Name: 6 habits that made me a successful language learner
Uploaded: 2024-07-07T12:15:30.000Z
Duration: 12 min 32 s
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To-infinitive

Today, I would like to share with you six key elements to my language learning success.

The superlative

I'm not suggesting that I'm the best language learner, far from it.

The comparative

Some of the people who kindly commented on my last video, people like Luca Lamporiello, LanguageSim, and there are many more are much better at language learning than I am.

But still, I have achieved some degree of success.

To me, there are sort of six key elements.

So let me go into each one of these elements in a little more detail.

The first one is don't focus on this illusion of trying to nail down details in the language, focus rather on patterns, allowing your brain to get used to the patterns is how you're going to learn the language.

I discovered early on that the attempt to master declension tables in German or conjugation tables in French, that that was an illusion, an illusion of learning that we are better off resisting.

When I left the classroom environment of French that I had at school and immersed myself in things of interest to me, my accuracy gradually improved.

Very interesting studies, and I'm going to leave links here in the description box, show that with children, their ability to learn languages is not based necessarily on intelligence or any specific linguistics ability.

It's based on their ability to recognize patterns.

This was the major factor determining who was going to be a good language learner.

Now, the question then arises, how do people become good at recognizing patterns?

To some extent, I think it's a matter of curiosity.

And in fact, again, they found that those children who were exposed to a greater variety of situations, contexts, they tended to develop a better ability to recognize patterns.

So it's not sort of honing in on the details of the language, the verb endings or the noun endings, but rather it's this ability of the brain to start to see patterns, and I have found this myself, I find it very difficult to learn declension endings in Russian or Slavic languages, but sort of new patterns, even if they're very strange, like the patterns of Japanese or Chinese or, or Korean are easier for me to integrate and to eventually to understand naturally and to be able to use then specifics of endings of words or nouns or verbs.

And this basically conforms to what I've mentioned before.

Manfred Spitzer pointed out our brains are designed to identify patterns.

They are not designed to learn details, specific items.

Work on patterns, avoid the fallacy or the illusion of learning specific details.

You're going to find it very, very difficult to do.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I'm not a fan of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar.

He claims that there is a, what he calls a paucity, a lack of sufficient input for children to develop a sense of the language.

But this tends to suggest that rather than some inherent grammar that we have within ourselves, it's more this ability, which varies from child to child, to recognize patterns, and that's where my emphasis has always been in language learning.

Now, the next aspect of my language learning approach is a commitment to intensity, intensity of input, massive listening and reading.

If I can give myself enough input, enough exposure, enough different contexts, I'm going to start picking up on the patterns of the language, but it requires intensity.

I have often said, I've said before that when I was a Mandarin language student in, uh, Hong Kong, you know, I did the course and half the time I learned it better than the other diplomatic language students in Hong Kong who took two years because I was constantly listening and reading.

I think there is a certain white heat of intensity that you have to try to achieve.

And I see that the different languages that I've been learning on my own, where I've been able to spend more time every day listening and reading to comprehensible input, as was the case with Russian, for example, or even for a short period of time, Romanian and Greek or Czech, I did better.

Whereas with Arabic and Persian, where I have kind of, it's been a bit diffuse, little bit of Arabic, little bit of Persian, little bit of Egyptian and a little bit of standard.

Without that intensity, I haven't learned as well.

So intensity of input and focus on input is very important if we are to establish these patterns in our brains.

So one of the reasons, for example, that I think Duolingo is not so effective is not because there's no chance to speak, as some people suggest.

It's because there is not a lot of meaningful content.

There is not that intensity of input, which I think is a precondition for learning.

The third element of my language learning success is a strong sense of belief in my ability to learn.

It's not something that I've started with.

I didn't know whether I could achieve real fluency in French, but I did.

And once I had that, I was confident that I could learn Mandarin Chinese or Japanese or any other language that I had to learn if I put in enough time.

So until you have done it, it's difficult to have that sense of confidence.

It's a bit like this sort of prior knowledge thing.

You know, if you're going somewhere for the first time or you're driving somewhere, we had the experience, we drove, my wife and I, across the mountains from Palm Springs to Temecula and of course going there.

It's a windy road, you know, and it seems like a long way.

But coming back, because you've been on that road before, it seems like a much faster hour and a half.

So once you've done something, you have a greater degree of confidence that you can do it, that you're going to get there.

And I think that's an important attitude to have because there are times when you don't feel you're making any progress.

There are times when you're frustrated, you forget things.

But if you have that confidence that you will achieve success, that you will get there, that will get you there.

And again, you'll see when you go to some of the links that I leave in the description box, a lack of confidence is going to actually hamper your ability to learn.

To some extent, you have to give yourself credit for what you have achieved.

You have to believe that you're going to get there.

And even when you don't feel you're doing as well as you would like, you have to continue to feel confident.

But I have always had that confidence that I can learn.

And I'm not particularly upset when I'm not learning quickly.

I don't set myself a speed goal that I have to achieve it by whenever.

As long as I'm doing it, I'm confident that I'm learning and I will learn it as quickly as I can.

Fourth, an element in my language learning, which I think is important, is flexibility.

When children are very young during what's known as the critical period, the brains are very flexible, the children, you know, we are creating new neural connections, there's a very high degree of plasticity in our brains.

And apparently there's a bit of a struggle between the plasticity neurons and the stability neurons.

And so the stability neurons start to take over.

And so we're reluctant to accept new things.

And I think it's very important not to be that way.

I'm open to try to imitate new sounds, new patterns, new ways of saying things, and I think this flexibility is important.

I've quoted before, I've made reference to a fellow language student back in the late sixties, Canadian diplomat, who, when he heard that in Chinese, the way they say, are you going is ni qi bu qi, you go, not go.

If you consider that any of the patterns or the sounds of the new language are strange or even worse stupid, that you can't make them part of you, then that's a problem.

You have to throw yourself into the language, pretend you are one of them.

That kind of openness and flexibility is, I think, common to all successful language learners, even when it comes to pronunciation.

I've mentioned before that my father would continue to pronounce Nova Scotia as Nova Scotia.

I think we have to be willing to notice things that are different in the language.

We have to try to associate words with sounds, notice how those words are pronounced and not insist on staying within the bounds of how these words are pronounced based on our own alphabet.

So flexibility, willingness to change are key elements of language learning success.

And the fifth element is don't be too anxious to speak.

Don't be too worried about your output performance.

There's far more to language learning than speaking or using the language.

You know, there's far too much emphasis on speaking, especially at an early stage.

Suggestions, uh, suggesting that if you don't speak, you don't know the language, that the only goal of learning a language is to be able to communicate with people.

I have learned to varying degrees, 20 languages.

I can't possibly find people wherever I am here in Palm Springs or in Vancouver with whom I can communicate in all the languages that I can speak.

You don't have to speak in order to learn.

You don't have to be an extrovert in order to be a successful language learner.

If you have a strong interest in the language and how it works in content in the language, culture surrounding the language, you develop these patterns about how the language functions, you will eventually speak.

When you have the opportunity and when it becomes important to you to speak.

So there need not be any hurry in terms of speaking or showing off what you can do.

I'm not interested in proving that after two weeks I can say a few things in language X.

But really, that doesn't mean you can have, as I've said before, a conversation.