Thursday, December 15, 2011

When is an experiment a failure?

I received a few comments directly after my last post (not sure why people are too shy to post comments here!) and I realise that its title and some of the content may have sounded unfair. That wasn't my intention really, and I've since read a follow-up post on Randy's Yearlyglot blog which just shows that I should probably have made my intention clearer.

Randy's post is a good one where he talks about the year not being a failure just because he won't reach his goal. I totally agree with him. In fact, I have to since I set myself the goal originally of passing the B2 exam in July of this year. I didn't hit that goal. I'm actually now considering just pushing on to do the C1 exam because that's where I would end my "academic" language goals, and I think that if I were to ever have a need for the qualification, the C1 level would be far more useful to me. In any case, I don't consider the time leading up to missing the goal a waste of time at all. Far from it! I've never been so confident and capable in a second language (not that I'm really good!) and that's all thanks to the goal I set myself. Even though the deadline has slipped, and I might move the goalposts on my self, the existence of the goal and the time spent heading towards it have all been very worthwhile. It really pushed me to do several things, mainly finding people to meet up with and chat to in German and I've made some great friends as a result. I didn't start having regular conversations (and I mean, just once a week) until about 4-6 weeks before I had originally planned to do the exam, and that wasn't anywhere near early enough. If I were to start again, I would get my shit together much earlier.

I still consider the method that was employed by Randy to have been less successful than it could have been, and as such the experiment, under the conditions it was done, was a sort of failure. The most important thing is that he had goals, and the goals pushed him to succeed. In terms of learning language (as opposed to experimenting with a method) he didn't fail and he didn't waste his time. It just reinforces to me the importance, above just about anything else, of having a goal.

As for an update for what I've been doing lately. Well, keeping up with my Anki, of course, and listening to German podcasts of course, and trying to find the time to read a German grammar book called "Modern German Grammar - A Practical Guide" (going cheap here for Aussies - maybe even cheaper than other people can get it from their local Amazon). I've borrowed it rather than bought it because I'm really trying to keep the costs of this exercise down (to as close to zero as possible!). It seems like a really good reference and is full of examples. I am actually reading it from cover-to-cover and that's far more enjoyable than it sounds! I don't expect to remember every little rule, or edge case, or even the big things. Right now I just want to get a sense for when there might be something to check or explore later. I'm currently up to about page 90 although I also read the 20 or so pages at the end entitled "Communication Strategies" which is really useful. So useful that I think I should review it on a semi-regular basis and do my best to absorb more of it all the time.

I'm still speaking German in person once a week, and last night I got the chance to watch an old favourite movie (Wargames) on a DVD that has a German language soundtrack and subtitles. I started off with both on, and then switched the subtitles off because they were just completely different. There was hardly even the smallest of exchanges that was the same in both the dubbing and the subtitles. Pretty funny :-) I hope to do some more of this. After looking through all my DVDs, I found about 15 in total that have at least German subtitles, and actually most of those also have German audio (it's not a common language to find in subtitles actually).

On a sort of language learning note, I've been chatting online with a french couple who've come to Australia for three months. One of them needs to pass the OET (an English language test for medical professionals) and so they're looking to meet up with people to practice English. In a sort of "pay it forward" sense, I've decided to return the kindness shown to me in my German studies (amongst other things!) by my new Austrian friends by doing the same favour for this new couple and helping to correct some English texts for them.

Bis zum nächsten Mal!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Language learning experiments that have failed...

I read something recently that made me think about how much advice there is floating from people on the internet and how often it is untested. Sometimes people put their results out there for you to assess yourself and make your own judgement. Benny the Irish Polyglot is generally one of these. I thought his results in Hungarian and Dutch were particularly impressive and demonstrated his point. Whether or not you choose to call what he achieved "fluency", he was interacting with people and using the language much, much better than most people who study languages more formally and stay forever at the "beginner" level, at least in speaking. I was one of those with French, but I think I read Benny's advice in time to stop my German getting stuck in the same rut.

On the other hand, Benny also puts up his results when they're not so good - Tagalog and Turkish being two examples I can think of.

There might be something about Turkish that drags these language learning experiments down, because it seems that Yearlyglot, who had a great year in 2010 learning Italian, has decided to call it quits in 2011 after having tried to learn Turkish. It's a shame because he was always good for a laugh - not usually intentionally, but still. His experiment for Turkish was to not use any language learning materials at all. None, that is, apart from normal content in Turkish. It was an interesting concept, but I have to admit to feeling that my Assimil "German With Ease" and Anki wordlists have given me a kickstart to comprehension and production that is hard to beat. Being presented with tonnes of content you don't understand at all can be a little useless to you. The experiment seemed to involve complicated contorsions to avoid just looking up words, or even basic concepts. The experiment never finished, so it's hard to draw conclusions, but Randy admitted to making slow progress even in the first six months before he started a new job. This really just bears out the way it felt to me - it was a very interesting idea, and I was keen to see the results, but I was glad I wasn't the one trying it! It felt like the kind of painstaking research a linguist does on an as-yet undescribed language. Sometimes it's just quicker to look up an answer!

