Antonio Graceffo is an applied linguist and martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here). His books, including ”The Monk from Brooklyn”, are available at Amazon.com.

A Khmer student wrote to me on youtube and asked me to produce videos about how to read English language newspapers.

“I’d like to ask you to make videos how to read newspaper and translate it from English to Khmer. I Khmer and I having a problem to understand English phrases.” Wrote the student.

Language learners often write telling me about some area of learning or area of their lives where they are experiencing difficulties of comprehension and ask me for a trick or a guide to help them learn.

As I have said in numerous other language learning articles, there are no tricks and no hints. The more hours you invest, the better you will get. And if your goal is to read at a native speaker level, then you need to read things a native speaker reads. If you are a 22 year-old university graduate, then you need to be reading at that level in the foreign language. And you won’t get there by reading textbooks ABOUT the language. You will get there by reading books, articles, and textbooks IN rather than ABOUT the language.

If we analyze this latest email, the student says he has trouble reading, and he specifically singled out newspapers.

Obviously, reading is reading. On some level, reading a newspaper is no different than reading a novel or reading a short story.

If you are reading novels and short stories, you should be able to read newspapers. If I asked this student, however, he is probably is not reading one novel per month in English. If he were, newspaper reading would just come.

Therefore, the problem is not the reading or the newspapers, per se. The problem is the lack of practice.

I never took a course called “Newspaper Reading” in English. I just started reading newspapers. And at first, I had to learn to deal with the language, structure and organization of newspaper writing, but no one taught me, or you. It just came to us. The same was true for German or Spanish newspapers which I can read almost as well as English. No one taught me, or taught Gunther or Pablo, it just came through practice.

A point, that I have made many times in articles, is that when you begin learning a foreign language, you are not an idiot. You are not starting with an empty brain. One reason it takes babies three years to learn their native tongue is because they are also learning what a language is and how language works. You know all of that, and much more. Babies don’t know that there is such a thing as grammar. Every single piece of vocabulary has to be learned. A seven year old may not know the words “population, economy, government, referendum, currency” in his native tongue. So, reading a foreign newspaper would be difficult for him, because reading a newspaper in his mother tongue is difficult for him.

If you are an adult, coming from a developed country, with at least a high school or university level of education, you should already be able to read newspapers in your native tongue. At that point, reading a newspaper in a foreign tongue is simply a matter of vocabulary.

True there are different uses of language, and styles of writing. And newspapers do have style which differs from other kinds of writing. But you just read, and read and figure them out.

The problem with most learners, however, is that they aren’t reading novels and short stories. Most learners need to just accept that they need practice. They need to read, and read, and stumble, and fall, and read again, until they get it.

I didn’t develop a taste for reading the newspaper in English untill I was in my late twenties. But, by that time I had read countless books in English, and completed 16 years of education. I only began reading newspapers because I had to read foreign newspapers at college. Then I learned to read the newspapers in English first, to help me understand the foreign newspaper.

One of the problems, specifically with Khmer learners is that there is so little written material available in Khmer. American students have had exposure to newspapers, magazines, novels, reference books, poetry, plays, encyclopedias, diaries, biographies, textbooks, comic books…  Most Khmers haven’t had this exposure.

If they haven’t read it in their native tongue, how could they read it in a foreign language?

And, I am not just picking on Khmers. True these styles of writing are not available in Khmer language, but even in Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese education, where these many styles of writing exist, students may not have had exposure to them. For example, Taiwanese college students said that during 12 years of primary school they never wrote a single research paper.

But then they were asked to do that in English, in their ESL classes.

Currently, I have a Thai friend, named Em, who is studying in USA. He has been there for three years, studying English full time, and still can’t score high enough on his TOEFL exam to enter an American community college. In Thailand he is a college graduate, but education in Thailand is way behind western education. And in the developed world, American community colleges are about the single easiest schools of higher learning to enter.

If Em finally passes the TOEFL and gets into community college, in the first two years of core requirements for an American Bachelor’s Degree, he will be given assignments such as “Read George Orwell’s 1984, and explain how it is an allegory for communism, and how it applies to the Homeland Security Act in the US.”

When foreign students stumble on an assignment like this, they always blame their English level. But I am confident that the average graduate from most Asian countries couldn’t do this assignment in his native tongue. Their curriculum just doesn’t include these types of analytical book reports.

When I was teaching in Korea, there was a famous story circulating around the sober ESL community. A Korean girl, from a wealthy family, had won a national English contest. She had been tutored by an expensive home teacher, almost since birth, and her English level was exceptional. The prize was a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school in the Unites States, graduation from which almost guaranteed admission to an Ivy League school.

Apparently, one of the first assignments she was given at her new school in America was to read a poem and write an original analysis of it, and then give a presentation in class. When it came time for her presentation, the student stood up and dutifully recited the poem, word for word, she also regurgitated, exactly, what the lecturer had said about the poem in class. And she failed.

In Korea, her incredible memory and ability to accurately repeat what the teacher had said, had kept her at the top of her class. But in America, she was being asked to do much more than that; think, and analyze, create, present, and defend.

The majority of learners believe that their difficulty in dealing with foreign education, books, newspapers, or conversations lies in their lack of vocabulary or failings of language. But once they posses a relatively large vocabulary, the real problem is some combination of culture and practice.

Getting back to the Khmer student and his problem reading English newspapers: To understand English newspapers you also have to know all of the news and concepts in the newspaper. The best way to deal with foreign newspapers, at the beginning, is to first read a news story in your own language. Then read the same news story in the foreign language newspaper. Also you can watch the news in your own language and then in whatever language you are studying, and compare.

Translation isn’t just about knowing words. You have to know concepts. The first rule of translation is that the written text must convey the same meaning in the target language as it did in the source language. Even if the wording, in the end, is not even remotely like the original. No matter how good your foreign language skills are, you cannot convey meaning which you don’t know in your native tongue.

Recently, newspapers in Asia were running stories about the Taiwan Y2K crisis.

To understand the newspaper stories, you would first need to understand the original, global Y2K crisis. The global Y2K issue was something that Cambodia wasn’t very involved in because there were so few computers in Cambodia in the year 1999. There were probably less than one hundred or so internet connections in Cambodia at that time. Next, you would have to know and understand that Taiwan has its own calendar, based on the founding of the Republic of China in 1911. Government offices and banks in Taiwan record events according to the Republic of China calendar, which means if you take money out of an ATM machine today, the year will show as 99.

Once you know and understand these facts, then you would know that Taiwan is about to reach its first century, in the year 2011, and is facing a mini-Y2K crisis, because the year portion of the date in the computer only has two digits.

The bulk of my readers do not live in Asia, and may not have known anything about the history of Taiwan, or the Taiwan date. But, any person with a normal reading level should have understood my explanation. It is not necessarily a requirement that you posses prior knowledge of the exact situation you are reading about, but you can relate it to other things you know about, for example, other calendars and otherY2K problems.

If you look at the above explanation, the vocabulary is fairly simple. There are probably only a small handful of words, perhaps five or six, which an intermediate language learner wouldn’t know. So, those words could be looked up in a dictionary. And for a European student, with a broad base of education and experience, that would be all of the help he would need. But for students coming from the education systems of Asia, particularly form Cambodia which is just now participating in global events such as the Olympic Games for the first time, it would be difficult, even impossible, to understand this or similar newspaper stories.

The key lies in general education, not English lessons. Students need to read constantly and simply build their general education, in their own language first, then in English, or else they will never understand English newspapers or TV shows.

Antonio Graceffo is an applied linguist, and martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here). His books, including ”The Monk from Brooklyn”, are available at Amazon.com.

Googling around the internet I found a lot of sites where people had written in saying, “I am studying language XYZ, and I want to know how many words I have to know to be able to read a newspaper.”

This question is particularly relevant for people who are studying Chinese, where each word is a character, and most students know the exact number of characters that they can read. Whereas students who have been studying Spanish, German, or Vietnamese for a period of years, wouldn’t generally know the exact number, or may not even know an approximate number of words that they understand.

