Studying
Foreign Languages
Ive
studied 2 foreign languages (English and Spanish), both quite different from my
native language (Russian) and also rather different from each other. Both of
the languages I studied mostly on my own. The English classes I took at school,
university and English First helped me with English but not nearly as much as
what I did outside classroom. And yet Ive been successful at studying and
practicing the languages all by myself, although I havent reached the levels
of profundity and fluency necessary for being indistinguishable from native
speakers or for writing novels or poetry. What Ive reached is enough for understanding
others, speaking, reading and writing. And Im going to share with you the
details of how I learned the languages, what worked and what didnt, what was
useful and what was not.
I began
studying English at a public school, some 15+ years ago. I studied it for about
5 years there, and I cant say I learned much. By the end of the school I ended
up knowing about 50 irregular verbs, and as many words as could fit in a couple
dozen of pages of a pocket vocabulary. And I had all the usual problems: I
didnt know how to pronounce vowels, where to put the accent in many words, how
to use the tenses properly, and how to correctly construct sentences any more
complex than I went to the movies on Saturday.
The reasons
for the failure of the public school to teach me English are manifold.
First, the
teachers kept changing because the country (
The second
thing was isolation. We only used our textbook to learn the language. We
wouldnt use anything like movies or radio to listen to the real speech.
Everything used to broadcast in Russian. Well, in some former
The third
was the time. Too little of it was devoted to the language. Whatever we were
learning, we were easily forgetting without constantly practicing it and
building on top of it.
The fourth and
perhaps the most important flaw was the total indifference. The teachers
couldnt teach well and didnt care. The kids (including myself) as always
couldnt care less and would prefer to do anything but study. We can now blame
the time and the system, but we couldnt change what was happening back then
and so we needed to continue or start almost from scratch.
The
university didnt improve my English. I still struggled with tenses and lacked
vocabulary despite one or two more years of studying the language there. Even
though I kind of was interested in English, most of my questions (like why is
this so, whats the rule, what are the exceptions and patterns to them) were
left unanswered. As I understand it now, back then my curiosity was aiming far
beyond what the teachers had studied or were ready to teach. My questions made
them think, scratch their heads and say something like Uh, I dont know or Well,
its just so, memorize it. Perhaps if I went to a dedicated language school,
Id get plenty of information to keep me busy and satisfy my curiosity, if not
almost drown me in the overwhelming amount of facts and details.
So, there I
was, 19 or 20 years old with pathetic English skills as result of the lousy
teaching and without a hope to ever speak English well. The free language
education didnt seem to work for me.
But it
wasnt hopeless and helpless. At the time I was very interested in computers
and used to spend many ours learning about the computers and trying to program
something. The brain was full of the new ideas in the completely different
field, I was curious and wanted to know more on the subject, as much as I
could. So, half way through the university I already knew 4 or more programming
languages, including the ones specific to a few entirely different computers.
While searching for more information about those bits, bytes and what not I
started to read the official documentation supplied with the software. It was
painful at first and I guess in the beginning I was more guessing and figuring
out the meaning of the texts than actually translating. If youve ever tried to
translate from a poorly known (or completely unfamiliar) language by using a
regular dictionary, you can understand why it was that way. In 96 and 97 (or
was it a year earlier?), the internet broke the grounds in
A bunch of
web pages that Altavista found for my query had lead
to the recovery of my English, something I didnt yet know at the time. I
greedily began to read everything I was finding on the subject of computer
graphics, explanations of the graphical algorithms, mail threads with their
discussions, sample programs using them and so on and so forth. There was one
particular web page that contained a number of graphical demo programs drawing
various things with special effects in 2d and 3d and every demo program and
every algorithm used in it was explained in simple English, perhaps the
simplest I ever read to date. The documentation was written in an entertaining
and breathtaking way. I ended up reading all of it despite the fact that I
could understand things from the programs source codes and the fact that I
still occasionally needed to use the dictionary to understand some things. When
I had been done with that I noticed how easy it was to read and understand,
something that never happened before. Of course, part of this ease could be
attributed to my interest in the matter and certain redundancy because there
were the code and the documentation, not just one of the two. Nonetheless, I
noted this fact and decided to carry on and continue reading in English.
