Artículos traducidos al español por Santiago Madrigal

• The advantages and disadvantages of learning a foreign language in the classroom.
• The problem with waiting until one is “ready” to start speaking.
• The fact that immersion is a choice. Don’t wait for the language to come to you!
• The power of social accountability (e.g. making commitments to other people).
• The problem with letting emotions drive when/if one studies.
• The importance of focusing on process over end goals.
• The many linguistic and social benefits of working with tutors.
• The fact that extroversion is not required to learn a language well.
• What “Language Hero” is and why he created it.
• Why learning a language is no longer a resource problem, but rather a confidence problem.
• The difference between polyglots and failed learners is drive, not ability.
• “Get in line, and stay in line.”
• A typical day of language learning for Kevin.
• Kevin’s favorite language learning tools and resources.
• The dangers of uncontrolled Internet use.

Listen to the Interview

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Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Couchsurfing.com
• Stickk.com
• Beeminder.com
• Duolingo.com
• ASSiMiL books
• Teach Yourself a Language books
• iTalki.com
• La Repubblica (Italian news site)
• Spotify
• Kindle books in foreign languages
• Leech Block Firefox Add-on

Learn More About Kevin Morehouse

• Website: LanguageHero.co
• Twitter: Twitter.com/Kevin_Morehouse

• English transcript (PDF)
• Japanese translation (PDF)
• Chinese translation (PDF)
• Korean translation (PDF)
• Arabic translation (PDF)
• German translation (PDF)
• Spanish translation
• French translation (PDF)
• Portuguese translation (PDF)
• Italian translation (PDF)
• Marathi translation (PDF)
• Russian translation (PDF)

Spanish is one of my next target languages and I was quite excited when Amanda Moritz of Brainscape asked me to do a review of their new Spanish language learning app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

There’s no better excuse to study a language and play on my iPod touch than doing a product review!

What I Liked

Truth be told, I am not a huge fan of flashcards. I much prefer to just listen, read, and speak. But Brainscape does an excellent job with what can otherwise become a rather boring aspect of language study. Here are some of the app’s best features:

In App Training

The first time you use the app, it will help guide you through how to use it. For example, here is what pops up when you rate your first card:

You rated this card a 2. The higher your confidence, the less often you will see this card. Also, tips will occasionally pop up showing you how to get more out of the app.

Audio Files for Each Flash Card

One of the biggest problems with most flashcard systems (both paper and digital) is that they only focus on one skill: reading. With Brainscape, however, you can actually hear each word or phrase every time your review a card. This not only helps improve your listening and speaking skills, but also improves retention (brain research shows that the more senses you employ during study, the better your memory becomes).

From Words to Sentences

The app’s “Spanish Sentence Builder” does a good job of slowly building up your vocabulary from individual words into phrases that include a combination of previously studied words.

Excellent spaced repetition

As noted in The Science of Brainscape:

Repeating an easy concept too soon risks wasting your time, while repeating a difficult concept too late risks your having to learn it all over again. By employing user-controlled spaced repetition intervals, you can ensure that less familiar language is repeated more often, while better knows words won’t be repeated as often.

Usage Explanations on the card

Many flashcard systems only show you the key word and its meaning or pronunciation. Brainscape Spanish! cards also provide usage notes so you actually know how to use the new word or phrase.

Ability to delete cards as you go

You’d think that this would be an obvious feature, but I’m surprised how many flashcard apps don’t allow you to delete cards as you go, if at all. Brainscape also makes it easy for you to suggest an edit if you find any mistakes or missing information.

Specific topic decks

In addition to all the basic words you will need in daily life, the Brainscape Spanish! app also includes specific decks on a variety of topics, including business, food, medicine, transportation, technology, and geography.

Ability to sync the app with your brain-scape.com account

Apps are a great way to review languages on the go, but if I am at home or the office, I prefer the increased screen real estate allotted by a computer.

