Language learning

I am by no means any sort of language guru. I only speak one language fluently. My other attempts at language learning have gone either completely nowhere (Latin), or nowhere fast (Chinese, Japanese).

There's a few reasons why my attempts thus far have been met with such little progress, 1) difficulty, 2) poor course material, and 3) laziness. I'd like to focus on the second one, because people trying to learn a new language might find some of my own personal discoveries in that department interesting, but I'll hit the other two as well.

1) Difficulty
Latin, from a practical "I want to communicate with a lot of different, living people" standpoint, is a dead language. This means that learning it is hard because, well, how do you find a teacher who is fluent in a language that nobody speaks. It can be done, I'm sure, but it is probably difficult. My Latin teachers in elementary and highschool sure did there best, and I respect them for it, but if you honestly want to learn a language well, you need to have an instructor who is fluent in the language.

As far as Chinese and Japanese go, there is an interesting government website here, that compares the average study hours needed to attain professional proficiency in a variety of languages. Languages are divided into categories. Category 1 languages, for example, require about 600 hours of study to become proficient, category 2 languages require about 1100 hours of study for proficiency, and category III require about 2200 hours of study for proficiency. Some example languages:

Category I: Afrikaans, Danish, Romanian, Norwegian, Italian

Category II: Zulu, Lao, Hungarian, Croatian, Mongolian

Category III: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

I would guess Cantonese and Korean are harder than Mandarin and Japanese for the following reasons: Cantonese is basically Mandarin but with harder tones and sounds, and Korean is basically Japanese but with nearly impossible sounds. However, Korean has the bonus of having a writing system that actually makes a lot of sense. Maybe that equalizes things. I don't know much about Arabic to compare it to the others. But according to the numbers on the website, I just haven't put the time in yet, to attain profficiency.

2) Poor course structure/material

This is what I have found very irritating, thus far, in both my attempts to learn the languages. When I first moved to Japan, Elton was thinking of hooking me up with a language teacher, because he said that if I relied on the language course at the university, I'll have gotten almost no where by the time I leave. When I asked him why this was the case, he thought about it and said that it probably has something to do with the education system. From the school's perspective, it is beneficial from a financial standpoint to prolong the education process. He wasn't certain about this, of course, but I ended up taking a university class instead of having a tutor and he was right on the money. I got almost nowhere because it was soooooo sloooooow.

And, it has been somewhat the same in my Chinese education. I don't want to put any of the blame for this on my Chinese instructor, she was fabulous. But there is something clearly wrong with a textbook that doesn't teach you the words for "left" and "right," or how to call a Taxi, or order food (wait, my textbook still hasn't taught how to do that), until the second year. And all that coming after teaching students the finer points of Peking Opera. The order is all screwed up.

Nothing made this clearer to me than when I actually visited Myron in China. When I got there, I found that the Chinese I had learned was essentially worthless. Not because I forgot all the words (I forgot a great deal, but upon review later I saw that it wouldn't have really mattered), but because the words I had learned just weren't very useful. You can't ask for directions if you haven't learned the words for "left", "right", "go straight", etc. You can't order kung pao chicken if you don't know the basics of how to order. You can't buy a train ticket if you don't know the words for soft seat, hard seat, soft sleeper, or hard sleeper. Or the word for round-trip, for that matter. You can't ask to find a hostel if you don't know the word for guesthouse. Etc.

The same thing goes for the Japanese lessons I experienced. I did not learn my most-frequently-used words from the text book I studied. I learned them from hanging out with friends or encountering situations in real life where I didn't know what was going on and realized "uh, next time I better know the words for that."

Maybe the first year/semester of learning a language should be structured like a language survival guide for travelers, supplemented with grammar. I can't see how focusing on the necessities for daily living and/or traveling would be a bad thing, because chances are, any student who is learning the language will study abroad and do at least a little bit of that before getting too far in the program anyway. Even if there is something unappealing about structuring the first few classes in a survival skills manner, it would at least be nice to see textbooks that put learning basic skills like buying batteries or toothpaste before learning Confucian proverbs.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that every textbook I've had so far was written by native speakers of the language. I wonder if there are any textbooks out there written by people who at one point needed to learn the language, and have successfully become fluent in the language about which they are writing. Such a textbook would be useful because it would be written from the perspective of someone who knows what is and isn't important.


3) Laziness.
This last one is highly dependent upon the individual. I was fairly motivated in class, some of the others preferred to listen to their ipods, sleep, or just not attend at all. However, one thing I did not do, because it was a pain and I wasn’t willing to put in the hard work, was memorization. It is such a pain to sit there with 500 flash cards and go through each one every day. But you need to do this. Actually, you need to do more, 500 words won’t get you far, you need to memorize thousands of words. Memorizing vocabulary is just a painful reality for anyone who actually wants to buckle down and get good at a new language. If you are willing to do this, than any program or textbook, no matter how crappy, won’t be able to hold you back. I tried to go the easy route, thinking that by watching a lot of subtitled movies/anime etc and thinking about the words, I would somehow slowly catch on to what the words mean.

I don’t want to say that watching these had no value. Listening to a language is also incredibly important. One thing watching movies and anime did is help me recognize words much faster, and as they are actually said. My ability to comprehend the language has increased greatly. However, watching cartoons did not add much to my vocabulary.

So, I guess the point of this post is that if you really want to learn another language, you can't neglect the hard work of memorization. I just realized this, and so the last week I’ve been going through my old textbooks of both Japanese and Chinese and making flash cards. The texbooks don't contain the most useful words, however, so I’ve also been listening to language podcasts from www.chinesepod.com come as well (incredibly excellent if you are learning Mandarin) because they teach you how the language is really spoken, and put you in many day-to-day scenarious. The whole pod-cast thing for languages is actually a really great idea, if you are currently trying to learn a language I would suggest finding a website that has podcasts for your language.