The Linguist - language learning should be fun

My European trip part 2

The old part of Brescia was pleasant to stroll around, older buildings sprinkled with small bars and restaurants. There were mainly younger people about, enjoying the Sunday evening. Dinner is not until 8.00 in Italy, so we began with a drink and snacks at a bar. Our waitress was delighted to practice her English on us, and of course was immediately introduced to LingQ and given a card.

We then moved on to dinner, at a small restaurant which the hotel had recommended. The food was a little disappointing, a little heavy, too much butter. My preference is for that kind of Italian food which uses more olive oil. However, our head waiter made up for the deficiencies of the cuisine by his dramatic and theatrical presentation of the menu. In fact the whole atmosphere in the restaurant reminded me of a theatre play. We were the first to arrive for dinner and we caught the restaurant staff finishing their meal, sort of like catching actors on the stage in final preparation for the night's show. Soon after we arrived and sat down, more customers came in. Our head waiter took his oratory from table to table, and the guests soon started playing their assigned roles of talking with a great deal of animation and doing a lot of gesturing and gesticulating.

The next morning we went to visit the company which manufactures the equipment that we were interested in. The founder and president of the company had developed the technology over 20 years and had at times thought of giving up. Finally in 2000 his fortunes improved as the interest in small scale power generation from biomass received more attention and support from various European governments. Since then his sales and staff had grown dramatically. This gave me some encouragement for LingQ, where we have been working for a long time and hopefully a breakthrough awaits us.

Over the next few days we traveled by car and plane to different sawmills in Austria and Germany to see the equipment in use. I was impressed with how thoroughly these German sawmills are extracting every last bit of energy out of wood waste that we are far from fully utilizing in Canada. Of course, none of this activity would be economically feasible without support and subsidy from government. Our role will be to convince our government to provide a similar level of support for us to the same thing. Wood is CO2 neutral, and utilizing wood waste can contribute to less dependency on oil and gas for energy.

On Friday my companions left to return to Canada, and I started out on the next leg of my journey, my language journey. The first thing I did was visit Milan's largest book store.

My European trip part 1

I intend to spend the next many posts talking about two subjects, my trip through Europe and the book Lernen by Manfred Spitzer. I will just alternate the two subjects.

Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage

Happy is he who has, like Ulysses, made a wonderful journey

du Bellay  16th century French poet.

Travel enriches us, or at least has the potential to do so. Just as in du Bellay's poem, we return home happier and renewed. We rediscover the joys of the home and hearth, yet we are changed by what we have seen. Some trips give us more than others. My most recent trip was wonderful. I feel like Ulysses.

Between October 25 and November 22 I was in Milan, Brescia, Leoben in Austria, Zovencedo (just outside Vicenza), Augsburg, Munich, Prague, Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Cologne, Heide (north of Hamburg), Berlin, Stockholm,and finally Karlstad (Sweden) before returning home.  I spent a good deal of the time in cars, trains, subways, and just plain walking. I was not on the beach, nor in the mountains. I did not stay at resorts, nor visit cathedrals and museums. I traveled though countrysides, visited cities, and experienced different histories, cultures and languages.

The first week I was with three traveling companions from our sawmill, Real, Robert and Steve (another Steve). We were looking at Italian equipment that would enable us to produce electric power using our wood waste, which consists mostly of bark. We are only utilizing a portion of our waste, or biomass, to dry our lumber, and wanted to see if we could somehow justify a small scale electric power station. An Italian company had develop a technique which uses high temperature oil, rather than steam, to drive the turbines. This would be easier for use to manage than the conventional approach using steam. This company, Turboden, was located in Brescia.

Our flight from Calgary to Frankfurt was late, so we missed our connecting flight to Milan. However, there was another flight a few hours later. From Milan's Malpensa airport we took a bus into the central train station. Sitting in front of me on the bus was an Asian looking gentleman, whom I took to be Japanese or Korean. Then I noticed that he was reading a Russian newspaper. I was curious, and of course always keen to practice my Russian. I struck up a conversation in Russian and discovered that he was Kazakh. We had a pleasant conversation about Kazakhstan and other subjects and I gave him a LingQ card. He was not going to be the last one to get a LingQ card on this trip.

From Milan we took a train to Brescia, and a quick taxi ride took us to our hotel. It was still early afternoon so we decided to rest a little and then go into town.

The Callan method

Does anyone have any experience of knowledge of this method. Apparently this method is quite popular in Japan on a website called english-bell.

From what I can tell the method involves intensive drilling in English. I have never enjoyed drilling as an approach to language learning, since I believe that constant exposure to interesting content will enable the brain to acquire the words and the habits of the language.

I hear people say that they can understand the spoken language and can read but just have trouble speaking. I have never found that to be the case. Those people who say that they can understand the spoken language and can read but cannot speak, in fact do not understand well when you speak to them  and never read a full book in English.

I remain of the view that if you train your ability to understand the spoken language, and the written language, and if you learn enough vocabulary through that process, you will develop the potential to speak well when the need or opportunity arises.

A small amount of speaking and writing from time to time will prime you, and aid in your acquisition of the language, until you finally find yourself in situations where you need to speak. Trying to force people to speak based on a limited knowledge of the language has always seemed to me to be an unpleasant way to force the language on people. It seems that many or perhaps most people are convinced that it takes someone else to teach them the language, whereas in my experience it is up to the learner to learn the language.

Any views on the Callan method or other methods based on drilling?

Why not put your kids in Chinese play school.

There is a lot of parental pressure on kids to achieve these days. In Asia parents put their kids into English play school and in the US I hear of parents wanting to put their kids into Chinese play school, all in the name of giving them some advantage. Now I am all for language learning, but is it really necessary? Don't little kids just want to play with their friends?  They are learning all the time, and it is not like they are going to miss the boat.

