those sounds, and the way to do this is to do a lot of careful listening, even to things that you understand absolutely nothing of. It might even be better if you understand nothing, because then you have no choice but to pay precise attention to the sounds.

I still think that there can be great benefits from finding a very fast but precisely spoken newscast, and listening to it carefully for as many hours as you can. Try to hear every little sound, and let it put you into a sort of trance. Just keep listening, and eventually you’ll get random phrases bubbling into your head when you’re *not* listening, even if you understand nothing of what they mean. This is what I think really helps you learn the sounds…when you can compare your own productions with those precisely “recorded” sounds that bubble into your mind.

The main idea with all of this is that you have to train your brain to process these new sounds. At some time in your past, probably while you were very young, you learned to filter out certain sounds, or that some sounds are “equivalent” to others. For instance, in English we say our Ts in several ways…we can aspirate them (with a puff of air like in the word “Attack”), or say them in an unaspirated way like in “a bit”. But they both still signify a T sound…if you mistakenly aspirate every single T in English (like some Germans tend to do), then you’ll perhaps sound a bit more “precise” and “foreign”, but it won’t change any of the meanings of the words. In this sense, aspirated and unaspirated T are somewhat equivalent in English. This is not the case in other languages, such as Hindi, where they represent different distinct letters and might change the meaning of words if pronounced wrong.

When learning an accent, you have to learn these new categories. The way that you do this is through lots and lots of attentive listening. You need to first hear the proper sounds of the language in your head. Find something that you can listen to over and over again, until it gets stuck like a Michael Jackson song that won’t stop repeating in your head. Once you’re at this stage, then you’ll be better able to compare the things that you say with how it sounds in your head.

It also helps if you can read a bit about the sounds, perhaps in a technical linguistic description. Some of the terminology may take some getting used to, but such descriptions can help point out the technical differences in the pronunciation that you may not be aware of just from listening. A good teacher will also do this for you, but not all of us have that luxury. These descriptions can also tell you where to place your tongue in order to produce some of these sounds, which also may not be obvious from listening.

Once you’ve heard about these concepts, you’ll be better able to notice them when they happen in your materials. Noticing is very important, because if you just listen with your prior English language preconceptions, then you’re going to hear them as English sound categories. You need to use all tools available to you to be able to notice when they actually differ, and how.

Accent study is mainly the combination of these two activities: 1) being able to notice when something is different, and 2) massive amounts of attentive listening that will allow you to hear examples of those differences many hundreds of times. With these two things under your belt, you’re well on the way to having a good accent.

The final part is practice. You need to condition your tongue to go in the right place at the right time to make those new sounds, and this can be quite difficult when the sounds are very similar to your familiar English sounds. In all of the languages I’ve tried, there’s always a stage where I’m better able to recognize good and bad pronunciation than I am at actually producing it myself. This is actually a good place to be at, because then you’ll be able to apply those listening skills to yourself!

What you do is make a recording of yourself talking, as best you can. Ideally, you should say some sort of script that you already have as a recording from a native speaker (perhaps from an audiobook, or from a site like Rhinospike). When you play your own recording back to yourself, you’ll hopefully be able to hear some of the places where you did something sloppy. Listen to the native recording again, and then record yourself once more.

Another exercise to try is to set the native recording on infinite loop. Listen first, for maybe 50 times. This will allow it to seep into your head and become stuck. Yes, really 50, not 10. Next, you try and repeat along with the recording. You’ll suck at first, and you may have to listen a couple more times and try again, but keep repeating along with it. Try to do this 50 times in a row as well. As you go, you’ll be adapting your mouth movements and breath in order to be closer to what you’re hearing. After enough practice, it’ll become a lot easier and it’ll just happen automatically when you’re speaking normally.

For a more in-depth description, I very highly recommend reading Olle Kjellin’s paper on “Accent Addition“. His suggestions that pronunciation and prosody (the rhythm and intonation of speech) should be learned first are very valuable, and I wish all language teachers would take his advice.

How can I learn a language quickly from novels?

I thought I’d elaborate a bit today on how to use novels effectively to study a language. I was inspired to try this mainly by three people: Khatsumoto from AJATT, Steve Kaufmann (who says he learned most of his 11 languages just by reading and listening), and the late great Hungarian polyglot Kato Lomb (who worked professionally in 16 languages).

The key to acquiring a language is comprehensible input. Your task as the learner is to find ways to make some text or audio at least minimally understandable, and to consume as much of it as you can. Your brain will pretty much unconsciously do the rest of it. For this reason, some people like to use that term “acquire” rather than “learn”, with regard to languages.

Here’s something I found on wikipedia, about Kato Lomb’s methods of learning from novels:

She attributed her success to massive amounts of comprehensible input, mostly through recreational reading. She was personally very interested in grammar and linguistics, but felt it played a small role in language acquisition, loved dictionaries but looked up words when she read only if the word re-appeared several times and she still did not understand it

I agree wholeheartedly with this idea. As I’ve said previously, using the dictionary while reading will kill your flow and slow you down. It’ll prevent you from absorbing as much as you might have. Use a highlighter while you read, and then do your dictionary work after you’re done your reading session (and sometimes you’ll discover that the dictionary merely confirms what you already suspected).