This information is relevant for anyone studying a foreign language, including English, particularly if your goal is to study at a university overseas or to work in a professional job in the foreign language environment.

Checking a number of websites, the answers varied substantially.

On aksville.com, someone took the time to write a long reply, explaining that major newspapers, such as USA Today, are written at a 6th to 8th grade level and require approximately 3,000 words to read.

Another site, called blogonebytes.com: “I read somewhere that to be able to carry on a good conversation in “Mandarin Chinese” one should know about 3,000 characters, and about 7,000 characters to read technical books.”

A follow up comment by a reader on the same site said, “You will need to know a minimum of 3000 characters to be proficient. You will need to be able to speak and understand in the range of 5000-7000 characters.”

According to Omniglot, a site which I tend to have a lot of respect for, “The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters enables you to read about 99% of the characters used in Chinese newspapers and magazines. To read Chinese  literature, technical writings or Classical Chinese though, you need  to be familiar with at least 6,000 characters.”

I had always heard that the range was somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 words to read a newspaper. In the case of Chinese, I know that I can read right about 3,000 characters, and yet, I absolutely cannot read a newspaper. If you hand me a newspaper, I can pick out words that I know, but I can’t actually read and understand the stories.

In Bangkok, I have several friends who are extremely conversant in Thai, and they can read a menu. But they would need an entire day and a dictionary to read a single newspaper story. And even then, they wouldn’t understand everything.

With German, after four years of studying and working as a translator and researcher in the country, I can obviously read anything. But, I have no idea how many words I know. Now that I am embarking on my study of Bahasa Malay, and also making plans to go back and finish learning Vietnamese, I am becoming very curious how long it will take to get my reading level anywhere close to what it is in English or Spanish. My own experience with Chinese made me question this 3,000 word figure. Also, as a person who earns most of his living from writing for magazines, newspapers, and books, I would hate to believe that I only write a 3,000 word vocabulary , and on a 6th to 8th grade level.

As many times as I attended 9th grade, you would think I would be writing at least at high school level.

The two facts that I wanted to verify were, the average reading level of The New York Times, my hometown paper, and the average number of words per edition.

The first question was easy to answer.

The May 2, 2005 edition of “Plain Language At Work Newsletter”, Published by Impact Information Plain-Language Services, explained that there are two generally accepted scales for determining the reading level of various publications. They are the Rudolph Flesch Magazine Chart (1949) and the Robert Gunning Magazine Chart (1952). Both charts analyzed such aspects of a magazine or newspaper such as, average sentence length in words and number of syllables per 100 words. Based on this information, they assigned a school grade reading-level to the publication. According to this rating system, The Times of India was considered the most difficult newspaper in the world, with a reading level of 15th grade. The London Times scored a 12th grade reading level, as did the LA Times and the Boston Globe. The survey must have been flawed, however, because they assigned The New York Times a reading level of 10th grade, which is lower than the LA Times, when everyone knows quite well that New York is better than California or any other place which is not New York.

If you get most of your news from Time Magazine, you might be pleased to know that Time and TV Guide both scored a 9th grade reading level.

The survey didn’t cover newspapers written in languages other than English, but if we assume that we are shooting for an average 10th grade level, this will probably be close to what you need to read a newspaper in any language.

The next question was much harder to answer. How many words do I need to read the New York Times? I have never believed the low estimates of 3,000 or less, simply because every event that happens anywhere in the world, any human situation can appear in the Times as a news story and could of course, require the appropriate vocabulary.

To answer the question, I went to the June 4, 2010 New York Times online and I chose 8 articles, taken from several different sections, because I assumed they would all require different vocabulary. The stories were: “Pelicans, Back From Brink of Extinction, Face Oil Threat”, “BP Funneling Some of Leak to the Surface”, “John Wooden, Who Built Incomparable Dynasty at U.C.L.A., Dies at 99”, “An Appraisal : Wooden as a Teacher: The First Lesson Was Shoelaces”, “Should you be able to discharge student loans into bankruptcy?”, “On the Road to Rock, Fueled by Excess” as well as other tidbits, announcements and follow up articles.

In some cases, if the articles were very long, I didn’t take them in their entirety, assuming there would be much repetition of words.

In all, I took parts of about 8 stories, comprising 51 pages of text. The stories I took didn’t even represent 10% of the total content of this particular edition of The New York Time, June 4, 2010 online edition.

I pasted the words into a word document, converted them to a single column table, which ran over 450 pages long. Then I sorted the table alphabetically. Up to this point, it was easy, just pressing buttons. Next, I had to go through all 450 pages, all 10s of thousands of words, removing duplicates. It was one of the most tedious exercises I have ever conducted in my life. It was exactly the type of obsessive compulsive behavior that gets people locked up in mental institutions. It took 16 hours. By the 10th hour, I began hallucinating. Nearing the 12th hour, I believed I was a hummingbird of some kind.

I allowed plural forms of nouns, so I counted “car” once and “cars” once. I also included all forms of a verb, so “walk” once, “walked” once, and “walking” once. I counted proper nouns, including place names, as the names of people and countries will come up in the news and you need to know them. Also, in foreign language, particularly Asian languages, the grammatical forms and proper names may not even be recognizable if you haven’t studied and learned them.

When I was finished, I found that the random sampling of stories I chose contained 4,139 unique words. This was much higher than the estimates I had read on some websites, but was well in line with what I suspected. If I had the energy to complete a similar analysis of the entire edition, I would have to believe the number would increase. And if we monitored the newspaper over a period of one month, analyzing the text every day, and comparing the vocabulary against an accumulated list, I would imagine that it would grow. Most likely the difference in vocabulary from day to day would be small, but still, the necessary vocabulary would increase.

Comparing the dialogues in my Chinese textbooks with the vocabulary that appeared in these New York Times articles, much of what I learned in school was useless. For example, all foreign language textbooks have chapters devoted to shopping at the market, where you have to memorize tedious lists of Fruits and vegetables. In these Times articles, not a single fruit name was mentioned. Neither my Vietnamese, Chinese, or Bahasa textbooks include the names of heads of state of various countries. But obviously, these names came up in world news stories.

Below is a small sampling of words that I found in the news story which, I don’t know how to say in Chinese. Some of these words, I question, however, if the average 9th grader would know them. Do 9th graders know: abetted, absinthe, archeo-feminist, or bearish?

abetted	albeit	assesses	bankruptcy	biofuels
able-bodied.	Amandine	assessment	batch	biography
abortions	ambivalent	assets	bawdy-sweet	black-clad
absinthe	anachronistic	asthmatic	bearish	bleak
absurd.	anarchic	audience-pleasing	Bedford	blemish
accord	Appended	aura	befriended	blockade
across-the-board	Archbishop	autobiography	behind-the-back	blowout
activists	archeo-feminist	autograph-seekers	benefits	bond
Advocates	articulate	awfully	best-selling	booster
aerodynamic	assertion	babbles	bioenergy	breakthrough

Names and proper nouns are important for understanding news stories. In language textbooks you may learn the names of major countries and the capital cities, but news happens in small cities and even villages as well. To read the news you need to know the names of political parties, famous people, economic theories, financial indices, global corporations, educational institutions, associations, and international organizations such as the UN.

All of these names were taken from the same collection of stories. Do you know how to say these in Vietnamese or write them in Thai?

Cypriot	Delta	Geneva	Mediterranean	Bihar
Baltic	Democrat	Greece	Nehru	Turkish-controlled
Brooklyn	Denmark	Uttar	Metropolitan	Nasdaq
Iranian	Dow	Midwesterner	Mayor	Polytechnique
Louisiana	Durbin	Scotch	Reich	Iskenderun.
pro-Greek	Dutch-Irish	Rev.	Latino	Kentucky.
California	Baptist	BENJAMIN	Bonaventure/Agence	Burke/Associated
Cambridge	Chicago-based	Berkeley	Pennsylvania.	Bush
Cyprus	Barataria-Terrebonne	Navy	BP	Dallas-Fort
Audubon	Gandhi.	Bess	Dalit	Arce

How many of the above terms were you able to translate or transliterate into the language that you study? This is the level of reading that an adult native-speaker can do, and this should be your goal. If the task doesn’t seem daunting enough, remember, in this article, we were only concerned with vocabulary. But you could have a vocabulary of a million words not be able to understand a newspaper or a book. For real communication, you need a comprehensive approach to language, which includes culture, syntax, context, and grammar.

