This word should be your mantra when learning a language. When you find yourself procrastinating, making excuses, and putting off speaking practice out of fear, this string of six letters can help put you back on track:

• I have enough time if I prioritize my day and put language learning first.
• I have enough materials. My problem is probably not a lack of resources but a lack of motivation.
• I know enough words to at least start a basic conversation, even if I stall a few seconds later. That’s what dictionaries and phrase books are for!

So enough excuses already! Time to stop complaining and start learning.

This is especially true for learning new vocabulary. Instead of spending time on words and phrases you might need someday (or even Sunday), focus all your energy and time on just the terms you will need to use today. For example, if you will be going to buy a prepaid SIM card in Taiwan, you would want to commit the words “cell phone” (手機, shǒujī), “prepaid” (預付, yùfù), “SIM card” (SIM卡, sim kǎ), etc. to memory. The Chinese names of different bird species might be useful for your birdwatching trip next week, but such information won’t do you much good at the Taiwan Mobile (台灣大哥大) store and is therefore not JIT. It can wait.

As Tim Ferriss puts it in The 4-Hour Workweek:

“I used to have the habit of reading a book or site to prepare for an event weeks or months in the future, and I would then need to reread the same material when the deadline for action was closer. This is stupid and redundant. Follow your to-do short list and fill in the information gaps as you go. Focus on what digerati Kathy Sierra calls ‘just-in-time’ in- formation instead of ‘just-in-case’ information.”

Both Require “Kung Fu”

One of my constant struggles as a language blogger is to find the right balance point between highlighting the importance of having fun in language learning and setting proper expectations about how much time and effort is required to reach fluency (however it is you define the term).

In both language learning and martial arts, you should do everything you can to ensure that you genuinely enjoy the learning process. Choose a good teacher, find other people to learn with, and find activities you love. But you must also accept that:

• Some requisite tasks will hurt (e.g. doing horse stances and learning conjugations).
• Some days you just won’t feel like learning and will have to force yourself to do so anyway.

This is where “kung fu” (功夫, gōngfu) comes in.  The word actually refers not just to martial arts, but to any form of learning that requires a great deal of time and effort to master:

“Gongfu is an ancient Chinese term describing work/devotion/effort that has been successfully applied over a substantial period of time, resulting in a degree of mastery in a specific field. Although the term is synonymous in the West with martial arts (though it is most over rendered Kung Fu), it is equally applicable to calligraphy, painting, music, or other areas of endeavor.” —Andy James

I don’t know about you, but I think learning a foreign fits this definition perfectly!

Both Require a Blend of “Self-Study” & “Sparring”

Another challenge in both martial arts and language learning is finding the right balance between preparation and application.

Some learners spend all their time training or studying alone, putting off the messy process of sparring or speaking with others until they feel “ready” (a feeling that will never come). You get better at what you practice, so if your goal is to learn how to defend yourself from an attacker or participate in flowing conversations with native speakers, then you have to actually apply movements with someone trying to attack you and speak with actual human beings, not just your iPhone.

Conversely, some learners want to just jump in and start sparring or speaking on day one. This is certainly preferable of the two options (especially for languages since there is no risk of physical injury), but the importance of self-study and preparation must not be underestimated in either endeavor:

• The more hours you spend in a horse stance or doing Anki reps, the stronger your kicks and vocabulary will become.
• The more times you practice techniques and phrases with slow, perfect form, the easier it will be to apply them at full speed while sparring or speaking.

Start “sparring” as soon as possible, but don’t expect to have effortless, free-flowing exchanges with native speakers until you have spent the requisite time in your “linguistic horse stance”!

Both Require Patience

I freaking love movies, especially those that follow what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” or “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

But there is big unintended problem with such hero flicks: by showing the transformation from beginner to bad-ass in the course of 2 hours or so, they make us believe (at least at a subconscious level) that significant change can happen almost instantaneously. In fact, the majority of the learning in such movies is crammed into a short “montage” scene, where someone goes from zero to hero in the course of an 80s rock ballad! This hilarious clip from South Park sums up this absurdity nicely. At a conscious level, all of us know that developing actual abilities will obviously take more than a few minutes. But these films can leave us with a short-lived sugar high, a hunger for instant gratification that will quickly evaporate once one realizes what actual training or study feel like. Use films to pump you up, but make sure to start out in a new language or martial art with realistic expectations about how much time it will take you to reach your  personal proficiency goals.

Both Require a Focus on the Basics

In a similar vein, many new learners of martial arts or languages want to skip the basics and jump ahead to the “flashy” stuff, may it be jump spinning hook kicks or technical terminology. While there is a time and place for both, it is imperative to master the basics first. Just as you can communicate a great deal with a very small number of words (Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50!), a martial artist can defend themselves from an almost limitless number of attacks using a very small set of core techniques. The key is quality, not quantity. As Bruce Lee said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

1. I don’t have enough time.
2. I don’t have enough money.
3. I’m not good at languages.

Now I don’t want to imply that these are completely invalid reasons why one fails to learn a language. Sure, having more free time would certainly make it easier to fit in the requisite hours needed to reach conversational fluency. Bags of cash would make it much easier to visit countries where the language is spoken, pay for tutors or classes, and buy the best resources available. And being a savant like Daniel Tammet would make the language learning process go much faster than us mere mortals (he learned enough Icelandic in 7 days to handle a media interview in the language!).

But it is imperative that would-be language learners understand that:

• Anyone can make at least a little bit of time each day to spend on language learning.
• Everything you need to learn a language can be found online or at your local public library for FREE.
• Everybody can learn a foreign language, even if it takes some of us longer than others.

The gap between making the above excuses and making serious progress in a language is not time, money, or ability but motivation. If you really want to learn—nay, must learn—a language, you will find the time by cutting out less important things, you will figure out how to acquire the necessary resources, and you will eventually get used to a language’s pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc.

The hurdles are inside your head, not on the clock, in your wallet, or within your genes. Now stop making excuses and start making progress.

In the traditional brute-force method of memorizing vocabulary (the default approach worldwide), the learner writes a particular word or character dozens and dozens of times, hoping that it will somehow stay in their brain long enough for the next test or conversation. But unless you have a photographic memory, you will probably find that the information you worked so hard cram into your noodle is nowhere to be found just a few hours later. It’s demoralizing. You think to yourself, “See? I told you I’m not good at languages! I told you I have a crappy memory! Screw it; I’m just gonna watch House of Cards and eat an entire pint of Cherry Garcia.”

But before you give up, waste the entire weekend on Netflix, and develop insulin resistance, please realize that YOU are not the problem! Despite its ubiquitous use, rote memorization only works for an extremely small percentage of learners. Fortunately, there are three superior vocabulary acquisition approaches that work with (not against) how the adult human brain encodes and prioritizes information: 1) Mnemonics, 2) Spaced repetition, and 3) Context.

1) Create Crazy Mnemonics

Most of you have probably already dabbled in mnemonics in school, perhaps when trying to memorize the order of the planets. For example, the silly sentence “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” might help you remember the that the planets are ordered Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. You would of course need to update this mnemonic now that Pluto has been demoted from planet status.

Even better would be a “linking system” that relies not on sentences but vivid stories. Tony Buzan shares the following example in his book Master Your Memory:

“Imagine that in front of you, where you are currently reading, is a glorious SUN. See it clearly, feel its heat, and admire its orange/red glow, Imagine, next to the Sun, a little (it’s a little Planet) thermometer, filled with that liquid metal that measures temperature: MERCURY.

Imagine that the Sun heats up, and eventually becomes so hot that it bursts the thermometer. You see all over the desk or floor, in front of you, tiny balls of that liquid metal Mercury, Next you imagine that, rushing in to see what happens, and standing by your side, comes the most beautiful little goddess. Colour her, clothe her (optional!), perfume her, design her as you will, What shall we call our little goddess? Yes, VENUS!

You focus so intently on Venus with all your senses, that she becomes almost a living physical reality in front of you, You see Venus play like a child with the scattered mercury, and finally manage to pick one of the mercury globules, She is so delighted that she throws it in a giant arc way up in the sky (which you see, as light glistens off it throughout its journey), until it hurtles down from on high and lads in your garden with a gigantic ‘thump’!, which you both hear and feel as a bodily vibration. And on what planet is your garden? EARTH.”

And on Buzan goes through all the planets, using vivid imagery, multiple (imagined) sensory inputs, a full color pallet, sexuality, stark contrast in size, etc. All of this seemingly extraneous information accomplishes one thing: helping your forever remember the order of the planets. It may seem like extra work up front, but in the long run, it is far more efficient and effective to learn information this way than through tedious rote memorization.

Rote memory fails because you are not giving your brain any hooks to attach the new information to. Crazy stories like above tie new, abstract information to memories already in our brains, things we can see (whether in our mind’s eye or on our own bodies like with knuckle mnemonics), or to concrete concepts that we can more easily recall.

So when trying to learn a new word, phrase, or Chinese character, create imaginative stories with multiple “hooks” that help to dig out the specific meanings, spellings, pronunciations, or strokes.

Here is an example on how to remember the kanji 朝 (“morning”) from Remembering the Kanji, a systematic mnemonic system designed by James Heisig to help independent learnings memorize the meaning and writing of all jouyou kanji:

“On the right we see the moon fading off into the first light of morning, and to the left, the mist that falls to give nature a shower to prepare it for the coming heat. If you can think of the moon tilting over to spill mist on your garden, you should have no trouble remembering which of all the elements in this story are to serve as primitives for constructing the character.”

If you are learning Japanese, download a free sample of Remembering the Kanji or get the book on Amazon. And don’t miss my interview with James Heisig.

2) Use Spaced Repetition

As the name implies, “spaced repetition” shows you flashcards at specific intervals based on how difficult or easy you previously rated them. The more difficult something is, the sooner (and more often) it will be repeated. Spaced repetition systems (or “SRS” for short) like Anki, Memrise, etc. are far more efficient than randomly reviewing a stack of unsorted flashcards since they (ideally) focus on just the information you need to practice at just the right time.

But a word of caution: although spaced repetition can increase efficiency, make sure that you don’t fall back on bad rote habits. Fill your flashcards with complete sentences and useful phrases taken from—and applicable in—real-life. Better still, add audio recordings of each sentence (ask your iTalki tutor or use Rhinospike to get free audio recordings by native speakers of your target language).

Read my post Spaced Repetition: What is It? Why & How Should You Use It? for more about SRS methods, apps, etc.

3) Learn & Use Vocabulary in Clear Contexts

The most potent way to improve the initial encoding and subsequent recall of new words is learning (and actually using!) vocabulary in context. By “context”, I mean out and about in the real world, doing real things, talking to real people, ordering real food, getting on real trains, flirting with real girls/guys, etc. Trying to memorize words at your desk is not only boring; it’s also far less effective. Studying alone in isolation creates far less robust memories because their is less urgency, less sensory input, less emotional feedback, and let’s face it, less of a point!

Read Anthony Metivier’s guest post Why It’s Impossible To Learn New Words And Phrases Out Of Context for more about the importance of context and how to create effective mnemonics.

Given all the time and energy one spends trying to solve such puzzles, why not just learn a language instead?

I haven’t come across any studies yet that substantiate this (if you have, please send them to me!), but I hypothesize that learning languages has a far greater impact on brain plasticity than solving simple math or vocabulary puzzles. Think about it: solving a sudoku puzzle only requires sensory input from the eyes, basic addition, and movement of the hand to write the numbers. Speaking a language with another human being is a far more complex “bio-psycho-social” skill that requires:

• The use of multiple senses, including sight, sound, and physical movement (e.g. hand gestures and body language).
• The reading of subtle changes in tone, speed, volume, and body language.
• The discernment and production of exact auditory signals.
• The processing of complex syntax and production of grammatically correct sentences.

Perhaps more important than the potential neural benefits are the many practical advantages offered by foreign languages over puzzles and brain training apps. When you solve a crossword puzzle for example, all you are left with is temporary satisfaction and a worthless piece of paper. Learning to understand and speak a foreign language, on the other hand, enables you to:

• Delve more deeply into the culture, psychology, art, history, sports, cuisines, etc. of exotic lands. Yes, you can read about the history and philosophy of aikido (合気道・あいきどう) in English, but you will get much more learning “The Way of Unifying Life Energy” in Japanese.
• Travel more enjoyably. Your Lonely Planet guidebook might help you avoid some common scams or pick a hostel, but conversational fluency in the local language allows you to go further off the beaten path, avoid expat bubbles, find hidden gems, and interact with locals.
• Travel more cheaply. There are usually three prices for things: 1) the monolingual foreigner price ($$$), 2) the bilingual foreigner price ($$), and 3) the local price ($). While you may never be able to pass for a true local (whether from an ethnic or linguistic perspective), you can at least get close enough to reap significant cost-savings.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think sudoku, crosswords, or Luminosity will unlock any of these advantages… ; )

Spaced Repetition Systems (or “SRS” for short) are flashcard programs designed to help you systematically learn new information—and retain old information—through intelligent review scheduling. Instead of wasting precious study time on information you already know, SRS apps like Anki allow you to focus most on new words, phrases, kanji, etc., or previously studied information that you have yet to commit to long-term memory.

Why Should You Use Spaced Repetition in Language Learning?

Because We Forget New Information REALLY Quickly Unless Reviewed

In 1885, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) put forth a paper titled “Über das Gedächtnis” (“On Memory”) in which he codified something every school student already knows: New information is forgotten at an exponential rate unless reviewed immediately. He plotted this rate along what he termed the “forgetting curve”.

As you can see, Ebbinghaus observed that he forgot new information almost immediately, with over half of the target information lost in just the first hour! Though his experiment was conducted only on himself (i.e. an N=1 study), his basic findings have been reproduced in more scientific studies since his time, and it’s generally agreed that we forget the vast majority of new information we encounter (as much as 80%) within 24 hours.

Because Spaced Repetition Lets Us Hack the Forgetting Curve

The good news is that we can use strategic repetition schedules to hack our memory and help control what sticks and for how long. Each subsequent re-exposure, if properly timed, can help push information we want to remember further and further into long-term memory.

This memory-boosting method was first popularized in language learning by Paul Pimsleur (1927-1976), the man behind The Pimsleur Approach. His particular brand of spaced repetition was dubbed “Graduated Interval Recall” (GIR), which he detailed in a 1967 paper titled “A Memory Schedule” (published in The Modern Language Journal). His proposed review schedule was as follows:

• 1st Review: 5 seconds
• 2nd Review: 25 seconds
• 3rd Review: 2 minutes
• 4th Review: 10 minutes
• 5th Review:  1 hour
• 6th Review: 5 hours
• 7th Review: 1 day
• 8th Review: 5 days
• 9th Review: 25 days
• 10th Review: 4 months
• 11th Review: 2 years

Modern SRS apps and software use even more complex scheduling, but lucky for us, all the math is done automatically by algorithms like SuperMemo’s SM2.

