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An Overview
Language learning is complex; it’s one of the reasons I love it so much.
You’re dealing with four separate, yet linked skills – reading, writing,
mine for the last nine years. While a detailed discussion of each aspect
of this method is quite a bit of material (hence the forthcoming book!), this
need all the help you can get to retain what you learn. This is where an
early focus on pronunciation comes in: if you look into the science of
memory, you’ll discover that it’s much harder to remember words you
can’t pronounce well. And one of the reasons that foreign languages can
switching to English.
steps: first, you’ll need to train your ears to hear the new sounds of your
pronounce them. For the first step, I’m in the process of Kickstarting a set
of apps that will do the work for you (and designing a free guide to
developing those apps yourself for any languages I’m not covering). For
the second step – training your mouth – I’ve released a series of videos
and flashcard decks to help teach you the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA). With its help, you can learn how pronunciation works in your mouth
No Translations
The moment you cut English completely out of your language studies is
the moment you begin to think in your target language. You can do this
from the very first day. Starting with pictures and graduating to simple
definitions and fill-in-the-blank flash cards (see below), you can teach
mental step of translating back and forth from English, and actually build
on days 1, 4, 10, 20, 35, 60, etc.) is much more effective than studying all
at once. Anki automates these intervals, showing you facts at the optimal
times to push them deeper and deeper into your long-term memory in the
what we’ve found is that learning the first thousand most frequent words
in a language will enable you to read 70% of every text you’ll ever
encounter, but learning the next thousand will only give you 10% more
(and the next thousand, 4%). Use this to your advantage! Learn the first
one or two thousand most common words, and then customize to your
own needs. Why learn academic language if you just want to travel?
Why learn business language if you just want to read academic papers?
Choosing your vocabulary to suit your needs makes your study time
much more efficient. So what does this look like in a new language?
English native speaker), and then fine tuning your pronunciation with the
help of the IPA (or a good pronunciation book). You should know the
sounds of your target language, how they’re different from English, and all
easy to visualize. Put those in an Anki deck and learn them. Once you
have some words to play with, start putting them together. You can use
make sure that what you put into your Anki deck has no English!), then
you get, the more vocabulary and grammar concepts you can describe in
basic grammar book, move on to a frequency list and learn the top 1000-
2000 words in your language, along with any specific vocabulary you
books. Put every writing correction (from a tutor or lang-8.com) into your
Anki deck, which will continue to build your vocabulary and grammar.
Stage 4: Speech
At the point where you can write ‘fluently’, find a place to immerse in the
language and speak all the time (literally! No English allowed or else you
won’t learn the skill you’re trying to learn, which is adapting to holes in
College, but a few weeks in the target country will work as well if you’re
very vigorous with sticking to the target language and not switching to
English. If you’re extremely strict with yourself, your brain adapts pretty
quickly and learns how to combine everything you learned in stages 1-3
together into fluent speech. You’ll find more detailed discussions of the
four key aspects at the links to the left and language specific resources in
have been following the blog closely have seen me update my model
flashcard decks, add new plugins, make new video walkthroughs, update
my model decks again, and so on. Over the course of trial-and-erroring
my way through the language, I now have a clear-cut plan for future
learners of Japanese and Chinese. In this post, I’m going to lay that out
for you, so you don’t need to try and piece it together through nearly 2
Step 1: Learn
Pronunciation
basically any other language. Get a pronunciation trainer and play around
with it for a few weeks. If you’re learning Chinese, you’re going to spend a
going to get to play around with these cute mnemonics for each letter. If
you feel like you have extra time and want to do something with that time,
feel free to do steps 2 and 3 while you’re working on the pronunciation
trainer’s flashcards.
help, go here).
Japanese
The decks have a few sample flashcards, but you can just suspend them
once you have the model deck installed so they’re not in the way.
the characters (things like 芸). If you want to have a shot at actually
You already have pre-made flashcards for those radicals in the model
deck you installed in Step 2, but you need to spend some time
customizing those flashcards so that they actually work for you. When
you’re ready for this step, follow the instructions here (they start at “How
to make this deck your own”). Ignore the part about downloading a deck,
1. Words to learn
4. Example sentences for those words that are simple and clearly
So go through this list, item by item, and figure out ahead of time where
Japanese Multisearch.
need to re-paste your word, one character at a time into their search
these from a tutor on iTalki.com. One hour (for $5-8) spent taking
words from the word list and coming up with sentences together will
give you enough content to learn for a full week, if not more. If not
calls, write down the time that my tutor says each example sentence,
and go back into that audio file and make mp3s for each sentence.