It’s a long stretch. I know. And it can seem impossible. But remember, every Sunday in New York City Catholic mass is said in 29 languages. For more than a century, large numbers of immigrants, my family included, have been coming to America and Canada in search of a better life. Most of them learned English with less than half of the education of the average person reading this article.

So, if your Grandma and Grandpa could learn a new language to a level of functionality, so can you.

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is an applied linguist, and martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here). His books, including ”The Monk from Brooklyn”, are available at Amazon.com.

Normally, ALG says you do 800 hours of listening, then you start speaking, and you do writing and reading last. The reality is, however, if you are not at the ALG school in Bangkok, it is nearly impossible to arrange these type of lessons for yourself. And, strict ALG takes two years to learn a category three language, such as Chinese, Thai or Korean. Most people working in a foreign country can’t invest two years in learning, particularly if they are on a one year or two year contract.

So, I modify ALG when I am doing my own learning and writing.

Next, the founders of ALG were concentrated on how to teach Thai to foreigners. In taking ALG out of Thailand and applying it to other countries, my personal feeling is that the game changes a bit because, unlike Thai, Korean is not tonal and the pronunciation is simple consonant vowel, consonant vowel. And second, the Thai writing system is extremely complex and you really shouldn’t learn to read until you have a very functional knowledge of the language. But in the case of Korean, Hangul is one of the easiest and most perfect writing systems ever developed.

Most people can learn Hangul in about a week, after that, you can read literally anything in Korean. Normally, I tell people to read last, because when you read you have an internal monologue which will be imperfect if you haven’t done sufficient listening first.

What I suggest, to speed up the process, but to also learn the language well, is to buy a university level Korean textbook, and hire a private tutor. Korean teachers will generally want to spend the first several lessons on the alphabet. Don’t let them. Don’t worry about the alphabet for a few weeks. It is probably better to hire a young university student who you can intimidate into teaching you the way you want to learn, as opposed to hiring an experienced teacher who only knows one way and will argue and fight with you.

Have your tutor read the dialogues in your book again and again. At home, listen to the audio CDs for the book. Do not start by having the teacher teach you the symbols or the characters of Hangul. Just follow along with your finger while the teacher reads. Do this for two or three weeks. You will begin to make guesses about what the different characters should sound like. You will begin to recognize words. You will slowly gain a rhythm for the language.

After several weeks, then you could spend a single lesson on the alphabet, to ensure that you know what each letter sounds like and how to recognize them. After that, you can read on your own.

At night, follow the written words on the page while you listen to the CDs. You can start writing at this point. It will help reinforce what you are hearing and learning. But remember, listening is still the key to learning a language and to avoid fossilizing mistakes. Never write an assignment and allow the teacher to take it home and mark it. You go over every assignment, verbally with your teacher, a number of times before you go home and write it. The next day, you should go over your homework verbally, with your teacher. Again, the teacher reads and corrects. You just listen and write. Think about your homework as a talking point, something to help you focus and contextualize your listening.

Don’t speak yet.

What I did with the Korean language was to buy as many level-one textbooks as I could find. There are about three or maybe four series of Korean textbooks sold in Korea. So, I bought all of them. I chose one that I only did with my teacher. The others I did on my own. You can get level one textbooks for free, just ask other foreigners who gave up on learning Korean. They will often pass the books on to you. Just write in them and fill them with ink, writing and rewriting each exercise.

My teacher and I went on like this for about a month or six weeks. Everyday, she read for me. In the evenings I listened to the listening for that book and the listening for the other books which I read on my own.

Eventually, when I started speaking, I only read out my answers from my main textbook while my teacher and I marked my homework.

With Korean language, the listening/speaking is not difficult in the sense of getting the pronunciation right. Actually, Korean, like Mandarin, has only a couple of sounds that we don’t have in English. BUT the listening is difficult because of the complex Korean grammar and registers of speech. So, when you first start “speaking” it should really be just reading grammatically correct and appropriate answers from your book. I did this for hours with my teacher. Occasionally she would ask me something that wasn’t in the book, but I would refuse to answer. You don’t want to start “creating” speech until you are ready. Stick with canned speaking practice for several more weeks.

Finally, you can start speaking. Again, it would be best to wait till the end of 800 hours, but this is not a reality for most people living in the country. So, maybe you start speaking at the end of two months of lessons. My vocabulary was already 2,000 words when I began speaking. And even then, I kept my speaking limited to what was in the book and eventually variations of what was in the book. You should move your reading and listening away from the book and into the real world pretty early on. But your speaking needs to stay in the sterile book world or you will create mistakes that you will never, ever be able to shake.

With all of my languages, once my listening gets to an acceptable level, I encourage people in the real world to talk to me in Korean, but I answer in English. The longer you stay at that level and the more total listening you do, the better your Korean will be when you open up your mouth and start speaking.

If you jump right into speaking, as most teachers want you to do, you will most likely never approach fluency. You will make errors of grammar and appropriateness of speech. Depending upon how early you start speaking you may even make mistakes in pronunciation which is truly sad because Korean is so perfect and easy to pronounce.

The keys to language learning are: dedication, hard work, listening, and discipline to avoid giving in to the temptation to speak too early.

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here).

His books, including “The Monk from Brooklyn“, are available at Amazon.com

Meeting a new Thai person I simply said “Sawadis krap.” Without a second’s hesitation, he said, in English “You Speak Thai very well.” Was I supposed to feel encouraged? Should my head have swollen to monumental proportions because of this meaningful recognition of my linguistic prowess?

I simply answered with a question. “How would you know?”

In Taiwan, I walked into the staff room of my new job and said to a Chinese teacher, in Chinese, “I am teaching level Seven-A tonight. Where would I find the resources and course outline?”

She answered, in English, “Wow! Cool, you speak Chinese.” And then she walked away, without answering my question.

So much of learning a language is actually about learning the culture. In Asia, people seem to enjoy bestowing, and I assume, receiving completely empty compliments. I was actually told in a school in Korea that I should make it a point to tell my female students that they were very beautiful and their English was good. It sort of made me feel ooky because I don’t think it is appropriate for a teacher to tell a student that they are beautiful or handsome or sexy or cute. There are people who have said things like that to students in America, and now Megan’s Law prohibits them from coming within 1,000 feet of a school. Also, I would hate to have to wear one of those ankle bracelets that alerts the police every time I leave the house.

On my list of pet-peeves, a list so large that it can be seen from space, is foreigners who buy into these compliments when they are learning an Asian language.

A friend of mine in Vietnam is really doing everything right, as far as learning Vietnamese. So, I want to be supportive and encourage him. He has learned more in seven months than most people will learn in countless years, simply because he is attending classes and doing self-study. But, even this friend, call him C3-PO, bought into the false compliment game. C3-PO told me, “My pronunciation is nearly perfect.”
“How do you know?” I asked, as it takes more than 1,000 hours of listening to achieve perfect pronunciation in Vietnamese. “Because everywhere I go and speak Vietnamese, people compliment me.” C3-PO answered.

And so I asked C3-PO, “Have you ever heard a non-native speaker, speaking English?”
“Of course I have. I am an English teacher. I have heard thousands of them.” He answered. “My parents aren’t even native speakers.”

“Do you feel qualified to evaluate if someone speaks English well or not?”

“Yes, of course, I am a placement tester at my school?” answered C3-PO.

“Do you think the Vietnamese people who complimented your Vietnamese pronunciation were placement testers at schools?”

As native speakers of English we have grown up listening to foreign accents. In my case, it is extreme because I come from New York City where nearly 100% of my classmates were first or second generation immigrants whose grandparents, and often their parents were not native speakers. But even if you are from a homogenous American neighborhood in Ohio, you grew up watching American movies and TV shows which took place in foreign countries or had foreign characters speaking English.