What Could Be Better

The following additions would be nice, but both represent rather costly endeavors, so I can understand if they doesn’t happen anytime soon, if ever…

Pictures

As noted in Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, “vision trumps all other senses”. Adding stock photography to the flashcards would not only improve retention but also make study more inherently more enjoyable. This would also require less translation, allowing the student to spend more of their study time within instead translating to and from the target language and English.

Sample Sentences on All Cards

Although I like Brainscape’s sentence builder approach (gradually progressing from individual words to more complex phrases), it would be nice to have example sentences even in the very beginning so you can start getting used to a wider range of Spanish vocabulary and structures. While you might not understand much beyond the target phrase or construction, I find that having this extra input speeds acquisition and improves enjoyment.

Like any language learning tool, the key is balance: if used in combination with other sources of language input and output (listening to podcasts, watching Spanish television programs, reading blogs, speaking with friends or a tutor, etc.), Brainscape’s Spanish! iPhone app is an excellent addition to your your language learning arsenal.

Brainscape Spanish! Press Release

iPhone app teaches you Spanish using “smart flashcards” and brain science

Brainscape’s researchers from Columbia, Yale, and MIT have developed a novel language-acquisition approach they call Intelligent Cumulative Exposure (ICE).

NEW YORK: When we think of using flashcards to study Spanish, we usually think of putting simple one-word questions and answers like “apple” and “manna” on 3×5 index cards. Not Brainscape. This small team of educational technologists out of Columbia University has leveraged the power of the iPhone to combine grammar, sentence construction, and audio pronunciation into an incremental and comprehensive language-learning experience.

Brainscape Spanish works in three simple, repetitive steps:

Brainscape asks you to translate a particular sentence (e.g. “I have two siblings”) into Spanish where the single underlined word is the only concept that has not yet been introduced in previous flashcards.

Brainscape reveals the correct translation (Tengo dos hermanos) on the back of the flashcard, and explains or annotates the new concept in smaller text. (e.g. Although the word hermano usually means “brother” when singular, the plural hermanos could mean either “two brothers” or “a brother and a sister”.)

Brainscape asks you, on a scale of 1-5, “How well did you know this?” which determines how soon that flashcard will be repeated. Cards rated a 1 would repeat often until you report a higher level of confidence, while 5’s are very rarely repeated.

The process continues to repeat one card at-a-time (with AUDIO accompaniment), at gradually increasingly levels of complexity, with previous cards being repeated on an as-needed basis, according to Brainscape’s machine learning algorithm. Interspersed with these sentence-building exercises are simple vocabulary enrichment and verb conjugation-practice flashcards which also employ a confidence-based repetition technique.

Brainscape’s founder Andrew Cohen has written an entire white paper about why the new method (which he calls Intelligent Cumulative Exposure) works so effectively. “The Input Hypothesis, the value of Active Recall, and the importance of Metacognition have been known for decades,” says Cohen, “but much of the advancements toward applying these principles have confined to laboratories. Brainscape is the first company to make these language learning advancements so absurdly convenient.”

Brainscape Spanish is currently a $40 iPhone/iPod Touch app but is available to try free on Brainscape’s website where you can also find other flashcard-based courses and even create your own smart flashcard decks. As of this writing, Brainscape has over 120,000 members, and it plans to create a web/mobile learning community that eventually encompasses the world’s entire body of knowledge as well as just languages.

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Read the Transcript

Orlando: Well let me start by saying that I like your Foreign Language Mastery blog site; it’s been fun to read.

John: Thank you. I’ve ended up interviewing a number of my mentors and heroes, and I stumbled across your blog and really liked what you had to say, so I thought it would be good to share your views with my listeners and readers. So I think best would be maybe to go through those 5 fundamentals that you have on your blog. [Note: In my preparation for the interview, I accidentally missed reading No. 6.]

Orlando: Ah, sure.