How Spaced Repetition Systems Work

Most SRS apps rely on self-ratings of difficulty to schedule reviews. For example, in Anki (one of the recommended apps I discuss more below), you will usually have 3 or so levels of difficulty to choose from:

• Red button: Used for “new” or “difficult” cards that you want to be shown again very soon.
• Green button: Fairly easy or somewhat familiar cards that you want to see again in a little while.
• Gray: Easy card that you don’t want to review for a while.

The exact interval of minutes, days, or months that each button represents will vary depending on how many times you have previously reviewed the card. For example, if this is your first time seeing a particular card:

• The red button will probably be labeled “1m” (i.e. 1 minute until the next review).
• The green button will probably read “10m” (i.e. 10 minutes until the next review).
• The gray button will probably read “4d” (i.e. 4 days until the next review).

How to Get the Most Out of SRS

Grade Yourself Honestly, But Quickly

A lot of learners get hung up on how to rate themselves, worrying they are giving themselves an overly generous score when they don’t really know the material or being too harsh on themselves when they were close but not perfect. Don’t fall into the trap of spending your valuable time deciding what you know instead of actually expanding what you know. When in doubt, just grade yourself in the middle and move on to the next card.

Use Complete Sentences & Clear Contexts

Avoid creating cards with just a single word or Kanji on the front and the reading or meaning on the back. These are boring and do little more than expand your declarative memory; procedural memory is what we are going for and that is only developed when seeing how words are used in context. Therefore, use complete sentences or even entire paragraphs.

Use Interesting Content

This may seem obvious, but I am constantly surprised by how many learners spend years forcing themselves through boring material. When you are assigned material by a teacher, you may not have a choice, but remember, this whole guide is about self-guided immersion: the choice is yours. Read and listen to content that excites you, topics that you would spend time with even in your native language. Then take chunks of this text or audio content you love (but perhaps don’t quite grasp entirely) and put them into your SRS deck.

Don’t be Afraid to Delete Cards

If you come across cards that are too easy, boring, or just annoying, delete them from your deck. Don’t think about it too much. If you find yourself wanting to delete a card but are unsure if you should, just delete it and move on. You won’t miss it. As Khatzumoto of All Japanese All the Time puts it:

“When your SRS deck starts to become more of a chore than a game, bad cards are most likely your problem.”

Recommended SRS Tools

There are loads and loads of apps available today that incorporate spaced repetition. Here are a few of the best:

Anki

Literally meaning “memorization” in Japanese, “Anki” (暗記) is one of the most popular SRS tools for language learning, and for good reason: 1) it has as heaps of useful user-generated decks, 2) it allows for extensive customization, and 3) it works on every major platform:

Anki Web (free) Anki Desktop (Mac, PC & Linux; free) AnkiDroid (Android, free) AnkiMobile (iOS, $24,99)

If you’re curious why three of the four platforms are free, while the iOS version costs 25 buckaroos, read Anki creator Damien Elmses’ justification:

“Taken alone, AnkiMobile is expensive for an app. However, AnkiMobile is not a standalone app, but part of an ecosystem, and the $17.50 Apple gives me on each sale goes towards the development of that whole ecosystem. For the price, you get not only the app, but a powerful desktop application, a free online synchronization service, and mobile clients for various platforms.”

Once you install your app of choice, make sure to download some of the shared decks created by other Anki users. There are heaps for most major languages, with lists for reviewing Chinese characters, practicing high-frequency words, etc.

Flashcards Deluxe

A good low-cost, high-quality, user-friendly alternative to Anki is Flashcards Deluxe from Orange or Apple. The app, available on both iOS and Android for $3.99, allows you to either create your own multisided flashcards (complete with audio and photos) or import pre-made decks from Quizlet.com and Cram.com.

Thanks go to Olly of IWillTeachYouaLanguage.com for recommending this app to me.

Flashcards Deluxe (iOS, $3.99) Flashcards Deluxe (Android, $3.99)

Skritter

Instead of the potentially problematic self-ratings used by most SRS systems, Skritter employs “active recall” (i.e. requiring us to actually write Chinese characters on the screen of our mobile device) to confirm which we know by heart and which we simply recognize but cannot yet produce from memory. Read my complete review of Skritter here.

Sign up for Skritter Japanese Skritter (iOS, free) Chinese Skritter (iOS, free) Android Public Beta

Memrise: Learning, Powered by Imagination

Memrise is arguably the best designed SRS tool on the block, but the site and apps offer much more than just a pretty user interface:

• Sound science. The entire Memrise experience is designed to optimize memory through the use of “elaborate encoding” (each flashcard includes community-generated mnemonics, etymologies, videos, photos, and example sentences), choreographed testing, and scheduled reminders (i.e. spaced repetition).
• Fun methodologies. Memrise points out that “we’re at our most receptive when we’re at play.” To that end, they have made efforts to incorporate gaming principles into their system. For example, they use a fun harvest analogy for learning (perhaps taking a page from the FarmVille playbook), breaking the learning process up into three phases: 1) Planting Seeds, 2) Harvesting your “saplings”, and 3) Watering Your Garden.
• Community. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Memrise is access to community generated “mems” (i.e. mnemonics), including a number of clever animated GIFs for Kanji.

Study Online (free) Memrise for iOS (free) Memrise for Android (free)

Massive-Context Cloze Deletions (MCDs)

Popularized by AJATT’s Khatzumoto, MCDs (“Massive-Context Cloze Deletions”) represent a simple—albeit extremely powerful—method for creating far more effective SRS cards. Instead trying to memorize (and test memory of) lots of information on your cards, MCDs focus on one single bit of target information at a time, may it be a Japanese particle, the meaning or pronunciation of a particular kanji, etc. In Khatz’s words:

“Learning—which is to say, getting used to—a language used to be like climbing a mountain. With MCDs, it’s like taking a gentle flight of stairs. Everything becomes i+1, because we’re only ever handling one thing at a time.”

Surusu

Another product of “Great Leader Khatzumoto”, Surusu is a free online SRS tool that works hand in hand with the MCD approach. It works on all major web platforms (Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari), the only requirement being an active web connection (sorry, no offline studying folks).

Midori’s Bookmark Flashcards

Midori, my recommended Japanese dictionary app for iOS, gives you the option to study your saved words using spaced repetition:

• Click “Bookmarks” and choose one of your bookmark folders to study.
• Tap the share button (the upward arrow) and select “Flashcards”. Choose “Spaced Repetition” for the order.
• I recommend activating “Show Meanings” to test yourself on producing the Japanese word from an English prompt (it’s much easier but less valuable to test yourself on producing English meanings from Japanese prompts). You can always change this during a study session by tapping the share button and then “Options”.
• If you want to review the entire card and see example sentences as you review, pinch out on a flashcard. To return to the flashcards, tap the back button in the upper left.

Pleco’s Flashcard Module

The Pleco dictionary app for iOS and Android is by far the most powerful mobile Chinese dictionary available. The basic app and standard dictionary databases are free, but there are a number of paid add-ons to expand its functionality, including an excellent spaced repetition flashcard system for ($9.95).

Pleco for iOS (free) Pleco for Android (free)  Browse Add-Ons

• Your confidence in your ability to learn.
• Your feelings about the language and culture.
• Your willingness to try things out.
• Your ability to learn from (and laugh at!) mistakes.
• Your tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

Here now are five of the most insidious psychological obstacles standing between you and fluency:

1) Negative Beliefs About Your Ability to Learn the Language

The most common—and arguably most destructive—psychological obstacle in language learning is the belief that you are not good at learning languages. Okay, maybe you didn’t do so well in high school or college Spanish class. But guess what? It’s probably not your fault. In most cases, poor performance in language classes is a reflection not of your inability to learn a language, but rather:

• How ineffective the standard academic approach to language learning tends to be for most people. A small percentage of learners with high linguistic intelligence manage to pick up languages in school, but most people do far better using more natural, immersion-based approaches that leverage multiple intelligences (visual-spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, etc.). Some teachers do indeed try to integrate such methods, but the limitations imposed by large class sizes and standardized testing make the task all but impossible.
• How few chances you likely had to use the language in fun, meaningful, personally relevant contexts. Your language teacher may have planned some skits and “culture days”, but these are a far cry from the exciting, messy, real world interaction you need to reach conversational fluency.
• The fact you were required to learn a language, especially one you didn’t get to choose. Language learning should be optional. Or at the very least, students should get to choose which language they learn. And I don’t just mean a choice between Spanish and French. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today; learners should be able to choose from a larger pool than just 2 or 3 Romance languages. If a particular language isn’t offered at one’s school, why not allow learners to develop a self-study program monitored by a faculty member or parent? The more power an individual has to choose, the more likely they are to take ownership of the learning process and put in the time and effort needed to make tangible progress.

2) Negative Beliefs About the Language & Culture

Looking back at my former English students, the one’s who made the most progress tended to be those who loved American culture, watched American movies, listened to American music, ate American food, and dreamt about traveling to—or living in—the United States. Those that had little interest in Americana (or the cultures of other English speaking countries) made far less progress no matter how important the English language may have been for their academic or professional careers.

In my case, my deep love and respect for Japanese culture gave me the extra fuel needed to continue putting one foot in front of the other even on days I really didn’t feel like studying.

3) The “Wait Until I’m Ready” Delusion

Many learners (especially those with perfectionistic tendencies) spend many years diligently preparing to use a language, flipping flashcard after flashcard, watching foreign films, listening to language podcasts, etc. All of this is well and good, but focusing only on input leads to an imbalanced language acquisition diet. You need to mix in healthy servings of output, too. Speaking and writing are by far the most efficient ways to solidify what you’ve previously learned, identify gaps in your vocabulary and grammar, and remind yourself why you started learning the language in the first place.

Look, I know it’s scary. There are so many things you want to say but don’t yet know how. So many unknown words and structures that fly right over your head. But so what? No matter how long you study, you will eventually have to go through this messy, two-way interaction. Why put off the inevitable? Why let fear stand between you and fluency? Regardless of your level, you can always try to communicate something today. If you only know five words, use those five words. If you don’t know any words yet, use gestures, drawings, inference, etc. to get your meaning across, paying close attention to what words and structures you hear as you go.

Imagine, for example, that you are at a market in Taiwan and want an apple. You don’t know the word yet, so you just point at one. There are many fruits on the table, so the merchant confirms which one by pointing at the pile of apples: “píng guǒ (蘋果)?” Boom, you now know the word for “apple” in Mandarin! He then asks you how many you want, but you don’t understand him. So he asks, “yī gè (一個)?” and holds out the universal gesture for the number one. You now know the number one in Mandarin, or more accurately, the phrase for “one thing”. Not bad for 10 seconds of person to person interaction! Had you tried to learn these words alone at your desk, you would miss out on the opportunity to:

• Eat the delicious apple!
• Mimic proper pronunciation.
• Encode words in a far more robust, multi-sensory way.

4) Fear of Making Mistakes & Looking Stupid in Front of Others

The “Wait Until You’re Ready” delusion above is largely fueled by fear. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of not understanding others. Fear of making embarrassing mistakes. Fear of ordering the wrong food. Fear of getting on the wrong train. Fear of accidentally saying you’re pregnant in Spanish when you meant to say you are embarrassed! This fear is not completely unjustified. You will indeed make mistakes. Heaps of them. You will order the wrong food and get on the wrong train. You will accidentally insult someone when trying to express praise. But in the vast majority of cases, the only real victim is your pride. And the ego can only be bruised if you let your sense of worth be tied to your perceived ability in the language. Tie your pride instead to your willingness to try things out and laugh off mistakes, not how perfectly (or imperfectly) you can use a language.

As Viktor E. Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When you say the wrong word, butcher a sentence, misunderstand someone’s question, or make a cultural faux pas, you have a choice about how you respond to the potential embarrassment. Do you get frustrated or have a good chuckle? Do you let the gaffe serve as proof that you suck at the language or interpret it as an opportunity for growth? The choice is yours.

5) Frustration With Not Understanding Everything You Hear & Read

Just as most learners put off speaking and writing practice out of fear of making mistakes, many avoid powerful listening and reading opportunities because they grow frustrated with ambiguity and uncertainty. They stop watching an un-subitled foreign film half way through because they don’t know exactly what’s happening in the story. They limit their reading to bilingual books. They only talk with native speakers who also speak English, allowing them to always fall back on their native tongue when confusion arises.

While it is indeed ideal to choose materials just above one’s current level of understanding, and bilingual speakers do offer some advantages over their monolingual counterparts, don’t let a pursuit of the perfect resource or tutor stop you from getting valuable linguistic exposure right now with whatever and whomever happen to be around. The pursuit of perfection usually just leads to procrastination.

How about you? What psychological obstacles have you encountered in your language learning adventures? How did you overcome them? Let me know in the comments.

JF: Could you try to summarize the results of the research you have done over the last 30 years in a few sentences?

SK: Of course. We acquire language when we understand what we hear and read, when we understand what people are saying to us, not how they say it. To borrow a phrase from the Jewish philosopher Hillel, “the rest is commentary.”

JF: Can you provide some of the commentary?

SK: With pleasure. We do not acquire language by learning about it, by consciously learning rules and practicing them. Consciously learned rules have very limited functions: We use them to edit what we say and write, but this is hard to do, and sometimes they can help make input comprehensible, but this is rare.

We do not acquire language by producing it; only by understanding it. The ability to produce is the result of language acquisition, not the cause.

Language acquisition proceeds best when the input is not just comprehensible, but really interesting, even compelling; so interesting that you forget you are listening to or reading another language.

Language acquisition proceeds best when the acquirer is “open” to the input, not “on the defensive”; not anxious about performance.

Language acquisition proceeds along a predictable order that can’t be changed by instruction. Some grammatical rules, for example, are typically acquired early and others much later.

JF: If all this is true, what happens to language teaching? Doesn’t this mean the end of language classes?

SK: Not at all. In fact, the comprehension hypothesis makes life much more interesting for both teachers and students. Classes are great places to get comprehensible input. Even if you live in the country where the language is spoken, it is hard to get comprehensible input from the “outside world”, especially if you are an adult. The language you hear is too complex. The beginner can get more comprehensible input in one hour from a good language classes than from days and days in the country.

Here is an example from my own experience. After having spent about six weeks in Taiwan, on and off over six years, all I could say was “I like ice cream” and maybe four more words, and I understood nothing. Then in the summer of 2007 I took a nine- hour short course in Mandarin, taught by Linda Li, using TPRS, a very good method for providing comprehensible input for beginners. Linda made the input comprehensible in a variety of ways, including pictures, actions, and the use of the first language.
I got much more comprehensible input in the first 30 minutes in that class than I had in Taiwan during the six weeks I was there.