I learned to do the Italian and Spanish accents at home, but I learned the German accent from watching “Hogan’s Heroes,” Japanese from “McHales Navy”, Swedish from “The Muppets”, and most of the others from Bugs Bunny.

Asians generally haven’t had this experience. Nowadays, they get American movies in English with subtitles or dubbed into their native language, but they almost never have foreign characters in their movies speaking their language. Think of movies like “The Last Emperor” a movie about the history of China made by an American company for an American audience. Asian countries don’t make historical epics about famous western people.

Take “Shogun”, an American movie set in feudal Japan about a European sailor. There is no analogous movie in Asia.

Americans, particularly those who have traveled or are more global, would recognize from someone’s accent if they are French or Japanese. Most Asians haven’t heard enough foreigners speaking their language to be able to differentiate.

Probably, in fairness, I would say the average American couldn’t tell from accent or appearance which Asian country someone came from. BUT we would be qualified to evaluate if their English was good or not. And most likely if we didn’t understand them at all, we wouldn’t think they spoke very well.

I went on to ask C3-PO, how many non-native speakers of Vietnamese had the average Vietnamese person ever heard speaking Vietnamese? The answer is that we are still at a point that many Vietnamese have never had any significant contact with a foreigner of any kind. And the number of foreigners who speak Vietnamese is so small, relative to the number of foreigners who live in the country, the average person has no idea at all how to evaluate you. They are just so happy that you have made the attempt that they compliment you, EVEN IF they don’t understand a word that you say.

And, this is where I get angry at my people and why I want to get in a boxing ring with 78% of foreigners learning Asian languages in Asia. I have witnessed, with my own eyes, literally hundreds of times that a foreigner wanted to show off how good his Thai, Khmer, Chinese, or Vietnamese was, so he spoke at length to a local. I saw the local’s face go from a fake smile, to worry, then fear, then back to worry, and finally a fake smile again. The local then said, cheerfully, “You speak so well.” And there was zero indication that they understood the foreigner at all. Often the foreigner was asking directions or some question which required an answer, or he was trying to buy something and the communication stalled the transaction. He didn’t get his answer, but he was so pleased with the complement that he happily went on his way without his insulin or whatever it was he had been trying to buy.

“Wow! I must be great at this language. Everyone compliments me.”

Another instance in Vietnam was a female co-worker who said, “I am gifted with languages.”

This seems to be a really common belief. I receive emails and Facebook messages daily from people who believe themselves to be gifted language learners. The number of people who told me that they are gifted with languages is off the charts. And honestly, not one of these people spoke more than one foreign language well and many of them spoke zero foreign languages well. This particular girl, let’s call her Leia, went on to say, “I have been told that I have perfect pronunciation in Vietnamese.”

Sadly, Leia was telling this to Vietnamese staff member, in English. And the Vietnamese staff member looked confused and surprised.

Leia had only been in the country a few weeks, wasn’t attending classes, and didn’t actually speak Vietnamese at all.

To me, this seems delusional. I don’t understand why these people aren’t locked up somewhere.

Leia then proceeded to read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle, in Vietnamese, very badly, translating each word, wrong.

Most people in Asia are very polite. Nearly all Asian cultures are confrontation avoiders and face is a huge issue. I have seen people go to ridiculous lengths of forcing themselves to see the Emperor’s New Clothes, rather than to admit that someone had made a mistake and thus cause that person to lose face. Most Asian people aren’t going to tell you to your face that your language skills suck. They won’t even admit that they don’t understand you.

If you are living in Asia: Definitely study the language. Definitely make an effort to talk to people, to communicate with them. People do appreciate when you speak their language. However, only speak their language if it will facilitate communication. If the person you are talking to has excellent English, why torture them with your faulty foreign language?

Less than one percent of people are gifted language learners. So, most likely, you are not one. Your native tongue doesn’t count. If you are born with five native tongues you still don’t know if you are a gifted learner or not until you actually try and learn a foreign language. If you actually speak more than three or four learned languages well, it is possible that you are gifted, but even that proves nothing. You may just be a gifted communicator.

That’s what I am, a gifted communicator. I am gifted at using the small amount of language I have to communicate at a higher level. In a very fair evaluation of my Chinese, which is my best Asian language, I was told that I was lower intermediate in vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar, but advanced in communication ability.

Don’t be confused between good at communication and good at language. Many learners, when they reach a point that they can use their local language to function, they stop studying and learning. My old German professor used to call this syndrome “Me want cookie.” Everyone knows what you are saying, but you talk like a four year old.

If you have a local girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, lesbian-life-partner, or friends, it still takes over 1,000 hours of listening to learn the language. But you may reach your 1,000 hours in six months instead of years.

It takes extensive listening to learn pronunciation. Asian people will compliment your speaking, no matter what you say or whether they understand you or not. If you want to evaluate your Asian language skills, go to the nearest language school and take a free placement exam. They will tell you straight away what your actual academic level of fluency is.

Most of your friends or people you meet on the street won’t evaluate your listening, but that is the key to the language. Your real level is the level at which you can understand, not talk. Can you sit in a café and pick up the thread of the conversation of two native speakers sitting at the next table. Can you actually, HONESTLY, participate in conversations with groups of native speakers?

For example, your Chinese friends are debating the merits of pegging their currency to the dollar. In the middle of this heated debate, one of them turns to you and says in baby Chinese, “Where do you come from?”

I got news for you, you are not participating in a conversation. A conversation is happening between native speakers, but they thought you looked board so they shot you a life line. Usually, you will answer and they will either return immediately to their previous conversation, or they may ask you two more banal questions, like “how old are you” and “do you have brothers and sisters?” No matter what you answer, they will simply return to their conversation. Either way, don’t kid yourself into believing you can hold your own in a conversation with native speakers.

And of course, the final point, also the primary point, the compliment:

“You speak Thai so well.” It means nothing, nothing at all. Just say “thank you” and keep studying.

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Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here).

His books, including The Monk from Brooklyn, are available at Amazon.com

Vietnamese is one of only two major Mon-Khmer languages, the other being Khmer, the national language of Cambodia. Like Cambodia, Vietnam is a former French colony. And so, the Vietnamese language has acquired some loan words from French. I am not yet an expert on the Vietnamese language, but so far it appears that the bulk of the loan words are for concepts which the French introduced to Vietnam, such as: Nô-en (Noel), phó mát (cheese), and ca vát (neck tie).

Because of Vietnam’s close proximity to China, and a long and turbulent shared history, there is a significant Chinese influence on the Vietnamese language. Sixty percent or more of the vocabulary is Chinese. Chinese words are often easy to spot because they are one syllable words. Khmer words are normally multi-syllabic. Some Chinese words will consist of more than one Chinese character, put together, but these are compound words, and even in Vietnamese, these words would normally be written as two one-syllable words, with space between them.

Even the country name for Viet Nam is taken from Chinese, with Nam, Vietnamese for south, coming from the Chinese word for south, 南 (nán).

It is very telling to see which words in Vietnamese were borrowed from Chinese. For example, words related to education and school subjects are Chinese. History – lịch sử in Vietnamese, 歷史 (lì shǐ) in Chinese. So, the word for history is clearly a loan word, from Chinese, and the pronunciation is fairly similar. Intelligent, thông minh in Vietnamese, 聰明 (cōng míng) in Chinese. Again, it is nearly the same.

Some compound words and loan words are extremely interesting, because they combine Khmer and Chinese or Khmer and French. For example, the Vietnamese word for glove can be bao tay or găng tay. The word “tay” is the Khmer word for hand. In the first example, bao is the Chinese word for wrap, package, or cover. So, the literal meaning is a covering for your hand. In the second example, “tay” is still hand but găng is most likely the Vietnamese pronunciation for the French word for glove (gant).

Dictionary in Vietnamese is từ điển, in Chinese it is 詞典 (cí diǎn). The second syllable of both of these words is nearly identical. The first syllable is pronounced differently, but clearly comes from the same Chinese root.