And I think it's wrong to claim, as many do, that looking up the answers is useless or produces completely inferior results. I started my Anki studies with a wordlist I downloaded (I have since been creating my own and reviewing that every day as well). There have been problems with that wordlist - sometimes I've used a word incorrectly because the card I learnt off was wrong - but those problems were far outweighed by the number of times I learnt a word from a card, never having seen or heard it before, and then I've later been listening to a podcast and recognised the word and thereby unravelled the sentence. To my mind, we all say we're time poor (I have a full time job, a young family, a large and socially active extended family and circle of friends, and an old house which we're always doing something to) and the fact is that languages are made up of LOTS and LOTS of words. Sure, they're more than just words, but that's a big part of them. I say, learn words however you can. If you find you've been mistaken about a word, correct it in your memory however best works for you (I update my Anki list :-) ) and move on. You WILL be mistaken, about MANY words. The goal is to have a pretty solid command of most of the words in a decent sized vocabulary (you can see I'm no longer too hung up on perfectionism!). Perfect is not an option.

Which reminds me of another language learning experiment that I feel demonstrates a technique to avoid rather than emulate, but many people still want to believe in over on "Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning". This one was to not say a word of Chinese while just listening to it (and watching it) for 2,000 hours. People's opinion on the value of the progress made, as demonstrated in the test with Friedemann, has varied widely. To my mind it seems pretty much exactly like what I would expect from someone who studied Chinese with Ease up to level 64 and then did nothing with the language for several years... But then, I don't speak Chinese at all, so I have to admit that I don't have much basis to be objective :-)

And just to be clear, Keith seems like a nice guy, and he's given this experiment a solid shot. I say, good on him! I was interested to read some of what he had to say and to see some of the results. I'm not saying to avoid hearing the language at natural, full speed. No way! Don't avoid it - embrace it from day one! I'm just saying that you're not likely to make much progress if that's ALL you do. Anyway, it was another experiment I was glad I didn't have to do...

I think one of the things that let this experiment down was that it didn't really have any specific goals, which was not a problem for Randy at Yearlyglot with his Turkish challenge. As I looked through his goal list, I realised that I had reached many of them by the 1 year mark myself. I hadn't tried to watch too many movies in German without the subtitles, so I'm not sure how it would have gone. Then again, I hadn't started really speaking much German regularly until after 12 months of learning. It sounds crazy to me now when I think about it. I did have a conversation all in German for about an hour within the 12 month mark (maybe the 8 or 9 month mark?), and since I started having regular conversations (probably averaging roughly 1.5 hours per week over the last 5+ months) my comprehension, production and just general comfort with German has increased dramatically, and the one movie I watched without subtitles, I understood pretty well. Randy's goals are better than mine because there are several to tick off along the way. I only have one - to pass the B2 exam, and I never broke that down into smaller milestones. If I had, my goals might have been similar to Randy's, and I also might have come up with a more realistic deadline, given my available time...

What's my point in all this? Well, there's a lot of advice out there. You need to sort through it for yourself. Personally, I don't think there's any magic bullet. The biggest "secret" I've discovered so far is that you need to do something every day. The two things I always make sure I get done whenever physically possible (so, not when I've gone off for a 3 day camping trip) is to review my Anki lists and listen to German (general news, science news, reportage, whatever I can find that interests me). My Anki lists aren't massive like many people's. I don't focus on their size, or how many items I've added today, or really too many of the numbers, I haven't worked out how much I've spoken in conversations, or how many hours I've spent listening to it (though I'm sure it's lots by now, considering it's what I usually listen to while commuting), but I am certain that doing something every day (reviewing Anki lists in particular) has been great for my conversational confidence and speed.

I think anyone who's struggling to make progress needs to consider doing something similar... Along with, of course, having conversations in your target language on a regular basis!

Friday, December 2, 2011

Some business conversation and letter writing tips...

I just thought I would check out what the practice material for the Goethe exam ... looks like and I found this leaflet on their website:

http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prf/pro/hdb/Pruefungsziele_Testbeschreibung_PWD.pdf

I've only had a really quick scan through it, but I noticed that, starting on page 31, they have a bunch of mini tips for formal letter writing, making business presentations and conversational tips for agreeing and disagreeing. I'm sure they're all reasonably formal, but still, worth reading. Conversational strategies (Gesprächsstrategien) start on page 37 and have advice on what to say when you're not sure you've understood correctly, how to agree/disagree, etc.

Have fun!