Speaking Strategies: Reading (4 of 4)

Since I’ve recently been force-feeding myself French, I figured that I probably should come back to this blog and jot down some of what I’ve learned. But first, this unfinished series has been bugging me, so I’m going to close it out. So how can reading help your speaking abilities?

Reading is diametrically opposed to speaking. It is on the more passive side, along with listening (as opposed to the active production of language), and it is written and will wait for you. So reading is not going to help your speaking directly. If all you do is read, you may never be able to hold a decent conversation.

But that doesn’t mean that reading is not helpful. It just means that reading needs to be supplemented with other activities. I generally encounter much more new vocabulary in, say, a novel than in speech, and I don’t feel bad about telling the novel to hold up while I write down an unknown word. It is much better for learning vocabulary than wordlists and flashcards, since you see the words in context.

Reading is also good for building up grammar recognition skills. Sometimes it is good to practice skimming. But I would recommend setting aside most of your reading time for detailed analysis. Know what every single word is doing in every single sentence.

Of course this is going to take a while at first. Don’t start off with great literature just because it is more fun; you will get burnt-out unless you have a will of iron. Start with something manageable. Pick up learning-to-read type books if you can find any in your language. I have a book in Mandarin Chinese which has an inane story obviously marketed toward angsty, spoiled high schoolers, but which does the job of giving me easy reading material – unlike my copy of Lord of the Rings in Chinese, in which I took two hours to get through the first line. Work your way up. You should generally be at a level which challenges you but which also gives you frequent opportunity to overcome those challenges. It is wasted effort to keep plugging away at an overly difficult text when accessible ones are available.

As you go along, reading for detail will get easier. You will recognize sentence and word forms more and more easily. At this point, try to read without constantly translating back into your native language. This is actually a rather difficult step. I find that a beer helps significantly to shut off that unnecessary English-noise, for myself. Your patient practice here will make repeating the same steps all the easier when you turn to speaking.

Reading gives you more opportunity to confront grammar then writing, since you have to deal with things that you yourself are not producing. Reading can give you something you don’t already have, just like listening. Same for vocabulary. It gives you phrases and idioms that you would not have thought to look up. This then also helps your speaking ability (though watch out for phrases that are overly literary – what would you think of an English-learner calling you “thou” or yelling “zounds” when stubbing her toe? – actually, I think I might need to start doing the latter).

The most eloquent speakers are often well-read. They have more to pull from. You need to put more work into connecting reading skills with speaking skills (not least in convincing your brain that those squiggles on the page are the same as those soundwaves in your ear), but the work does pay off.

Speaking Strategies: Listening (2 of 4)

The relation between speaking and listening should be clear. If you want to speak well (or even intelligibly), you need to be able to make sounds that are reasonably close to a native speaker. To know whether you are doing this, you need to listen to native speakers.

Any source for listening material can be a source for speaking practice as well. Find a TV show, music clip, news broadcast, textbook dialogue, etc., and listen to a clip. At first you may need to stop after every word, but in time you can get in entire phrases. Repeat back what the speaker says insofar as you can. Even if you don’t understand the word (or can’t tell where the word boundaries are), try to mimic what you hear. Even if you think you know the word, mimic the pronunciation and intonation of the speaker. You can never get too much practice when it comes to correcting your foreign accent (not that an accent is necessarily bad – after all, do you think worse of someone for having a French or Italian accent? – but it is good to be understood, and too heavy of a foreign accent is problematic for that).

If there is a text to go with the passage, look at that when you are stumped so that you have the opportunity to learn something new, but don’t run to it first. Try to process as much of the audio as you can first. Try to figure it out and see how much you can repeat based on the words you know and the sound structure of the target language.

Of course, if you have a real speaker to whom you are listening, you can just ask what they meant by an unfamiliar word. This is even better than having a text at your disposal, since you really have to exercise both listening and speaking skills to understand the point. However, such a remedy is not always available (although technologies such as Skype make it easier to connect with native speakers of most languages).

As I’ve mentioned before, listening also helps your linguistic habits. You start saying things because they sound right, not because you’ve stopped and pondered and analyzed the subjunctive construction in that sentence.

In any case, listening provides you with opportunities to learn something new about your language, either in pronunciation or in vocabulary. This is where speaking is weakest – it is easy to just continue with whatever you have already without improving. People who speak too much in any language often don’t have a lot to say, and in a foreign language they don’t even have the ability to say nothing well. Although they may sound perfectly fluent to one unaccustomed to the language, they are mere chatterboxes. When I continue with writing and reading, I will mainly be illustrating more ways in which the deficiency of speaking can be addressed by strengthening other language skills.