Study in Vietnamese is học, and university is đại học. If the Vietnamese use Chinese characters to write the title of a university they use the same traditional characters as Taiwan or Hong Kong. Study would be written 學 And university would be written 大 學. But the interesting thing is the pronunciation. In Chinese, study is pronounced xué and university is dà xué (literally meaning “big study”). But the Vietnamese đại học, although using the same Chinese characters, would have a pronunciation much closer to Korean (대학 dae hak) than to modern Mandarin. This is most likely because the loan words in Vietnamese and Korean came centuries past, before the Mandarin dialect became standard Chinese. Another similar example is “dormitory”: ky tuc xa in Vietnamese, and 기숙사 (gi suk sa) in Korean. The Korean and Vietnamese pronunciations are quite similar. They would both use the same set of three Chinese characters, but the pronunciation would be completely different from modern spoken Mandarin, 宿舍 (sù shè).

Another example of a connection between Korean (or older Chinese) with Vietnamese would be the word for happy, hạnh phúc, as in, “I’ll be happy if someone gives me a crossbow.” The modern Chinese word for “happy” is 高興 (gāo xìng). So, it isn’t even close, but the modern Korean word 행 복 (hang bok), is almost the same.

Sometimes all three languages align. The Vietnamese word for “romantic” (lãng mạng) is almost identical to both the Chinese 浪漫 (làng màn) and the Korean 낭 만 (lang man).

Telephone, điện thoại in Vietnamese, is 電話 (diàn huà) in Chinese. In both languages the word điện means electricity. So, this character 電 (điện) appears in nearly all appliance names, in both languages. The Vietnamese word for machine is máy móc and everything from an airplane, máy bay, to a motorcycle, xe máy, includes this machine word. In Chinese, however a computer is seen as an electric appliance, 電腦 (diàn nǎo, literally “electric brain”) whereas in Vietnamese, the computer is a machine, máy tính.

While the word for motorcycle and airplane use the Vietnamese word for machine, the word for car is clearly a loan word from French, ô tô.

The Chinese word for machine is 機器 (jī qì). So, it is not similar in pronunciation to the Vietnamese word, máy. But the function is the same. Airplane, máy bay in Vietnamese is 飛機 (fēi jī) in Chinese. Both Chinese and Vietnamese create the word airplane as a compound word, composed of two syllables, written separately, one of which means “machine”. Camera is máy ảnh in Vietnamese, 照相機 (zhào xiàng jī) in Chinese. Again, the overall word for camera is different, but both Vietnamese and Chinese have created a compound word for camera which contains the respective word for machine plus the respective word for picture or photo.

Many language learners put great emphasis on words. They want to learn vocabulary, thinking that learning a language and memorizing lists of definitions is somehow the same thing. Obviously, they are nearly completely separate from each other. If you were a native speaker of French, Chinese, and Khmer learning Vietnamese, you would still need to acquire, grammar, usage, and pronunciation, as well as cultural-linguistic elements, such as forms of address and appropriateness of speech. So, even a triple native speaker would be a long way off.

Studying the mechanical parts, the elements, the words of a language is, however, an interesting academic pursuit. In the case of the Vietnamese language, it is fascinating to see how so many components of the language can be traced to some other language, and yet Vietnamese is completely unique.

____

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here).

His books, including The Monk from Brooklyn, are available at Amazon.com

Many people have read about the ALG Automatic Language Growth method of language acquisition. The program is listening based, and is currently being used at AUA school in Bangkok, under the direction of David Long. Since the vast majority of the world’s people can’t travel to Bangkok, students have asked if it is possible to learn by distance learning or self-study. To date, there are no specific ALG distance learning or self-study programs available. Hopefully there are some products coming out toward the end of 2009.

Some people have written in and asked if they could approximate the ALG experience by watching tons and tons of hours of TV in Japanese or Chinese or another foreign language. The answer is yes, BUT only if you already have a sufficient basis to understand 55-70% of what you are hearing. If you are a complete beginner, it won’t work. The TV would just become more noise.

If you are a beginning student, one way of “artificially” increasing your comprehension level is to first watch a similar movie or show in English. This is what we often did while I was studying to be a translator. We would read a current news story in several international newspapers and compare them. Or, we would watch a movie or TV show in English, and then watch it in the target language. I do this in Taiwan, too. I watch a lot of Disney movies, like “Mulan,” “The Incredibles,” or “Kung Fu Panda” in English and then in Chinese. Over a period of months, I go back and forth between English and Chinese, watching them over and over again.

The trick is to choose few enough materials that you get constructive levels of repetition. If you choose too few, you wind up hearing the same story too frequently. You will get bored and tune out. Your brain will stop “guessing.” And when you stop guessing, you stop learning. If you choose too many materials, then it will take too long before they repeat. So, you must find a balance. You be the judge. After you embark on a disciplined program of listening on a regular schedule, then you can occasionally shake things up by throwing a new movie or TV show into the mix.

Just as an unscientific rule of thumb, depending upon how many hours you are listening per day, maybe you want to repeat a particular movie once per month.

People have asked about using the ALG method to learn reading and writing, particularly in Asian languages, which employ different alphabets. When children learn to read their native tongue, they already know nearly all of the words in their reading book. They need to simply learn the reading. ALG would say that most students of foreign language begin reading and writing to early. Reading and writing should be begun only after students have sufficient language. They shouldn’t be struggling with the meanings of words and phrases while learning to negotiate an unfamiliar writing system. In the case of Thai, which has many unique sounds which sound similar to the western ear, how can you learn to read and write these sounds if you haven’t mastered hearing and saying them?

Learning to read and write too soon is one more way of fossilizing mistakes, taking flawed language and making it permanent.

When you reach a point that you are ready to learn reading and writing, you will need to employ a traditional methodology in order to acquire the alphabet and how to actually read and write in say Japanese, Thai or Chinese. In an ALG classroom, the teachers often write Thai words on the board while they are teaching listening, so that by the time the students get to their reading and writing levels, they already have some passive knowledge of the alphabet and have made assumptions about how it works. Studying on your own, you may not have this benefit.

Once you can read, you can use the Core Novel Method, which is how I learned German. You just read and read and read stories and books that you enjoy reading, without a dictionary, or with only occasional dictionary support. Once again, choose materials you are already familiar with in English. And you can go back and forth between English and the target language. With reading, I would advise not reading the same book more than two or three times per year.

Again, you can’t use this method if you are a complete beginner.

If you are a complete beginner, you can use both ALG and the Core Novel type approaches with your traditional learning materials. In other words, you can listen to your CDs and tapes over and over and over again and read your learner texts over and over. The reason ALG would actually steer you away from this suggestion, however, is that ALG is about listening to real language, not synthetic language, designed for the class room. Stories and movies are good because lots of real life situations and language occur in them. Arguably the news or an interview show is best for ‘real” natural language. Interview shows in particular are largely unscripted, so are more authentic. The disadvantage, of course, is that there are no pictures to help you understand. So, an interview show would be only slightly better than listening to radio.

What I did for Chinese was to find several series of materials and buy two sets at the same level. In other words, I bought a complete set of beginning level 1 materials: textbook, workbook, character book, and CDs for both the “Far Eastern Chinese” series and the “Audio Visual Chinese” series. This way, I had more practice at each level. If you are working with your teacher, you can have him or her teach you from one series, while you use the other series for self study. Make an appointment with your teacher once a week or so to check the homework from the series you do on your own.

ALG shies away from books, homework and traditional teachers. So, I am not strict ALG. But I take a lot of concepts from ALG and apply them to my language teaching and learning. In ALG there is an exercise called “Cross Talk.” This is a cross-cultural or cross-lingual communication tool developed by David Long, the man who is carrying on Dr. Brown’s work. In cross talk, two people who do not share a common language sit together and communicate by drawing on a paper, while they each speak their own native tongue. The idea here is that the listener has the visual clues of the pictures, plus body language, facial expression and tone of voice to help him understand what he is hearing. For an English native speaker, there is also the assumption that nearly everyone in the world has some understanding of English. So, this will also aid the listener in understanding.

I have taken cross talk a step further and employed it as a language learning tool, which allows any man, woman or child, who is a native speaker to become your language teacher.

