As a language learning addict, I follow lots (and I mean lots) of polyglot blogs and podcasts. It is always interesting to see what has worked (and what hasn’t worked) for successful language learners. While most fluent foreign language speakers tend to agree on the vast majority of language learning DOs and DON’Ts, there is one area that always seems to cause heated debate, shouting, name calling, and occasional mud/poo flinging: the importance of language input (i.e. listening and reading) versus language output (i.e. speaking and writing).

I have sat quietly on the sidelines for some time now, politely listening to both sides of the argument. But it’s time to blow my referee whistle because both teams are “offsides” (Okay John, enough sports analogies already!)

The Argument is Flawed to Begin With…

The problem with the whole argument is that input and output are not mutually exclusive components of language learning. You need both. The key is order and balance.

1. Listen first, then speak

When just starting out in a language, it is important to get as much listening input as possible. Just like when you learned your first language, you need to first go through a “silent period” where your brain gets used to the patterns and phonology of the language. Once you have filled your teapot up with enough listening input, language will naturally want to start pouring out. That’s when it’s time for a tea party to put into practice what you have assimilated (and no, I am not promoting that kind of “tea party” as I am a bleeding-heart liberal…)

But unlike little babies, adults can also rely on reading input to back up what we listen to. This difference (along with the fact we don’t have to wear diapers) gives adults a major leg up on babies learning their first language.

To this end, try to find short, simple dialogues of actual native speakers with transcripts. Then listen and read, listen and read, and listen and read again as many times as your schedule and sanity allow. My personal favorite transcript-equipped podcasts are produced by Praxis Language (ChinesePod, SpanishPod, FrenchPod, ItalianPod and EnglishPod) and LingQ (English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Swedish). I can’t stand the overly stilted, monotonous dialogues found on most textbook companion CDs and suggest you avoid them like the plague.

2. Take equal doses of your input and output medicine.

Once you have gone through your silent period (which will be input-centric by definition), try to spend an equal amount of time on input activities (listening to podcasts, reading blogs, etc.) and output activities (speaking with friends or tutors, writing a blog post in the foreign language, etc.). It may be nerdy, but I literally use the stop-watch feature on my iPod touch to time my input and output activities each day…

If you follow the above regimen, your foreign language skills will progress quickly, efficiently, and most importantly, enjoyably. However, if you follow the advice of the extremists on either side of the input-output debate, you are in for heaps of problems and a world of pain. Here’s why:

Output Only Problems

Proponents of the “Output is awesome; input is lame” philosophy suggest that learners just “get out there and start communicating with native speakers”. This approach, while certainly sexier than what I prescribe above, has a number of problems:

1. Nasty mispronunciation habits.

Bad pronunciation habits develop when you pronounce things how you think they should be pronounced based on your overly limited listening exposure to the language, and your logical, but nonetheless incorrect, assumptions based on how words are spelled but not pronounced.

2. You’ll be that annoying guy at the bar.

Because you have a limited vocabulary and only understand little of what is said to you, you will likely attempt to control conversations by keeping them on topics you are familiar with, using phrases and vocabulary you have memorized. All but the most patient interlocutors will get bored or annoyed by such one-sided conversations. Don’t be that guy.

3. You probably won’t enjoy the process and give up early.

Many would-be language learners give up because they simply don’t enjoy the process. Much of the angst, tedium and phobias stem from having to speak before one is ready. Language teachers are the worst perpetrators, presenting you with new words or phrases one minute, and then expecting you to actually use them the next. Well-meaning friends or language partners are no better, trying to “teach” you new words and phrases and expecting that you can actually use them right away. Assimilation takes time and repetition, so don’t beat yourself up if it takes a few times (or a few hundred times) of hearing or reading a new word or phrase before you can actually use it.

Input Only Problems

If, however, you spend months and months diligently listening to your iPod and reading online newspapers, but never actually speaking with native speakers (by design or chance), you will understand quite a bit of what goes on around you but will struggle to actually verbalize your thoughts well or have natural exchanges with native speakers. This happens because:

1. Proper pronunciation is a physical feat.

You can’t think your way through pronunciation (believe me, most introverts have tried and failed!). Good pronunciation requires that your ears first get used to the new language  (i.e. through getting lots and lots of listening input), and then also getting your lips, tongue and larynx used to new sounds not found in your native tongue, which of course takes lots and lots of talkin’ the talk.

2. Speaking and writing identifies your learning gaps.

Until you actually try to say or write something, you won’t know what you really know. While you may passively recognize certain words, phrases, idioms or Chinese characters, you may still struggle to say or write them. This is even true for your native language (as I found out when I first started teaching English and was confronted with such conundrums up at the white board as “Wait a second…How in the hell do you spell “misspelled”?)

The more you speak and write, the more you know where the “holes” are in your language cheese, and the easier it will be to fill them with focused study and review.

Conclusion

So as in all things, the extremists tend to be just that: extreme. They tend to get more attention, but the efficacy of their advice tends to be an inverse proportion to their popularity…

To become fluent in a language, just consume a balanced diet, rich in listening and speaking, with plenty of reading and writing sprinkled in for flavor.