John: I think that really sums up your basic stance. I’m sure there’s a lot more you could say, and we’ll fill in as we go. I think the first one was the 500 hours of study that’s required to reach a modicum of fluency.

Orlando: Right. The issue is time on task; that people underestimate how long it takes to learn a foreign language. And sometimes, even if they’re doing everything right, there’s a sense that ‘Oh, I still don’t speak Spanish!” because you don’t speak it as well as you speak English. And it’s always good to go back and tell people, “Even if you’re doing everything right, it’s not going to be a 20-hour project.” You know, I always get phone calls from people saying, “Uh, we want to negotiate with people in Mexico. Can you teach us some Spanish?” And it’s like, “Sure, but it’s not going to be a during your lunch hour for 3 weeks type of project.” So that first category is that realize that it does take time on task, and to be proficient in a foreign language, is going to take you a hunk of time.

That 500 hours is a nice number, too, because what it says is that even if you’re in a normal classroom situation and you meet 5 times a week for a whole semester, you’re still going to be way short of 500 hours. So a lot of it is you just got to spend more time on task. That’s number 1.

John: Ok, and then number 2 was about context.

Orlando: Number 2 is context, which is, words stick when you’re in the situation of the moment. Word’s don’t stick if you can’t connect them to some sort of experience or some kind of context. I often give the example to my students of a time I was sitting on a bus in Brazil, and there was this kid that was driving me crazy, jumping up and down and screaming and yelling. And the mother yelled out, “Não faça isso, filho.” (Don’t do that, son.) And I remember thinking afterwards, “Wow, command form!” And never again did I have to think about how to conjugate a command form in Portuguese. I saw the lady; I saw the kid; he was driving me crazy; and forever more, I could just say “Não faça isso, filho.” So that context of the moment really helped me have that word stick. So I think it’s a big deal to put all of your language learning into some sort of real context of a real opportunity.

John: Ok, on that note, what advice do you have for somebody who, for example, lives in the United States, and doesn’t have the opportunity to go live abroad? What can they do to create a context for themselves, so that that sticks?

Orlando: Well, you know what, the nice thing of being an adult learner is you can pretend. You can create those scenarios for yourself. You can put yourself in the situations. You can visualize yourself actually buying something, saying something. I actually think that’s one of the great opportunities of an adult learner; is we can role-play stuff. Where children when they learn a foreign language, they can never really put themselves in a role-play situation. But you see the sad thing is that a lot of people don’t know that. And so they will just take a big gigantic list of words, and kind of keep reading the list of words, and never ever try to visualize, “How are you ever going to really say this?” or “What would you really say in this real situation?”

John: You mentioned about differences between children and adults. Maybe we can go off on that tangent shortly. I think there are many, but I also think that there is a lot in common that people also underestimate. What’s your view on the similarities and differences?

Orlando: You know, I’m not a gigantic fan of the whole critical period, you’re kind of doomed after you’re an adult kind of thing. I also don’t believe, that, you know, sometimes people talk about how easy it is for children to learn a foreign language. But if you look at the amount of energy and effort they really put into it, we’re talking about 5, 6, 7 years where their whole concentration is language, language, language, playing with languages, playing with sounds, trying phrases out, communicating back and forth. There is nothing easy about the way children learn foreign languages. They’re just putting tons and tons and tons of effort and time into it. And so I think that sometimes we sell ourselves short when we say, “Oh, there’s automatic language learning that goes on when you’re a child.” Well, it’s automatic in the sense that you’re doing it every day, every day, every day, every day. But it certainly isn’t without tons of effort. And if we put as much effort into our adult language learning, as what children do into their first language acquisition, we would probably do a lot better as well.

Years and years ago, Lily Wong Fillmore did a great study, it was her dissertation, on little kids that were learning foreign languages in elementary schools. And she had a great example that kids first socialize, then they communicate, then they worry about form. And when we teach foreign languages, we do the exact opposite. We worry about form first; we worry about communication second; and we get to socialization third. And I thought it was kind of a neat observation, that that’s how kids worry about it. If they want to go play in the park, they play in the park. And that’s kind of their number 1 thing to do. And communication becomes second; form is down the road.

