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!