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

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.

by John Fotheringham

Most language learners fail because they lack the motivation to put in the time and consistency needed to succeed.   But this is not simply a matter of laziness.  I have seen even the most driven, self-disciplined people fail in foreign language learning.  While discipline is certainly important (I will be writing a post on this soon), I believe that most people are unmotivated (and ultimately fail) for 3 main reasons:

1. A Lack of Comprehensible & Interesting Input
2. A Lack of Connection to the Culture
3. A Lack of Positive Reinforcement

Comprehensible & Interesting Input

“The best methods are those that supply comprehensible input in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear.”

~ Stephen Krashen

Read just about any book, blog or well-written bathroom stall scribble on the subject of foreign language learning and you’re bound to hear the term “comprehensible input.”  One of Stephen Krashen’s key theories, the Input Hypothesis goes as follows: a learner will “acquire” a language (which is to be distinguished from the conscious and rather unproductive process of “learning”) only when listening or reading input is just above their level of comprehension.

So if you are new to Japanese, for example, watching the nightly news or reading the Asahi Shimbun is probably not going to provide very much comprehensible input and will do little for your progress in the language.  On the flip side, newspapers may in fact be below one’s level of comprehension for more advanced learners.  To continue one’s progress, such learners should seek out materials that include more advanced vocabulary.

The second (and I would argue more important) half is getting interesting input.  Even if you understand the basic gist of an article, new words and structures are less likely to stick if the content bores you to tears.  Our brains are amazingly efficient at filtering out information that we are uninterested in.

With the plethora of content available today online, there is simply no excuse for listening to or reading content that doesn’t float your boat.  I personally find podcasts to be the best medium because there are just so darn many of them on so many different topics.  Blogs are a close second for the same reason, but you should try to listen more than you read.

When it comes to choosing topics, always ask yourself this question:

“Would I read or listen to this in my native language?”

If the answer is no, find something else.

When you use content that is not overly easy or difficult for you  (and covers topics that are of interest), you are much more likely to spend sufficient time with the language and the culture that speaks it.  Which brings us to…

Cultural Connection

Most people set out to learn a foreign language so that they can communicate with the culture who speaks it.  Yet I am often surprised at how many people learn foreign languages in a cultural vacuum.

If you want to converse freely with native speakers, you need to know what makes them tick.

Many language books do mention some interesting tid-bits of culture (eating customs, how and when to bow, kiss or shake hands, etc.), but few ever dig deeper into the culture’s psyche.

Since words only account for 7% of meaning in human communication (on average), it is essential to learn how a culture expresses the other 93%.  This is especially true in “high-context” cultures like China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea that rely more on non-verbal cues than low-context cultures like Germany, England and the U.S.  Consider this: when someone says yes in Japan, for example, do they really mean “Ok, I agree to do that” or is it simply a culturally conditioned way of saying “Hell no” without causing offense?

Learning about a culture doesn’t just mean figuring out whether to bow or shake hands; it means finding out the historical, moral and emotional fibers that make the culture unique.  And yes, different cultures are in fact different.  Don’t fall into the trap of believing that just because a culture laughs, cries and gets angry that they do so  for the same reasons (and in the same circumstances) as you.

Positive Reinforcement

“I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

~Stuart Smalley (Al Frankin)

One of the most potent fuels in foreign language learning, or any complex physical/psychological skill is positive reinforcement.

This can be internal (the quiet but intense satisfaction you get when you can effectively communicate an idea, request or need to a native speaker in their language) or it can be overt (getting compliments on how well you speak the language, pronounce certain words, or use “difficult” idioms, vocabulary or structures.) Both kinds are important, but keep in mind that many cultures (especially Japan and Taiwan) often compliment people on their language ability as a matter of course.

There are four main sources of potential positive or negative feedback:

1) Feedback from Your Better Half: If you are dating (or married to) someone from the target language group, make sure to communicate clearly with them about how (and WHEN!) you like to be corrected.  Most native speakers have absolutely NO IDEA how to learn or teach their native language and don’t have a good sense of what will be hard for you and why.

2) Teachers & Tutors: Find a tutor who is patient and positive, and waits until after you have finished speaking to make corrections.  If you are living in an immersion environment, find local native speakers who are studying another foreign language (perhaps your native tongue) so that they will be more patient and empathetic with your mistakes.  I am not saying that you should not seek correction of you mistakes (I think you should), but it needs to be done so in a nurturing way that does not raise the “affective filter” (see the Linguistionary) and discourage future output.

3) Yourself: Another excellent way to get positive reinforcement is to provide it yourself!  While looking in the mirror like Stuart Smalley may help, it  has the nasty side-effect of scaring off friends and lovers.  Instead, I recommend making video and audio recordings every 3 months or so.  This allows you to really see the progress you have made in the language.  Progress happens so steadily that it is often hard to notice improvements in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc.  Recordings take out the guesswork.

4) Strangers: Interestingly, feedback from people you don’t know can often have the biggest impact (for better or worse).  In countries like Japan and Taiwan, you will often be praised for speaking the language (no matter how little you know.)  In the early stages, this can help provide motivation to continue learning.  But in these same countries, people will often assume you can’t speak the language and begin listening for English words even when you are speaking their language.  This happens less and less the more your pronunciation improves, but don’t underestimate the power of assumption.  When this inevitably does happen, try not to take it personally.  It happens even to highly fluent individuals from time to time…

Take Action

1. Find foreign language content that is matched to your level and interests.  Again, I think podcasts are your best bet.  Download iTunes  if you don’t have it already.  It’s free and easy to use.
2. Make friends with native speakers of the language you are learning.  Become a tutor or join clubs or activities that will put you in contact with new people from the desired language background.