John: Interesting. Well, back to number 3, about schema theory and social scripts.

Orlando: Right. You know, I’m a gigantic believer in the idea of chunks, that we learn foreign languages in little chunks, little phrases, little situations. And we know how the script goes. Recently, I was the example I often give is that when I go to a bakery in a foreign country, that in the Unites States, I know the rhythm of going to a bakery. They ask what you want; they cut it open; they slice it. There’s kind of a way that you follow the pattern of buying meat, and cheese, and bread at a bakery. When you’re in a foreign language, that pattern changes. And it’s not a language issue necessarily; it’s that I don’t know the rhythm of how to keep the flow of everybody’s activities going in the bakery. So in foreign language, if you know the flow of the dialogue you’re supposed to follow, it helps you understand things.

I was recently in Rio, and when I was in the check-out line, somebody asked in essence if I had a “blah blah blah card”. Well of course I didn’t because I was a tourist. And that was not part of my dialogue. I was not ready for the lady at the checkout to ask me about if I had that card. And I went from understanding 100% of what she was saying to a bunch of garbled noise. Because I didn’t know the dialogue. And I had to have her repeat that a couple of times until I finally [realized], “Oh now I know what she’s asking for” and I could say, “No, I don’t have that.” [For] a foreigner that comes to the US, it may be that when you buy a certain thing, sometimes they say, “What’s your zip code?” Well, you’re not ready for them to ask what your zip code is. You’re just trying to buy some bread. And so you would probably not understand that question because you’re not used to that dialogue. So that’s schema theory. Schema theory is: What are the dialogues? What are the chunks? How do we put strings of words together? How do you take turns and change back and forth, and reinforce things? There’s a pattern that we do that in, in language, and the more we understand those patterns, the more we understand the foreign language.

John: That’s also why I think movies are an excellent way, but once you get…

Orlando: Well, we’ll get to that when we get to number 5 on narrow listening.

John: Good point. Ok, so number 4: input and intake.

Orlando: Yah, you see, when the second language theories first were coming out, they talked about the importance of input. And then years later, they said, “You know what? It really… It’s nice to have a lot of input, but sometimes it never sinks in. And so what really is a big deal, is what they call ‘intake’, which is input that you’re actually conscious of, that you’re aware of, that you’re concentrating on.” And you know, the words get changed. Sometimes they call it “consciousness raising”; I’ve even heard it called “input enhancement”. But basically it’s the idea that you have to be exposed to a lot of the foreign language, but it’s not enough to be exposed to it. You have to be actually listening to it; have it sink in. So your input becomes intake. And so I’m a big proponent of that, that you need to hear a lot of language, but you need to recognize it; you need to consciously be thinking of it. And see if it can soak in a little bit while you’re listening.

John: Ok, so number 5 was narrow listening and narrow reading.

Orlando: Yah, this comes from Krashen’s ideas that narrow listening and narrow reading basically means, I believe, that you get more success out of looking at a small chunk in detail than a very large, gigantic hunk, superficially. And so when you look at my materials, the clips will be 2 minutes long. And then I want the students to really study in detail what happens in those two minutes. I seem to get more out of that than I do watching a 2-hour movie. That kind of runs past me. I understand the movie but I can’t say I really learn a lot of foreign language watching that movie. But if I take that same effort and time and put it into a very small chunk of language, and study that in detail, I get a lot more out of it. So I believe that narrow listening and narrow reading does more for language acquisition than a broad, one time through sort of experience.

John: One thing though I have noticed when I look at a short chunk of material, I do agree that I get more out of it in terms of acquisition, but on the other hand, if I do watch a movie or I read a longer passage, I also can get lost in the story, instead of just focusing on, “Oh, I am learning the language”, which I think has its own benefits as well.