The comprehension hypothesis helps clarify what the goal of language classes is: Acquire enough of the language so that at least some authentic language input, input from the outside world, is comprehensible. Then the acquirer can improve without a class.

JF: I noticed that you said that language acquisition “proceeds along a predictable order” with some grammatical items acquired early and others late. This finding must be a big help in teaching – now we know when to teach which grammatical rules, right?

SK: That’s what I thought at first, but I have changed my position: I don’t think we should teach along any order. There are strong arguments against using any kind of grammatical syllabus.

First, we don’t know the natural order. We know enough to be confident that the natural order exists, but researchers have not worked out the order for every aspect of grammar.

Second, if our hidden agenda in a reading passage or discussion is the relative clause, or some other aspect of grammar, it is very hard to make the input truly interesting.

Third, we have to constantly review the target structures: Every language student knows that one set of exercises and a few paragraphs are not enough.

Finally, we don’t need to use a grammatical syllabus. In fact, it is more efficient not to have a grammatical syllabus. I have hypothesized that if we provide students with enough comprehensible input, the next structures they are ready to acquire are automatically provided and are reviewed regularly and naturally.

JF: I assume that translation is out of the question…

SK: Too much translation can interfere with delivery of comprehensible input. This is because there is a tendency to pay attention only to the translation and not the second language input.
But there are ways of using the first language to make input more comprehensible, including doing background reading or having discussions on topics that are especially complex and hard to understand in the second language. This is part of the basis for bilingual education: Providing background knowledge in the first language that makes second language input more comprehensible.

In class, the first language can also be used for quick explanation or for providing the meaning of a problematic, but crucial word. This may or may not help much with acquiring the meaning of the actual word, but will serve to make the entire discussion more comprehensible and thereby aid in acquisition of other words and grammatical rules. Linda Li did this very effectively in the Mandarin class I attended.

JF: This sounds nice for developing conversational language. But we also need to talk about what Jim Cummins has called “academic language.” That’s the real goal for many students of English today. Now that English has become an international language, many people need high levels of English literacy and knowledge of specialized vocabulary.

SK: Again, the comprehension hypothesis is a big help. It predicts, and predicts correctly, that there are several ways of developing academic language proficiency. The one I think is the most powerful is wide, self-selected reading, also known as free voluntary reading.

There is an overwhelming body of research that shows that free reading is the main source of our reading ability, our writing style, our “educated” vocabulary, much of our spelling ability and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions, all important aspects of academic language proficiency.

A second way is through sheltered subject matter teaching, that is, making subject matter comprehensible for second language students in special classes, a form of “content-based” teaching.

Studies show that students in these classes typically make good progress in second language development and learn subject matter at the same time.

JF: One more question; a very important one. You have claimed that there is research supporting these hypotheses. But it is very hard to find the actual studies, especially these days when money is a problem for nearly everyone. How can we access the actual studies?

SK: I think the prices of technical books and journals are outrageous, and do a disservice to educators and concerned citizens. My approach is to make as much as possible available on the internet, for free.

I have my own website, www.sdkrashen.com, and readers of this interview are free to download, share, and cite anything on this website. I am adding articles as quickly as I can. There is already one book on the website and there will be more.

The website also has a mailing list, if people are interested in seeing short items I come across, and my own letters to the editor. I write several letters to the editor to newspapers all over the world every week. Again, readers are free to share anything from the website with others, including with their students.

We also started a free open-access internet journal a few years ago, which includes many of the research papers my colleagues and I have done, the International Journal of Language Teaching (IJFLT). Just go to ijflt.com and you have easy access. The journal emphasizes short, readable papers, a real contrast to the usual thing you see in some professional journals in education these days. And for those interested in the political as well as the research controversies in language education in the US today, I recommend two more websites which have been very important for me:

• www.SusanOhanian.org, which I regard as the center of gravity for the “resistance movement” in American education.
• www.elladvocates.org, the website of the Institute for Language and Education, a new organization dealing with policies related to children acquiring English in the US.

JF: Thank you, Professor Krashen.

• On average, speaking a foreign language only accounts for a 2% increase in wages.
• A great deal of money and time is devoted to learning foreign languages in school that could (as some argue) be better spent on English literacy skills.
• English is (and will likely remain for some time), the international lingua franca of business.

But…

The above arguments against learning a foreign language stand on the following assumptions:

• You only learn a foreign language in a formal school setting.
• You only learn a language in an effort to earn more money.

Obviously, there are countless ways to learn languages outside of the classroom using the ever-growing pool of free (or at least reasonably priced), high-quality language learning materials, resources, apps, and crowd-sourced tools. But given the high rate of change and economic interests of traditional language education, most folks still think the only way to learn a foreign language is to plop their butts in a classroom or buy over-hyped, over-priced language products. There are certainly benefits to having access to a teacher (they can answer questions, choose tailored materials for you, and help build a cultural context), but all of these benefits can be attained with an online tutor or language-exchange partner. If you have the time or money to take classes, go for it. But don’t use a lack of either as an excuse not to learn a language.

And regarding the second assumption, external motivators like income or promotion aren’t actually very effective in the long run anyway. As an English teacher and corporate trainer, I observed that most students primarily motivated by the promise of higher pay or a position higher up the corporate latter didn’t have the necessary passion (or time!) for learning the language to show up week in and week out or put in the requisite effort outside of class. Those who excelled tended to love language for language’s sake, and looked forward to using the language to better understand and participate in the world.

One quote in the interview really stood out to me. Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, argues:

“If people are going to get some basic career benefit out of it, or it enriches their personal life, then foreign language study is great. But if it’s a language that doesn’t really help their career, they’re not going to use it, and they’re not happy when they’re there, I really don’t see the point, it seems cruel to me.”

I completely agree! But forcing students to learn a foreign language in school doesn’t mean they can’t learn them outside of school. And when one has a choice whether or not to learn a language, and what language or languages to learn specifically, it certainly provides much more personal enrichment than mandatory classes. And even better, such self-guided learning can lead to fluency far faster, far cheaper, and with far less frustration than traditional classroom-based language learning.

Here’s the show. Have a listen and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

As language learners, we’re often told that we need to memorize new words followed immediately by memorizing a phrase that uses the word. There’s no disagreeing with the important of seeing new vocabulary in context, but this method does not tell the full story of context and its power.

Some of what follows may seem a bit brainy and conceptual, but stick with me for a moment because understanding context more fully can change how you study your dream language. First off, it’s important to realize that learning words out of context is technically impossible. There is always context and you cannot learn even your first word of foreign language vocabulary without it.

Why? Because whenever you learn a new word, you’re learning it in the field of your mother tongue. Your mother tongue is a very important context because it’s like a comparative software database that sits in your brain pumping out computations every time you learn. “Maintenance” in French is like “maintenance” in English, only the sounds are different.

Or there may be limited or “false cognate” associations between two words. “Attendre” in French looks like “attend” in English, but the meaning of the words are quite different (the difference between waiting for something or someone and showing up at a concert). Either way, whether you are comparing or contrasting new vocabulary words, your mother tongue is the ultimate context in which the process of learning occurs.

Why does this matter?

Because the context of your mother tongue and understanding that this primary language is a kind of “software” installed into the foundation of your mind is where the power lies when it comes to quickly learning and memorizing new vocabulary.

Hacking Context

The language – or languages you already know – is a primary basis for association when learning foreign vocabulary. At some level your mind will always make associations, but you can hack this natural impulse by self-consciously guiding the natural capacities of your imagination using mnemonics or “memory tricks.”

A lot of people resist memory techniques for language learning because they think there’s too much work involved. Index cards and spaced-repetition software seem more concrete and direct and rote learning-based drills are deeply familiar to us from years of school.

However, what if I were to tell you that you could “download” new vocabulary words and phrases so that you can see them immediately in context quickly, reliably and even addictively?

That would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

Here then is an example of how you can use the context of your mother tongue to quickly learn and memorize a new word.

“Der Zug” is the German masculine noun for “train” in English. “Zug” sounds like “zoo” with a “g” at the end, so to help you memorize this, you could see a gorilla installing a “g” at the end of the word “zoo” at your local wildlife park. You would make this image large, bright, colorful and filled with zany action.

In other words, the gorilla wouldn’t just be putting the “g” at the end of “zoo” in a calm and polite manner. He’d be doing it in a frenzied manner, perhaps because the zoo police are after him (and ideally they’re about to arrive using the zoo’s train to help compound the meaning that you’re trying to associate the sound zoog/Zug with the meaning of “train.”

All of the images in this example rely upon using English, not German, as a primary context. We are playing with the foreign language word in the sandbox of my mother tongue, and if you’re playing along, you’re integrating and absorbing “der Zug” into your mind using imaginative play.

Dealing with Gender in Context

I mentioned that “der Zug” is a masculine noun. How on earth are you going to memorize this important aspect of the word with so many other images already going on?

Simple.

Put a pair of boxing gloves on your gorilla. Or anything you associate with masculinity. Maybe he’s got a cigar in his mouth, a moustache or some other stereotype (I’m sorry, but memorizing foreign language vocabulary is not place to be politically correct …)

The best part is that once you’ve chosen an imaginative indicator of gender, you can stick with it and use it again and again for every masculine word you encounter and want to memorize using a mnemonic strategy.

For some people, this might seem like a lot of work and I’ll admit that what I’m suggesting certainly isn’t a magic bullet.

But with a small amount of practice, mnemonics work gangbusters for learning and memorizing foreign language vocabulary. And if you actually found yourself using your local zoo to generate the image I’ve suggested for memorizing “der Zug,” then you will experience an interesting side-effect that you can exploit whenever you are memorizing foreign language words.

Location, Location, Location

When you try to recall the meaning and sound of this word, your mind actually knows where to go to look for images you created. This is the mnemonic principle of using a familiar location. There are ways to get even more systematic with mnemonics so that it’s even easier and more effective to memorize massive amounts of vocabulary in a very short period of time based on the principle of location, so it’s well worth looking into these special methods.

Zoog/Zug in a Phrase

Now let’s look at “der Zug” in the context of a phrase. Although you’re now going to see and memorize the word in the context of German, you will still be consciously using the context of your mother tongue to “encode” the phrase into your mind.

And let’s stick with the local zoo so that we also have the “context” of a location that will allow us to visit the mnemonic imagery we’ve created, substantially increasing our chances of recalling the sound and meaning of the phrase with ease.

“Der Zug ist abgefahren” means that the train has left the station. You can use the phrase literally or your can use it to mean that someone has “missed the boat” or that an opportunity has been missed.

You’ve already memorized “der Zug,” so it’s now just a matter of memorizing “abgefahren” (to depart). I suggest that you practice the principle of “word division” here by splitting “abgefahren” into “ab” and “gefahren.” Just as you can use a figure like boxing gloves to always remember when a word is masculine, you can repeatedly use a certain figure to remember how certain words begin.

In this case, lets use Abraham Lincoln for “ab.” The first thing that comes to my mind for “gefahren” is an image of Forrest Gump running far with the letter n tucked under his arm like a football because he’s late for the train. And Abraham helps him out by throwing the train from the zoo(g) at him so that he won’t miss it (remember, zany and weird images work best because they stand out in your mind).

Abraham Lincoln + Gump + running far with an n = abgefahren.

Der Zug ist abgefahren.

Got it.

In conclusion, I’m suggesting that you combine contexts: the context of the language itself by following up your memorization of a new word with the memorization of a phrase, but also the primary context of your mother tongue. Instead of thinking of new language learning as a process of “addition,” we can think of it as “embedding” new words like seeds into a field of rich dirt that already understands how to connect, differentiate and absorb. All we need to do is consciously manipulate our natural powers of association to bring a massive boost to our language goals.

As a final note, I’ve suggested to you some images in this article that are meant as a guide to making your own mnemonics. Because you serve as the best possible context (the movies you like, the places you’ve been, the specific ways you use your mother tongue), it’s important to draw upon your own inner resources. Relying on yourself will not only make new vocabulary words and phrases stick out like a sore thumb in the context of your mind, but drawing upon your own life will also make you more creative. The more creative you are, the more readily you can make images for memorizing more vocabulary words and phrases. Used well, context is a truly perfect circle.

The Internet has blessed modern language learners with unprecedented access to foreign language tools, materials, and native speakers. Assuming they can get online, even a farmhand in rural Kansas can learn Japanese for free using Skype, YouTube, and Lang-8. But language learning luddites and technophobes scoff at these modern miracles. Like Charleton Heston clutching his proverbial rifle, they desperately cling to tradition for tradition’s sake, criticizing these modern tools—and the modern methods they enable—from their offline hideouts. Communicating via messenger pigeon and smoke signals no doubt…

“Technology is for for lazy learners!” they exclaim. “Real language learners”, they insist, use the classroom-based, textbook-driven, rote-memory-laden techniques of old.

I call bullshit.

Given how ineffective these traditional methods and materials tend to be for most learners, I can only assume supporters do so from a place of masochism, not efficacy. Perhaps they feel that the more difficult their task, the more bad-ass they become if they manage to succeed despite less-than-optimal methods, materials, and tools.

These voices seem to be loudest in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese language learning circles, which should come as no surprise since these two languages are often considered “extremely difficult” and teachers of these languages tend to be most stuck in tradition and unwilling to embrace change. Personally, I don’t consider any languages difficult per se. Just different. This may be mere semantics, but one’s attitude toward a language plays a major role in one’s ability to stick with it long enough to reach fluency. Think about it: even supposedly “difficult” languages like Japanese, for example, pose many advantages for native speakers of English, including:

• A massive head start in vocabulary acquisition. Japanese contains a mother load of English loan words. When in doubt, just pronounce an English word with Japanese pronunciation and changes are good you will be understood. If that fails, just write down the English word on a piece of paper and they are likely to recognize it. Why? Throughout middle school, high school, and university, Japanese students must memorize thousands of English words, but the focus is on reading and spelling, not spoken English. So most folks can recognize English words when written down but probably won’t register the same word spoken aloud. Yet another reason why traditional language education approaches fail…

• Few new sounds & one-to-one pronunciation. English speakers already know how to make nearly all the sounds in Japanese. You just have to learn the Japanese ‘r’ and ‘ts’ sounds. Also, each kana in Japanese can only be read one way, unlike English letters—for example, English’s notorious ‘e’—that can represent numerous sounds.

• No need to change verbs based on the subject. Unlike most European languages, Japanese does not inflect verbs to agree with the subject pronoun. “I go”, “You go”, “We go”, “They go”, “He goes”, and “She goes” are all ikimasu (行きます・いきます).

But the linguistic masochists of the world don’t want to talk about such advantages because it threatens their egos and their “I study hard therefore I am” ethos.

