Ryan McCarl, Accelerated Individual Language Learning 1
Accelerated Individual Language Learning
Ryan McCarl
Some of the following tips are taken from Barry Farber’s How to Learn Any Language,
but I have added or subtracted according to my own learning experiences.
The Basics:
Pronunciation. Pronunciation is crucially important, but many introductory
language programs spend an inordinate amount of time going into detailed
phonetic information that makes little sense without any context. Listen carefully
and repeatedly – as many times as possible – to the speakers on your cassette or
CD course and try to imitate them as closely as possible, accent and all. Always
repeat aloud after the audio, and speak clearly and confidently. Do it in your car
with the windows down and smile at the people who stare.
The Four Skills of Language Learning:
The only way to study a language seriously is to progress in all four of these areas,
but if you have a specific goal in mind it is acceptable to emphasize one or two
skills over the others. If you are studying for the sake of travel, for instance, your
emphasis will be on speaking and listening, whereas if you are planning to do
research or study a foreign literature, reading alone (with pronunciation) will do.
Speaking. There are few things more rewarding than being able to carry on a
conversation, no matter how basic, in a foreign language. You must attempt from
the beginning to speak clearly and confidently and to think and operate in the
foreign language. If you are thinking of English sentences and painstakingly
translating them in your head, you are getting into a disastrous and time-wasting
habit. Don’t think: “My name is Joe… let’s see… je is ‘I,’ appeler is the
infinitive form of the verb ‘to call,’ and I need to conjugate it in the first person
singular and add the object pronoun me for “myself”… so… Je m’appele Joe.”
What a waste! When someone asks you your name in French, you should be able
to reply with the set phrase Je m’appele… without a moment’s hesitation. When
you are able to converse in this matter – speaking accurately and with minimal
hesitation – you will be speaking fluently.
There are two must-dos if you want to learn to converse quickly and accurately.
The first is that you must listen to your language audios frequently and repeatedly,
and you must speak along with them as though you were personally engaging in
conversation. Active concentration is generally necessary, but you should listen
to your audios in the car, while walking around, in the shower, on your iPod, and
wherever else the opportunity presents itself. Listening several times a day is
crucial, especially in the early stages of learning. The second is that you must
never pass up a chance to converse with another speaker of the language, even if
Ryan McCarl, Accelerated Individual Language Learning 2
all you can do is introduce yourself or order a meal. The first step to conversation
is to learn a few basic and necessary phrases, get them down fluently, and speak
them whenever possible as though you have been studying the language for years.
Eventually, your vocabulary will increase, your pronunciation will come more
naturally, and you will develop tactics such as circumlocution (the practice of
speaking “around” vocabulary that you cannot recall, e.g.: “person who studies
the stars” rather than “astronomer”) which will exponentially increase your ability.
Listening. Listen to your tapes over and over. That’s all there is to it.
Concentrate and keep an eye on yourself to be sure you are understanding the
language itself without translating every line into English. Again, if you are
speaking French, you should hear Je m’appele Jean-Luc, not “my name is JeanLuc.” Eventually you should be equally comfortable with both of the above
phrases. Also, be aware that there is often a huge divide between the target
language as it is spoken on your beginner’s audios and the same language as
spoken on the street. Dialects exist and people speak quickly and
ungrammatically – they contract words, blend them together, spew them out,
mispronounce them. This is not to discourage you, but merely to assure you that
it will take time (and probably some time abroad) to develop an advanced “ear”
for the language you are studying. At the advanced level, radio and television
programs in your target language are readily available for your perusal on
university campuses or the Internet.
Reading: There are two distinct skills involved in reading. The first is
comprehension and the second is translation. While both are important,
comprehension in the original language is by far the more crucial skill early on.
Comprehension asks: “What does this passage mean?” whereas translation asks:
“How could this passage be accurately rendered in English (or another language)
while preserving its meaning, tone, sense, and aesthetic value?” If the language
you are studying has a Roman alphabet (like English), reading is by far the easiest
of the skills because the focus is on recognition rather than recall. You will find
that it is much easier to understand the French word européen in print than to
quickly recall and pronounce it in conversation.
Writing: When you are reading a foreign language, your eye will usually pass
over grammatical functions such as gender without giving them much
consideration. Whether l’avion (Fr., airplane) is masculine or feminine has no
bearing whatsoever on the meaning of the passage. When you are composing a
letter or essay in the target language, however, such details become all-important.
Thus writing accurately and well is probably the most difficult of the four skills to
master. This is where the drudge work usually comes in – there is no way to
master Romance language patterns without doing grammar drills and there is no
way to master Japanese or Chinese ideographs without writing them frequently
and repeatedly.
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Methods and Tips:
Thankfully, there are shortcuts to language success, and you will find that these
methods will allow you to progress faster and enjoy your studies more.