This is a lot of work, and we’re in the process of creating a web app
to make this process simpler. If it seems like too much work, you can
sourced pictures.
Chinese
(Mandarin/Cantonese) Information
Sources:
1. Words to Learn: Start with the 625 List
2. Stroke Order Diagrams: This
Anki plugin is designed for Japanese, but the developer has added
more Chinese support, so you may find that it ultimately saves you
I’d use MDBG.net, which unfortunately doesn’t work well with our
word into their search engine. But they do offer animated gifs of the
these from a tutor on iTalki.com. One hour (for $5-8) spent taking
words from the word list and coming up with sentences together will
give you enough content to learn for a full week, if not more. If not
(Cantonese).
calls, write down the time that my tutor says each example sentence,
and go back into that audio file and make mp3s for each sentence.
This is a lot of work, and we’re in the process of creating a web app
to make this process simpler. If it seems like too much work, you can
for Cantonese, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not
Chinese first (as a part of the Multisearch) just to see what comes
might lose if I was learning the words alone with exclusively English-
sourced pictures.
take you some time to get used to it, and creating your first cards is going
about that card model is that for a typical word, you might generate 10
To learn how to use the flashcard model, read this article about “Kanji
Signatures” and watch the video inside of it. Although I’m talking about
quickly summarize the concept of Kanji Signatures, basically it’s the idea
of adding a flashcard that asks you about the first two radicals in any
when it comes to building a good memory for that character, since you’re
training yourself to start the character correctly, which usually lets you
(and should) do when learning characters. Make more mnemonics. All the
time. Any time you see a new radical, make a new mnemonic for it. Any
time you see two old radicals used together, make a new mnemonic for it
flashcard model has two fields for making new mnemonics. Plan to use
them very, very often. I had something like 500-1000 mnemonics I was
characters that I didn’t do this with. If I did Japanese over again, I’d go
learning them in sentences that you’re developing with a tutor, then you’ll
find that after you finish the 625 list, you can actually have conversations
in your target language. You’ll be missing a lot of vocab, but still, you’ll be
at a pretty solid intermediate level. You’ll also find that you don’t need to
can. Keep making sentences with a tutor that involve every one of the
high intermediate level and in a pretty solid position to play with whatever
you want to play with, as per Chapter 6 in the book. You should be in
have a lot to learn, but your foundation is going to be rock solid and taking
in new information is going to be way, way easier. Good luck, and I’ll see
you on the other side. For my own studies, I’ve had to put Japanese on
hold (I’m 30% the way through Step 6) while I spend 6 months on
Japanese to finish the job. So you have some time to start catching up to
Short, punchy, incredibly insightful and useful book about learning another
language, especially for a first-timer. I've read a few books on the subject
now, but this is the only one that spoke directly to my issues. Especially
loved his points on the importance of sounds over words. Hint: a language
that is written but not spoken is called a dead language.
my notes
Sounds, although invisible, have a substance and a character of their own.
Accept as your objective to learn the sounds rather than their written
representation. When there is a conflict, when a word does not look the way
it sounds, it is the sound you must believe in and cling to.
This man ended up with a list of words on the back of an envelope. The
Greek was in his pocket, but not in his mind; he had a sword that would not
draw. Like many people, this important executive lacked faith in the spoken
word. He trusted only what he could see written down.
Many people, even many teachers, fall prey to the fallacy that the written
form of a language is the language itself.
Know before starting exactly what you want to accomplish and why.
Learning grammar becomes easier after having mastered the first two
languages.
Ingrid Bergman, who knew five languages, was asked which she preferred,
she replied: “English for acting, Italian for romance, French for diplomacy,
German for philosophy, and Swedish for secrecy, because so few people
know it.”