Living in Asia, you will hear again and again that a foreigner is hoping to learn Chinese or Japanese from his or her partner. Often the linguistic development in the couple reaches a point of frustration, rather quickly, and they just give up on learning. They generally choose communication over development, and settle on a lingua franca. More often than not, couples communicate in English. The local, Asian partner, has generally had years of school English, where the foreign partner may have had a few months, or as little as zero training in the local language. So, the couple communicates in English, and the foreign partner never learns the local language.

Obviously there are many exceptions to this rule. We all know numerous couples who communicate in the local language. But most of the exceptions occur in couples where the foreign partner already had sufficient language to allow for communication and growth. Again, this concept of “already having sufficient language” mirrors Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and the ALG concept that if the language is too far over the listener’s head, it just becomes noise.

If we took a random sampling of mixed relationships, foreign and local, we would find that the bulk of them communicate almost exclusively in English.

The other method many foreigners try to employ is the language exchange. They meet once or twice a week with a local friend and agree to speak an hour of English and an hour of the local language. The problem again is that the foreign partner is generally at a lower level than the local partner. What the foreign partner needs is a teacher. But the local doesn’t know how to teach. And since such a large percentage of the foreigners living in Asia are teachers, the local partner benefits from a free English language lesson with a real teacher. The foreign partners often get frustrated, complaining that their girlfriend, boyfriend, or language partner doesn’t know how to teach.

You give an hour of English to your partner. When it is his or her turn to give you an hour of Japanese, you actually wind up with ten minutes of Japanese, and fifty minutes of clumsy explanations in curious English. I often see pairs of people sitting in Starbucks, with a Taiwanese friend, who has no concept of teaching or grammar, explaining the Chinese language, in broken English, to a Westerner. It is often clear from the face of the westerner that he or she doesn’t even understand the explanation, but he smiles and says “Thank you” out of politeness.

The foreigner then usually looks at returning to school to learn the language. But school has a number of draw backs, such as boredom, inconvenience, and expense. These are the exact reasons why the foreigner quit school in the first place. In the end, many Westerners never acquire the language of their host country, although upon arrival, this is one of the most commonly stated reasons why someone chooses to live in Taiwan, Japan, or China.

To circumvent this difficulty of learning from informal teachers, I came up with the concept of Language Buddies. Similar to a traditional language exchange, you meet with your partner one or ten or a hundred times per week.

If you want to use your traditional learning materials with your partner, who is a non-teacher, you can prepare all of your lessons in advance. Then have your native speaker partner simply read all of the lessons to you, including reading texts and grammar exercises. When he or she finishes, then it is your turn to read. It can be very frustrating to ask a non-teacher to explain the language to you, so just use your native partner as a reader and pronunciation checker. Also, as soon as you ask him or her to explain the language, he or she will generally answer in English, which will eat into your Japanese listening time. ALG, of course, strictly prohibits analyzing the language or asking about the language. ALG would also want you to stay away from traditional language learning materials because they are full of synthetic, rather than “real” language.

For a more ALG type of approach, you can use the Cross Talk Method to tell each other stories,while drawing on paper. When you hear words you don’t know, you just let them go. Don’t ask for a translation. You can ask questions using English, but urge your language partner to answer in the local language. This way, in your one hour of Japanese, you are actually hearing one hour of Japanese.

You and your language partner could plan your themes in advance. This way, you will each be using similar vocabulary. For example, you could both tell a news story which is currently running in the papers, or you could retell the plot of the latest popular movie. You could tell your partner in advance what it is you will be telling, and then he or she could prepare by first reading the story in his or her native tongue or in English. And you could do the same. Find out what your partner is going to tell you, and you prepare yourself in English or Japanese in advance.

What if you are both fans of “Star Trek” or “The Sopranos?” You could each agree to watch the same episode, whether in your own language or in the language you are studying, and then you would go in and tell the story in English, using picture stories, inflection, and body language. Your partner would then tell you the same story in Japanese.

Or, you could just let it be up to the speaker what he or she tells on a given day. This way you add the real element of surprise. The beauty of this exercise is that you are each in complete control of the story while speaking, and the listener is free to listen. More importantly, the learner is free to learn whatever he needs to, or whatever he can, on a given day. One of the reasons ALG doesn’t like textbooks is because the books decide what the learner learns. In ALG the learner decides what he will learn on a given day.

Departing from strict ALG concepts, I would suggest using a digital audio recorder or camera to capture the story. You could listen to it again in your spare time, as part of your daily listening exercises.

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here).

His books, including The Monk from Brooklyn, are available at Amazon.com

“The rabbit and the lion walked through the jungle. All of the animals ran away. Afterward, the rabbit said to the lion, ‘I told you they were all afraid of me.’”

This was the story I struggled through last week. Yes, I was sort of proud that it was written in Chinese, but it is quite humbling that most of my reading material is purchased in the books section of Toys R Us. Some of them came with free candy. Others were pop-up books. I particularly like those. All of them are decorated with little cartoon drawing of smiling monkeys and happy flowers.

If your ego gets away from you, as mine often does, just ask the nearest seven year old to help you with your reading practice. This will bring you back to Earth in a hurry.

Learning to read and write Chinese turns you into a study hermit. Chinese children spend five hours a day, from about age five to age fifteen or sixteen, writing endless lists of Chinese characters. In other words, it takes them ten solid years of studying five hours a day, seven days a week, to learn their native tongue.

One reason it takes them so long is because every single piece of vocabulary has to be taught. When you learned to read and write in school, your teachers taught you some very basic vocabulary. Probably through about sixth grade you had spelling tests and vocabulary exercises, but you were only taught a very small percentage of your vocabulary, the rest you acquired passively from listening and from reading and studying your other subjects. But for Chinese, every single piece of vocabulary has to be taught. Even native speakers can’t do much with a word they can say, but don’t know how to read or write.

As an adult foreign-learner you are at a huge disadvantage compared to the native speaker children. For one thing, they already know the meaning of every word.

When you first sign up for Chinese classes, in Taiwan or China, you are given a choice of speaking and listening only, or the complete set of reading, writing, speaking and listening. When I first began learning Chinese at Taipei Language Institute, for the purposes of survival, I chose speaking and listening only. At that time I was the only foreigner on two Chinese Kung Fu teams, training with each team once per day. This gave me several hours of exposure to the language each day outside of the 2-4 hours per day I spent in the classroom. As a dedicated learner, with the opportunity to hear and practice the language, I reached a point where I was getting through a chapter of our book every two and a half days.

One of my American friends, call him Jim, chose the complete set of read, writing, speaking, and listening. In the six months that it took me to complete all of the books from beginner to upper intermediate, he hadn’t completed book one. He could read and write every single word that he knew, but he knew only about 1,000 words when he left Taiwan.

We had another classmate, call her Su Ling, who was a Taiwanese American. At home, her parents only spoke Taiwanese. So, she had returned to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the first time in her life. She could neither read, write, speak, nor understand any Mandarin.

The three of us went to a restaurant, and the waitress automatically handed a menu to Su Ling, and began speaking to her in Mandarin. I interrupted, explaining to the waitress that, in spite of her looks, Su Ling didn’t speak Mandarin. The waitress smiled politely, and resumed her incomprehensible babble with Su Ling.

“Tell her again.” Said Su Ling, “I don’t think she believes you.”

When I finally was able to convince the waitress that I was the one she needed to talk to, she handed me the menu, which I immediately handed to Jim, the only one of us who could read. Jim read the menu aloud, which I understood, but we had to translate into English for Su Ling. When we decided on our order, I told the waitress what we all wanted.

Basically, the point of the story is, if you can’t read Chinese, it takes three people to order off a menu. And, since I often find myself dining alone, I needed to learn to read.

I returned to Taiwan in June 2008, and began taking private lessons in reading and writing in late July. Once I got through my first hundred characters, I realized that learning reading and writing would be a very, very different experience than learning speaking.