There’s nothing wrong with studying your butt off. But make sure your efforts are applied to methods that actually work like spaced repetition systems, imaginative memory, mnemonics, and pegging, and materials you truly enjoy like podcasts, YouTube, blogs, anime, and manga. Why cling to expensive, outdated methods when free, modern options exist?

First of all, make sure that you’re using a good way to measure your actual—as opposed to perceived—progress. I suggest recording an unrehearsed audio or video diary at least once a week, and writing a daily journal. Both of these active output tasks are far better measures of your fluency than multiple choice tests, and best of all, encourage you to do the very tasks that lead to conversational fluency.

Assuming your progress tracking tools are not the issue, here are five likely reasons you’re not improving as quickly as you’d like:

1) You’re not putting in the requisite hours each week.

The most common reason we fail to progress in any skill based endeavor is that we simply don’t spend enough time on task. It’s all too easy to log in 40 hours a week marathon viewing Breaking Bad, but how many hours a week do you honestly spend hearing, speaking, reading, and writing your target language? As an experiment, jot down how many minutes or hours you spend studying or immersing in a language each day for a week and then tally up your results. Even the most diehard learners may be surprised how little they spend each week. This is but one of the highly under-appreciated components of child language acquisition. They have no choice but to immerse in their first language throughout the day, and end up spending an enormous amount of time in their first few years of life sucking up the language around them. Before you say “children are better learners than adults”, try spending the same number of hours they do actively acquiring the language. If you did, I bet you’d learn even faster than the little ones.

2) You’re spending too much time reading and not enough time listening and speaking.

Although reading skills are extremely important, many learners (especially highly educated adults) fall into the cozy trap of reading far more than listening or speaking. I get it. Reading is safe. There’s no messy two-way communication to deal with. No chance that people won’t understand you, laugh at your mistakes, or give you chicken feet when you wanted fried chicken. But realize that reading does very little to improve your listening and speaking skills. You’ve probably encountered non-native speakers of English who can read The New York Times without much difficulty but can barely order a coffee to go along with the paper.

3) You’re not engaging in “deliberate practice”.

Podcasts and YouTube are great, but passive input alone is not enough. To make quick, tangible progress in a language, you have to engage in deliberate practice every day:

• Stay on target. Deliberate practice requires a high level of motivation and intense, constant focus on your specific goals. If your goal, for example, is to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, ignore (or at least minimize) reading and writing tasks for now until you’ve reached your objective.
• Get immediate feedback on your performance. Deliberate practice requires immediate feedback on your performance in the language. Have your friends, tutors, or teachers jot down mistakes you make and go over them one by one once you finish your sentence.
• Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. Deliberate practice requires that you get repeated exposure to the same words, kanji, phrases, structures, topics, etc., especially those that prove most difficult for you. If you already know something frontwards and backwards, there’s no reason to waist valuable time reviewing it again. Spaced repetition systems (SRS) like Anki and Memrise are a great way to automatically schedule reviews based on difficulty and the time since your last exposure, but just like the reading trap I mentioned above, make sure that you are not spending more time doing Anki reps than you are actively listening and speaking your target language.

4) You’re not hungry enough for it.

Aside from using archaic methods and boring textbooks, there’s a major reason why most folks don’t learn much in their high school Spanish class: the class is mandatory. If you had been given the choice to learn more “exotic” sounding languages like Japanese or Chinese in school, I bet you would have been more motivated to learn and retained much more of what you studied. Choice is a powerful motivator. I’ve taught thousands of adult English learners over the past 10 years, and have observed two overarching trends:

• Even after years of study, students in mandatory English classes (whether at school or work) seldom make any real progress.
• Those who did excel had strong internal motivation. Even if they didn’t have to learn English or weren’t offered free classes by their company, they would have chosen to do so at their own expense.

5) You don’t have a clear purpose for learning the language.

While there’s nothing wrong with learning a language just for spits and giggles, you probably won’t progress very quickly if you’re just learning as a casual pastime. If you’re serious about making rapid progress, you must make the language your top priority, and create extremely “S.M.A.R.T.” (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. “I want to be fluent in Japanese”, for example, is not such a goal:

• It’s not specific. “Fluency” is a very broad concept. Do you mean oral fluency or literacy? Do you mean fluency in a wide range of topics or just for your specific professional needs and personal interests?
• It’s not measurable. Not only is “fluency” difficult to define, but it’s also extremely difficult to measure. Sure, you can use standardized tests like the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), but it is better at measuring your test taking ability and how much information about Japanese you’ve memorized, not your actual ability to use it day to day.
• It’s not attainable. If something can’t even be defined or measured, then how can you ever attain it?
• It’s not relevant. This goal is so large and vague that it has little impact on the day to day activities required to improve your fluency in Japanese.
• It’s not time-bound. There is no finish line in languages. Even native speakers continually expand their vocabularies and refine their communication skills, so by definition, this goal is not time bound is therefore not helpful for our purposes.

Photo courtesy of Ivana Vasilj via Flickr Creative Commons

Charlemagne, also known as “Pater Europae”, famously said:

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”

Beyond the soul, languages are good for the mind, too. A 2011 article published on Livescience.com showed that learning a new language can protect our brains from developing Alzheimer’s disease, improve cognitive skills, and keep our minds sharp.

The good news: Thanks to the latest mobile technologies, language barriers are starting to fall. Google Translate’s Phrasebook, for example—a highly-recommended application by Verizon—facilitates communication and helps people learn and remember useful foreign phrases.

The bad news: Despite the neural benefits of learning a foreign language and the many advances in language learning technologies, most people still struggle to learn languages, held back by the myths like “only children can learn a foreign language well”.

In this article, we’ll bust the age myth, along with four other frequent offenders.

Myth 1: “I’m too old to learn a new language.”

People usually think that kids have more flexible brains, which can soak up more information than adults. This is a myth. According to many studies, adults can actually learn new languages more efficiently than children. Thanks to the adult’s mature learning system, they can understand complex grammar structures and memorize new vocabulary far more quickly. It’s never too late to learn something that can help enhance your life.

Myth 2: “Mistakes don’t matter.”

Committing mistakes is a natural, unavoidable part of the learning process. Moreover, you will usually still be understood even with grammatical mistakes if your pronunciation is good and there is a clear context. And even if they don’t understand you, they will appreciate your effort.

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to fix your mistakes. One of the best ways to improve mistakes is to record yourself talking about a particular topic or event, and then have a native speaker transcribe what you said, highlighting mistakes in your grammar, vocabulary usage, and pronunciation.

Myth 3: “I’m not a fast learner.”

Everyone has their own set of learning curves, and it’s true: learning a new language can be “challenging”, though not necessarily “difficult” if done correctly. In the past, teachers used older methodologies that made adult students more anxious and less motivated to learn new things. But thanks to modern teaching techniques, anybody can learn a significant amount of functional language in a few weeks or months.

One such technique is mastering a small set of basic phrases first. For example:

“I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me.”

“Do you speak English?”

“Where is the bathroom/toilet?”

“I understand. / I don’t understand.”

These examples represent many of the top 100 words, which are frequently used in everyday conversations.

Myth 4: “You will learn a language automatically by living abroad.”

While immersion is an essential part of learning a foreign language, the fact is that living in another country alone won’t automatically turn you into a fluent speaker. Some immigrants to the Unites States, for example, have learned that just living in an English speaking country isn’t enough to transform them into fluent English speakers. Without concerted effort, living in a foreign country will likely only lead to mastery of very basic phrases you need to survive, broken sentences, and bad grammar.

On the other hand, with enough effort, you can immerse yourself in language right here in your home country. If you’re learning Japanese, for example, look for a native speaker in your own area who can really teach you. Watch foreign movies or television programs to practice your listening skills. Practice speaking and writing until you reach conversational fluency, and then go abroad to polish your skills and aim for native-like fluency.

Myth 5: “English is the language of the world. Learning a new one isn’t important.”

Only 5% of the world population speaks English, while 95% speak another language. Learning another foreign language, aside from English, is recommended and it can be a fulfilling experience. It helps you understand different cultures, keeps your mind engaged, and you become an asset to your workplace.

As the world becomes more digitally connected, we become more exposed to different languages. From the comfort of your own home, you can easily learn a new language through the Internet, television, and even books. In the end, you’ll gain more and be able to connect with other cultures.

The following guest post is by Matthew Pink, a writer and editor working in digital publishing. He covers topics including media education, music and sound. You can find out more about his work and his new crime e-novel ‘Scafell’ at www.matthewpink.co.uk

Learning languages is a multi-faceted process. Nowadays they would probably call it holistic. Or 360. Or something.

But what I mean is that there are many different channels you can use to absorb the language which then enable you to reproduce it when the situation requires.

There is the bread and butter of vocabulary learning which you simply have to integrate into your daily routine. There is grammar and syntax to think of – this is best taught and then practised until trial and error gets you to a place where you can slip clause A into hole B with confidence. Then there is form and function to mull over – when is it appropriate to use what tone and what style of formality. Then of course there is pronunciation to consider – making sure you are understood.

Naturally these different facets are variously served by blends of active and passive learning.

Through the passive consumption of audio content (as it is now so-called), language students can absorb all these different facets through listening and comprehension exercises. These exercises, if structured correctly to include active task-based learning, are a great way to consolidate and strengthen the base layer of knowledge of the target language.

However, I actually want to propose a method which turns this on its head a little bit and make a case for an active learning task which I have found particularly useful in the past. This is the production of a short radio drama through a short workshop (a little like this one). This was an especially stimulating exercise for me because it combined so many of cultural passions – sound, music, drama and speech. When you can harness a student’s interests to language learning, you often find it to be the most dynamic and productive of learning periods.

Let me set the scene a little bit.

In our particular case we were given the outline of a situation ripe with conflict – an awkward dinner party conversation between a father and his teenage daughter where the overly defensive mother is also present and trying to mediate between the two firebrands of her family.

We had to put together a 5-10 minute sketch in the target language which would work as a piece of radio drama. The facilitator gave us a box of goodies with which to create whichever sound effects we would need to create to accompany the awkward conversation. We were to create the piece together, rehearse, and then record it for reference.

Firstly, between the 3 of us, we thought how the conversation might pan out between the father and daughter. We decided that the daughter was going to tell her father over dinner that she was pregnant by her boyfriend (of whom her father was not keen at all). There was to be some skirting around the subject by the daughter, some awkward silences, some tension-raising screeches of glasses and scuffs of chairs on the floor and then finally an explosion of rage from the father which we wanted to cut off just as the detonator went off (for effect).

We then noted this down in rough form in the form of a rough script, allocating one character’s voice to each of us and we imagined what we might say in that character’s position.

Where we could we tried to write the script in the target language but mostly we wrote in our native tongue and then translated afterwards. This seemed to work well.

Interspersed between the lines of dialogue we were instructed to use sounds to replace the ‘unsaid’ where the answer to a question might not be a directly verbalised response but instead the shifting of a glass, a nervous cough, or the scrape of a chair.

We then rehearsed and, from the practice session, we were able to edit the sections which didn’t work. On top of this we improved and honed the translations to make them more realistic.

We then completed another practice run-through and, when everyone was happy with their sections, we recorded it.

The great advantage of this particular task was that it made us think about all of the different facets – accurate (and realistic vocabulary), correct grammatical construction, hitting the right tone and pronouncing effectively so that, when the recording was played back we didn’t all cringe in embarrassment. (OK, well we did a bit because it is always like that when you hear your own voice!). With the fun that comes with the introduction of sound effects to enrich the piece, the task becomes refreshing as well as constructive.

Things to remember for the set-up of the task:

Fortunately, there are three guaranteed, certifiable, kid-tested, mother-approved ways to improve how fast you learn, how much new information you retain, and how well you perform in a foreign language: 1) get adequate sleep, 2) eat right, and 3) exercise regularly. “Gee thanks Captain Obvious.” Yah, I know, nothing groundbreaking here. But as I’ve researched and experimented with what exactly constitutes high quality sleep, good nutrition, and healthy exercise, I’ve been amazed how wrong (and even dangerous) most mainstream health advice tends to be. Case in point:

• Saturated fat does not cause heart disease and is in fact one of the most important fatty acids. Guess what? Butter is health food!

• Dietary cholesterol has little impact on serum levels so avoiding cholesterol rich foods is idiotic even if you buy into the highly flawed “lipid hypothesis” of heart disease.

• Vascular inflammation is the real issue in heart disease; high cholesterol is but a symptom. As Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, puts it:
  

  “Just as a large police force is needed in a locality where crime occurs frequently, so cholesterol is needed in a poorly nourished body to protect the individual from a tendency to heart disease and cancer. Blaming coronary heart disease on cholesterol is like blaming the police for murder and theft in a high crime area.”

• More cancer is caused by under exposure to the sun than over exposure. Vitamin D deficiency is an extremely widespread health problem, made even worse by our indoor lifestyles and overuse of sunscreen (which often contains known carcinogens and prevents the skin’s vitamin D production system from kicking in).

Okay, enough ranting. Back to the language-health connection.

Get Enough Sleep

Most modern humans are severely sleep deprived, both in terms of quantity and quality. Instead of going to sleep when it’s dark and waking up when it’s light as we evolved to do, our natural circadian rhythms have been reset by high-stress lifestyles, artificial lighting (especially the blue light of TV and computer screens), alarm clocks, and regular over-consumption of sugar, starches, and alcohol.

In addition to hurting our ability to learn (our brains encode and store new information while we’re conked out during the night), sleep deprivation also hurts our performance while we’re awake, including our performance in skill-based endeavors like language. As John Medina shares in his excellent book Brain Rules (quoting a study on the performance of soldiers):

“One night’s loss of sleep resulted in about a 30 percent loss in overall cognitive skill, with a subsequent drop in performance. Bump that up to two nights’ loss, and the figure becomes 60 percent.”

And the negative effects of sleep loss are not just from pulling all-nighters:

“When sleep was restricted to six hours or less per night for just five nights, for example, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivations.”

So obviously sleep matters a great deal in learning and performing in a language. And yes, foreign languages are a performance. So what can we do to get more sleep and improve the quality of whatever hours we do get?

Eat Right and Exercise Enough (But Not Too Much)

Duh, right? Well, it may be obvious that we should eat right and exercise to stay in shape, but did you know that what you eat and how much you exercise also significantly impacts your ability to fall asleep (and stay asleep)? To ensure a smooth trip to La La Land, avoid consuming caffeine, sugary foods, and alcohol in the evening (or better yet, altogether). And contrary to popular belief, alcohol actually hurts the quality of your sleep. Try caffeine-free hot tea instead of booze for your night cap.

We’ll discuss exercise more in a minute, but I want to briefly mention it here given its effect on sleep. If you’re having trouble falling asleep at night, one surefire solution is to engage in some short, high-intensitity exercise a few times a week such as sprints and weight training.