I found a
number of web sites of other people eagerly learning the computer stuff and
sharing their ideas and programs with others. The sites contained links to
other similar sites and so there always was something interesting to read, one
just needed to follow the links or use Altavista to
find more. Soon I discovered the existence of news groups, a service
mechanically working pretty much like the regular e-mail, except it wasnt just
between two people (or everyone on the TO and CC lines); it was between all
members of a group and there could be hundreds or thousands of the members.
Everyone could read everyone elses message or post their own and everyone else
would see it and possibly reply back.
In about 2
years of reading off of the internet and communicating with others over e-mail
and in news groups I had greatly improved my English. I grasped most of the
grammar and extended my vocabulary nicely, although not without a skew towards
technical and computer terms. :) Initially it used to take me half an hour to
an hour to compose an e-mail or a post to a news group and the message only
consisted of a dozen of sentences. And it still contained mistakes despite me
trying to avoid them by carefully choosing words and grammatical constructs
familiar to me. But in just 2 years of doing that repeatedly I went from a few
messages like that a day to reading several dozens of messages daily and
writing similar amount of my own, some times for several days in a raw. Wasnt
it great? Oh, boy, it was! I was learning what I was interested in. I was sharing
with great minds. And I while doing that I was also learning
what I needed later and couldnt learn well before. I was learning
English.
The 2 jolly
years almost passed when I knew I was gonna go to the
The first
time in the
And so I
started to work on my English. All the classes were in English, all the
entertainment (e.g. the TV) was in English and there was no escape. It was
nothing less than a full immersion into the language, something some language
classes and software titles claim to provide but really dont.
The classes
were OK. I could understand most of what teachers said. Besides, a lot of
information was either already known or seemed familiar, since it all was
mathematics, physics and computer stuff, the things Id studied before. The TV
on the other hand was completely incomprehensible. The speech was too fast,
sounded odd and there were quite a few words I didnt know. So, I was just staring
blankly at the screen, trying to recognize where the words began and ended in
this continuous stream of sounds erupting from the box. It was that bad, almost
as if I knew no language at all, not a single word of it. I could only guess
what they said on the TV. But watching the TV for a few hours a day for about 2
months made the trick. I actually started to understand the speech, not guess. At
this point I started to pick new words because they were in frequent use on the
TV. I also started to see better where Id do pronunciation mistakes. I started
looking at how vowels were pronounced and where the accents in the words were.
It was very painful to undo all the damage that had happened to my
pronunciation due to the negligence on the teachers part. They never taught me
to pronounce correctly. I literally had to unlearn and relearn. To correct the
situation I used to repeat the familiar words in their proper articulation,
every word that I found sounding different from what I had thought it shouldve
sounded like. It was unbelievable. No wonder why so many people who learn
Russian dont pronounce words correctly, even if everything else (e.g. grammar)
is correct. They all have experienced the same educational flaw. In Russian the
accent location is irregular, its never indicated in the text, and it moves as
the words change their form. Only practice and memorization can help here.
As I was
making the progress with English, talking on the phone became easier. You can
imagine what it was for me to talk on the phone when I had just arrived to the
I spent
almost a year in the
The second
time I went to the US, which was 4 years later, I took English classes from a
native teacher (here by native I dont mean an American Indian who would be the
most native American one can ever find:). I wanted to improve and polish some
things. The guy wasnt bad, but I was asking him way too many questions to
which he didnt know logical answers. Its just that we never question
irregularities and oddities of our native languages; we never try to classify
them as scientists would. We simply absorb the language the way it is. And so
many times questions about those weird things in the language would not find
the kind of exhaustive answer we want. And lets face it: native speakers
arent the best teachers of their language. They have this captivating feeling
that they know the language. After all, dont they? And they miss a lot of the peculiar
details like those irregularities because to them they arent irregularities at
all. They cant point at them beforehand, but they will immediately spot a
mistake in your speech or writing. That is, they wont tell you what to avoid
or to do differently before youve made a mistake. Theyll do this after. Its
the way they are. However, on the upside, over the time its possible to
practice the language to perfection with native speakers. It just may need much
more time than you actually have. Think about the kids. It takes them several
years of constant communication with the parents, other children and the childcare
personnel to master the grammar and learn basic vocabulary. And dont forget
that at this early age learning (well, memorizing) is the most effective than
at any later point in our lives. So, to master the language this way in
adulthood one would need to spend a lot of time talking the language. And if a
lot doesnt sound like much, think 3-5 years minimum. Now thats a lot, isnt
it?