Speaking Strategies: Drills (1b of 4)

I guess that makes it out of 5, then, but who wants to read 5 posts in a row? So this is just an addendum to the last one. When it comes to speaking a new language, is it better to be creative in speaking, or to drill basic sounds and phrases?

You need both to actually use the language, I think. But it seems to me that starting with drills is probably better, unless you are surrounded by speakers of the target language who can constantly correct you. If you want to play an instrument, you must learn your scales and arpeggios. Why? Because these are the building blocks of music. If you jump right in with all the fun stuff, you get bad habits and you don’t give yourself the skills to systematically learn how to play. You create a ceiling for yourself. Same with language – if you struggle with basic phrases and sounds, you will constantly encounter obstructions in speaking.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t talk about stuff. You should. You should use the language, and it is more fun to do so than to constantly drill. When you pick up an instrument, you practice those scales, and then you have some piece you work on as well (even if it be “Für Elise” or “Smoke on the Water”). Both are helpful, but in the long run those scales will often be more helpful than those early simple pieces that you can bust out. I remember picking up classical guitar back in high school and teaching myself Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring in a grueling 3-4 hour practice session. I could play the first part pretty well, but I didn’t have much in the way of skills to play anything else – I would have to sit down for hours with the next piece, and the next, and so on. If I had worked on the basics first, it would have been longer before I played Jesu but I might not have given up the guitar in frustration.

In my opinion (and this is the opinion of someone who tends to err toward perfectionism), writing is a better outlet for creative production of language when you are first learning it. But I’ll leave you hanging there, since next time I will discuss how speaking and listening interrelate (unless I decide that I need “Speaking 1c”).

Speaking Strategies: Speaking (1 of 4)

How does one speak a foreign language? I’ve been focusing on more passive elements, such as reading and listening and recognizing vocabulary, but speaking uses different muscles, as it were.

So why name this first post “speaking”, if the entire series is on speaking? First, because I’m going to look at how it relates to listening, writing, and reading in the next three posts. Second, because the best way to speak is to, well, do it.

Much language learning is about going out there and using the language, even without perfection. Don’t look for the perfect program. It doesn’t exist, and even if it did, you’d accomplish more by using any method you have available while looking for it (in fact, you should go and do something before finishing this post – study language, then read about studying language; reality comes before theory. — Done? Good – continue). Now, sloppiness and bad habits can be problems as well, but you deal with those by having strategies to continue improving, not by not starting in the first place.

A lot of speaking is about muscle memory. Language often uses common phrases which you need to get used to. It’s mostly clichés. You need to spend years becoming an eloquent orator in your native language; your first goal in speaking a foreign language is just to hold a conversation. (Also, listen to your native language speech sometime: you can be ungrammatical, forget words, and change topics mid-sentence, even when you are used to the language. Don’t place the bar higher for a new language.) So get those basic phrases practiced.

This requires actually speaking. Actually use those vocal muscles so that they know what they are doing. It’s no different from sports, music, dancing, or any other physical activity. Just say stuff for at least a few minutes every day, like most language activities. It helps to have something to repeat – the FSI language courses in the Links section have some free (if perhaps slightly outdated) courses specializing in speaking and listening practice. It will be difficult at first, but if you continue, these phrases will come out naturally.

First get the sounds down. Then words. Then phrases, and sentences. Build up from the basic parts, and you will build up your speaking abilities.

Remembering Language: Bootstrapping (3 of 3)

It’s frustrating going around not being able to say anything. At some point, you have to drop perfectionism and just accept the fact that you’ll occasionally sound stupid in your new language (the topic of a future post). But that’s not terribly good advice if you can’t say anything whatsoever. I’m trying to have a conversation in Urdu right now with a pen pal, and I’m struggling to say “Hello, how are you?” (“Assalaamu aleikum – kyaa haal hai?”, evidently). I need to be able to express something in order to start using language, or habit and context won’t be of much use to me.

One way of doing this is to find simple words and place them around. When you look at your bedroom door in the morning, you see al-baab or dar or whatever. Also, use the “diglot weave” that I mentioned last time – work in foreign vocabulary to your ordinary speech (I did get this trick from somewhere, though I can’t remember the source). Once you get a bit more advanced, you can use target language sentences with the odd English word (or whatever your native language is) to replace what you don’t know. This will get you using the language even without much background.

But that’s a slow way of building vocabulary, and as for the label idea, you can’t pin hubb on the concept “love.” I recommend two things at this point: flashcards and audio files.