Don’t watch TV right before bed

I know, I know. Everyone likes to enjoy their favorite shows before turning in for the night. But beware that the blue light from your television, computer, mobile device or iPad actually tricks your brain into thinking it’s daytime. Combine this with the emotional impact of the programming itself, and it can become difficult to doze off even after pushing the off button.

Take Naps

Most of us get a bad case of “the sleepies” in the mid afternoon. We usually write this off as a product of our heavy lunch (and food does definitely play a part in energy levels), but the afternoon yawn is actually caused by the temporary stalemate between “two armies” as John Medina puts it, the body’s “Process C” (the “circadian arousal system” which wakes us up and keeps us awake) and “Process S” (the “homeostatic sleep drive” which puts us to sleep and keeps us under). If you want to have peak performance throughout your day, don’t fight the urge for an afternoon siesta.

Eat What You’re Evolved to Eat

About the worst thing you can do for your brain performance and overall health is consume foods you are not evolved to eat. And in today’s world of ubiquitous sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, processed and packaged foods with ingredients we can’t pronounce, feedlot raised animals fed diets even worse than ours, mass-marketed “health” foods that are anything but healthy, and a propensity for eating all these wannabe foods while on the run, it can be quite a challenge to consistently put the right kind of fuels in your body.

With a little research, planning, and discipline, however, it is very possible to eat well day in and day out. But I warn you now: proper nutrition will require changing some common misconceptions about what is actually “healthy”. Here is a quick list of what to avoid:

Sugars, Starches & Alcohol

As a general rule of thumb, try to avoid all white-colored foods and food ingredients (white sugar, white flour, white tubers, etc.) as they spike your insulin and signal your body to store energy in fat cells instead of burning the fuel you eat or carry in your love handles.

In addition to weight gain, high blood glucose levels also negatively effect the performance of the hippocampus, the brain’s center for retention and recall. I love gummy worms as much as you, but they aren’t exactly brain food.

And speaking of brain food, you may have heard that we have to eat carbs because the brain burns glucose. It’s true that our gray matter can use glucose as fuel, but it actually runs better on ketones, which our bodies naturally produce on lower carb, higher fat diets (which, by the way, is what our ice-age evolved species has survived and thrived on for the vast majority of our history). Moreover, our livers can create all the glucose we need from protein through a nifty process called gluconeogenesis.

Grains

Although grains, especially the “whole grain” variety, have been touted for decades as “healthy”, they are anything but good for us. Not only are they high in insulin-spiking carbohydrates, but they they also contain heaps of harmful anti-nutrients like gluten, gliadin, lectins (a sugar-binding protein that wreaks havoc on the gastrointestinal tract), and phytates. If you are consuming grains for their fiber, you can easily get the same (if not greater) benefit from just eating leafy green vegetables, especially considering the damage grain fiber does to intestinal microvilli (the little hair-like structures in the intestines that allow healthy individuals to absorb nutrients). We have only been consuming grains for roughly 10,000 years (the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms) and are most of us are not evolved to process them efficiently as fuel. Read Mark Sisson’s article Why Grains Are Unhealthy for more on this highly under-appreciated topic.

So if these yummy ingredients are off the table, what should we eat? It’s pretty simple: eat the two things humans are evolved to eat: plants and animals. Or to call on Mark Sisson again:

“Plants (vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and herbs and spices) and animals (meat, fish, fowl, and eggs) should represent the entire composition of your diet.”

For maximum health benefits and brain function, choose the following kinds of plants and animals whenever possible. They may cost more in the short-term but the long term health benefits will be well worth it!

Organic, Local-Grown Fruits & Vegetables

Buying organic helps ensure that you will not be consuming toxins harmful to your body and brain. This is especially important for fruits and vegetables that are consumed whole, skin and all like berries, apples, lettuce, bell peppers, celery, broccoli, etc. Buying local minimizes the impact on the environment and actually creates healthier, more nutrient-dense foods since they ripen on the stem, not in air-conditioned, chemical laden trucks, ships, or airplanes.

Wild-Caught Fish

We all know by now the importance of omega-3 fats, and that salmon and other fish are excellent sources of the stuff. But not all fish are created equal! Most fish you see in the grocery store have been farm raised, reducing the quantity of omega-3s and lowering the overall nutritional value of the fish. Add to this the many ways that farm fishing harms wild fish populations and the choice becomes clear.

100% Grass-Fed Beef

If you don’t eat meat for spiritual or moral reasons, then I won’t push the point any further. But if you are avoiding the stuff on health grounds, you need to update your knowledge. Beef can actually be a very healthy addition to your diet, but it needs to be the right kind of beef. Just as humans get fat when they eat the wrong things, so do cows. When fed a diet of corn and soy instead of the wild grasses they are evolved to eat, a cow’s omega-3 to omega-6 body fat ratio becomes skewed in the wrong direction, producing higher concentrations of omega-6s, exactly the kind of fat you want to avoid. Grass-fed beef on the other hand has much higher percentages of our hero, omega-3, giving you a similar health benefit to eating salmon!

Pasture-Raised Poultry & Eggs

Our little feathered friends are evolved to eat insect-centric omnivorous diets, not the vegetarian diet of corn, soy, and grain they are usually fed today. Feeding them this way leads to the wrong ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats in meat and eggs, not too mention the cruel living conditions that go with it. Whenever possible, try to find “pasture raised” chickens and turkeys that are free to eat worms, bugs, and other slimy creatures they are meant to eat. Their bodies, and by extension, your’s, will be all the healthier for it. And before you raise your hand in protest about the fat and cholesterol in eggs, here is Mark Sisson again to the rescue, quoting the Framingham Heart Study, the longest and most comprehensive epidemiological study of all time:

“There is no correlation between dietary cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol levels. Framingham residents who ate the most cholesterol, saturated fat, and total calories actually weighed the least and were the most physically active.”

Exercise = More Blood to Your Brain

Along with eating right and getting enough sleep, exercise completes the brain health trinity. Sadly, most modern humans fall into one of two extreme camps: zero exercise or chronic exercise. Neither of these are good for us, and both will negatively effect your brain health. I don’t think anyone needs much convincing that some exercise is good for us, but for those who don’t believe there is such a thing as “too much exercise”, I highly suggest reading Mark Sisson’s article Why You Shouldn’t Burn More Than 4,000 Calories a Week Through Exercise.

Here now are but a few of the many brain benefits reaped through regular physical activity:

Increased Blood Flow to and Within the Brain

More blood means more oxygen for hungry brain cells and reduced damage from “free radicals”. This all adds up to improved memory and overall cognitive function.

Increased Neuron Creation

Studies show that exercise, not just exposure to new information as you would expect, increases brain cell production.

Increased production of BDNF

In addition to being a freakishly long word, “Brain-derived neurotrophic factor”, is one of the key chemicals involved in the formation and preservation of brain cells.

Increased Brain Stem Cell Activity

Research at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine shows that exercise moderates the activity of bone-morphogenetic protein (BMP), which reduces stem cell responsiveness in the brain. Within a weeks’ time, BMP levels were halved in lab mice that ran on a wheel, and an opposing protein aptly called “noggin” increased. As a result, the mice displayed remarkable adeptness in cognitive tests.

Improved Mood

Exercise increases the production of endorphins, helping you feel good no matter what may be happening around you, and improves the brain’s ability to produce and process dopamine, so you feel good longer.

Improved Discipline

Every time you exercise despite really not feelin’ like it, you strengthen your self-discipline, meaning you are more likely to spend time that day on working your foreign language muscles, and perhaps even physical muscles, too.

So there you have it. Sleep. Eat. Move. Three simple (though not necessarily easy) steps to improve your brain fitness and supercharge your foreign language learning endeavors. Vroom, vroom!

Trying to maximize fun in language learning is only for lazy learners. Using free web tools like Skype, podcasts, and YouTube to practice foreign languages is only a fad. Using modern crowd-sourced tutoring services like Lang-8, RhinoSpike, LiveMocha, and LingQ are terrible because only those with a PhD are qualified to identify errors in your speaking or writing.

Sorry folks, but the only way to learn a language is attending expensive classes, taking standardized tests, studying complex grammar rules, and memorizing long lists of out-of-context vocabulary. Real language learners know that the process must be painful, tedious, expensive, and time consuming to be legitimate.

Oh, I almost forgot. April Fools!

And here’s the trailer for The 4-Hour Chef:

1. Bilingualism improves executive function, especially in children.

“Executive function” is an important function in the brain that governs such activities as planning, controlling impulsivity, and staying focused for a task until completion, while discarding irrelevant information. Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame published an article in the journal Science which focused on the way that bilingualism greatly enhances executive function. This is especially true of children, and the improved executive control is greater the more truly fluent an individual is in both languages.

2. Bilingualism may reduce the chances of dementia later in life.

Of course, although our focus here is children, knowing two or more languages can have lifelong benefits. A recent University of California-San Diego study, cited in this New York Times article, found that those with “higher degrees” of bilingualism experienced the onset of dementia and other Alzheimer’s symptoms much later in life. Bilingualism is basically thought to engage the brain in such a way that it keeps it “in shape,” as it were.

3. Bilingualism has a much greater influence in the workforce than you would think.

When I first graduated from college, the job market was particularly rough. My peers and I all struggled to find work that fit our skills and interests. But you know what? I’m not exaggerating those who found work more quickly all had one thing in common. We were all multilingual from an early age. Don’t just take my word for it, however. Check out this Brain Track article, which explains the growing demand of bilingual workers.

4. Bilingualism improves memory.

You probably don’t have to be told that having a good memory is advantageous. After all, so much of what we do, whether at work or school, is dependent on having a sharp memory in order to succeed. Several studies, like this one, have demonstrated that bilingualism has a profoundly positive effect on episodic, semantic, and working memory.

5. Bilingualism fosters a greater and more sensitive understanding of the world.

We can talk all day about the positive effects bilingualism can have on an individual. But ultimately, what bilingualism comes down to is something more than just the sum of its attendant benefits. It’s all about understanding the full spectrum of diversity in this world, and knowing on a deep and visceral level that everyone is different. Grasping that the world both within us and around us can be interpreted and described in different ways helps children grow into mature and caring adults.

Raising bilingual children, especially if you aren’t necessarily bilingual yourself, of course, can be difficult. If either you or your partner knows a different language well, try speaking the other language on a daily basis. Consider enrolling your child in a bilingual school, or one that strongly supports bilingual education. Hiring a nanny or babysitter who only knows another language is another great way of introducing your children to the wonderful world of bilingualism. Whatever you do, make learning a second language a priority. It might just make or break your child’s future.

Can you suggest other ways bilingual skills can benefit children? Leave a comment below.

Source: http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/bingualism-across-us

Estelle is a writer interested in a wide range of educational methods. Having played several instruments and been exposed to many art forms in her childhood, she finds that solving the education puzzle today requires more than simply a large budget. She currently writes and researches about online education.

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci stated that language is always closely related to culture and ideology. For that reason, the primary reason for which many are opposed to the linguistic hegemony of English is not because they are fundamentally opposed to the language itself, but because they see it as a means by which the English-speaking world is engaging in neo-colonialism. Where the English language goes, cultural perceptions and ideologies from English-speaking countries follow, reshaping the cultural landscapes of various countries in ways that some see as an affront and a marginalization of their own cultures. One of the main areas in which this is an issue is in the world of education and academia.

In many disciplines, the best and brightest students throughout the world feel that it is necessary to learn English if they want to excel professionally. For this reason, many top-level schools hold all of their classes in English regardless of where they are located. For example, the China Europe International Business School one of the top business schools in China holds its classes exclusively in English. If ambitious students do not learn in English speaking schools, a growing number of the best online colleges are offering supplemental English courses.

According to Professor Yukio Tsuda, an unavoidable effect of the expectation that all learned people must be able to speak English well is the assumption that anyone who does not speak English well is uneducated and unintelligent. This can result in an unfair marginalization of various professionals, experts, educators, and researchers who have stellar credentials in their particular fields but simply lack linguistic skills in English.

Those speaking other languages may have trouble getting their scholarly works published and distributed through the most esteemed venues of the world, and any achievements they make may not receive the renown or attention they would receive if their findings were simply published in English. One might argue that the obvious recourse for such people is to pay someone to translate their works into English. However, that only fixes one aspect of the problem. With English standing as the world language for both business and academia, such people are also hampered in their ability to network and establish the personal relationships of trust and respect that are often so vital to success.

In late 2011, President Hu Jin-tao of China published a controversial essay in which he highlighted what he saw as a culture war between China and the West primarily with the English-speaking world. Hu identifies the United States like the United Kingdom before it as a force that “exploits its strength to export cultural products throughout the world.” He likened these cultural products to opium. While his pronunciations were geared toward a general audience, the implications on the world of education were particularly clear.

As long as countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and India which has now all but made English its primary language continue to be regional and world economic powerhouses, English will continue to be the international language of choice for business. As long as the United States and other English-speaking countries continue to flood the world market with movies, music, books, and other media products that people all over the world enjoy, professors in humanities and social science programs will continue to feel required to address them as parts of their own cultural canon. And as long as the scientific community continues to use English as a lingua franca to communicate among multinational peers, scientists of all fields will feel obligated to become proficient in English.

Hu Jin-tao, Yukio Tsuda, and others may be incensed at the prospect of another century of English hegemony in education, but so long as the economics are there, these trends will continue.

However, language schools can also be a major impediment to the very goal you go there to achieve: learning a foreign language as quickly and efficiently as possible. This may come as a shock to those who have been conditioned to believe that classrooms are the only place, or at least the best place, to learn a language.

Here are the top ten disadvantages of formal, classroom-based language learning (at least in my view):

1. You don’t need a teacher or school to learn a foreign language

There is an important distinction to be made between learning and schooling. Those who believe they need formal training in a language are making the false assumption that the two are one and the same. To reach fluency in a language, you need to acquire a great deal of tacit knowledge, that special kind of internalized, experience-based information that you may not be conscious of. The sad truth is that most teachers focus on explicit knowledge (e.g. facts about the language such as grammar rules), which has very little to do with one’s ability to speak a language. Explicit knowledge is easier to teach and test, however, which probably explains why it makes up the bulk of school curricula.

2. You don’t need to “study” grammar rules

At some point in history, the education establishment convinced society that they needed to be “taught” languages. This was quite an amazing feat considering that all human beings are endowed by evolution (or God if you prefer) with the ability to automatically acquire any language they hear in adequate quantities. The problem for most learners (and the reason they buy into the “I need more schooling!” mentality) is that they never get an adequate quantity of language input. The irony is that this input deficiency is often caused by the very classes that are supposed to provide it. With a focus on memorizing grammar rules, most learners end up spending the vast majority of their time learning about a language instead of actually learning the language itself.