So, if
youve already learned one foreign language (or studied your native language in
depth), heres what youre likely to face when learning another one. If you use
some standard text book, it will seem to you boring and lacking details. Itll
happen not because the book is bad, but because you already know what to expect
in the new language, youll already be familiar with many concepts and
constructs the book describes because those are shared among several languages
and you know some of them from another language. So, you wont need all those repetitious
detailed explanations and numerous examples just to understand what you already
know or to get the idea of a foreign language being very different from your
native and the fact that one generally does not translate word for word. And thats
a normal thing to happen.
The way out? Look for a good grammar reference thats nearly complete, where the
information is presented in a well structured manner (with diagrams, tables,
cross references), which covers common irregularities and provides patterns for
those irregular things that cant be explained by a precise rule, but can be
quickly recognized as suspicious (if one knows what to look for), be checked
with a dictionary and learned correctly. For example, we know that in many
English words the pattern ea (as in the word eat) reads as the e letter
of the English alphabet. But therere also words where it reads differently.
Compare eat with weapon, great and caveat. Got it? Now you know what to
do when you see a new word with ea in it. You need to look it up in the
dictionary and memorize the pronunciation along with the spelling. If you dont
learn about this ambiguity from a book or some other place, youll probably
learn it the hard way. See if the book points at such suspicious things. Also
get yourself a vocabulary. Start with a pocket vocabulary with about 2-3
thousand words. Well, it may be more practical to start with a smaller one (100-500
words) but youll grow out of it quickly anyway. Learn the grammar and several
hundred of words. The vocabulary can be studied almost indefinitely due to the
enormous amount of words in a language, but the basic grammar is quite compact.
So, get the grammar straight, study the grammar reference from cover to cover.
Read it whole several times until you understand it all and it looks familiar
enough for recognizing. In the mean time memorize the words from the
vocabulary. 500 to 1000 words would be a good start. I think fluent language
skills correspond to three to five thousand words or more. Obviously, we dont
use all of them daily. And which ones we use depends on what were talking about.
This article, for example, contains about a thousand unique words. When youre
finished with the grammar, you can turn to books, newspapers, and web sites.
The learned grammar and basic words will be enough to begin reading and build
upon. Youll learn more words and touch up your grammar in the process. Writing
is also useful, so finding a pen pal for language exchange and writing to each
other can be a good exercise. Or you could find an interesting newsgroup (or
forum) on the internet in the language youre learning and get involved in
discussions. Also start with audio-visual aids such as radio or TV. In the
beginning it may be much like listening to a continuous flow of sounds or just
noise and trying to decipher and guess. But dont worry, itll get better as
soon as you know enough words and are accustomed to the speech.
If youve
got a bit of ingenuity and arent afraid of technology and learning new and
cool stuff (which, I suppose, you dont if youve embarked onto learning a
foreign language and are reading this), consider making a good use of your
computer to help yourself. If youve already used electronic dictionaries,
flash card programs and other educational software, you can make a big step
forward, if not a giant leap and exploit the technology to provide you with
additional services you could only dream of.
So, youve
been making your flash cards (I hope you have or at least planned to) by hand
in a text editor or in the flash card program of your choice. Its all right to
do this once or several times, but the more words you need, the more time
consuming this is going to be because of the limitation of the tools (the
editor or the flash card program). The user interface may be not good enough or
it may require you to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse. Or
there can be no simple functionality like search and replace a complex pattern
of text or simply to sort or randomly order your words or cards. Its sad these
basic things arent readily available. But theres a way out. It may be not for
the faint-hearted to do what Im gonna suggest, but
it truly pays out.
Learn how
to make basic script programs in Perl. Perl is either already available in your
computer if youre using Linux or Unix or some similar Operating System, or it
can be freely downloaded for your Windows. Its been made available for many OSes and chances are youre a few if not less clicks away
from getting it onto your computer.
Perl is a
very powerful tool for all sorts of manipulations with text. Its easy to
search for text and its easy to replace text with Perl. Its possible to
specify a complex pattern of symbols instead of trying various combinations and
Perl will find the text matching the given pattern. And it will do replacement
based on the patterns too. Youd be able to sort the words/cards or just
randomly order them. Youd be able to find unique words or duplicate words. And
the best thing about this is that these operations become automated. You no
longer need to spend minutes and hours of your precious time on just editing,
copying & pasting something. Youd be able to do things like distinguishing
verbs, adverbs and adjectives from a list of words; an input text file and your
smart Perl script will do it quickly and efficiently. Knowing some basic word
morphology and using the regular expressions can do the trick. At times you
might need to jump through the hoops because of the language irregularities and
ambiguities, but hey, this is precisely what engineers deal with on the regular
basis. Be one of those great minds, be smart and do cool stuff few people do!
