Language Learning: a how-to (repost)

I posted this three years ago. Someone sent me a PM about it the other day, so I figured I'd post it again for anyone who hasn't seen it and might find it useful. I'll try not to accidentally delete it this time.

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How to learn a language, targeted towards people teaching themselves at home.

Feel free to jump around. It turned out a bit dry.

Learning Strategies

The following are all valid, tested learning strategies, but they may not be right for your learning style or your goals. This is not a collection of resources. Most learners use a combination of these techniques, even within one activity, and some resources are more suited to some techniques than others. Types of resources to be used with each technique will be included in the descriptions.

For simplicity’s sake, I describe each method as it is used as a primary Learning Strategy, but the principles behind why the strategies work can be applied to creating or altering other activities as well. I try to keep theory and history to a minimum and focus on how, but I included enough so that you can google it or ask me in the comments if you want to learn more. Here are some questions to get you thinking about how you’d like to learn:

Question	Suggested learning strategy
Are you social or outgoing?	#5
Do you love literature and reading?	#1, #2, #4
Are you learning a language only for reading?	#4
Is being able to speak from day one important?	#2, #5

And if all of this gets too confusing, get a textbook. They’re written to guide you through the process, and the exercises will include activities that exercise the same language muscles as the ones I’m writing about here. Most textbooks are well-suited to #2, #3, and #5.

1. Listening-Reading

The listening-reading (LR) method is, most simply, using bilingual texts with target-language audiobooks. You learn new vocab by comparing the text with the facing English, as opposed to word lists or dictionaries. Grammar is acquired naturally rather than explicitly studied. This technique is based on the idea that the amount of comprehensible input (i.e. listening to things you can mostly understand) is the most important factor in learning another language.

In its purest form, LR allows you to skip the boring textbook sentences and children’s books and go straight to what you want to read. It’s made comprehensible by using parallel texts, rather than relying on the learner to be able to understand most of the language independently. Here is the mother of pure LR’s guide. The writing style is a bit jarring, but there are some very good points and considerations there. It’s essential reading if you want to use LR as your main Learning Strategy.

Lighter forms of LR can also be used in conjunction with other methods, and there’s no one way to do it right. The standard method is as follows:

1. Read the English version of a long text, the longer the better (L1).
2. Read the original text (L2) while listening to the audio.
3. Read the English text (L1) while listening to the audio again. This is the most important part and the only step that cannot be skipped under any circumstances.

Repeat these steps until it gets too easy, then get a different book. Doing another repetition using the shadowing technique is a good way to get some pronunciation and speaking practice in with this method as well.

You have to get a feel for what works for you.

Warning! If you’re not really analyzing the text in detail and figuring out how the language works, what you’re doing is extensive reading/listening. That’s good practice, but it’s in the Practice Activities section rather than the Learning Strategies section for a reason. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t understand it, it’s not helping you much. More on that in the Practice section.

A variant on this method is reading with some kind of program that helps you look up words quickly, reducing your reliance on the English text. Some of the programs have the added benefit of tracking which words you know and let you export the words to Anki. Learning with Texts, Foreign Language Text Reader, LingQ, and readlang are programs that can help with this.

Pros:

• Instantly engage with content interesting to you
• All vocab and grammar is learned in context
• No explicit grammar instruction (only a pro if you’re someone who freezes up when they hear words like verb, adjective, conjugate, or decline)
• Good for learners who have large chunks of time to dedicate to learning, scales well with long study sessions, even upwards of 9 or 10 hours at a time
• Lots of listening practice from the very beginning

Cons:

• Requires extreme amounts of concentration
• No hand-holding, your brain has to do the work of figuring out the language itself, and you have to schedule and motivate yourself
• Difficult to gauge progress at the beginning. It will likely be at least 100 hours before you start understanding noteworthy amounts of native speech in the wild
• Easy to fall into the trap of not focusing and analyzing enough, which leads to very slow or nonexistent progress. And because it’s difficult to gauge progress, you could spend 50 hours “studying” with little to show for it if you’re not careful
• Easy to get demotivated because of how little you understand at the beginning
• Not a particularly efficient method if you can’t dedicate at least two hours at a time to it. This method scales very well with long study sessions, but if you only have 30 minutes at a time, you’d be better off doing something else

In short, this is a powerful method for confident learners, but it’s easy to mess it up. For people who are trying to learn their first foreign language, I would not recommend using LR as your primary learning method. It is, however, a great activity if you have a whole weekend and want to spend it doing nothing but studying.