3. Tests and grades do more harm than good

Ideally, formalized testing and grading systems motivate students by providing competition and objective feedback. In reality, however, most grading is far from objective (teachers tend to reward students they like and penalize those they don’t), and tests do little more than demonstrate one’s ability to memorize facts. Feedback is important, but it needn’t be in the form of traditional testing or grades. Ask your teachers to evaluate your performance by giving specific examples of things you said right or wrong, not with multiple choice tests.

4. Classes go as fast as the slowest person

The bigger the class, the wider the range of abilities, and the slower the class will have to go. Schools know that students are more likely to stick with something too easy but will quickly throw in the towel if something is too difficult. And despite placement tests and numerous class levels, it can be very difficult to appropriately group students by their actual skill in the language. With finite time slots mutually convenient for all students in a given group, some students will inevitably be placed in classes that are above or below their actual ability level. Also, placement tests come with the same problems mentioned in # 3: they test one’s memory and knowledge (especially of the written word).

5. Reading out loud does not improve your pronunciation or speaking ability

Teachers often have students read out loud to allegedly “practice pronunciation.” The truth is that your pronunciation improves only from massive amounts of listening input and speaking output. Reading aloud does little more than show what words you are unfamiliar with and often reinforces mispronunciations instead of fixing them. While some teachers genuinely believe in the read aloud method, others just use it as a zero prep activity to count down the clock.

6. Oral drills do not help you learn how to speak; they only demonstrate your ability to do so

Just as reading aloud does not improve your pronunciation or reading skills, oral drills do little for your speaking fluency. We improve our speaking ability through increasing the quantity and quality of listening input (e.g. podcasts about your favorite topics), and then applying what we have heard in natural, contextualized conversations.

7. You will be encouraged to move up to the next level even if you aren’t ready

This is all about business. Schools make more money when you buy new books, take level tests and re-enroll in more classes.

8. Your progress reports are meaningless

Teachers hate writing progress reports. They are usually an exercise in creative writing, not meaningful feedback on your actual performance and progress in the language. Not knowing what to say (and not wanting to waste time on a task they don’t get paid for!), many teachers will just cut and paste canned comments, or come up with general, vague statements and overly technical descriptions of your grammar and pronunciation problems.

9. You should be the one who chooses the material

Despite being widely used, standardized textbooks are bad tools for a number of reasons. They build on the myth that schooling equals learning, as discussed in # 1 above. They lull students into a false sense of accomplishment, where completion of chapters is confused with actual internalization of the content. And with content written not to entertain but to avoid offending anyone, they are typically boring and sterile. Interest in the material is essential for effective language learning, so make sure to choose schools or teachers that allow you to choose materials that float your boat.

10. It doesn’t take years to learn a foreign language well if you do it right

If you like the language you are learning, believe you can learn it, and get as much listening and reading input as possible, you will learn the language well enough to communicate in a matter of 6 months to a year. Most students, however, end up paying tuition for years and years despite a lack of progress. Students blame themselves (backed up by the bogus comments found in their progress reports), not realizing that the problem lies not in them, but with their school’s materials and methodologies.

Common Misconceptions

Argument 1:

Chinese characters are really, really difficult; it’s easier to learn how to speak first.

Argument 2:

Chinese and Japanese children learn Chinese characters more easily than foreign adults because they already speak the language and therefore have more to attach the characters to.

Argument 3:

Most adult learners can get by without reading and writing; it is the spoken language that matters most.

Argument 4:

Most signs in China and Japan have Romanized Chinese and Japanese (i.e. Pinyin and Roumaji), so foreigners can get around without knowing Chinese characters.

Argument 5:

It takes a really, really long time. If it takes native Chinese and Japanese children all the way through high school before they learn all standard use Chinese characters, it will likely take non-native adults even longer.

Okay, on to the shredding…

Rebuttal to Argument 1

Chinese characters are not difficult if you go about learning them in an un-stupid way that exploits (instead of ignores) the adult brain’s full potential for creative thinking and association.

Rebuttal to Argument 2

Chinese and Japanese children don’t learn Chinese characters easily. They learn through pure rote memory (the same method Japanese teachers and textbooks expect us to use), arguably the most painful and inefficient way to learn just about anything. The difference is that Japanese children don’t really have a choice. Learn Chinese characters or fail school, let your parents down, and end up an unemployed looser drinking cheap baijiu or Ozeki One-Cup saké by the train station…

Rebuttal to Argument 3

The spoken language is indeed extremely important. And yes, many learners (especially the Chinese and Japanese themselves) focus entirely too much on the written word at the expense of their oral skills in foreign languages. But I cannot tell you enough how important literacy is in Chinese and Japanese:

• Reading opens up a massive pool of potential language learning material, including some of the world’s best literature.

• It allows you to read the transcript of things you listen to, a practice that creates new connections faster than a media whore on Facebook.

• Being able to read and write Chinese and Japanese makes you far more employable than only speaking the language.

• And hey, nothing impresses the Chinese and Japanese more than foreigners who can read and write Chinese characters. You shouldn’t let it go to your head of course, but you can channel that positive energy into acquiring more of the language.

Rebuttal to Argument 4

Pinyin and Roumaji are false friends. Yes, it may help you take the right exit off the highway or get on the right train before your Chinese characters are up to snuff, and yes, they are what you will likely use to type Chinese and Japanese on your computer or mobile device, but they are not a replacement for learning Chinese characters. Knowing at least the meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters will allow you to read real Chinese and Japanese, live and work in China or Japan with greater ease, and darn it, just flat enjoy learning the languages a heck of a lot more.

Rebuttal to Argument 5

If you use the efficient, adult-friendly method I recommend below, you can learn the the meaning and writing of all standard use Chinese characters in a matter of months, not years or decades as is usually the case with rote memory.

How to Learn Chinese characters

So now that I have hopefully convinced you that learning Chinese characters is both worthwhile and not as impossible as often thought, let’s get into how to learn them as quickly, efficiently, and enjoyably as possible.

Use “imaginative” not rote memory.

Despite it’s common use, rote memory is a terrible way to learn Chinese characters, especially for adults who have better tools at their disposal, namely, what is called imaginative memory. The method, used in James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Hanzi, involves creating unique, vivid, emotional, altogether wacky stories that help you remember the meaning and writing of each and every Chinese character. Instead of trying to remember a more or less arbitrary slew of strokes (ridiculously difficult) you just have to remember whatever story you created (waaaay easier). This may seem like an extra step to those just starting out with Chinese characters, but believe me, it will end up saving you heaps of time and frustration in the long-run.

Use spaced repetition.

Back in the 1960s, cognitive psychologists, linguists, and memory researchers proved what every elementary school student has long known: we forget new information really freaking fast unless it is repeated. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we remember information for progressively longer and longer periods of time upon each re-exposure. With this in mind, a number of language learning systems and flashcard tools have been developed (including Anki which I discuss below) that repeat target words, phrases, and yes, Chinese characters, in increasingly longer intervals. Just when you are about to forget a Chinese character, boom, the spaced repetition system puts in front of your face, urging your brain to store it in ever longer memory.

Study Chinese characters right before bed and upon waking.

Studying new Chinese characters right before bed is ideal because our brains consolidate new information while we sleep. Whatever you see or think about right before this neural housekeeping session has a better chance of sticking. Furthermore, I find it to be a rather relaxing practice that actually calms my mind and helps me fall asleep. Studying first thing in the morning not only solidifies what you learned last night, but also ensure that you get in some study time that day no matter how crazy your day becomes.

Take it slow and steady.

As in all skills (and tortoise-hare parables) slow and steady wins the race. You may be tempted (especially in the beginning) to rush through as many Chinese characters each day as possible. But you will soon realize that studying more kanji or hanzi everyday does not automatically equate to actually learning more. Take your time with each character. Make sure you have truly committed its meaning and writing to memory before moving onto the next.

Be consistent.

Pick a set number of chracters to learn every day (I recommend 10 in the beginning moving up to 30 as you get into the flow of things), and stick to this goal like super glue. Make a deal with yourself that you can’t go to sleep until you’ve learned your daily dose. Or allow yourself that special naughty delight (beer, chocolate, an episode of Dexter) only once you have reached your daily chracter goal.

Take it bird by bird.

It is all too easy to get intimidated (and depressed!) by Chinese characters when you focus on how many you still have to learn. The key is to focus not on the distance between here and your final goal, but just one (and only one) character at a time. This psychological tool is put into words best by Anne Lamott in her must-read book on writing and life, Bird by Bird:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Recommended Materials and Tools

Last but not least, here are my recommended Chinese characters learning tools. Before spending any time or money on any of these, however, make sure you are properly motivated to learn. Even the best tools in the world matter not if they sit on the shelf unused.

Remembering the Kanji 1

If you get only one Chinese character learning tool, this is the one to get. The subtitle to James Heisig’s kanji classic reads “A Complete Guide on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters”. And that is exactly what the book does; it provides a systematic, adult-friendly way to learn the the basic meaning and writing of all 1,945 standard use characters plus 97 additional characters for common people and place names. By design, book one does not teach you how to pronounce the kanji, a comparatively more difficult task covered in book two. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Remembering the Kanji system, but Heisig defends his approach well:

“One has only to look at the progress of non-Japanese raised with kanji to see the logic of the approach. When Chinese adult students come to the study of Japanese, they already know what the kanji mean and how to write them. They have only to learn how to read them. In fact, Chinese grammar and pronunciation have about as much to do with Japanese as English does. It is their knowledge of the meaning and writing of the kanji that gives the Chinese the decisive edge.”

$34. 460 pages. Available on Amazon.

Remembering the Hanzi (Simplified or Traditional)

For Chinese learners, you can choose between two options depending on whether you are learning traditional or simplified Chinese characters. Regardless of whether you study traditional or simplified characters, keep in mind that there are two books, each covering 1,500 characters (for a total of 3,000).

$29 for each book (pages vary). Available on Amazon.

Remembering the Kanji 2

Once you have learned the meaning and writing of all standard use kanji, it’s time to tackle their myriad readings. Contrary to popular belief, this component of Japanese is far more arduous than learning to write the kanji themselves, but again, Heisig comes to the rescue with his second book, Remembering the Kanji: A Systematic Guide to Reading Japanese Characters.

Most Japanese kanji have two kinds of readings: those of Chinese origin called on-yomi and those of Japanese origin called kun-yomi. Kinder kanji have just a few readings, while other less friendly characters have dozens of variant readings, each with their own unique meaning. I’ve looked far and wide for alternatives, but this book still represents the most efficient way to learn all these various readings without going crazy or pulling a wakizashi across one’s gut…

$27. 397 pages. Available on Amazon.

Remembering the Kanji 3

For the eager beavers who complete books one and two and are still hungry for more, check out Heisig’s third book, Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency. This volume goes through the meaning, writing, and reading of 1,000 additional characters needed for university study and specialized academic or professional pursuits.

$32. 430 pages. Available on Amazon.

Skritter

This is one of my favorite new iOS apps. Check out my review to learn more.

Remembering the Kanji iOS app

Until this app came along, I used to recommend James Heisig’s Kanji Study Cards, a complete (but enormous) set of cards designed for reviewing all the information covered in Remembering the Kanji 1 and 2. But no longer with the introduction of this life (and back!) saving app, which covers all the same ground and then some.

$4.99. For the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Available on iTunes.

Anki

Some people love flashcards, others think they are the root of all evil and should be banished to the whatever level of hell holds Hitler. I personally find them a useful addition to (not replacement of) authentic content like podcasts, blogs, television shows, etc. And when it comes to Japanese flashcards, there is no better tool than Anki, a name which literally means “memorization”.

Free for Mac, PC and Android. $24.99 for iOS. Download here.

Now Go Get “Kanjing”

Alright folks, you now have the tips and tools you need to kick kanji’s keister. Now get out there and accomplish in a few months what usually takes foreigners and Japanese children alike over a decade. Happy Kanjing!

Who Contributed to The Polyglot Project?

This tome of language learning awesomeness contains over 500 pages of advice, tips, and success stories, with contributions from 43 authors, including:

Who Created The Polyglot Project?

The book is the brainchild of Claude Cartaginese of Syzygy on Languages, who also edited the work. In his own words, The Polyglot Project is:

“a book written entirely by YouTube Polyglots and language learners. In it, they explain their foreign language learning methodologies. It is motivating, informative and (dare one say) almost encyclopedic in its scope. There is nothing else like it.”

Where Can You Get the Book?

The Polyglot Project is available as a free PDF or as a physical book via Amazon. You can also download a PDF of just my section if you prefer.

It is true that some westerns could be completely stumped by tones, and just not get the language at all. But, a person who already speaks a tonal language does not have an advantage over a westerner or a Korean or Japanese who is intelligent, motivated and who is trying to learn tones. Remember that a Cantonese or Mandarin speaker has mastered the tones of his or her language, not the tones of Vietnamese. Saying that someone from a tonal language would have an advantage is like saying people from languages with words, or sounds, or verbs or adjectives would have an advantage.

Mastery of a particular language is based EXCLUSIVELY on your mastery of THAT language, not other languages. If you know tones in one language, you still need to learn the specific tones for the new language you are studying.

Next, people who were more language-savvy suggested that both the Chinese and  Korean students would have a huge advantage because of all of the Chinese cognates between Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. But in my class, I have noticed the Chinese and Koreans don’t even hear or notice the cognates. I help Schwe Son translate his homework every single day and he never sees the cognates. The Koreans are the same.

In addition to not having a particular advantage, our Chinese classmate, Schwe Son (not his real name) seems to have a number of special problems because of his Chinese mother tongue. For example, we learned the words for “half a million.” But in Chinese, there is no word for a million. They count by ten-thousands. So, a million is 100-ten-thousands. Schwe Son pointed at the Vietnamese words for half a million, nửa triệu, and asked me to translate. I translated it into Chinese, literally, “Half of 100-ten-thousands.” The look on Schwe Son’s face was as if he had just seen me defecate in a frying pan. “Why don’t they just say 50-ten-thousands?” He asked. He had a point.

The old Vietnamese word for Burma is ‘Miến Điện’ the same as in Chinese. But now the Vietnamese have created a Vietnamese spelling for the countries new name of Myanmar. Most languages and most countries move toward not changing country or city names, but just spelling them in their own language. This is why Beijing is now Beijing in English, instead of Peking. But Chinese cannot move in that direction, as it is impossible to spell foreign words with Chinese characters. As a result, many Chinese place names are outdated. Or, they have to create a totally new word, which may or may not be recognizable as the place it relates to.

So, in class, when we encounter a country names that are instantly recognizable for western or Korean students, the Schwe Son needs a translation. Afterwards, the translation has no real meaning for him. He just has to memorize it, although it doesn’t relate to anything.

