The Linguist - language learning should be fun

Limits to Krashen?

Here is the podcast.Download Krashen challenged

Beniko Mason has some wonderful articles on research on language learning showing that reading is more efficient in language learning than deliberate instruction. I am indebted to Igor the Macedonian for the link.

He will now attack me as I explain why I like to do a little Krashen plus "n". In other words I believe a little speaking and writing and word review, and even a little grammar review, have their place in making the brain more attentive. As long as we do not expect to learn the grammar or the new words, as long as we are not hung up about speaking and writing correctly, these deliberate learning activities help, as long as they do not get in the way of listening and reading.

I also make the point that the interest in the content is more important than making the reading easy. I am not a fan of graded readers, for example, at least for my own learning. A little bit of easy content to start with and then let me at the authentic stuff as soons as possible. I believe that LingQ makes that jump easier, and that is why we developed the system the way we did.

So go ahead Igor, and hit me. I can take it.

Krashen teaching methods challenged.

Several grammar purists have been attacking my language learning ideas, and those of Stephen Krashen. It is worth reading the comments to my post about Stephen Krashen, made by Nickzi, Anton and Jason.

Here is my answer. It is a bit long to leave as just a comment.
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First let's look at what fluency in a language means. My definition can be found in a document that is a few years old, called The Linguist Manifesto. Fluency does not mean perfection. Perfection in another language is an illusion, but we can all achieve fluency. We can always improve. As long as we are communicating effectively we are fluent. I have a Russian employee who communicates very well in English, but will never lose his accent and never get the articles right. I know Swedes who are effortless in English and say "it is many people" rather than "there are many people", and Germans who say they have lived in Canada "since many years" instead of "for many years" and on and on. I doubt if explanation or grammar study will change them. Yet they are fluent.

Anton, I do not know where you got the idea that I dislike having my fluency questioned.  You state that without an understanding of the aspect of verbs one cannot know Russian. Nonsense. I have no real sense of the aspect of verbs, even after reading the explanations. This feature does not exist in English and my brain is not yet ready to understand it. In time it will. But you cannot say that I do not know Russian. I am very happy with my Russian.

My goal in Russian is to understand it, and I understand literature and news sites like Echo Moskvi. I am held back only by a lack of vocabulary, not by a lack of grammar understanding. When I do run into Russians and speak Russian, I am able to communicate satisfactorily, and get compliments on my Russian. If I had a month in Russia, I would speak a lot better, but I have progressed much faster listening and reading and using LingQ, than the students at universities who study grammar. I  do want to improve and speak more accurately but I know I will get there faster my way then by trying to force grammar into my head. I will occasionally review the grammar, accept the fact that it is all unclear, and that the variations are simply too many to remember, and then go back to enjoying the language. In any case it is still words, and not grammar rules, that are holding me back.

I do not deny that some people can learn languages differently from the way I do, but my experience tells me that these grammar keeners are few and far between. Certainly I, and many of the peope that I have met, are not among them.  I avoided grammar explanations in my study of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, just to name a few. I made good progress.

Most people I know have trouble understanding grammar explanations, with all their exceptions, and they have even more trouble remembering them. This grammar learning, "work", as Anton calls it, is to most people, an inefficient, boring and discouraging way to learn languages. People who struggled with "transitive and intranstive  verbs", rules on "modals" and all the rest, just improved by leaps and bounds when they came to LingQ to improve their English.

I have no use for grammar perfectionists and academic linguists. I have no interest in the many terms and labels they invent to describe language, as if these terms can make language seem like science or mathematics. These people are not only a waste of time, they are an impediment to language learning. I am interested in what enables a lot of people to learn languages, not in linguistic pedantry.

There are many examples of the lack of success of traditional language teaching, and most school learners will confirm this to me. In one famous example from New Brunswick, there were two schools teaching English to francophones. One had a teacher and traditional program, and the other just let the children listen to and read stories. The children in the second school performed better after two years.

Jason, your comments on Mandarin are groundless. I learned Mandarin by listening and reading and focusing on phrases, and ignoring grammar explanation. After 8 months I passed the British Foreign Service Exam in Mandarin.

The key is lots of input, and that means putting in a lot of time. If the method of study is enjoyable we will put in the time needed to progress.And if we learn naturally through a lot of input, we manage to remember what we learn. In fact a number of LingQ members have observed that their language skills improve even when they are away from the language. This is pemanent learning. When we learn grammar rules and tables, we only remember them for a short period of time.

To understand why this is so, I recommend you read up on how the brain learns. I particularly recommend Manfred Spitzer's book called Learning, The Human Brain and the School for Life.

More on grammar

How much attention do we need to pay to grammar in language learning? In my view, not much. Download Grammar 2

I spend very little time on grammar and I have learned to speak 10 languages. I find that listening and reading, and focusing on words and phrases, is a more productive and enjoyable way to spend my time. I said so in my previous post.