For flashcards, you can make them by hand so that you can carry them around with you. I will suggest, however, that you use the computer program Anki. It’s free and it works. It avoids the mess of piles of flashcards (and when you’re like me and you have a couple thousand in various languages, that’s a definite consideration). Best of all, it keeps track of how well you know words – you’ll review words you get wrong more often than ones you get right.

How should you use flashcards? At first, it’s probably easiest just to put the target language on one side and your native language on the other. Even here, you can use a sentence instead of a single word. For example, you could have a card with shajara on one side, and “I see the apple ______ outside in bloom.” This gets you thinking about context instead of merely arbitrary correspondences of sound – you start to associate shajara with the concept you would put in that sentence instead of the random English sequence t-r-ee. In time, that can be an Arabic sentence on the other side, perhaps with Arabic synonyms that you know better.

Use flashcards actively whenever possible. Flashcards are by their nature active, but you can do things to make your brain really process the material. I can start going from Arabic to English, to get a passive recognition of the words. But it is better, even if I only want to read the language, to go from English to Arabic (or Latin, Greek, Quenya, whatever) as well. Making myself remember that word makes it stick in my mind more. And with Anki, you can set it up so that you have to type in the answer – this forces you to stop and pay attention to the word instead of being lazy (“rice, lice, they sound close enough, right?”).

Cramming has some place in flashcard learning. Flashcards should be studied every day – memory needs constant repetition – so if cramming is your only study habit, it is pretty much worthless. You are better off spending just 5-10 minutes a day in review. But I find that one problem in starting to learn a new language is that the words all sound alike to me. By building a new set of flashcards and studying them all at once until I get them more or less right, I start to at least differentiate between the words. I won’t necessarily remember the different meanings the next day, but I’ll remember that sheniidan and shenakhtan are different words.

Mnemonics can also help you in the initial stages of remembering words, especially in a language with no relation to any other language which you know – I remember that my first month or so of intensive Arabic study was a royal pain because I had no hooks for remembering the vocabulary. There are all sorts of tricks you can use – one in particular that I’ve seen is called the “Roman Room.” A Google search on its use in language should get you some material. It’s a good way of separating out different languages and remembering details such as gender and such as well. (I honestly find that straightforward repetition and frequent reading/listening help me more than any mnemonic, which is why I don’t have more info here, but you use what you have to use.)

What do you do when you are out and about if you are relying on computer flashcards? Flashcards made by hand have some utility here. However, my recommendation is that, if possible, you get yourself an mp3 player and make audio files. See my post on Listening Practice for how I go about using audio. You can repeat after a speaker while making breakfast in the morning or driving. You can’t flip through flashcards efficiently at these times. In this way, you can make use of what would have been dead time to practice your language.

In addition to that, I find that audio practice helps my linguistic intuitions in a way that flashcards do not, although I suppose others may differ. Hearing the different sounds helps me to remember the difference between words and to be more likely to remember the details that I often forget in writing (“Is that supposed to be khana or khaana?”). At any rate, if you can learn both through audio and through print, you are engaging more senses and giving yourself more of a chance of remembering the material.

Remembering Language: Context (2 of 3)

Last time, I mentioned that habit is more important for learning a language than anything else. However, habit takes a while, and you need to be able to build up something in the meantime so that you can participate in the language more. I’ll talk next time about flashcards, which seem to me to be best for bootstrapping vocabulary in the first place.

I’m not a big fan of mnemonics for language learning. Why not? Because they distance me from the meaning of the word. If I want to remember that shajara means “tree”, I want the idea of a tree to come to mind. Ideally, I don’t even want the English word “tree” interjecting, although that can take a while. I want to directly associate that term with the reality. That means less processing, which means that I will understand the language more readily. If I see the word shajara and I have to think, “Ok, what does that remind me of? Hmmm… I thought it sounded like something…. maybe Shaggy from Scooby Doo… Oh yeah, I pictured him leaning against a tree,” I’ve forgotten what I was reading about. This process can be better than reaching for the dictionary, and it does have a place in language learning (as I’ll talk about in the next post), but if possible, I should just associate shajara with that gnarled, barky thing outside my window.

That’s nice for typical, everyday things. But I don’t want to always talk about common, concrete objects, although it is helpful to associate something sensible to every word I remember (even abstractions should relate to the world around us in some way, after all). And even when I talk about those things, I am talking *about* them, usually not simply pointing out to my friends that the glass thing over there is a window. I’m talking about how many windows are in a room, or requesting that the window be closed because it is chilly, and so on.