We have only had eight days of class so far, but have already encountered a lot of Chinese cognates. The word for ‘a shop’ which I learned in Hanoi was ‘cửa hàng’. But here in Saigon they say ‘tiệm.’ this is a cognate from the Chinese, ‘Diàn’.  And yet, when we came to this word, Schwe Son asked me to translate. I said, in Chinese, “tiệm means Diàn.” Schwe Son simply said, “OK.” And immediately wrote the Chinese character in his notebook. There was not even a flicker of recognition.

List of Chinese and Cognates from the first eight days of class (I have only listed modern Mandarim cognates. If I were to list ancient Chinese cognates (similar to Korean and Cantonese cognates) the list would be much, much longer.)

Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language, in spite of having so many Chinese cognates. Chinese is a single syllable language, with a lot of compound words. But Mon Khmer languages have multi-syllabic words. The Chinese student is having a lot of difficulty with the pronunciation of multi-syllabic words.

Possession in Khmer, Vietnamese, and English can me made, using the verb, “to belong to”, as in, ‘the book belongs to me.’ But most languages don’t have that construction. Neither Korean nor Chinese has it. (It exists in Korean, but no one uses it). So, they were all having a hard time understanding the concept of, “book belongs to me”, “sách của tôi”. The Chinese student kept pushing me for word-for-word translations. But obviously, there was no way to translate this word-for-word. I could only translate the meaning. In Chinese, “This is my book.” But then he would flip the book to the previous day’s lesson. “I thought this phrase meant ‘this book is mine’.” He said. “Yes,” I said. “The meaning is the same, but the wording is different.” “OK, so what is it in Chinese?” He asked again.

Schwe Son realizes he needs to improve his English in order to get through his study of Vietnamese language. So, every day, in addition to translating his homework into Chinese, he asks me to translate it into English for him. And this creates a whole other set of problems.

In Vietnamese there is a word for the noun, “a question.” ‘câu hỏi’ And the verb, “To ask” ‘hỏi’ is a related word. The noun, “answer” ‘câu trả lời’ is also related to the verb “to answer” ‘trả lời’. But in English, obviously, the verb, “To ask” is unrelated to the noun, “a question.”

“Open and close your book” in Vietnamese is exactly as it is in English. Meaning the same words “open and close” could be used for the door or a drawer or a crematorium. But in Chinese, the words for “open and close your book” are unrelated to “open and close the door.” I translated for him, and he understood what the phrase ‘open your book meant’ in Chinese, but it was a completely unrelated phrase, that had no meaning and no connection to anything else for him. For the rest of the classmates, once they learned ‘open and close’ they could apply it to anything. But for Schwe Son it was one isolated piece of linguistic noise.

There are so many aspects to learning a language: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, usage, and many more. Although an argument could be made that a student with a given native tongue may have an advantage in one area, he or she may have other areas with particular difficulties.

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, your brain needs time to get used to the patterns and phonology of the language. 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 already have fully developed brains and don’t have to wear diapers) gives adults a major leg up on babies learning their first language. For more on the many advantages adult learners have over children, read this excellent article by Benny the Irish Polyglot.

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 to start speaking; and speaking a lot. But be careful with the “I’ll wait until I’m ready” approach, especially if you are a shy perfectionist. If you fall into this category, years or even decades may pass before you feel “ready”. Depending on your temperament and how many hours you spend a day with the language, a few months, weeks, or even days should arm you with enough exposure to start communicating.

And by all means, if you want to start speaking day one, go for it! Just don’t feel obligated to do so, and don’t let yourself be forced by a tutor or teacher as this often leads to a fear of speaking later on and negative feelings toward the very language you aim to learn.

To get started in a language, 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. Read the dialogues out loud if you want to get your mouth used to the sounds, but keep in mind that you will be mispronouncing things for a while until both your ears and mouth get used to the language.

And I suggest avoiding textbook companion CDs as they tend to offer overly stilted, monotonous dialogues that aim to teach a particular grammar point at the expense of natural communication.

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

Once you have gone through a few days, weeks, or months of listening and reading this way, start mixing in equal amount of output activities (speaking with friends or tutors, writing a blog post in the foreign language, etc.). It may be nerdy, but it’s a good idea to literally use the stop-watch feature on your iPod touch or phone to time your input and output activities each day. As Peter Drucker says, “What gets measured gets managed.”

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. But by the same token, don’t miss chances to speak with natives speakers out of fear you won’t be able to communicate. You’d be amazed how much you can communicate with a few words, body language, drawings on a napkin and animated gesticulation…

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 has a chance of performing in the language (and yes, language is a performance). 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.

Joseph Gustav is a guest blogger for Pounding the Pavement and a writer on call center management for Guide to Career Education.

More and more, it is becoming extremely beneficial to know a foreign language in today’s tough job market. Any kind of edge helps now more than ever in this economy, and one of the most sought-after and respected skills that can give you the upper hand is knowing a foreign language. Having expertise in another language only opens up more doors and opportunities — and offers more perks at those jobs.

If you need more convincing, read on for these reasons why a second language will positively impact your career.

Foreign languages are in demand.

The world is becoming a smaller place, and as such, it is important for companies to be able to communicate with clients or constituents in their native languages. For people looking into business-oriented endeavors, Chinese and Japanese are highly sought after, and for those working in social services, being able to speak Spanish will give them a huge leg up.

It shows ambition and aptitude.

Even if you are not applying for a position that will require you to use your language skills, it still looks excellent on a resume. It proves you had the ambition to undertake such an intense, time-consuming endeavor, and have the aptitude to learn something that is so difficult for many people. Plus, there is still the beneficial stigma that people who speak foreign languages are more intellectual and better educated than those who do not, so that certainly won’t hurt either.

Face less competition.

In a tough economy, successfully finding work is often all about having skills others don’t and being able to fill niches others can’t because of a lack of skill and experience. With a foreign language under your belt, you’ll be able to fill niches the majority of jobseekers will not, and so will have less competition to face and better chances at landing a position as a translator, teacher, copywriter, or any other of a multitude of jobs that require expertise in a given language.

Open up new doors.

Conversely, just as the competition will thin out, the number of positions you will be able to fill will only grow exponentially as you will be able to apply for the positions you did not have the required language skills for previously. When looking for work, it is essential not to limit your opportunities so as to give yourself the best chance to find enjoyable (and good paying) work. Broaden your horizons and your career opportunities by learning a new language.

Be an essential team member.

While working as part of any team within your new position, you will be an integral and respected member as your language skills will be necessary to success. Relish being a key player at work and having an essential helping hand in all projects you are involved in.

Increase travel opportunities.

If your company needs to send someone to meet with clients in a foreign country but no one speaks the language well except you, who do you think they are going to send? With a foreign language under your belt, particularly one in high demand areas like Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese, you will increase your chances of having your company pay for you to visit the places you have always dreamed of visiting. Hopefully you’ll be able to sneak away a minute or two to see the sights and practice your language skills with the locals.

Consider the words shoe and happy. Are these English words difficult? To you and I, these terms are probably as easy and basic as they get. But what about for a 6-month old American child? Or what about for a hunter-gatherer living deep in the Amazonian rain forest who has never heard a word of English spoken or seen any English writing? For both all English words are more or less difficult, or rather, “unfamiliar”.

And that right there gets to my basic contention. There are no “difficult” words in English or any human language; there are just those words that are familiar, or as of now, unfamiliar to you.

Consider the words vapid and insipid. If you are well-read or have just studied for TOEFL, you are probably familiar with the words and would not consider them difficult. But if you were to poll the average American high school student, they would probably not know the meaning of either word despite the fact that neither represent advanced cognitive concepts (and in fact have the same basic meaning of bland, flat, dull or tedious), have few letters, and are easy to spell. These words aren’t difficult; they are just uncommon and therefore perceived as difficult to the uninitiated.

I do concede, however, that there are some words that are difficult to pronounce in certain languages. One prime example came up yesterday as I was discussing different types of cars with my girlfriend (she has just moved to Seattle and is quickly realizing how lame our public transportation system is compared with Taipei hence the need for a car). I was explaining the pros and cons of front wheel drive cars and rear wheel drive cars, when I suddenly realized what a mouthful “rear wheel drive” is when said many times fast in quick succession. The combination of R’s, L’s and W’s requires quite a bit of tongue and lips movement and can quickly wear out the mouth muscles. Similar challenges are experienced by Mandarin Chinese learners when trying to wrap their mouths around “retroflex” sounds like zh, ch, and sh, that require bending the tip of the tongue back towards the top of your mouth.

But just as the pronunciation of words that you once found hard to produce get easier and easier to say over time, so too do once “difficult” words that become clearer and clearer every time you hear, say, read or write them. And that right there is the key to learning words (and the languages in which they rest): exposure and practice.

The trick to learning a language is to actually learn the language.

This may sound obvious, but it points to the fundamental (and so often under-appreciated) reason why most adults fail to learn a foreign language no matter how many years they sit in a classroom or live where the language is spoken:

Most adult learners spend nearly all of their study time reading and learning about their target language, with very little time truly listening to or reading in the language.

If you doubt this, you need only look at a typical foreign language classroom, textbook, audio CD or podcast intended for native English speakers: with a few exceptions, nearly all of them present 75 to 90% of the course in English, not the target language. The same is true across the globe, though is perhaps most pronounced in Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea where materials intended for English learners are nearly all in Japanese, Mandarin and Korean respectively.

This approach is certainly more comfortable for adult learners (and therefore allows publishers and schools to sell more courses), but it is a recipe for failure. Just look at how few people emerge from years or even decades of formal language study unable to say more than “My name is…” or “One beer, please.”

You can study grammar rules and memorize vocabulary until you are blue in the face, but this will do little for your ability to actually speak the language. Researchers like Victor S. Ferreira (Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego) have shown that this is due to a significant difference in memory types: most formal language study focuses almost entirely on “declarative memory” (e.g. information and facts), while the ability to actually form grammatical sentences off-the-cuff is determined by “procedural memory”, the same mechanism that allows you to drive a manual transmission or swing a golf club without “thinking” about it. (See How Does the Brain Form Sentences? in the April 2009 edition of Mind Magazine and don’t miss my interview with Dr. Ferreira, available as a free bonus to Master Japanese readers). If you are terrible at a foreign language (or golf for that matter…), it’s not because you are stupid or uncoordinated, it’s simply because you haven’t practiced enough yet to develop the necessary procedural memories.

Or as Khatzumoto of All Japanese All the Time so eloquently puts it:

“You don’t suck at the language; you’re just not used to it yet.”

1. Why the classroom is a less than ideal place to learn.
2. The importance of short, frequent exposure to the language.
3. Using reading to back up your listening activities.
4. Using spaced repetition to maximize retention.

The following post is by Khatzumoto of All Japanese All the Time and is republished here with his permission. Khatzumoto’s posts are funny, pragmatic, and the product of someone who actually practices what they preach. Enjoy!

OK. Everyone knows that quote by Woody Allen or whoever about showing up. You know, 70% of winning is showing up. Well, Woody Allen, that daughter-dating scoundrel, lied to you. The truth is 70% of winning is showing up is a bunch of bull!

Because, in fact, 100% OF WINNING IS SHOWING UP. I mean it. Thats all you have to do. Show up. Be there. And it will take care of itself. Have you ever noticed that people at the top of their respective fields are often the most prolific? Do you think this is an accident? Chief, this is not a coincidence. Sure, there are exceptions. But take TEZUKA Osamu (手塚治虫), one of the most prolific manga creators in history. Ask yourself, was he prolific because he was good or good because he was prolific? I say the latter. Shakespeare wrote quite a bit of noss, too. Michael Jordan and Larry Bird practiced like absolute fiends; we shouldn’t insult them by attributing their skill to race, height (MJ was below NBA average, by the way) or even talent until we’ve spent at least as much productive court time as them. Let me put it this way: assuming you are able-bodied, if you worked as hard as an NBA player for as long as an NBA player on basketball, you would be an NBA player, but only if you worked as hard. That Pavlina chap has like a kajillion articles on his blog: he didn’t make it off one post. More on topic, the best group of Japanese speakers on the planet, a group many call the Japanese, just happen to spend more time hearing and reading Japanese than any other group. They’ve “shown up” to Japanese as if it were their job or national pastime or something. But there’s nothing special about this group of people; when a Japanese person speaks Japanese to you, what she is demonstrating is nothing more than the result of dedication, albeit often unwitting dedication. Whether you are Japanese by default (born and raised in Japan) or by choice, it doesn’t matter, your path and your task are essentially the same: show up.

I’m from Kenya. Sure, we have a snow-capped mountain, but we don’t have real snow or ice or anything. Yet I learned to ice-skate last year. Do I have some talent for ice-skating? No. But I read up on Wayne Gretzky and how he had ice-skated every day (4-5 hours a day), how his dad had made him a home rink and everything. Apparently, he even had his skates on while eating dinner (he’d wolf down that Canadian food they fed him, and then he’d go back outside; he skated for hours every day, and went pro at about 17). I’m not an ice-hockey expert, but it seems quite clear to me that Gretzky made himself a great hockey player purely through ice time; that man showed up on ice for more hours than any of his peers. So I tried to model the man in my own small way, and ice-skated almost every day (4 days/week minimum, 2 hours per day sometimes 3 hours, sometimes 90 minutes) for two straight months (November and December). Now I can ice-skate. It wasn’t magic. The combination of being on the ice all the time and the people who saw me on the ice all the time and decided to give me some pointers, and this burning desire to not be out-skated by 6-year-olds (freaking toddlers giving me lip and having the skill to get away with it over my dead body, man, over-my-dead-body), all that combined to make me a competent skater. No one who sees me knows it’s been less than a year since I actually learned to skate. I can barely even remember what it was like when I used to walk around that rink holding onto the wall for dear life. (For the record, the first time I touched the ice was in August 2002 at a mall in Houston, Texas. The second time was in December 2002 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In both cases, I didn’t actually know how to skate, and nothing carried over to my ice-skating project that started in November 2006). Anyway, the point is, after being on the rink all that time on a daily basis, Greztky or no Gretzky, it would be hard not to learn how to skate. When you show up, it’s hard not to succeed. With all the time I spent hardcoring on Japanese, it would be a struggle not to be fluent.

Today, all over Japan, Greater China and the world, kids are being born. OK, admittedly not that many kids (haha, gotta love that population shrinkage humor! *wink* *nudge*), but they are being born. Those kids are going to know Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese. But not because of parenting or genetics as such, but because they’re going to show up. They’re going to be surrounded by Japanese/Chinese 24/7/365.24219878. Are you going to let them beat you? Babies? Freaking BABIES? Beat YOU? Are you going to take that? You, a human being with a marvellous working brain capable of learning whatever is given it? And you’re going to let babbling, drooling half-wits (sorry, babies, don’t take it personally) beat you? If not, then get up off your rear and start doing all [language] all the time!