Richard Burton said, “Simple grammar and vocabulary: marked out the
forms and words that I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by
heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare
moments during the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an hour
at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After learning some three
hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy
workbook (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined
every word that I wished to recollect. Then chose some other book whose
subject most interested me. The neck of the language was now broken, and
progress was rapid. Whenever I conversed with anybody in a language that I
was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words inaudibly after them,
and so to learn the trick of pronunciation.”
It is fair to ask, at the end of a language lesson, be it the first or the fiftieth,
“What did I learn today that would help me if I left immediately for the foreign
country?”
No more than five minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English - just
enough to get a tough grammar point across.
The music of a language, its intonation, strikes you even when you cannot
comprehend a single word. It can also be the first thing you learn.
Absorb the new accent by listening to someone speak the language and
imitating the sounds he makes.
Imitate the way the foreign person speaks English. A foreign accent is
merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another.
If you will trust your ear, you are almost certain to speak with a good accent.
The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly
planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use
your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.
Work with a Model: Check your pronunciation often until good speech habits
are firmly established.
Think in Sound-Clusters. J’en ai un (“I’ve got one”). You might say each
word authentically and yet be unable to glide them together with a native-like
accent. One must practice the glide as well as the sounds.
Practice Whole Phrases, Not Words: In real life, a string of words like “I don’t
know” or “Not on your life” is said as though it were a single word. If you stop
to take a breath in the middle of a foreign phrase that should be said in a
single burst, you are not saying it correctly.
For mastering a really difficult foreign sound. I keep careful track of when my
friends thought I was closer and when they thought I was further away from
the correct pronunciation.
Listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality.
Good pronunciation begins not in the mouth but in the ear.
Invite a Friend to Make Fun of You: When you have trouble hearing the
difference, ask an acquaintance to imitate your pronunciation followed by the
right one. Don’t try saying it yourself prematurely; you risk becoming
discouraged easily at this point. Keep listening until you feel the difference
penetrating you.
One class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by
listening to recordings. Students who worked with recordings acquired
grammatical habits with unexpected ease.
The ear may find simple what the mind calls complicated.
Students who had spent only sixty minutes practicing in the lab did slightly
better than those who had spent more than a week on it in class. The reason
for their advantage is simple. They had heard and said a large number of
correct French sentences, and their ears had become so attuned that only a
correct sentence “sounded right” to them.
Novelty rather than repetition should become the primary law of learning.”
Virtually any question one can ask will bring about the use of a pronoun or
two in the answer.
Q: Didn’t your father lend his gold watch to the man next door?
A: Yes, he did lend it to him.
Make up cues that will force you to use pronouns in the answer.
Verbs are the only words in most languages that can assume many forms. In
French, for example, a noun can have only two forms (singular and plural),
and an adjective only four (masculine singular and plural, feminine singular
and plural). But a verb...! I once counted the different written forms a French
verb can take and was amazed to find over 130!
A dozen or so common verbs (be, do, go, etc.) account for a very high
percentage of all verb occurrences. These few are almost all “irregular,” for,
being on people’s tongues more often, they have evolved and changed form
faster:
to be
to have
to be able
to come
to go
to know
to take
to want
to say or tell
to do or make
to see
to give
Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are
studying expresses these concepts.
Learn the Hardest Thing First: it appears to fly directly in the face of reason.
Yet it has helped me more than almost any other. Learn the hardest thing
first and the rest will then seem easy.
Attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is
most receptive.
It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word. If
you wish to learn a grammatical expression - let’s say jusqu’à (until) - put it
down on a flash card in a sentence like Il est resté jusqu’au matin (He stayed
until morning). The more striking or entertaining your sentence is, the better
you are apt to recall it.
You do not want to pair up French words with English words lest you be able
to recall la nuit only when thinking “night.” Rather, you want la nuit to occur
to you when you are “thinking in French,” without having to go through
English to remember it. For la nuit, you might make three cards, reading:
English Side French Side I never go out at night. Je ne sors jamais la nuit.
Good night. Bonne nuit. I slept badly last night. J’ai mal dormi cette nuit.
Once you can deliver the French sentence in response to these three
different stimuli, you “know” la nuit in a much richer sense than if you could
say it only in response to the English word “night.”
One of the quickest and surest ways to pick up foreign vocabulary is through
reading.
When a strange reaction follows something you have said, always track
down the reason. Never let a chance go by to correct a wrong habit.