Further reading: 1

2. Shadowing

Strictly speaking, shadowing is pronunciation practice. It’s much like repeating or echoing L2 audio, but done simultaneously as the L2 audio continues to play. The reason it’s in the Learning Strategies section is because of how it’s used in conjunction with a resource like Assimil, which is what I’ll be focusing on here.

For those unfamiliar with Assimil, it’s a collection of about 100 short dialogues or occasionally monologues with facing translation in English (L1) and audio recordings of the dialogues. Linguaphone is another set of similarly structured courses that work well with this method. With a little adaptation, this can work with Glossika or FSI as well. Assimil is not explicitly designed for shadowing, but it’s almost perfectly suited for it.

The learning itself occurs similarly to the LR method, in that you are comparing text/audio to a translation in English (L1). Assimil has two huge advantages, though, in that a) it is designed to introduce less complex words and grammar first and gradually get harder and b) there are notes and explanations to help you figure out why things are the way they are. Here’s how it looks:

First, put the lesson you’re working on on repeat. Keep your book closed. Try to speak along with what you’re hearing. After doing that a few times, open your book and read along with the English while continuing to listen and speak along with the audio. Then begin to read the L2 text and glance over to the English (L1), still listening and speaking along with the audio. Turn off the audio, analyze the text and the translation, read the notes and look up anything you don’t understand, then do any exercises in the book. Read the L2 text out loud, then play the audio again and shadow it. Check your pronunciation against the audio recording.

Depending on you goals and how much time you have, there are some more activities you can do with the lesson as well. You can do a dictation exercise by listening to the audio and writing or typing out the text, then checking what you wrote with the text in the book. You can do scriptorium. You can record yourself reading or shadowing the dialogue and compare it with the audio. After you’ve studied the lesson as outlined above, you can use it as passive listening practice when you can’t spare the attention to properly study, for example on a commute or while doing the dishes.

Even if you don’t follow the method as strictly as outlined above, or if you don’t think shadowing suits you as a primary Learning Strategy, it’s a great activity to incorporate into the study of any textbook or material that has audio dialogues. At an intermediate or advanced level, shadowing audiobooks is a very effective and efficient exercise.

This is based mostly on Professor Arguelles’s shadowing method. The Shadowing Step by Step video at the bottom of this page is a very detailed, in-depth look at the method and how to do it. Professor Arguelles can be a bit eccentric, and like many polyglots tends to be a bit dogmatic about the way that works best for them, but he’s undoubtedly one of the most skilled language learners in the world. You can learn a lot from listening to or reading what he has to say about it, even if you think some of it won’t work for you.

Pros:

• Practices speaking, listening, and reading
• Clear, structured learning as laid out in a textbook like Assimil
• Grammar explanations
• Vocabulary and grammar is learned in contexts
• Easy to gauge progress and see improvement

Cons:

• Although more structured than some strategies, Assimil doesn’t guide you through the learning process as much as other textbooks. Some degree of learner autonomy is required
• Assimil and other shadowing-friendly resources cost money
• Requires ~30 minute chunks of uninterrupted, focused study time

This is a solid method that is clear, easy to follow for inexperienced learners, and available for a wide variety of languages. This is one of my top picks that works well for most learners.

3. 10,000 Sentences

The idea behind this method is that if you can read and understand 10,000 sentences in a language, you can understand most anything. Like the LR method, 10k is based around the idea that you large amounts of comprehensible input is what determines a learner’s success. This, along with Grammar Translation, is one of the oldest language learning methods out there. It works, but it’s difficult to implement correctly and efficiently.

