Secrets of Learning Languages Part One

They look a lot more worn now.

I can no longer resist the lure of my blog, so here I am with some Secrets of Learning Languages (Part One).

1. You don't need talent.

There is probably such a thing as talent, a mysterious gift that separates the Very Good from the Outstanding. However, you didn't need talent to learn your native language, and you don't need it to learn other people's languages either. One of the most damaging things a child can believe is that she can't do something because she's simply not talented. Her logical assumption will be not "Try, try again" but "Why should I bother?"

A grown-up told me when I was 19 or so that I wasn't "good at" languages. I had been taught French for twelve years, Italian for three and Latin for one and received A or B grades in them all.  But I believed the grown-up and went on to do abysmally in university Latin, Greek and Irish before switching my major to English Literature because I knew the A's would come easily (talent!), and they did.

I am now reasonably fluent (see #7) in Italian and Polish, and use both languages for work, but this is not through talent.

2. Interest + Application + Time = Language

So you don't need "talent" for learning languages. You need to work. Unfortunately, "how to work" is not often taught in school, and if you sailed through elementary school, you might not have learned it on your own before you hit the wall in high school. Also unfortunately, a capacity to work (in my culture anyway) is treated like a virtue, not a skill, and even then it is second banana to "talent."  So here are the main components of language work:

Language work involves interest, application and time.

Interest: When learning languages it is best to pick a language you have good reasons to learn. However, these have to be compelling and personal reasons, not merely practical. The most practical (and one of the hardest for anglophones) language you can learn right now is probably Mandarin. But unless you have deep personal reasons for learning Mandarin, like an all-absorbing love of China, Chinese cuisine, your Chinese boyfriend, Kung Fu or eavesdropping on Mandarin-speakers on the bus, you are probably not going to power through the pain involved in learning Mandarin.

I picked Italian in high school to avoid Art class, but also because it was the most widely-spoken European language in my city at that time. Learning to speak it was also a sort of revenge on the Italian-Canadians who bullied me in elementary school. Years later it became the Language of Vacations Abroad.

I started Polish to help sell the Polish translation of my first book and didn't quit because a kind friend told me not to bother even trying because I would never, ever learn Polish.

And now that I can read it, I'm too scared. 

Application: I have been studying Polish for about six years, two months, and I have used many different materials: textbooks, class handouts, films, songs, dictionaries, grammars, novels, talking books, prayer books, poetry books, tourist brochures, and food labels. I would have become fluent years ago had I studied a little EVERY DAY. My current level of fluency has come about because I  have studied for at least an hour EVERY DAY without a break since October 8.  But more importantly, I never quit (for longer than one angry night). Never quitting is the secret to language-learning because of the magic of time.

Time: Given what I now know about how I learn languages, I predict that I will be able to function in Polish society without linguistic problems in three years. If I begin Urdu this January and study every day, I will be able to converse biographically in Urdu in three years.

If only I would give Italian half an hour of my daily attention outside of work ....

Well, I don't do that badly chatting to my Italian tutor and translating what Marco Tosatti thinks because I started learning Italian 31 years ago. Every time I have learned, recalled or relearned and (especially) heard or spoken an Italian word since September 1986, my Italian skills have been strengthened.

I have often praised my high school Italian teacher for her excellent teaching, but I was a dud when she enrolled me in an Italian language contest c.1989. (More on the inadequacy of classroom learning later.) To my horror, after three years I couldn't actually speak Italian. (I assumed I lacked talent.)

Flash forward to 1997. At the end of 1997, I decided to relearn French, Italian, Latin and Greek. French and Greek eventually fell by the wayside, but I worked my way through my high school Italian textbook and Wheelock's Latin Grammar. I also borrowed a Passport Books "Teach Yourself Italian" set from the Library. In 1998 I went to Italy for the first time, and I could speak Italian. Not comprehensively, but well enough for touristic purposes. Well enough for my workplace, too.

The fact that I can chat away with my Italian tutor twenty years later probably has as much to do with that intense relearning in 1997-8 as it does with the initial learning in 1986-9. But there is another very important factor:

3. Getting so used to feeling stupid you no longer fear it. 

By embarking on language learning, you are risking feeling stupid at regular intervals for years. That which you have been able to do well in your own language since you were six (or sixteen or twenty for reading and writing) you will no longer do well.  You will stammer, blush, feel stupid and hate yourself. You will think "Language Fail" again and again, especially when the object of your Target Language communication answers you back in English.

But I have many thoughts on this subject, too:

a) even native speakers don't speak their native language perfectly (or intelligibly)* all the time, so even if you achieve "native-like" fluency, you will still make mistakes;

b) governments across the world pour money into teaching children English, and that's why all those young people in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland and even Russia speak at least tourist-level English;

c) humility improves your character;

d) it's scientifically proven that the trauma of embarrassment over mistakes helps you memorise the corrections;

e) the better you get, the more impressed other people are that you speak the Target Language at all;

f) realising that the process of learning a language is psychological, not moral, helps kill shame;

g) the shame wears off the more often and the longer you speak to native speakers.

4.  The highs make up for the lows.

Speaking in Polish is much more difficult than speaking in Italian, but when I use either successfully,  my brain seems to flood with dopamine. I leave Italian class feeling high: happy and hilarious. I'm not quite there with Polish classes although I do enjoy reading Polish very much.

When I finish a week's work on a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew, I feel very satisfied. And naturally I am pleased when I recall enough words to ask a Polish interview subject some questions. However, there is still a lot of fear/shame mixed up in my Polish communications, and it will probably linger for at least another year or so.

Fear/shame is obviously one of the lows. Other enemies to your language-learning happiness are skeptical friends, alarmed members of your family, and unsympathetic or merely clueless native speakers of your target language.  However, you can turn these negatives into plusses.