So, if you’re starting a new language, or even continuing to learn after having learned a lot already, how can you make new harder books more comprehensible? In general, I’d say that grammar is not the answer. Grammar is acquired naturally from reading, although I’ve found that it can sometimes be useful spending a tiny tiny fraction of your time just taking a quick skim over some grammar example sentences that illustrate a certain concept.

There is one textbooky thing that actually can help significantly though, and that is vocabulary work. Firstly, don’t think that you can learn all about each word and all its various meanings and uses just by memorizing lists. You can only learn this stuff from context, i.e. reading books and listening. What you can get from lists though, is a sort of outline or general meaning of a word…a sort of sense for it, devoid of context. This is helpful as a way to bootstrap yourself…to get started, with a bit of a sense for common words, which will let you more easily dive into real content where you’ll really learn things. However, I only find this helpful at the very start, perhaps by blasting through the 500 most common words in the language in a day or two.

So, vocab lists can be pretty boring. What I generally find more interesting is to move straight to real books by getting two copies: one in English and one in my target language (“L2”, as they say). Besides being less boring, you actually learn much more this way. I’ll give a quick outline of what I do.

Firstly, one of my current projects is Swedish. I’m fighting a bit of personal disappointment at the moment, because I can read advanced German novels very easily, but not in Swedish….currently I’m reading the German translation of Brandon Sanderson’s first “Mistborn” book, a rather good novel of what some might call “high fantasy”. I’d love to be able to read effortlessly in Swedish too, but so far I’m finding my copies of Stieg Larsson’s books to be a bit tough.

So, I’m working on this in two ways: Intensive Reading and Extensive Reading. For the Extensive part, wherein I try to just read as much as I can without interruptions, I’ve chosen two easier books: “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho (which is quite good!), and “The boy in the striped pyjamas” by John Boyne. They both have very few infrequent technical words, and lots of dialogue, so they’re perfect to just listen to in Swedish while I read the Swedish book.

For the Intensive part, I focus on learning as many new words as I can, in context. For this, I pick any book I want, as long as I have both the Swedish and English versions. The reason for this is that it saves me a ton of time on dictionary lookups if I can just glance over at the English edition to figure out what’s going on. For this task, I’m using the first Stieg Larsson book, known in English as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, although the Swedish title is “Män som hatar kvinnor” (“men who hate women”).

In this book, there are many words I already know, but still quite a few that I don’t. I work through each sentence, and try to understand every single word in it, and the whole idea of the overall sentence (and the paragraph). I keep the English book on the same page, with my finger on the current paragraph so I can find it easily. I focus on the Swedish book, and try to figure out each sentence in my mind, and then if I have any questions I go to the English book.

Once I’ve read the English, I go back and read the entire Swedish paragraph again and try to understand all the details without looking at the English. I try to keep the words in my head, and really “feel” their meaning in that context. I don’t just want to repeat the English translations for each of them in sequence…I want to really feel what those words themselves mean in that sentence.

The purpose of the English is to give you comprehension of everything. You don’t need to memorize corresponding words, and actually the words don’t typically match exactly anyway. They only mostly match in this particular context. You want to extract the ideas of the story, and use that to understand the particular words in the L2 book. All you have to do is understand the L2 text as you read it, and this is enough.

Working slowly through the text this way can give you a lot of vocabulary very quickly. You don’t have to look up each individual word, and you can potentially learn several new words in each sentence, with very little effort. Also, once you’ve worked through a whole page, you can go back and read that page in the L2 all at once, and feel the satisfaction of understanding every single thing you saw.

I recently heard about another way to increase your feelings of satisfaction while doing this. Someone named “Teango” on HTLAL says that he uses a “clicker” to track all the new words he figures out. This is one of those small counting devices commonly used by officials in sports events. You hit a button or turn a dial so that it “clicks” up to a higher number.

Teango uses one of these to “click” every new word that he figures out that he hadn’t previously known. He might read part of the English text, and then come back to his L2 and see some word that he didn’t know before, but now he has a moment of epiphany as he realizes what it means, and then he clicks the clicker. At the end of his reading session, he writes down how many hours he spent, and how many clicks he had, so that he can track how many new words he’s learned overall. As he goes, he gets the satisfaction of watching that number go higher and higher. Apparently after a while, just the sound of the click itself makes him feel happy, as a sort of pavlovian response. There’s a more detailed description of his reading method here. You’ll see it if you scroll down to the bottom of that page.

So, coming back to my Stieg Larsson book, I’m going to work through the whole thing trying to understand every single word in it. I imagine that by the time I get only partway through, I’ll know almost every word there. By that point, I’ll just stop to check the English when a certain single word is causing me trouble, and then my Intensive work will slowly be transforming itself into Extensive. By the end of the year I plan to be effortlessly reading any Swedish book I like.

Overall, to acquire a language quickly, you just need entertaining materials that you’ll keep coming back to, and some way to make them at least a tiny bit comprehensible. If you just keep sticking a book in front of your eyeballs enough, you will learn a lot from it, even if it seems really really hard at the start. Working with a translation to help you along is a way to make that feel easier and to wring every last drop of knowledge out of it.

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions 🙂