When I was learning to speak, I spent as many hours in front of my teachers as possible. The only way I could get any input, any new learning, was sitting with my teachers. But in reading and writing, you have to do it all yourself. The best student will be the one who puts in the most hours of homework. Before, I had the teachers teach me the new material, and I saw them twenty or more hours per week. Now, with reading and writing, I have to teach myself the new material. I work through the chapters completely on my own, and then meet with my teachers just to correct, or go over what I have already done on my own. My ratio now is only six to eight hours per week of lessons and twenty or more hours per week of self-study.

When we were at Taipei Language Institute, I remembered Jim telling me, “With the Chinese, for every single word you learn, you have to learn three things: the way it looks, the way it sounds, and its meaning.”

It’s true. With Chinese, unlike any European language, it is possible to know thousands of words, and not be able to read them or write them. This is where I was when I started studying. The other possibility is that you see a word. You know how to pronounce it, but you forgot what it means. Or, that you remember the meaning, but forgot how to say the word.

One example is that the Chinese have about three ways to express the concept of “a week.” Each of these is composed of two characters. Very often I am reading, and I know the sentence says, “I study Chinese three times per week.” I use the word “xin qi” to express one week, but my teacher corrects me. “These are the characters for ‘li bai’ which also means week.” Two different sets of characters can have the same meaning, but different pronunciations. In English we have a lot of synonyms, which are written and spelled completely differently, but have similar meanings. But, because of our phonetic writing system, it would be impossible to look at the word “demise,” and say “kick-off.”

For myself, the last two don’t happen as often because my vocabulary, going into my basic reading class, was already well over 2,000 words. So, while I could maintain a fairly normal conversation, my reading book has sentences like, “My name is.” and “How many glass of tea did Mr. Wang take?” When any of my Taiwanese friends open my textbooks they always look at me in surprise. “This is so easy. You are way beyond this.” They learned to read so long ago that they forgot that someone who speaks Chinese well may not know how to read at all.

Interesting, my second-grade students don’t think there is anything strange about what I am doing. They watch me do my homework and often say proudly, “Teacher, I can read all of that.” Half way through the page, though, they inevitably stop and ask me, “What is this word?” Yesterday, one of the kids asked me about five different Chinese characters in my homework. I was so proud of myself. If I study really hard, I might qualify for elementary school.

In learning to read, I thought a lot about what Jim said. And, although I understand the concept of why, at universities in the west, students are taught all four skills from day one, this must be a very daunting, very discouraging way to learn. Progress would be so slow. In my case, having learned so many words first, even with reading and writing I am getting through a chapter every three days. This is only possible because I already have the speaking and listening. Maybe this method of study would be better for university students in other countries. Maybe it is only possible if you are studying in a country where the language is widely spoken.

So much about L2 (second language) acquisition has been written based on how children acquire their L1 (first language). There are some fundamental differences, however, namely that an adult has more logic and experience to draw from. An adult also understands the mechanics and use of language. When I teach second graders that they have to use good grammar, they may not even be aware that Chinese has grammar. And certainly, their Chinese grammar wouldn’t be perfect yet.

One point that makes my current study of Chinese reading and writing more similar to the way Taiwanese children learn is that, like a Taiwanese child, my vocabulary is already large and I am already able to speak and communicate. Now, I have to learn the reading and writing. Even in the more advanced reading books, if I get stuck on a word, it is normally because I don’t know how to pronounce or recognize a particular character. But, if my teacher reads the character, I understand. This is exactly the case for Taiwanese children.

There are huge differences in vocabulary and usage, however, but more on this later.

One of my Tainan friends, call him Chuck, has lived in Taiwan for twenty years. He learned all four skills from day one. He had some very interesting points to make about language. First, he said, “I studied hard for the first five years. Then I took the exam and I scored 3,000.” Meaning his test results showed that he knew 3,000 or more characters. Three thousand is the magic number. At that level you should be able to read anything, even college textbooks, but you will still need a dictionary for specialized vocabulary that you may encounter. “I stopped studying at that point,” continued Chuck. “And my Chinese stopped improving. I recently retook the test and still scored 3,000, so I haven’t lost anything. But fifteen more years of living here didn’t cause me to improve.”

Chuck was touching on a subject I have written about extensively, namely, being in the country doesn’t mean you are immersed or that you are learning. Chuck has lots of Taiwanese friends and speaks Chinese all day, but in the course of a normal day or normal conversation, he doesn’t go beyond his three thousand words. The only way to move forward is to study.

Chuck also said, “There is nothing anyone can do for you when you learn to read or write. Even your teachers can’t really help you. If you get stuck or you make a mistake, they can correct you. But you have to learn it on your own.”

And this means countless, lonely hours of reading and writing. Reading and writing Chinese, you become a study hermit.

Chuck told me about a foreigner who was teaching in Taiwan in the 1980s when the country was a bit less developed and regulations were in some ways looser. This foreign adult wanted to learn Chinese, so he went to an elementary school principle and obtained permission to attend classes, along with the children.

“For four years he sat in the back of the classroom learning the stuff children learn,” said Chuck. “But to me, it seemed a little pointless. He didn’t need to know the name of every utensil in the house.”

Now we are back to the differences in vocabulary and approach of an adult learner, verses a child. I haven’t tried it, but I would bet money that if I took my basic reading dialogue entitled “At the Money Changers” and showed it to my second graders, they wouldn’t be able to read any of it. And if I read it aloud, the probably wouldn’t know words like currency exchange, travelers checks, or the technical names for currencies such as American Dollars or New Taiwan Dollars. They might not even be able to read the rates, which are posted in decimal form. At the same time, I don’t know how to say baby bottle or game consul. And I always forget what to call your father’s younger brother.

And perhaps most embarrassing, the second graders didn’t stutter when they were reading the story about the lion and the rabbit. It took me two days to read that.

This hits on my other writing focus. There is a myth that children learn language faster than adults. It’s just not true. For my work as an adventure writer, I need a lot of specialized vocabulary in the fields of international relations, politics, and geography. There is no way second graders would understand any of the concepts, so how would they learn and use that vocabulary. Often, we are talking about a second grader’s inability to learn these words and concepts in a foreign language. But now, I am comparing me, and adult learner, learning Chinese, to native speaker second graders. While they have many advantages in general reading and writing, by virtue of being native speakers, it will be years before they could read and explain the texts I will be using at university, a few months from now. And of course, if we compare an adult foreign leaner to a child foreign learner, the difference becomes even more extreme.

Learning to read Chinese means memorizing one or more characters for every single piece of vocabulary in your head. The characters are based on over a hundred base characters. So, after a while, you can see a new character and guess that it has something to do with talking or driving or is esoterically related to the heart or an open door, but for the most part, it is pure memorization.

The Chinese language is like an epic movie, starring a cast of thousands of characters.

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia (check out our interview with him here).

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Now that I am a teacher, I understand what the nuns were saying back in grade school. They were saying, “Children learn by listening, not by speaking.” But I couldn’t here them, because I was too busy talking. Actually, I was imitating The Fonz from the “Happy Days” TV show. While I was saying his catch phrases “Ayyyy!” and “Woaaaaa,” the other kids were learning useful tidbits of Americana like, “What year was Benjamin Franklin elected president?”  Because I wasn’t listening, I thought the answer was 1789. But actually, the answer was never.

You see, I should have been listening.

Stephen Krashen, one the world leading linguists, proposed the “comprehension hypothesis” (or “input hypothesis”) which is a smart-guy way of saying, “you learn by listening and reading, not by speaking and writing.”

Speaking is the cream. It’s the icing on the cake. In fact, you don’t even need to ever do it to learn a foreign language. The learning comes through listening and reading. If you start talking too early, the danger is that you will speak incorrectly. You will have grammatical and pronunciation errors which will become fossilized over a period of time. Another issue is that many learners use speaking as a defense mechanism. To try and avoid having a native speaker say something to them that they don’t understand, they dominate the conversation.

Teaching in Taiwan, I see this behavior with many of my Chinese counterpart English teachers. They are so terrified that I will say something which makes it obvious that their English is lacking, that they dominate the conversation. Sometimes I can’t even get a word in edgewise, which can be very frustrating when you are trying to coordinate your teaching syllabus or explain to someone that they are on fire and need to drop and roll.