First, you can use the friends' skepticism as a goad, as I did. "I'll show them" may sound like an odd inspiration, but as I mentioned above, it has worked for me twice.

Second, your family members' alarm will wear off as they get used to your new hobby. Eventually they may start to brag about it. After complaining for six years about how impractical learning Polish is, Benedict Ambrose volunteered me as his hospital ward's Polish translator.

Third, if you can't take the heat of a nation's character, get out of their language kitchen. In general, the French hate French spoken badly. In general, the Poles are blunt. In general, non-anglophones do not understand just how insulting rude English words sound to anglophones, so if Francophones or Allophones tell you in English how you sound in their language, it may hurt more than they mean it to.

The way to deal is to find unusually kindly people who are native speakers of your Target Language and practise on them. These include teachers, but remember that not all teachers are kindly or able.

śłedź! śłedź! yummy śłedź!

5. Yes, you have to memorise. 

The good news is that language classes aren't useless (more on this later). The bad news is that you will have to supplement classes with memorisation.

For about forty years I laboured under the delusion that to learn something all you have to do is go to class, do the homework and cram for the exam. If despite doing all these things, you don't get an A, you don't "have talent", so give up.

What the last six years, two months have taught me is that the only way to stuff hundreds of words and dozens of grammatical points into an adult human head (or my adult human head) is through constant memorisation through testing.

It makes me a little sad, now, thinking about the five years of Polish night school classes I took without spending every other night memorising the new words presented in the lessons. I did the homework, and I participated in the classes, and I never fell asleep once, despite being a morning person. However, there were never any tests, and so I never actually studied, and so my spoken and written Polish progressed but slowly.

I read, yes, and I looked up words in the dictionary. (Working with a Polish dictionary is a skill in itself, let me tell you.) Reading is the easiest part of language-learning for adults. I also wrote letters, and occasionally got a Polish friend to correct them. But I couldn't speak Polish very well, and I had a very hard time concentrating hard enough to comprehend spoken Polish. Eventually I found this so frustrating, I finally began reading books about fluency. And they all said the same thing: you have to memorise.

6. There's a problem with Anki.

The fluency books recommend memorisation though flashcards in  Spaced Repetition Systems like Anki or, for the less electronically inclined, Leitner boxes.

Gabriel Weiner of Fluent Forever believes that using English on flashcards impedes memory so, not being electronically inclined, I made hundreds of flashcards with pictures on one side and Polish words on the other. Drawing passable pictures took SO LONG I gave up and turned to Anki.

However Anki has a big bug. If you miss a single day of review, Anki will present you with more cards than you can cope with. Miss a week and Anki will hit you with a blizzard of pictures. You will go out of your mind with impatience waiting to come to the end of your afternoon-long Anki exam.  The more new words you put into Anki, the worse the problem becomes.

Another problem is that you might not remember what concept you were trying to indicate with your pictures. This is a particular problem for any word not a noun.

Besides, it turns out that Weiner is not quite right. Although young people may learn faster with images, older learners may learn faster with words. This is, in fact, true for me.  I am much more likely to recall text than a picture. I have noticed this while speaking, When I need a Polish word I can't quite remember, it comes floating up before my mind's eye in my own handwriting.

I now have a new Spaced Repetition System to cope with the overload and work with my script-loving brain. After reading a new chapter of The Magician's Nephew, I write down all the words I don't instantly recognize. That came to 144 this week. I divide the list by 6. From Monday to Saturday, I look up the dictionary definitions for a sixth of the words, e.g. 24.

Then every day I look at the list and choose the five to ten most useful-looking words.  I make English-Polish flashcards for them. They go into the "Test tomorrow" part of my Letter box. The next day, after I learn them again, they go into the "Test Sunday" section. After Sunday's test (and relearning), they go in the "Test a Month from Now" slot.

On December 26, I will test myself on the "Sunday cards" from November 26, and then they will go in the "Test in Two Months" box.  This is not at all scientific, but I suppose in February I'll put them in a "Text in Six Months" box. Or maybe I will throw them on a bonfire. It is impossible to count how many words a language has, but my Oxford-PWN Polish-English Dictionary contains "200,000 words and phrases".

That's a lot of cards.

7. Fluency is a continuum.

My Polish tutor is guilt-striken because she doesn't think she is earning her fee. Mostly she sits in a hipster cafe listening to me chatting away about my week. She attempts to teach me grammar, but either I know something very well or not at all. And every week I turn up knowing 30 more words she didn't teach me. What's a Polish tutor to do?

"The problem is that you are fluent," she said.

"No, I'm not," I replied, astounded. I was astounded because, for one thing, I understand only half of whatever she ever says, and for another, the only way I can really get going in a Polish conversation is to travel down the well-worn track of "When I was ..."

It may be truthful to say that I am fluent compared to all my tutor's OTHER clients, or that I am fluent next to the vast majority of non-Poles, or that I can rattle off ungrammatical Polish for five minutes at a stretch. At any rate, it is probably a good idea not to get too hung up on the word "fluent" although for six years, two months I have longed to become fluent and waited in vain for the magical switch I've heard about to flip so I can understand all Polish.

Suddenly I remember the exchange between my night school teacher and me when I was feeling particularly disgruntled with my lack of progress. "I have been studying for X years, and I still can't have a conversation," I said, or words to that effect, in Polish.

"But we're having a conversation right now!" protested my night school teacher.

First year of learning Polish: no grey hair. 

*I have met many English-speaking Continentals who have a hard time understanding Scottish accents for the first few years of their residence in Scotland. Some Scottish accents still give me trouble, and I've been here for almost nine years.


To be continued...