In response, Liam, representing I believe the views of people who like grammar, and  those who teach grammar, made a comment to my previous post in which he said that to learn the subjunctive in Spanish or adjective endings in German we can either

"1) Memorize the tables and use them while speaking, constantly referring to them in your head

or 2) Not learn the grammar and fool yourself into thinking you're learning the language "naturally", which only kids under the age of 5 can do with any proficiency."

But it all depends on our goal. If our goal is to communicate, to understand, to learn lots of words and phrases so that we can express ourselves, maybe the niceties of the subjunctive in Spanish or adjective endings in German do not matter that much. Maybe they can wait.

I tried memorizing declension tables in German, and it was only when I stopped doing that, and focused on listening and reading, that my ability to communicate in German improved. I do not refer to tables and usually find that I can handle the subjunctive quite easily in French and Spanish, although the third person singular of various tenses can give me trouble if I have been away from the language. It just does not come out automatically the way I would like, at times. But I am all right with that and do not think that memorizing tables would help me. Besides it is boring to memorize tables, so I choose not to do it. I get lots of compliments on my German, Spanish and French.

I would say that the kind of language learning proposed by Liam is responsible for the generally poor results that are achieve in class room language instruction. While Liam may learn best that way, I think he is in the minority. I believe, with Krashen, and with Manfred Spitzer, that the brain does not do as well with the explicit explanation and learning of rules and tables, but rather the brain will figure these things on its own, with enough of the right kind of input. Occasional reference to grammar can help, but memorizing the tables, in my experience is an ineffective way to spend one's language learning time.

The role of grammar in language study

The role of grammar study in language learning.Download the Podcast on Grammar

What is the role of grammar study in language learning? Stephen Krashen says that grammar based learning is not very effective and I agree. We will get used to different aspects of the grammar of the new language according to a natural order that is part of how brains learn. With enough input we will figure out how the language works. The more we learn, the more we are able to learn, according to Krashen.

Spitzer, in his description of how the brain learns, would seem to agree with Krashen. Yet I know from my own experience that there is a place for grammar study.  I deal with grammar as a reference resource and there are two stages of grammar reference.

1) Before starting a new language I sometimes, although not always, look at a summary of the grammar of the language I am going to learn. This is easy to do today. You just have to google "summary Swedish, (Dutch, Japanese or whatever) grammar" or the equivalent in your native language, or a language you know. You will find a wide choice of sources to choose from. Pick the one you like, probably the shortest one will be the best. Read through it without trying to remember too much. I mean a quick review of about 15 minutes. It is just to get an overview of the language before you start.

2) Throughout the period that I am studying the language, whenever I feel the urge, or am curious about something, I refer to grammars. Today this easily done online. You can even google "French verbs" or "Russian cases" to find specific sites to refer to from time to time. I do not do this too often. I do not know how much it helps, but I admit to being curious to look things up and I know that I discover things that I had not noticed or figured out simply from input.

And that is it. That is all the grammar you need - a first time review, and occasional references or additional reviews. Remember, the goal is not memorize or learn the rules or explanations or tables, but to review them so that you will have an easier time noticing the language as you hear it and read it. This will help your brain eventually learn the language naturally.

I must say, however, that this grammar study does not amount to more than 1%  of the time I spend on learning a language. Mostly I listen and read, and then review my LingQs, and talk with my tutor at LingQ.

Your favourite grammar book.

Grammar is a bit like the map of a city you are visiting as a tourist. If you are new to the city, as a tourist, you probably only want a simple map that you can look at quickly, before setting out on a tour. Then after wandering around a while, you want to look at the map again. Now it has more meaning, and you can get into more detail. The more you visit the city, the more meaningful the map is. When you live in a city you often need more detailed maps or map books.

To me grammar books are like that. They should be simple guides.The ideal grammar book is short, around 100 pages or so, divided into easily researchable chapters. The key features of the language should be presented simply, with examples. Explanations should be kept to a minimum. Exercizes and drills are avoided entirely.

What do others think?Please tell me some of your favourite grammar books for different languages, whether they match my criteria or not.

I abandon all intention to study Russian cases.

I have decided that I will not learn Russian cases, at least not deliberately. It would just spoil my enjoyment of the language.

I should say that I began the day (a rainy Sunday in Vancouver) with the intention of trying to improve my grammatical accuracy in Russian. I mean, I understand the language quite well. I get about 80 %  of what I hear on Echo Moskvi, more if I am familiar with the subject and if there are not too many unknown words. My lack of knowledge of cases and case endings does not really hamper my understanding of the language.