Another annoying thing that learners will do is laugh at everything you say. The strategy here is that if they aren’t sure what you said, it may be a joke. And if they were told a joke but they didn’t laugh, then people would find out that they didn’t understand. So, they just laugh at everything.

Sometimes, to amuse myself, I will sharp-shoot my coworkers by telling them something tragic, but using vocabulary they couldn’t possibly know. For example, I will say, “My mother is demised. She was engulfed in a raging inferno and had to be euthanized.”

That one really breaks them up around the office. Actually, in addition to the comic value of saying something like this to a coworker, it also becomes a sort of honesty test. If they laugh, I know they are full of rice droppings. But if they say, “Sorry, I don’t know several of those words; please restate,” then I know they are honest and willing to learn. But this is the smallest number of cases. Normally, they just chuckle and say something like, “Yes, paper is sometimes made of rice in China.”

All playful xenophobia aside, the point is that we learn through listening or reading input. These learners have demonstrated to me that they have stopped listening. Someone who chuckles at your comment and walks away, or quickly changes the subject, has already reached the pinnacle of their English. They have stopped learning. No matter how many more years they spend listening, their English will not get any better.

Just in the interest of fairness, I see foreigners do this in Chinese too. Just today, I saw a café owner ask a foreign customer, “Do you want soy milk or whole milk in your coffee.” The foreigner just smiled, said “yes, yes” and then checked his cell phone for messages.

We can’t reject the input or we stop learning.

As children we listened for years before we started speaking. And yet when we started speaking, we didn’t have a foreign accent. We had exactly the same accent as the people around us. For better or worse, I was surrounded by a lot of Italians who spoke English as an eighth language, although they only spoke two languages. So, my model was imperfect, but what are you going to do?

Why do our students have imperfect accents in English and why do we have such terrible accents in Chinese? Obviously because we have spent very little time listening.

If you think of when you were a child learning to speak, there were probably times when your mother made you repeat after her to correct your pronunciation. But this way of teaching was done for the smallest minority of words in your mother tongue. Most of your language learning happened passively, again, from listening and reading. As a child you were learning without even being aware of it. When you started speaking, those passive words became active. But you were only able to say them because they were already in you brain.

The Thai program I attended in Bangkok didn’t allow us to speak at all. We had to listen for ages, learning passively. The theory was that when we were ready to speak, we would do so, and do so correctly, without having been “taught” any words or even grammar. Believe it or not, the program worked. Now that I am back to studying Chinese in Taiwan, I am using a similar approach.

I spend hours and hours reading and writing Chinese characters. Everyone keeps saying to me, “Being in Taiwan is a great opportunity to speak Chinese.” Yes, it is. But, we don’t learn by speaking. We learn by listening and reading. So, I study, and study, and study. The variety of words that I get from study would never be matched by hanging out with people in a bar. In fact, if you hung out with people long enough, you would only develop certain vocabulary and then block out everything else.

I know several foreigners who have been here for ten, fifteen, or even twenty years. Some of them are married to Taiwanese. And yet, after only a few months of study, I see my Chinese level passing theirs. One simple, mathematical reason for this is hours spent with the language. If you hang out with someone, or even live with your spouse, how many hours per day are you actually speaking? In a Chinese lesson, one on one, we spend a solid two hours talking and listening. That is a lot more than many couples talk to each other each day.

Then, when I sit down to do my homework, I have another three solid hours of input. No matter who you are living with, they won’t be giving you three hours of input. The input I get from my books is perfect in that the new words introduced in the vocabulary section are repeated in the reading and again in the grammar exercises. Slowly, methodically, my vocabulary, grammar, and usage are growing through repetition. Living with someone you would also get repetition. And in the short run you would see your language improve dramatically. But after the initial spike, you would level off. There are certain phrases or certain topics that would make up the bulk of domestic conversation. Once you had mastered those, most of your learning would be done. That is why the foreigner living in Taiwan for three years may be at the same level after five years or ten years. But this is not true of people who study.

For the above mentioned reasons, I believe that reading is more important than listening. But, of course, if you don’t practice listening, you will never have good pronunciation. Whether through listening or reading, however, if a word is not in your brain, you simply cannot hear it.

An American friend of mine, who speaks excellent Chinese, was asked to give a lecture, in English to the other teachers at his university. Afterwards, a Chinese coworker approached him and said, in Chinese, “I didn’t understand your lecture.” The American said that this was understandable, and began explaining the lecture in Chinese. But the Chinese coworker stopped him and asked, “Why is it Taiwanese people miss certain keywords when they are listening to Americans speak?”

My American friend was laughing when he told me this story. “It’s not that he missed keywords, he missed EVERYTHING. And, rather than attribute his lack of understanding to his lack of knowledge of English, he attributed it to his race.”

It goes both ways. A Canadian friend told me, “I have trouble understanding the Chinese news on TV, so I need to work on my listening.”

This Canadian only has about 500 words of Chinese. His problem is he just doesn’t know enough Chinese to understand. If the problem were truly listening, then it would mean he could read a transcript of the news and understand it, but he can’t. If the structures aren’t there, we just can’t hear them.

We put them there by reading and listening.

When I studied in Germersheim, Germany, I met many Eastern Europeans, Hangarians, Romanians, and Poles, who had never met an English native speaker or seen an American movie. They had learned everything from books, and their English was nearly flawless. Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, and Ernest Hemingway are by far better models of English than foreign friends in a bar.

A significant point about those Eastern Europeans vs. the Asians we encounter living here is that Asians who are dedicated students of English tend to read a lot of books about English, such as “A Million and One American Idioms, or “An English Learner’s Guide to Gender Bias in British Syntax.” The European students tended to read literature and books IN, rather than ABOUT English.

Native speakers don’t learn idioms by reading books about idioms. They learn them by reading books about gardening, hunting, baking, stock investing, and how to make hats out of old tires. You also learned idioms by watching movies about car chases, wars in space, searches for lost relics, Kazak journalists touring America, and severed hands that crept along the ground and strangled people.

When I hear the CNN journalist say: “The tale of how this woman overcame every manner of adversity to build her small business into one of Africa’s leading corporations is a real Rocky Story.” I understand what he means by “Rocky Story,” not because I read it in an idiom book, but because I saw “Rocky” 29 times.

Reading and listening your whole life put English sounds, vocabulary, and grammar in your head. When you first started speaking, all you did was activate them.

Again, my own experiment with learning Chinese mirrors this hypothesis. When I do speak Chinese now, I find myself using advanced vocabulary and grammar that I learned in my books. I had a PTA meeting at school, and while I was talking to the parents of one of my students, I heard dialogue 37 come out of my mouth.

One side of me is saying, “I have been studying really hard from books for several months now, I should go into an immersion situation in China to activate all that I have learned.” But the other side of me, the side I think is correct, is saying, “Whether you activate it now or ten years from now, those structures and that vocabulary will still be there. But if you keep studying, the longer you wait to activate it, the more you will have to activate, and the better you will be.”

So, my best advice to people who want to learn a foreign language is, Shut UP and LISTEN or read a book. The choice is up to you.

____

Like Antonio’s writing?

Check out some of his fantastic books on travel, martial arts, language learning and endangered cultures.

Antonio speaks numerous languages (French, German, Italian, Khmer, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Thai), and has used his language skills to good ends. He has devoted the past 10 years of his life to chronicling martial arts masters around the world in his web TV show Martial Arts Odyssey and has worked tirelessly to fight the atrocities being waged against ethnic minorities in Burma.

On top of all this, Antonio has written an impressive trail of books, including The Monk from Brooklyn: An American at the Shaolin Temple, Adventures in Formosa, Rediscovering the Khmers, Boats, Bikes, and Boxing Gloves: Adventure Writer in the Kingdom of Siam, The Desert of Death on Three Wheels, and his latest book, Warrior Odyssey: The Travels of a Martial Artist in Asia.

The Interview:

In this exclusive interview with Antonio Graceffo, he “pulls no punches” (pun intended) when sharing his views on how to learn foreign languages and martial arts effectively. His wisdom stems from years spent living abroad coupled with sound theory.

To learn more about Antonio, visit his site SpeakingAdventure.com.