Suppose,
youve already studied the language grammar and youre reading your first book
in the new language and you need to learn many new words from the text and you
plan on making use of your flash card program to memorize them. Open your
electronic dictionary. You must have one already. Instead of opening the flash
card program and making the cards on the go, open your text editor. Make the
cards in the plain text form in your editor. Use one line per pair of words,
like so:
information;información
black;negro
ocean;oceano
frequently;frecuentemente
abandon;abandonar
Save this
file as Unicode (UTF-8, in particular). Youll be able to make flash cards out
of this file at any point later. Just compose the list of words you need and
their translation. Use some unique non-letter character to separate the words
in the two languages. A semicolon can be used. Less apparent but also suitable
could be the tab characters.
Now, what
you really want to do while learning languages that have the notion of gender
in the grammar (such as Spanish and Russian) is to mark somehow the gender of
nouns. In Spanish this could easily be achieved by simply placing the definite
article in front of the noun. That way youll learn not just the noun but also
its gender and never confuse. So, the list would be now like this:
information;la información
black;negro
ocean;el oceano
frequently;frecuentemente
to abandon;abandonar
A note of
caution to the learners of Spanish and perhaps similar languages: while the
above technique works perfectly most of the time, therere rare exceptions
regarding the articles:
Now, if you
have this list, its easy to figure out which word is what part of speech. All Spanish
nouns are denoted by the definite article. All Spanish verbs end in ar/er/ir/ír (except ayer,
which is an adverb). Most single-word adverbs in Spanish end
in mente (except despacio).
Unless you put entire phrases into this file, prepositions or some new kind of
word, the rest are the adjectives (and they in Spanish normally end in o/a/e
and less often in other letters such as l/n/r/s/z). You can write a Perl
script to search this list for the appropriate letter patterns and generate
from it another list that contains, say, only nouns or only verbs. You can now
choose what part of speech to concentrate on. Can your flash card program help
with this? I bet not. And even if it can, most likely it wouldnt be this flexible.
The application of the above idea will, of course, vary from language to
language. If its hard to employ morphology, you can still come up with some
markers such as the definite articles in front of English nouns and the
preposition to in front of English verbs. You can guide the automation with
these markers. For Russian instead of the articles (which are non-existent in
the language) one could use the personal pronouns such as she, he and it for
all 3 genders (the 3rd is neuter). Adjectives, verbs y adverbs can
be easily recognized from a simple morphological analysis.
What else
can you do? For the fun of it or for educational purposes, you can combine the
words into something more meaningful. Suppose, you have this list:
kimono;el quimono
white;blanco
Knowing
which word is what part of speech, couldnt you combine them like so?:
white kimono;el quimono blanco
You could. And
this would allow you to learn words not individually but together, several at
once. Or you could easily generate cards with conjugations of regular verbs. Or cards with numbers from 1 to 99. You get the idea.
Now, lets
get back to actual flash cards. From a text file with a list of words with Perl
you can easily create flash cards that are also effectively text files (txt,
html, xml, etc). If your flash card program works with flash cards in a
text-based file format, you need to find out what that format is (look at some
available cards in a text editor or if you have none yet, create a card in the
program and then analyze its format). If its binary (with lots of weird
symbols), check if you can easily import your lists into the programs cards.
If the program supports only the binary format and has no easy import function,
dump it. Find one that operates with cards in simple almost plain-text format (Pauker is almost that thing: the xml flash card files it
uses are additionally compressed with the standard gzip
file compressor). Then write a script to make cards from your word lists and
enjoy learning the way you want. And by the way, there exist word lists which
can be helpful too.
Therere a
few things we may do inefficiently while using flash cards that can be done better.
For grammar
and vocabulary:
For reading
practice:
For reading
and writing practice:
For
listening practice:
Flash card
programs:
Flash
cards:
Grammar
books:
Word lists:
Bilingual
books for reading:
Pen
scanners:
Verb conjugators:
March 2008
Alexei A. Frounze