One modern approach, popularized by Antimoon and later AJATT, is to immerse yourself in the language (read books, watch TV, etc.), pull interesting sentences from things you read or hear (called sentence mining), and put them into flashcards. L2 sentence on the front, English (L1) and any notes you might need on the back. You learn the words and grammar through sentences on your flashcards, and AJATT recommends 10,000 hours of immersion (what I am calling Practice Activities) to go along with your 10,000 sentences. This works, but there are more efficient ways to go about it. This method includes no intensive listening, which slows it down, and mining your own sentences takes up a lot of time. Proponents argue that mining the sentences is part of the learning process, and it is, but the copying, pasting, and finding sentences that you can understand as a beginner all take time that could be spent doing something that involves more practice as well.

Why bother explaining this method at all, if it’s so inefficient? For one, some people legitimately like learning this way. A Learning Strategy you enjoy will work better for you than a Learning Strategy you don’t. Secondly, the core concept is sound, and there are very good ways to adapt and combine this method with other methods to make it work. Instead of explicitly studying grammar, you’re learning sentence templates that you can swap around to produce the sentences you want.

Pulling sentences from textbooks and putting them into flashcards is much quicker provides sentences that progress from easier to harder. Cut up your book’s audio files and put them on the flashcard using a tool like Anki (front:audio → back: L2 and English (L1)), and then you get intensive listening practice at the same time. If you are learning a language with a difficult script like Chinese and Japanese, having two separate cards, one with the written sentence on the front and one with the audio on the front, is an effective strategy. Shadow the audio when the flashcard comes up, and you’ve got pronunciation practice as well. Add some cloze deletion cards for unknown words, and you train your active recall. Like with any method, you still need to supplement with lots of Practice Activities, but that’s a method that can hold its own with any of the others on this list. (Note: This is my personal favorite method for difficult languages)

You can also combine this idea with subs2srs, a program that makes audio or even video flashcards from movie files and their corresponding English (L1) and L2 subtitle files. Explaining how to use subs2srs is outside the scope of this guide, but the end result is that you can make thousands of audio flashcards from your favorite movies without having to cut up or type out the cards yourself.

[The following section was written about the old Glossika pdfs+mp3s which are no longer available for purchase.]

A discussion of 10k wouldn’t be complete without discussing Glossika’s take on the method. Glossika doesn’t offer more than 6000 sentences for any language, but the principle is the same. It includes the sentences, progressing from less to more difficult; audio files which are great for shadowing; plus pronunciation guides in IPA. It’s a good compromise between 10k and Assimil-style shadowing. It is, like its uncle 10k, more comprehensive and will take you to a higher level than Assimil, but it has no grammar notes or explanations and requires a good bit more autonomy on the learner’s part.

[The new Glossika still offers most of the same benefits, but you have no control over the Spaced Repetition, you have no audio files to cut up and use how you like, and you have no pdfs to copy for your 10K list if you want. It also costs $30 a month, and you have to be connected to the internet. The plus side is that there are more sentences, they've fixed up some of the errors and bad audio, and as long as you're happy with their SRS and presentation, you don't have to spend as much time importing it into Anki. It's still worth considering, especially for some of the less common languages they support.]

Pros:

• Remains effective into intermediate and advanced levels
• Content interesting to you (from sentence mining or subs2srs)
• Highly adaptable. The principle that knowing a lot of sentences means knowing a lot of vocab and grammar generally works and can be combined with other methods.
• Free (except Glossika or buying movies especially for that purpose)

Cons:

• Glossika and movies cost money
• Difficult to execute correctly. Not as difficult as LR, but you can slow down your learning a lot trying to figure out how to effectively mine sentences and set up flashcards
• Overkill for easier languages. You probably don’t need 10,000 sentences to start engaging with native material in Spanish.
• Does not necessarily provide as much practice as other Learning Strategies (though it can be modified to mitigate this disadvantage, or you can just spend more time doing Practice Activities)