I just returned from Sweden. I have two employees there who have young school age children. They are quite frustrated at the fact that in Sweden they do not start teaching reading until the age of seven. The same is true in Finland. Yet Finland consistently scores at the very top in international comparison of 15 year olds in reading and math. Chinese kids study 1200 hours a year and Finnish kids only 800 hours per year and do just as well or better. And the Finnish kids get very little homework. Of course, that Chinese number does not take into consideration the additional hours of "cram school" which is an East Asian tradition. The Finns also learn to speak Swedish and English.

Could it be that hours of schooling do not matter very much, that hours of homework do not matter very much? Apparently Finnish teachers are very well paid. I do not know, but it seems to me that fewer, better paid, motivated and respected teachers, and fewer hours of instruction, and more room for reading and learning, will lead to better results.

I mean it is clear to me that very little learning takes place in Canadian language classes. Can this problem be more wide spread?

I will be talking in other posts about the fascinating book I read in Germany about how the brain learns. I am not sure that our teaching system takes into account what we have learned about the brain in the last few years.

Meanwhile let's give the kids a break. Let's inspire them rather than drill them or pressure them.

Rain in Karlstad Sweden, rail travel in Europe and the high cost of books

I am in Karlstad for the annual Swedish lumber marketing conference. It is raining and it is cold. I have completed my two weeks of wandering around Germany (with side trips to Prague, Paris, Brussels and Antwerp). My two weeks of travel on the magic carpet of a Eurail pass was wonderful. Once the ticket was paid for, the train travel was "free" for as much as I wanted to use it. I think I spent over 30 hours on trains. Most of the time I was very comfortable, reading, and listening, mostly in German, and watching the scenery go by. I will describe all of this in more detail in a report on my travels later. Let me just say that the German cities were a delight, and I really recommend Berlin, where I stayed on the Friedrichstrasse near Check Point Charlie. I walked for many hours in Berlin and would like to go back, with my wife, stay for a week and take in all of what the city has to offer.

Getting back to Karlstad, my lumber meetings begin after lunch. So went to a book store. I bought another book and audio book by my favourite Swedish writer, Hermann Lindquist, who writes about history. I bought his book and CD on Madame Pompadour. I looked at the section on books for language learning. There was a series on learning English. I cannot remember the name but the store only had books 5 and 6 in the series. Each one cost $100 Canadian, although only $80 for students. There was a book for learning Swedish as a second language by the same company and in the same price range. Who would buy these books? If you bought all 6 of the English books, you would spend $480 to $600, and where would you be? I imagine some people will even buy the books and hardly even use them.

At LingQ you pay $10 a month, and you get a chance to see if you like the system first. And for $40 a month or so you get a personal tutor who talks to you and corrects your writing. Once we get our much much delayed new version out, and we are very close, ( I have seen it and it looks great), we really have to make more people aware of who we are and what we have. That is my resolution for the new year, to promote, promote and promote.

Grammar again

About 5 years ago when we began The Linguist, the predecessor of LingQ, I did a video recording in nine languages on my deck, including one in German, which you can see here. I recently received the following email about this German video.

"Dear Steve,

In your German clip you should have said: "Das hat mir ... vielE Türen geöffnet" and "Probieren Sie meine Methoden doch einmal aus." "Versuchen" doesn't mean "give something a try", but rather "make an attempt" or "try to do".

Grammar rules are indeed indispensable.

MfG

Ed Crosby

Technical translator/interpreter -- English, German, Spanish"

I have on many occasions in the last 30 years looked at German declension tables. It has not made much of an impression on me. It was only when I abandoned any hope of learning which endings belonged to which words in which situations, and simply let myself enjoy the language, that I began to speak German. Yes it is a good idea to strive to speak correctly, or to follow common usage. It is not clear to me that learning grammar rules is the best way to achieve that goal. The brain makes its own rules, according to Manfred Spitzer in a wonderful book on how the brain learns. Reading grammar can help, but it is not the most important thing. Listening, reading and using the language are far more important.

What is more, the question of what words mean and how they are used is not a grammatical question, but one of habit and experience and lots of exposure. I do no aspire, like Ed Crosby, to interpret or translate, I just aspire to communicate. Even if I wanted to interpret or translate, I would not worry about grammar rules until I had a good command of the language.

Free US site for immigrants to learn English

I would be interested in hearing any comments on this site set up by the US government for immigrants to learn English. 

Importing lists of terms

I have been doing a lot of reading in German while sitting on trains. I have a Eurail pass so the travel is all paid for. Yesterday I traveled from Koeln to Heide via Hamburg. The first train was late getting in to Hamburg so I missed my connection and had to hang around the train station.

When I read in German there are words I do not understand, quite a few per page. I import them into LingQ as a list of terms. Then I get them emailed to me. I can review them on the computer, or even sitting on the train,where I can read them again on my Blackberry. Very useful!

Livemocha reaches one million members!

Livemocha, the world‘ s largest online language learning community, announced today that its community has reached 1 million members from around the world in its first year of existence.

They also won an award

"NWSource posted its list of winners for “Favorite Northwest Employers” (generally the Seattle area). Livemocha was selected as the winner in the “favorite startup” category!"

 Has anyone used Livemocha? Can anyone give us a comment about it here?

LingQ meet up in Antwerp

A cozier meet up of Lingq members took place in Antwerp at a book fair called Boekenbeurs. I was amazed at how many people thronged into the fair to look at book, listen to authors etc. Fortunately or unfortunately the books were all in Dutch so I did not buy any ( I already have a full suitcase of books and audio books). Members Nicole, and Mom whose name I do no remember but who studies 4 languages at LingQ ( like mother like daughter), Martijn and Vincent all exchanged views on how to make LingQ better before setting off in our different directions.