The Multiple-Track Attack. Everyone knows that repetition is a necessary and
inescapable fact of learning language well, but many falsely think that
“repetition” necessarily means drudge work – writing a Kanji (Chinese) character
100 times in a row, for example, as I used to do in my early Japanese studies.
This sort of drill can be useful in writing practice, but it is far from the best way to
reinforce material. After writing or repeating an isolated word enough times, your
mind will begin to “tune out” and the exercise will be fruitless. As Plato wrote,
“what is learned under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
There is a better way. Vocabulary must be learned in context and should be
repeated in context. If you see the German word krieg, meaning war, in your
textbook, you will soon forget it. When you go on in the same week, however, to
encounter that word in a newspaper article on Iraq, a history textbook, and even
another German language text, audio course, or reader, you will have the sort of
repetition you really need – repetition in context. You will quickly learn to
recognize and understand the word, and when you learn to recall that word as
quickly as you recall guten tag (hello!), you will own it entirely and be another
small step closer to fluent self-expression. In practice, this means that you need to
invest in more than a single textbook or course if you want to learn a language
well, and you must go out of your way to find (usually via the Internet) alternative
material to supplement your textbook and audio studies.
Constant Reinforcement and “Hidden Moments”. When you are waiting in
lines, suffering through a painfully boring lecture, or at a bus stop, you are
spending small amounts of time doing nothing productive. Such moments are
unavoidable and they add up quickly. It is possible to learn a lot of language in
these moments. Flash cards are an excellent way to review vocabulary quickly –
make your own by folding index cards in four and cutting them. I recommend
filling each card with no more than two words and flipping them from the top
rather than the side (so that the corresponding English words are “upside down”
on the other side of the card). Word lists are also helpful – keep a list of twenty or
thirty vocabulary words in your pocket, writing the English word on the left half
of the page and its foreign equivalent on the right, covering up the answers with
an index card. Make sure you are practicing both recognition (looking at the
foreign word first) and recall (looking at the English word first). It is crucial
above all that you actively listen to and speak along with your audio programs as
often as possible.
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The Right Materials. The price might be a bit hefty, but you should try to
acquire: a textbook with audio CDs and an emphasis on grammar (preferably with
plenty of drills); a good dictionary; a phrase book to get the immediately
“necessary” phrases down; a single newspaper or magazine (or even a single
article) in the target language to work through slowly and enrich your vocabulary;
a basic reader with vocabulary lists; a portable audio player that matches the
format of your listening selections; an “On the Go” or comparable audio-only
course.
Fluent Phrases. Right from the start, learn the basic phrases that you need for a
simple conversation and get them down pat. No hesitation, all confidence. This
is no substitute for thoroughly learning a language via your textbook/audio course,
but it will prepare you to put the language to use at even the earliest stage.
Converse, converse, converse. With your teachers, with other students, and –
above all, no matter how embarrassed you are initially – with native speakers. To
use a word confidently in conversation is to thoroughly own that word. Do not let
self-consciousness or concern about being “rusty” or at the beginner level rob you
of enjoying the greatest privilege and reward of language learning.
Rewards:
I devote many hours every day to studying and retaining foreign languages, and I
could only keep it up if the rewards were frequent and obvious. I am happy to
report that this is indeed the case. I use Japanese and Spanish daily – Japanese by
coming into contact with my professors and Japanese friends (on both sides of the
ocean) and Spanish by ordering coffee and having short conversations with the
workers at my favorite café and other employees of the university. I have
opportunities to converse in French and read German several times a week. I am
lucky enough to live in a city in which such constant exposure is possible, but by
consciously seeking out native speakers and attempting to travel to areas in which
a language you have studied is spoken, it is possible to make your language
ability useful whether you live in New York City or in Des Moines. Also,
literature and the Internet are always available, so it is practically impossible to
ever be fully cut off from even obscure languages if you have a desire to learn.
I can say with confidence that your travel experience will be infinitely better if
you have some ability in a place’s native language. The language itself attracts
you to the country, you learn to sympathize with and feel closer to the natives,
you feel more at home in the foreign environment, and you will have the constant
thrill of being surrounded by the material you are studying. Some of my greatest
memories are of conversations that I have had in foreign languages, some of
which have led to personal connections that would not have been possible without
the language.
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Finally, if you study or enjoy literature, especially poetry, the value of reading
work in its original language cannot be overstated. A poetry snob will tell you
that lyric poetry cannot be translated, and there is some truth to that statement.
Either way, reading real (non-textbook) material in a foreign language – whether
timeless literature or correspondence from a friend – is a thrilling experience that
you should not deny yourself.
Well, what are you waiting for? Go commit yourself to a language and learn it. Feel free
to contact me with questions or comments at:
Ryan McCarl
2242 Blissfield Ct.
Muskegon, MI 49441
rmccarl@uchicago.edu
(231) 638-1201