Further reading: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

4. Grammar Translation

This was the go-to method for teaching Europe’s literate classes for centuries, possibly longer. It’s not that popular these days, but it still works, even if it’s a bit dry and inefficient. The Grammar Translation method treats language as a sum of its vocabulary and grammar. If you know the vocab and the grammar, you should be able to put together a sentence. It doesn’t necessarily include any listening or pronunciation practice, which means there aren’t many opportunities to make the language automatic, which is probably your goal. Nobody wants to sit around and flip through declension charts and vocabulary lists in their head to be able to understand or make a sentence. And when you try to produce sentences, they’re going to sound like early iterations of machine translators, when they went word by word.

Nobody wants that, except Classics majors and other people learning languages for purely academic purposes. If your only goal is reading, you can learn to translate fast enough to understand what you need to read, and eventually the reading will become automatic. It’s effective because you can more or less entirely skip the Practice Activities outlined below. Sure, you may go your whole career and never be able to string together two sentences in Latin, but you can read it, and that’s what you want. Good examples of books which still rely mostly on this method are Hansen and Quinn’s Greek: An Intensive Course and Wheelock’s Latin.

Elements of Grammar Translation are found in more modern courses focused on modern, spoken languages, as well. The learning in everyone’s favorite language app, Duolingo, is still fundamentally the Grammar Translation method at its core. Learn vocab, learn grammar, put it together like a puzzle. Duolingo has made some changes like including audio, and its grammar instruction is more explicit in some courses than others. As long as you make sure to spend plenty of time practicing and engaging with the language, Grammar-Translation is not a bad way to start studying a language.

Pros:

• You don’t have to bother practicing speaking, listening, or writing.

Cons:

• No practice
• Pretty much everything else

5. Teachers

I’m going to keep this segment short, because there’s no shortage of places to read about how to learn a language from other people. I’m lumping everything that involves another human being teaching you something into this category.

The most straightforward way to learn from a teacher is to hire a teacher. Find one you like, and don’t be afraid to tell them what you want and why you’re learning. If they aren’t being responsive to your goals, pick a different teacher. Cons: It costs money, and the teacher may not be good.

You could also try to do a language exchange. The first problem with this is that it’s a little inefficient, because you have to spend half your time helping them. If you enjoy that, then it’s not an issue. The second problem is that even well-meaning native speakers aren’t necessarily good teachers. It will probably work if they’re patient and willing to try, though. Humans are shockingly good at communicating when they want to, even if they don’t share a language at all. How efficient this method will be depends a lot on you and the dice roll that is finding a good language partner.

Getting unsuspecting natives to teach you can work, as well. The actual learning of vocab and grammar comes mostly from attentively listening to other people and getting things from context. To give an actionable example, if you find ordering stuff at the bakery very confusing in Germany, stumble through ordering a coffee, sit near the counter, and listen to people order until you figure out what questions the bakers ask and how people respond. Keep in mind, though, that this only works if you know a few words already, or there are plenty of cognates in every day vocabulary. This would be much less effective or more difficult as a true beginner in Vietnam.

I know I’m not doing justice to these methods, but it’s easy enough to google. Any kind of two-way interaction with other human beings is going to be practice, and there’s usually enough context that you learn new things too. The only other warning I have is to pay attention to whether you’re actually learning new things, or just practicing what you know. Do too little of either and you’re likely to stagnate.

Supplemental Exercises

For Vocab

Sometimes, your lack of vocab is what’s holding you back more than anything else. When that happens, you need to give your vocabulary a boost. Ideally, you’re learning most of your vocabulary through your Learning Strategies or Practice Activities, but sometimes, for whatever reason, you just feel like you don’t know any words. There are a few ways to remedy that.

Further reading: 1

A. Flash cards

Put L1 on one side, L2 on the other. Some kind of spaced repetition system makes this much more efficient. You can build your own flashcards or download premade decks in Anki, or use some of the courses on memrise. Clozemaster is a good option that functions like flashcards, but uses cloze deletion. The big advantage there is that you see the word in context.