I’m going to take a leap here and tell you what I really think: I don’t believe in prodigies. I do not believe that any person holds a significant advantage over you; I do not deny the possibility that some people may have an advantage over you, but I absolutely reject the idea that that advantage is significant. I explained this in “You can have, do, or be ANYthing, but you can’t have, do, or be EVERYthing.” I think people invented the idea of prodigies in order to excuse themselves and their own children while seeming to congratulate the receiver of the title “prodigy”. It’s much easier on everyone’s egos to say “I or my child cannot do thing T like person P because person P has some semi-magical genetic superpower” than to say “I or my child cannot yet do T like P because I have not yet worked as hard W as P”. This is why Buddhism, which started off as a personal development movement, metamorphosed into a religion. Why be like Mike or Siddharta, when you can just sit back and worship them? Why work on your jumps, when you can watch the fruits of Michael’s work on his? Why free your own mind, when you can look up to someone who’s already freed his? It’s a very aristocratic idea that has no place in a true meritocracy, but the very people who are screwed over by it (regular folk like us) are at the same time very much in love with it: If there are prodigies, no one will call us out for not trying because they’re not trying either, and because we have created a condition that can only be fulfilled by accident of birth, our excuse is airtight: we can go about being mediocre for the rest of our lives, blameless.

Gretzky, Jordan, these people worked harder at their sports than you and I. So they started working earlier than you, this doesn’t make them prodigies, child or otherwise, this just makes them people who started earlier (and not even that early, Jordan famously got cut from his HS basketball team). To admit that they were not prodigies, to admit that they busted their little behinds to get where they were (no matter their age), does not make them less. To me, it only makes them more; it makes them greater. These were not superhumans. These were normal humans who made themselves super; they were not given a legacy like a Betty Crocker cookie mix that just needed eggs and milk, they made one from scratch. And that, to me, is something (someone) infinitely greater.

Bruce Lee is reported to have said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

A lot of times, we judge people (including ourselves), we call them (ourselves) “normal”, “prodigy” or “challenged” based on their first try. On their FREAKING first try. Don’t EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER judge yourself on your first try. At least wait until your 10,000th.

Don’t buy into all this kafuffin about how you have to start golf or violin or a language in the womb if you ever hope to be good. The only real reasons that there aren’t many late bloomers are money and flexibility. Money to buy equipment and time to practice, and flexibility of the mind a willingness to learn and grow, to accept change and, yes, even to accept sucking for a while.

Adults have this competence fetish; they cling desperately to their dignity like a little boy to his security blanket; they want to be good at everything they do, and (they think) everyone expects them to be good at anything they do if they are to do it at all adults are meant to be dignified and able; adults aren’t allowed to show ignorance or confusion. Well, forget that crap. Let go of your pride: you will suck at anything you are new at and little kids will be better than you. It’s okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be those kids used to suck, too. Sucking is always the first step on the path to greatness; it’s not a question of how many times the earth has made a full rotation around the sun since you were born; it’s a question of what you’ve done during those rotations. As my gamer friends might say “all who pwn must first be pwned”. And the time to be pwned is at the beginning. You are a noob, accept it; it’s not a death sentence, it’s just a rank you can win yourself a promotion.

The fact is, you are a human. Compared to other animals, you can’t run very fast, you can’t jump very high, you aren’t very big or strong. But you have this thing called a brain. And it’s purpose is to learn to do things new things, things that it didn’t know before. This brain is, of course, connected to the rest of your body so your whole body can join in the fun of learning new things; your body itself is constantly growing and changing. You’re not like a statue, motionless and set in stone, unless you choose to be. You’re not “too old”, it’s not “too late”, who even gave you the right to decide what time was right? I never got that memo! Who died and made you the god of When It Is No Longer The Right Time To Do Something?! Are you going to let your life be ruled by stupid old wives tales and stale folk wisdom? Are you going to fit yourself to bad research results? Are you going to be guided by how things are usually done? Are you going to be a little worker ant and live inside that cruddy little box of mediocrity that the world would draw for you if you would let it? Are you going to just read history or are you going to make it? Are you going to spend your whole life Monday-morning-quarterbacking yourself, talking about what you would do if you were younger? Are you going to live out your own little Greek tragedy, fulfilling everyone else’s lowest expectations of you? I think you know the answers to those questions. So, stop whining, and start doing. Whatever it is. Do it. And keep doing it. As long as you keep moving, you’re always getting closer to your destination.

Nap Hill said it best:

“Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”

This article is copyright (©) 2007 Khatzumoto/AJATT.com and reprinted with permission | May 18, 2010

While the two terms are often used interchangeably, there is actually an important, highly under-appreciated difference between being “efficient” and being “effective”. And this is perhaps more true in foreign language learning than any other endeavor!

Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and a very accomplished language learner to boot, illustrates this point well:

“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”

Obviously it is preferable to be both efficient and effective in language learning. But what is the current situation in language classrooms and materials? A quick look around reveals that despite a fair amount of efficiency, only a very small percentage of learners, teachers or materials could be called effective. Consider the performance of 1,500 French language students in New Brunswick. After 12 years of daily French instruction, only 0.68 percent (that’s not a typo) could meet the province’s intermediate proficiency requirements! (Thanks go to Steve Kaufmann for turning me onto this revealing study). I have seen the same results among nearly all English learners in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan, and foreign language students in the states.

Yet despite all the evidence, people continue to pump time, effort and money into foreign language programs, cram schools, textbooks, and now, online programs that just repackage old methods in new media. It is time that people face up to the facts: traditional, formal language instruction is not effective for the vast majority of learners no matter how efficient or hard-working they may be.

The Effective Language Learner’s Formula

The good news is that there are effective (and simple!) language learning methods, it’s just that very few people actually use them. Here’s the tried and trued formula that is reiterated again and again by the vast majority of successful language learners:

1) Maximize Input

Get as much meaningful and interesting input as possible. “Meaningful” here means that is just an itsy-bitsy bit above your level of comprehension. And the more interesting the material, the more likely you are to continue listening or reading (and repeating the process again and again and again.)

2) Use narrow listening & reading

“Narrow” here means that you listen to or read a variety of articles on the same topic. This allows for sufficient repetition without boring yourself to tears. If you have access to native speakers of the language, you can conduct a simple interview with a few different people. Chances are they will all use a similar set of vocabulary again and again since the context is constrained by the questions you ask.

3) Get a private tutor

Unlike days of old, it no longer matters where you live in the world to learn a foreign language. Countless language sites provide one-on-one tutoring services or you can just chat for free via Skype. Also, most cities have volunteer English tutoring programs in which you can make potential conversation partners in your target language. If you are a university student, volunteer to tutor foreign exchange students learning English.

You’ll notice that nowhere in this formula does it require sitting in a classroom or forcing oneself through a bland textbook. All you need is quality language input, which is now widely available for free (or at least very cheaply) online and can be carried around using a portable media player.

Common Missteps

But one last thing. To make this formula effective, the adult learner must put aside a few counter-productive tendencies:

The Desire to Know Everything Right Now

To be an effective language learner, you must get used to dealing with lots of ambiguity and uncertainty. I think this is why many, though certainly not all, travelers and expats have more success in language learning. By traveling to or living in a foreign land, they get used to (and sometimes learn to enjoy) not understanding the surrounding environment or language.

The Desire to be Perfect

Perfectionists make poor language learners for 2 reasons. First, they refuse to speak or write anything that they don’t think is perfect. While you should indeed wait to speak until you have received sufficient input (the “silent period” as its called by linguists), you need to start talking long before you have mastered the language. Speaking with a native speaker shows you where the holes are in your L2 cheese, and the buzz from communicating ideas, feelings and menu choices in a foreign language can give you the extra fuel you need to keep learning. Second, perfectionists have such an aversion to making mistakes that doing so greatly increases their anxiety and decreases their motivation to continue learning (what Stephen Krashen refers to as as “raising the affective filter”. See The Linguistionary).

The Desire to Think One’s Way Through the Language

Most adults spend too much time thinking about the language. This includes translating back and forth between the L1 and L2, trying to remember and apply grammar rules or vocabulary, and self-correcting mistakes (Stephen Krashen refers to this is as the “Monitor Hypothesis”; see The Linguistionary). Children, on the other hand, do not not consciously monitor their first language, nor could they even if they wanted to. And despite the lack of advanced cognitive abilities, they all master their first language. Why? Because you don’t have to explain how a car works to know how to drive!

Take Action!

1) Buy a portable media player if you don’t have one. The ROI makes it well worth the minimal investment.

2) Find online content you find interesting. With well over 100,000 free audio and video podcasts, iTunes is a good place to start. If you don’t have iTunes yet, go here to download it for free.

3) Read The 4-Hour Workweek to learn more about being both effective and efficient in all aspects of life, and learn how to generate much more of all three life currencies: time, money and mobility.

I believe that grammar based language instruction underpins why so many people hate language learning, and fail to reach fluency despite years of concerted effort.

But I can hear the language “prescriptionists” yelling:

“If people don’t study grammar, how then will they ever learn to speak and write properly!?”

I have a one word answer for them, and I will say it in the Spelling Bee style they tend to love:

“Input. I-N-P-U-T. Input.”

So why is natural input the key to languages and not explicit study of grammar? Again, the answer is strikingly simple:

“Language ability cannot be taught; it can only be learned.”

Most schools, educators, and parents have come to believe that they have to “teach” children both native and foreign languages. This reveals a basic misconception about language, which has been thoroughly debunked by researchers far smarter than I, including Steven Pinker of Harvard, and Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California. In a nutshell, their research shows that human language is an innate physical skill akin to walking. You were not “taught” how to walk; you figured it out through trial and error. Your ability to speak your native language is the same. Native English speakers learn to string sentences together through listening input (which starts in the womb by the way!), not because parents or teachers taught them about “subjects” and “predicates”, the meaning of Latin or Greek word roots, or English case inflections.

Ok, I hear the grammar mavens shouting again:

“So if the grammar-based approach to language learning is so ineffective, why has it survived so long?”

There are many reason for this, including ignorance, arrogance, and tendency to stick to tradition. But perhaps the biggest reason is good old fashioned greed. There is a lot of money to be made selling books, training teachers, running conferences, preparing students for tests, and selling cram school tuitions. (You’ll notice that many of the pro-grammar blogs make affiliate income through links to grammar books, test prep courses, etc.)

Oh, now I hear language teachers shouting (a group of which I am a member):

“Then what are we to teach our students?”

The main tasks of an effective language teacher include:

1. Getting students fired up about the language.
2. Providing a cultural context for the language.
3. Giving suggestions for high quality input resources that fits your student’s interests, ability level and professional or academic needs.
4. Learning your student’s native language (this shows that you are interested in their culture and that it is indeed possible to learn a foreign language well using this approach.
5. Limited explanations about grammar and vocabulary

“Wait a second, grammar explanations!? You hypocrite!”

I include #5 not because it will help students learn the language, but because:

• Most students (and employers!) demand it
• Some people find it interesting (and interest trumps all)
• Many students (especially in East Asia) must pass grammar-based university entrance examinations. Even though it’s an unjust war, you still need to prepare them for battle.

Mind mapping is certainly not a new idea, and many different folks have probably come to it on their own. We owe its popularity, however, to one man: British author, speaker, and memory master Tony Buzan. He is the author of countless books on using mind mapping to improve your performance at school or work, and how maximize one’s memory with both ancient and modern memory enhancement techniques (check out either The Mind Map Book or How to Mind Map).

So What is a Mind Map?

Buzan defines mind maps as follows:

“A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain. It harnesses the full range of cortical skills – word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness – in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain. The Mind Map can be applied to every aspect of life where improved learning and clearer thinking will enhance human performance.”

While I like his definition, I think we can remove the flower pedals and whittle it down to this:

“A mind map is a non-linear outline.”

Instead of listing ideas vertically on one or more sheets of paper, you arrange your ideas on of paper in a web-like structure. It is important to use only one sheet as this forces you to be brief and keep all of the ideas centered around the main idea written in the center. This is a major advantage over using traditional writing which often makes it easy to lose focus on the main idea and get lost in interesting but distracting tangents. Effective mind maps only use one word or phrase for each topic or sub-topic. This is where many people go astray, adding Twitter-like entries for each bubble. It is difficult to do in the beginning, but training yourself to choose one vivid, concise keyword has many advantages:

In addition to keywords, a good mind map makes use of color and images to help stimulate the brain and facilitate fast recall. Don’t worry if you look childish; this is one time when doodling is actually constructive!

How can mind maps used in language learning?

Mind maps are extremely useful for 3 main purposes in language learning:

When listening to or reading an article, you can make a mind map that includes all previously unknown vocabulary. Put the title of the article in the center of the map, and then fan the words around the center. You can then add one-word definitions, synonyms, antonyms, parts of speech, translations, drawings, etc. depending on your learning preferences.

If you are working with your tutor via Skype, for example, you could both view the same mind map using a tool like Tony Buzan’s iMindMap 7 (which is the app I used to create the mind map above). Your mind map can act as both an agenda for the conversation and a visual tool to aid your listening comprehension. After the call, you can refer back to the mind map to quickly review any new language that came up. If meeting a private teacher or tutor face-to-face, you can accomplish the same thing on paper.

And perhaps the most powerful use of mind maps is organizing your thoughts before you begin writing. Here are some of the writing-specific benefits of mind mapping:

Multiple Intelligence Categories

Gardner believes (as do I) that human intelligence is manifested in a number of different forms, including (though not limited to) the following seven categories:

Sadly, traditional education systems focus only on the first two kinds of intelligence, a fact that is especially true when it comes to foreign languages. Nearly all language courses, teachers and materials focus exclusively on linguistic intelligence (e.g. overt explanations of grammar, word usage, etc.). When people claim that they are not good at foreign languages, what I think they are really saying is “I have low linguistic intelligence.” The good news is that it doesn’t matter!

Consider my case. When attempting to convince would be foreign language learners that they too can learn, the reply is usually the same: “You are just good at languages.” In fact, my linguistic intelligence is actually quite low. I have been successful in foreign language learning not because of innate linguistic smarts but because I tap into other intelligences (in my case, musical intelligence, visual/spatial intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence).

Applying Multiple Intelligences in Language Learning

So how then can we apply multiple intelligences in foreign language learning? First of all, you need to identify your strengths and weaknesses. You will then be able to make the most of the former and mitigate the latter. There are countless online surveys you can take to identify your multiple intelligence profile, but I recommend this survey from Literacy Works since it allows you to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 (more accurate than the yes/no questions used on most multiple intelligence surveys you’ll find on the web).

Once you finish all the questions, they will provide a score out of five for each type of intelligence and offers suggested study methods and activities that suite your strongest intelligences. Most of the learning suggestions are related to reading and writing (since the survey is prepared by an adult literacy organization) but you should still be able to take away plenty of ideas on how to apply your multiple intelligence profile to all language learning tasks, including listening and speaking.

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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