• 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! Bot 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.

Case in point: he had long dreamed of trying stand-up comedy, so he actually went and did it instead of just “talking big but acting small” as so many of us tend to do. Despite being his first time on stage, he crushed it in front a packed house of comedy fans in a city known for being notoriously unsupportive of inexperienced comedians. And it wasn’t just his friends that loved the show; the video went viral on Upworthy and currently has more than 47,000 likes on Facebook!

Seeing him living his dream up on that stage made me reflect on the many things I had dreamed of doing but had been too scared or lazy to begin. Inspired by his example, I started improv classes a few months ago and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life! Thank you Joe for the much needed kick in the ass.

What are your dreams? Whether it’s learning a new language, vagabonding across Asia, performing on stage, or starting a new entrepreneurial venture, start today. Don’t wait until “the right time” comes. It won’t.

As Tim Ferriss shares in The 4-Hour Workweek:

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”

I miss you so freaking much Joe, but I am comforted by the fact that you will live on in your daughter Olivia’s smile, in your wife Erica’s laugh, and in the hearts and minds of the thousands you have inspired.

If you would like to help support Joe’s family in their time of need, please follow the link below:

Listen to the Podcast

To stream the show here on the site, just click the arrow below. If you don’t see the audio player, your browser or device doesn’t support Flash. In that case, just click “Download the MP3″ instead.

Download the MP3 Subscribe in iTunes

Susanna’s Story

Susanna Zaraysky was born in Leningrad (now called Saint Petersburg) in the former Soviet Union. As Suzanna jokes in the interview:

“All of my official documents say that I was born in a city and country that no longer exist!”

She moved to the United States at the age of 3, but continued speaking Russian at home. She refers to herself as a “heritage speaker” of Russian, with native level fluency in the spoken language but weaker literacy skills. At the age of 11, she started learning French, going on to do a home stay in Pornichet, France at age 15. During her two months there, she developed strong French skills and an even stronger love of crêpes salées (“savory crepes”).

While in France, she also started learning Spanish (all students in France are required to learn English one other foreign language of their choice), a language she went on to study more intensively when she returned to the states. The language came quickly for her as she had already been exposed to a great deal of Spanish growing up in California, and likely thanks to Spanish’s many overlaps with the French she already knew.

In college, she started learning Italian purely for fun, but opted to study on her own instead of falling asleep in early morning Italian classes designed for complete beginners.

After college, she took up Portuguese for no particular reason that she can remember. A friend suggested Com Licença!: Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers to her, which she used as both an educational tool and sleeping pill. She jokes that despite speaking 7 languages, she finds grammar study quite boring. I definitely second that!

From 2000 to 2001, Susanna worked in post-war Bosnia where she quickly picked up Bosnian. The language’s membership in the Slavic Language family (to which her native Russian also belongs) gave her a big head start in the language.

Susanna’s Language Learning Tips

You have to be willing to take on (and develop) a different personality when learning a new language.

“If you don’t feel open to moving your body in a different way, being a different a person, then that is a surefire way to fail at language learning.”

Use music as much as you can in language learning. It’s not just fun to listen to good music; music actually activates more of your brain than languages and is one of the best ways to improve your pronunciation, accent, timing, and even grammar. Spanish music, for example, is one of the best ways to learn the subjunctive as many songs talk about doubt.

“The reason people have strong accents in other languages is because they are playing the music of the foreign language in the tempo and rhythm of their mother tongue. It’s like dancing the waltz to cha-cha music.”

You can learn any language, anywhere. Use whatever resources are available to you and don’t underestimate your access to foreign languages in your backyard. As Susanna observed in post-war Bosnia, people managed to learn foreign languages using whatever radio or TV signals they could pick up.

“If someone can, in a war situation, learn a language under an extreme amount of duress, and very few resources for obvious reasons, then when people tell me, ‘Oh, I don’t have $2,000 to go to Costa Rica and pay for Spanish classes’, I just want to smack them on the head!”

You of course need to learn a language’s grammar if you want to reach a professional level in a language, but shoving grammar down your throat in the early days is probably not the best strategy for most people. It’s better to get a feel for the language first and develop a strong emotional resonance.

Get as much listening exposure as you can to your target language. This is the way children learn, and adults need to train their ears, too. As Dr. Paul Sulzberger demonstrated in his PhD thesis at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, listening to a language before you begin formal study of its vocabulary and grammar better prepares you to recognize words.

More About Susanna

For more information about Susanna, check out her excellent book Language Is Music: Over 100 Fun & Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages, her YouTube channel, and her website, Create Your World Books.

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?

I started the Language Mastery blog in April 2009 with three primary goals:

To dispel widespread, insidious myths about language acquisition.

Especially the motivation-crushing triumvirate:

1. “I’m too old to learn a foreign language”
2. “I don’t have time to learn”
3. “I’m just not good at languages, so why bother?”

To share time and sanity-saving tips I’ve learned as both a language learner and teacher.

I’ve been learning and teaching languages off and on for well over a decade, and in that time, I’ve observed a few key patterns that separate the many who fail from the few who succeed. The number one thing?

Attitude trumps all. If you’re fired up enough to learn the language and truly believe you can:

• You’ll find the time no matter how busy you are
• You’ll find target language input no matter where you live
• You’ll practice speaking with native speakers no matter how stupid you feel

To help adult learners select kick-ass materials relevant to their goals, interests, and learning styles.

While methods matter, choosing the right materials is far more important. You may follow the latest, greatest, research-based methodologies, but if your materials are so boring or unrelated to your life that you never crack the book or load the app, it’s all for not.

“What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong materials, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.” ~Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Chef

I’ve written many posts on these topics so far (see the Start Here category for my favorites), as well as pouring my soul into the ever-evolving Master Japanese guide (up to 539 pages as of writing), but I know there are still many questions I’ve yet to answer, holes I haven’t yet patched in, materials I haven’t yet reviewed, methods I haven’t yet discussed, and probably some emails from you that managed to slip through the cracks (I do my best to answer every email I get by the way, but Gmail’s over-zealous spam filtering means I occasionally never get emails from folks not in my contacts).

So here’s what I need from you. In the comments below, please share:

• Specific topics you’d like me to address or expand upon (language learning, specific languages, linguistics, travel, culture, etc.)
• Language learning methods you’d like me to cover in more detail or test out on myself (I’m always happy to be a Guinea pig in the name of science!)
• Language learning materials, tools, books, sites, apps, etc. you’d like me to review
• Polyglots, bloggers, authors, researchers, teachers, etc. you’d like me to interview
• Anything else you’d like to see more or less of on the blog

 If you’re not comfortable leaving a public comment, feel free to email me instead (hopefully the Google gods let your message through!)

Onwards and Upwards,

John