Orlando: When I was in China, it was my first time in China and I had a free afternoon, so I went to the movies. And I watched my first movie totally in Mandarin. And it was kind of fun to go through the experience of, “Ok, how much of this am I going to grab?” Because my Chinese is kind of survival level; it’s not fantastic Chinese by any means. But it was pretty fun to go through the whole movie and just see, “Ok, how much am I going to catch onto? No responsibility here; let me just soak in what I can soak in.” I think it’s good to be exposed to that now and again, too.

John: Number 6, then? Which I missed I guess…

Orlando: And the final one is, it’s a fairly old model, it’s called Schumann’s acculturation model. And that’s the one where you kind of lump together all the cultural and social factors that affect language learning. You know, as we’re about things like anxiety, motivation, how extroverted you are, how much you identify with the culture yourself. Do you have a girlfriend from that country? Do you love the movies from that country? Do you love the music from that country? That’s a big, big deal. You know, how much you just are the sort of personality that can just jump out and do that kind of stuff versus how much you just hang back.

I remember I had a friend in Brazil who was one of these perfectionists: “Unless I say it correctly, I’m going to say it at all.” And in the end, he never really did learn the language well because he held himself back. He was so guarded about, “Oh, I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to do it wrong.” That sort of personality that can say, “You know what? I want to enjoy this food, and if I don’t say something, I won’t be able to eat it, so let me say something. I think that girl’s pretty. Let me talk to her, because I want to get to know her. I don’t care what it comes out like.”

Well I had a student a few years ago, when I took them to Venezuela, he was a music freak. And he would go out in the street, and as soon as he heard music in somebody’s apartment, he would literally stop, knock on their door, and start talking to total strangers about, “What kind of music are you playing on your radio right now?” His grammar was kind of backwards, but his ability to get to meet people and to talk to people was just phenomenal, just phenomenal. He was amazing.

John: Do you think there’s any harm in speaking too soon?

Orlando: You know, there’s no doubt that people fossilize. You kind of get to a certain level, and then if you can survive for whatever you need your language for, you kind of stop there. And you’ll see that for people who live abroad for 2 years. And after 3 or 4 months, they kind of stop their progress, and kind of never improve after that. But they kind of are able to use the language for whatever they need the language for. Part of the answer to your question is, “What do they really need language for?” And if you’re going just to socialize, just to hang out, you know, just for informal sort of things, maybe your informal Spanish or Portuguese is just fine. It may be that in other situations you need to have more precise, or let’s say “correct”, sort of language forms. I think a lot of it is not just the language learning process; it’s what are you going to end up using the language for.

In terms of speaking too soon, you know, we have the whole silent period concept where it’s good to let it sort of soak in for a while, and then you can start talking. And I think there’s some validity to the idea that you should learn how to be a listener. Too often when we’re abroad, we forget to actually listen to people, and try and soak in.” I know that sometimes when I’m abroad, I’ll say to myself, “Ok, for the next hour, I’m just going to sit and listen to people, and make little notes about things I hear. And even in languages I’ve been speaking for 30 years, I’ll still have a notebook full at the end of that hour, just because I want to hear what people are saying. So it’s a give and take. You know, there’s a point where you can fossilize, and if you don’t really, really concentrate, and force yourself to get a little better, you’re just going to get stuck there. And I think it takes a hunk of effort, to, when you feel yourself getting to that point, to actually improve and get a little bit better.

So anyway, those are the six items:

1) I think that you have to have a good time on task;

2) You need to learn language within the context of the situation;

3) I love Schumann’s…I love the schema theory of Vygostky on their scripts and chunks you need to follow;

4) I think that input should be more than input; it should be intake, so that it starts to sink in and you concentrate on it;

5) I like the narrow listening concept that Krashen has; and

6) I think we can’t ignore the big cultural factors that go into language learning.

And that’s all six.

John: Excellent. Very, very good.