I have started speaking with my tutor and can more or less express myself on most subjects, however clumsily.I have started writing and I use the spell checker in the LingQ writing section, which helps. But the cases are a matter of sheer luck.

I decided to look up Russian cases on google. I have had a quick read over and have decided to give up any intention to study the cases. No way. I have better things to do. Russians will either put up with my cases, or ignore me. In the meantime I understand them fine.

Here are the first sites on Russian cases that showed up on google. Read them and you will see why I have decided to go back to just enjoying the language, and letting the cases come out at random, when I use the language.

http://russian.speak7.com/russian_cases.htm
http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/case.html

Syntax versus the love of the language.

Here is the podcast.

Do we learn a language better by finding ways to enjoy it or by studying grammar and syntax. Anyone who has been following this blog knows where I stand on this. On Thursday I will be at the Sophia Bookstore here in Vancouver, to discuss language learning with a person who has also written a book on language learning, Robyn Matthews, author of Language Logic.

I have read Robyn's book. She is passionate about language and feels anyone can learn another language at any age. On both points we agree.

Thereafter we do not agree so much. It would not be right to attempt a detailed summary of her book since I may not do justice to it. It is my impression, however, that Robyn favours taking courses, finding a tutor, learning syntax and grammar, and studying the basic concepts of a language, as a condition to successful language learning.

I will find out more on Thursday evening.

I have been listening to my Rubem Alves audio books again, and re-reading his texts, which I have imported into my Portugese area at LingQ. (I am taking a break from Russian because I want to do a Portuguese video intro for LingQ. I need to get into the mood. Otherwise, every time I struggle to find a word, Russian comes up.)

Here is what Rubem Alves says about grammar.

Se o conhecimento científico  de anatomia fosse condição para se fazer amor, os professores de  anatomia seriam amantes insuperáveis. Se o conhecimento acadêmico  da gramática fosse condição para se fazer literatura, os  gramáticos seria escritores insuperáveis. Mas essa não é a verdade. ... 

Gramática se faz com palavras mortas. Literatura se faz com palavras vivas.

"If the scientific knowledge of anatomy were a condition for making love, professors of anatomy would be unrivaled lovers. If the academic knowledge of grammar were a condition for making literature, grammarians would be unrivaled writers. But this is not the case.....

Grammar is made with words that are dead. Literature is made with words that are alive."

I had a post earlier about how learning a language is like falling in love. I really feel that way. Now,it is possible that some people may fall in love with the grammar of a language. I do not deny that. Most, however, do not. They fall in love with other things in the language: the sounds, the music, the rhythm, the words and phrases, the content, the literature, the culture, the people they can now reach out and touch. This can all be done with no knowledge of grammatical terms.

Alves goes on  to say;

Existe uma incompatibilidade total entre a experiência prazerosa de leitura – experiência vagabunda! – e a experiência de ler a fim de responder questionários de interpretação e compreensão.

"There is a complete incompatibility between the pleasant experience of reading, a vagabond experience, and the experience of reading for the purpose of answering questions of meaning and understanding. "

And he goes on to say about students in a typical classroom:

Foram forçados a aprender tantas coisas sobre os textos - gramática,  análise sintática –que não houve tempo para serem iniciados na única coisa que importa: a beleza musical do texto literário:

"They were forced to learn so many things about the texts, grammar, analysis of syntax, that there was no time to be initiated into the only thing that mattered: the musical beauty of the literary text."

And yes, learning a language is first and foremost about listening and reading and, if possible, loving the language. That comes first. If you can manage that, and if you can encourage learners to do that, the rest is easy.
 

How to deal with grammar

A proposal on how to approach grammar at Lingq.

While we do not stress grammar instruction here at LingQ, we recognize that people are curious about the structure of the language they are learning. One solution is to buy a small grammar book and read it from time to time.

The first time you just skim the book to get a general idea, since the explanations seem complicated and you do not have much of an idea of the language. Then as time goes on you are able to refer to the grammar book for more detailed explanations which now start to make sense. Still you cannot really remember the rules, but the explanations help you get used to certain patterns that you have noticed in the language.

HERE IS MY PROPOSAL FOR LINGQ.

Members should submit writing about what they find difficult in the grammar of the language they are studying. These should be short pieces on some aspect of grammar. They can state what points of grammar they feel are difficult as a learner, or they can ask questions about the grammar.

The written submission will be corrected by a tutor. The tutor may also provide a short explanation. The corrected writing submission and the explanation from the tutor will then be added as learning content in  LingQ, both the text and a recording by a native speaker.

I think that it is important to start with a view of the grammar or structure of the language from the perspective of the learner, not the perspective of the native speaker. I do not know what is difficult in English, but I know what I find confusing or difficult in Russian or Korean.