Learning vocabulary is easier in context. Find sentences with your vocabulary items – this should be easy if you are getting new words from reading, news, TV, movies, etc. Then, you can start associating new vocabulary with words you already know. Instead of inventing arbitrary mnemonics, you are using what you already know as a mnemonic bolster for the new content. Let’s say that I were learning the English word tree. I can remember sentences such as “I see the tree,” “The tree is brown,” “The tree is next to the house.” Trees are therefore visible, brown, and outside of houses – this should trigger my memory if I need it. Dialogues are great for learning common conversational words and phrases for the same reason.

If you jot down the words in your notebook, try to use the target language as much as possible to describe them. If you can’t do that yet, then say things like “The shajara is brown,” “Close the shubbak – It’s cold in here!,” “Did you borrow my kitaab for class al-yawm?” and so on. This technique will get you using those words, which lets you get habituated to them while still picking up your language.

All of this besides the last point, however, still assumes some basic vocabulary. When you first start a language, however, or when you first start using it in a new field or with a new author, you often find yourself needing to look up all of the new vocabulary. You need an efficient way of getting all that in your head quickly, and I will cover skills for that next time.

Remembering Language: Habit (1 of 3)

I set the temperature icon on my computer to Celsius in order to get used to the metric system. I have found that in the past couple months, I have automatically started thinking in terms of it being “5 degrees out” instead of the equivalent Fahrenheit. I didn’t do anything special. I didn’t sit down and calculate out the Celsius temp every time I looked at the Fahrenheit. I didn’t even think much about it. But because that icon was there, I started forming the habit of thinking in Celsius.

Language memory works similarly. When I was in an Arabic immersion program this summer, I thought about how I could more effectively be learning the language. I fiddled with my state of awareness, I actively thought through what I should be calling everything, I spent hours building flashcards with audio, I played games to impress upon myself when I should use the mudari9 mansub or majzum forms of the verbs. I tried to keep myself from even thinking in English.

Now, I’m not going to say that none of that helped at all. But by and large, the process of using Arabic was one of habit. It didn’t seem to matter too much whether I thought only in Arabic or whether I let myself think in English too. The words I used often, no matter what state of mind I had while using them, stuck. These words and these phrases are still what sometimes slip out of my mouth (especially when I’m feeling Arabic-y after a couple beers). These are greetings, prepositions, and common phrases.

Sometimes, after I had been in an Anglican church for a bit, I found myself with a peculiar temptation. Whenever someone made a Star Wars reference and said, “May the Force be with you,” I was itching to say, “And also with you.” The habit of the liturgy formed my linguistic habits even in merely similar situations. When someone says to me, “as-salaamu 9alaykum,” I simply respond with “wa-9alaykum as-salaam.” (I find these sorts of ritual interesting and closely interwoven with language, so I think I’ll eventually do a post just on that topic.) I don’t think through what I should say, so I don’t translate into Arabic. But I don’t just “go through the motions” either, as if the thought and the act were two entirely separate entities. I simply act in Arabic.

Prepositions work in the same way – I still find myself thinking stuff like “I was fii Madison during the summer.” Or I’ll mouth familiar phrases: I still think “laysa mushkala” sometimes, a common refrain in our group (literally, “no problem”, but also had connotations of “don’t worry”). I don’t automatically think of “street” as “shari9a” yet, but I do think of State Street in Madison as “shari9at wilaya“, and I think of the cafe (maqha) “Steep and Brew” as “Steep wa-Brew”.

In short, if you want to remember language, use it. Don’t worry about how you use it. Don’t worry about shortcuts. Just use it, and it will take care of itself. However, sometimes that isn’t enough, at least for the short term. So, in the next post, I will cover how to pick up new vocabulary and why straightforward memorization is not the most effective method. In the final part, I will cover how to memorize using flashcards when it must be done, such as when trying to build your vocabulary in the first place.

Listening to the Aeneid

Last time, I had mentioned that listening to a language is helpful for being able to process it as language, as meaningful and expressive, even when you are only looking to understand the written language (as with Latin and Greek). I had also promised some methods which can help one to understand these complicated languages in real-time. I had mentioned that I tried this with Plotinus, the 2nd century C.E. Greek philosopher, with some success.

I’m basically using the GRASP method, which I found on SLU’s website (here: http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/languages/classical/latin/tchmat/pedagogy/grasp.html).  Here’s what you do: you break down your sentence into manageable parts before putting it together.  An example of how I apply the method:  Let’s take the English sentence, “The rabbits ran in the hall.”  I would break it down like such:

• The rabbit
• The rabbits
• run
• ran
• The rabbits ran
• the hall
• in the hall
• The rabbits ran in the hall.