B. Word lists

I’m addicted to screens, so I’ve never personally used word lists and don’t feel qualified to talk about them. Some people swear by them, though. Follow the links on this page to learn more about it.

For Pronunciation

For getting native-like intonation, shadowing is one of the best techniques out there. Your textbook, audiobooks, whatever you can find, shadow it. When you hear a native speaker say something differently than how it would have sounded if you’d said it, shadow it. But even if you’re using a Learning Strategy that’s pronunciation heavy, chances are there will be at least a couple of sounds you have trouble producing.

That’s where minimal pair activities come in. If you’re learning English, you may struggle with distinguishing the words ship and sheep. They sound the same, with just one sound being different. Get audio for both words from Forvo or somewhere else, play them randomly, say which word it is, and check to see if you’re right. Do it over and over until you get it. Then switch to bit and beet. Then sit and seat, and so on and so forth. Some people like to set these up as flashcards, but I generally just put it on shuffle in vlc. Only when you can hear the difference should you try to produce the sound. It’s important that you can recognize whether the sound’s correct or not when it comes out of your mouth. As far as actually getting unfamiliar sounds to come out of your mouth, sitting around and jabbering to yourself until it happens seems to be the way it usually works out in the end.

Practice Activities

Learning a language is like learning an instrument. You practice for countless hours until it’s automatic. But like an instrument, you have to know something to practice before practicing is any use to you.

Practically, for you the language learner, this means that practice activities shouldn’t be used as your main sources of learning until you can understand enough to learn by context. If you’re a Spaniard learning Catalan, you might be able to jump right in and learn primarily from the practice activities from the get-go, like a guitarist learning the bass. If you’re learning an entirely foreign language like Chinese or Korean, it may be years before Practice Activities become a more effective use of time than the Learning Strategies for Beginners.

For most learners, it’s best to start with Learning Strategies and slowly incorporate more and more practice as you improve. For a language like Spanish or German, you may be able to rely completely on practicing to continue improving within six months or a year. You could continue more directed learning methods if you want, but you don’t have to. If you’re learning Vietnamese, it’ll be a couple of years, probably more. That’s not to say don’t practice at the beginning! Practice is always good, but at the beginning, don’t practice at the expense of activities that are designed to increase your knowledge of the language, i.e. the Learning Strategies. It will slow you down and can be demotivating.

By the time your learning consists mostly of practice, you’ve probably figured out what works for you already. Like socially focused learning methods, there is no shortage of information about these methods on the internet if you want to know more. Some good options for practice are:

1. Watching TV shows and movies
2. Extensive reading / Extensive listening – Extensive reading is focused on the content. Intensive reading is focused on the language. Be careful not to think you’re doing LR while you’re doing extensive reading instead. Also, extensive reading is one of the absolute best ways to build vocabulary. The more you understand already, the better.
3. Listen to music
4. Talk or chat with people – Again, be aware of how much you’re actually learning here. As an advanced student, if you always talk about the same stuff with the same people this isn’t really that helpful.
5. Self-talk – Talk to yourself. Practice generating sentences on the fly. Give yourself impromptu speech topics in your L2. Prepare for conversations by playing them out yourself. This is great for people who get nervous when they are put on the spot and have to actually speak the language they’ve been learning.

Pitfall to avoid: Blind Immersion. It’s easy to fall into this trap. Why haven’t I learned anything? I’ve been in Spain for five years and can’t say buenos dias, I thought immersion was supposed to be the best way to learn a language! Remember: Practice is not learning! You can learn a lot by practicing, but only if you can understand a good bit of it already. You can't have a conversation without a foundation to build on. Finding the right balance of study and practice is key. Do both, and if you’re not sure what to do, lean more towards studying.

Conclusion

There are nearly endless ways to mix and match these methods into different activities and curricula, but hopefully this gives unsure learners some places to start figuring out how they learn best. Remember that the most important thing is how much time and effort you put into learning.

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