Please let me know your views. If you agree, then start writing your grammar explanations and questions about the language that you are studying as writing submissions in LingQ. We will record the results and put them into the Store .

I am going to do it in Russian.

Meaningful communication

I have been following a discussion on learning English at ALC's Japanese language Business English blog. The issue is the old "vocabulary versus grammar" discussion. Of course I agree that vocabulary is more important than grammar. At LingQ we notice all the time that our learners have more trouble using words correctly then getting the tenses or prepositions right. Vocabulary mistakes impact on the ability to convey meaning in a way that grammar mistakes do not. Even in my study of Russian, it is the lack of words, rather than the complexity of Russian grammar that holds me back. The more words I learn, the more I understand. I have deliberately avoided trying to understand the more obtuse explanations about case, imperfective verbs and all the other niceties of Russian. Yet I am happily listening to and reading Tolstoi as well as other easier material, after probably 500 hours of study, mostly just listening.

The ALC blog post quotes a Professor James Milton of Swansea University,a Professor Michael McCarthy of Cambridge and Paul Nation of New Zealand, the latter perhaps the foremost guru of vocabulary learning in English. While I largely agree with  these gentlemen (Who am I to agree or disagree, you might ask), there is one thing they miss or at least do not stress enough.

Language learning is most effective when based on meaningful communication. Reading a book is meaningful communication if what the author has written is meaningful to the reader. Communication is taking place, even when we only read or listen. If the content is meaningful we are motivated to continue listening and reading. The more we listen and read in a language, the better we get. So the key is to find and read and listen to interesting, usually authentic, content that is not too difficult and efficiently learn words from this content. That kind of study is enjoyable and is likely to continue long enough for the learner to achieve fluency.

So I believe efforts to learn the first 2,000 words of a language in any way that is not part of meaningful communication (mostly listening and reading) will not continue long enough to have significant lasting benefit.

I believe that the first 2,000 words of the language come up so often (they are high frequency words after all), that they are easy to learn, as long as we keep listening and reading, and as long as we stay with content that is not far ahead of our vocabulary level.

Knowing the high frequency words ( let's say the most frequent 2,000 for English or French) gives you 80% of the content, which Milton claims gives you the "gist". I do not agree. I know over 20,000 words of Russian (far fewer word families, I admit) but this does not always enable me to understand or get the gist of what I am reading. As I learn more and more Russian with LingQ, my vocabulary increases, my high frequency words are encountered more and more and therefore are solidly acquired in a way that I could not do if I just focused on them. In other words it is the pursuit of more and more words that enables me to solidify my hold on the high frequency words.

So I think we need to learn, or at least try to learn, a very high number of words through lots of reading and listening (meaningful communication) in order to learn a language and master even the most common words. Paradoxical maybe, but that has been my experience.

Language learning is not about trying to learn a small amount of vocabulary thoroughly. It is about getting a lot of exposure to the language in a systematic way.

That is what is behind the design of LingQ; the statistics we keep of each learners saved, learned, and known words, the ability to search content by the number of unknown words, the prioritizing of words by frequency and much more.

Of course there is more. There is writing and speaking and pronunciation. But vocabulary is the key, and meaningful communication is what is going get most people there, not the artificial study of word lists or grammar rules. I believe the same applies to literacy learning for native speakers.

Fossilization

I was on another Forum where the subject of fossilization or ingrained grammatical errors came up. What can be done when people have been using the language for a long time and continue to make basic errors.

Of course many on the Forum use this example as proof of the need for explicit grammar instruction. Here is what I had to say.
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People have poor habits because they do not notice the language when they hear it. This ability needs to be developed.

It is very difficult to correct people when they speak. In my experience they just go back to whatever habit is ingrained. I also find the study of grammar rules not tremendously beneficial unless combined with a meaningful context.

Ask your friend to write, or even to say things , record them and transcribe them. Correct the writing. That is a footprint of her speaking pattern. Highlight every incorrect phrase, and change it into a correct phrase. Deal with phrases, not words. Explain why, in this phrase or that, a certain form of the word is used. Ask her to learn these phrases. Ask her to read the corrected text out loud 5 times. Ask her to focus on phrases. Ask her to look for similar phrases when reading or listening, to start noticing these patterns in meaningful contexts.

Tell her that it is not a matter of learning rules, but of training her brain to naturally produce correct phrases. Her will power , her determination to change, will greatly influence success, as will a routine of practice that leads to her noticing the phrases when she hears them and reads them. If she can train a new series of networks in her brain she will gradually speak more naturally or more correctly. It is not a matter of her being wrong, or unintelligent, but rather a matter of activities of neurons in her brain that she can influence through certain practice routines and will power.

The conjugation tables and rules can play a small supplementary part in this transformation of her brain, but only a minor part, in my view.
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Of course that is the approach that we take in LingQ.