Orlando: Well, it was fun talking to you today.

John: It was fun talking to you. I really appreciate your time. Talk to you again.

Orlando: Appreciate it.

Mo’ Info

To learn more about Dr. Kelm and his projects, check out his blog and grab a copy of his new book, When We Are the Foreigners.

LingQ focuses on listening and reading tasks, following the same input-based method Steve has used to learn foreign languages. But output is certainly not ignored. Using one’s LingQ points (which can be either purchased outright or earned by tutoring others or sharing content you’ve created), users can speak with tutors and get their writing corrected by native speakers. The tutors I have talked with were excellent.

Users can choose between 4 different levels:

The Good

After using LingQ for quite some time now, here’s what I’ve come to like best:

Automatically Saved Words

After spending years highlighting new words and phrases in magazines and then manually typing them into Excel sheets or online databases, this feature makes LingQ a huge time saver. Some other sites allow you to also save and review new words this way, but they don’t allow you to import your own content the way LingQ does.

Yellow Highlights

When you save words and phrases using the LingQ button, these items appear highlighted in yellow in all future texts you study. To quickly remind yourself of the meaning or pronunciation, you simply hover over the LingQ or click (depending on how you configure the settings).

Flexible Hints

When you want to LingQ a word or phrase, you can choose between popular hints, add your own, or copy and paste from the integrated multilingual dictionaries. I find that the act of creating (or at least editing) the hint or definition helps increase retention and deepen my understanding of new words and phrases.

Spaced Repetition Emails

After creating some LingQs on a given day, they will automatically be emailed to you following a spaced repetition schedule (that is, gradually longer and longer intervals between each email). You can then quickly scan through the words and hints to both refresh your memory and decide which items to review further.

Good Variety of Content

There are heaps of lessons covering a wide range of abilities and interests, and you can always import your own as I discuss next. You can browse lessons from the library by topic or level, or you can click on individual lessons to see how many new words it presents (all words not yet LingQed or marked as “known” will show up in blue).

Custom Lessons

Perhaps my favorite feature of LingQ is the ability to import and LingQ your own content. For example, I recently imported an e-mail I received in Chinese and then had a Taiwanese friend record the audio. Voila; instant content that is interesting, relevant, and perfectly tailored to my learning needs. And of course, words I had previously LingQed in other lessons automatically showed up in yellow.

The Bad

Even the best language learning system always has room for improvement. Here are few weaknesses that I hope to see fixed in the future:

Wonky Word Boundaries in Japanese and Chinese

While this issue has been significantly improved since earlier versions of LingQ, I still come across a number of Japanese and Chinese words that are improperly parsed. This tends to be more of a problem in imported texts.

Browser Glitches

When LingQing new items or hovering over existing LingQs, I sometimes run into problems getting the window to pop up. When this happens, I simply refreshed the browser and the problem went away. Not a big deal but a little annoying when you are immersed in a dialogue or story.

A Few Unreliable Tutors

Most tutors on LingQ are members themselves, and enjoy tutoring as much as they enjoy learning languages. However, I had one experience where a tutor failed to show up for a scheduled session and didn’t reply to follow up emails or messages on their wall. Fortunately, I was able to get a refund for the points I spent for the no-show tutor.

My Verdict

LingQ faces competition from quite a few online language tools with far larger marketing and development budgets, but it’s focus on effective methods, authentic content, and community help LingQ continue to survive and thrive despite comparatively fewer bells and whistles. There is no perfect system out there (nor will there ever be), but LingQ offers driven, independent language learners one of the best resources I have found to date for learning multiple languages in a natural, input-based way. Those more accustomed to formal, highly structured language programs, however, probably won’t like LingQ very much. Of course, such folks wouldn’t agree with most of what I have to say anyway…

Update

LingQ 2.0 has just been released. Myriad useful improvements to make creating and reviewing LingQs that much easier. This Apple-esque video covers what’s new:

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