Yes, it can be tedious, but the point is that, for every morphological change to the words, you can feel the difference. You don’t think about whether “rabbits” is plural or not. You don’t parse it to see how it comes from the dictionary form “rabbit”. You simply know that it is plural. You just know that “ran” is past tense. Why should forming the accusative in Latin be any different?

This method is best applied when you’re dealing with complicated structures. Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit come to mind, but anytime you want to break down complex sentences so that you understand them intuitively this method can work. Let us take the opening of the Aeneid to see how we can do this with Latin:

• arma virumque cano. (Of arms and the man I sing.)
• cano (I sing: dictionary form, so we’ll start with this, though we could have started with the infinitive “canare” first to get a feeling for the 1st-person ending.)
• vir (man: dictionary form for comparison, so we can get a sense for the change that makes it accusative.)
• cano virum (we hear that the -um ending is added after the verb.)
• arma (arms: generally I would start with the singular “armum” and go to the plural, so that we can hear what makes it plural, but the Latin here uses the plural with this meaning “arms”, just like the English.)
• cano arma (this time, no change for the accusative.)
• arma virque (-que: and. Getting fancy now. Note that I put it into the nominative again, since there is no verb yet.)
• cano arma virumque. (Almost there, but I’m making a nod to English word order to get the meaning into my head.)
• arma virumque cano.

Of course, as you progress, you can leave out steps as necessary; maybe you won’t need to put the verb first to get the meaning clear to yourself, maybe you have the 2nd declension accusative down cold and would rather focus on the subjunctive. But language work isn’t a race, and it is better to practice the little things. In Latin, you are going to come across accusative endings a lot. Spending some extra time in these sorts of drills will pay off when you don’t have to sit parsing the text you are reading.

Audible and Written Language

One can look at language learning as being divided into four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  Each of these requires its own time for practice.  You can of course read without ever being able to speak the language.  And even if you can passively read a text, you can’t necessarily write the language – I’ve probably forgotten a good number of Latin and Greek verb conjugations, but I’ll recognize them if I see them in context.

You can look at these skills as being related to the audio language (listening and speaking) versus the written language (reading and writing).  It is possible to focus on only one set of these skills – reading and writing go together more naturally than reading and speaking, for example.  However, I think that working in these two different versions of the language can help each other.

Working with the written language encourages attention to detail.  You have the time to think through what you are reading and writing, to check every grammatical point.  You can figure out why every word has been placed where it is, both according to syntactical rules as well as rhetorical force. However, sometimes the language becomes a code to be deciphered rather than its own means of expression.  Anyone learning a language for scholarly work can testify to that.

Working with the audible language encourages real-time processing. You can’t sit and think about that one word for five minutes, or go back and re-read to that sentence two lines above.  The person is speaking and you need to respond to them here and now, even if only to ask them to slow down or switch languages.  You must treat the language as a language, not as a code.  And you need to pay greater attention to context to tell you what those odd words you miss might mean.  However, sometimes in listening and speaking, one gets sloppy and completely overlooks the details.

When I was in an Arabic immersion program over the summer, I noticed that some of the fellow students seemed so fluent in their speaking while I was stammering out basic phrases and barely understanding anything I heard. Once I started listening better, I realized that although they could speak quickly, their speech often had grammatical errors.  I probably came into the program with a better understanding of how the language works than what they left with, although I felt that my listening and speaking skills plateaued.  Their problem is that they need to slow down and think through how they express themselves in order to sound reasonably fluent in the language, and more reading and writing can help that. My problem is that I need to speed myself up and leave behind perfectionism in order to actually make the language useful, and more listening and speaking can help that.  If you have to choose between the two, you have to go with what your situation demands, but if you can, you should work on both.

This is true even in “dead” languages. If you want to actually use Latin and Greek as languages and not as complicated codes, it helps to speak it and listen to them.  I’ve recorded Plotinus on my MP3 player and listened to the file.  This in turn helped my reading since I was developing the skills to process Greek in real-time and to directly associate the sentences with their meanings, rather than funneling them through English first.  Next post, I’ll cover some ways I used to help myself understand an inflected language such as Greek through audio files.

On Learning Languages

Anyone who knows me knows that I spend time on languages.  It’s a bit of an addiction.  So, while I do have a couple other blogs, I figured that I should put aside one simply for language stuff.  Now, no one really cares about what language I’ve picked up recently, though I’ll probably tell you anyhow.  The point of this is rather for me to share what I’m using to help me learn languages and to share these techniques in order to promote the exploration of this beautiful and fascinating realm of human culture.