Adding a language is like adding another colour to your communication swatch! (Picture from freeimages.com)

Language learning, fast and slow : one-track hack or polyglot glutton?

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As a language learning addict, the idea of having multiple projects on the go at the same time is always appealing. But is there a sensible maximum to the number of languages we should be studying simultaneously?

The topic came up on a very interesting recent Hangout with Benny Lewis, the mastermind behind the Add One Challenge. Quite rightly, the general advice was that progress will be faster if you focus on one at a time. It stands to reason – we only have a finite mental capacity, and if you want to see results fast, you should direct it all in one direction.

Learning: fast and slow

But there are two differing attitudes towards learning in competition, here. The key selling point to much of the language hacking approach is ‘results fast‘. There is nothing wrong with that. I have used it to great effect myself. Efficiency and speed are fantastic study skills to develop if you have particularly practical (or urgent) goals in language learning.

By contrast, there is also a much more gradual approach to languages. Instead of a focus on short-term working knowledge, it emphasises the joy of the learning process. It regards learning it as a gentler method of layering knowledge upon knowledge over time. It is about finding fun in the detail, revelling in the rules. Furthermore, the lower priority on speed means that it supports multiple language learning a little better, if that is what you want to do.

There is room for both of these methods in the same language learning life, of course. The learner can chop and change according to circumstance and need. Need working fluency for a trip? Choose the fast route. Greedy linguist who wants a taste of everything? The slowly-but-surely approach is an excellent option.

Back to school

After all, early experience of languages in school is frequently in the mould of the gradual grammar crammer. For example, at my own secondary school, all students studied French and German for their first two years. Later, when the time came to take our options, we selected the one language we wanted to continue with.

Practices are similar in other European schools, with Icelandic students learning English and Danish, for example, or German students learning English and Spanish. Learning a couple of languages at a time in your own time is no unusual feat – kids have been doing it for decades.

The more the better?

There is even an academic argument for adding multiple languages into your study routine. Closely related languages, for instance, can be part of a larger voyage of discovery, opening up a whole language family. The resulting bird’s eye view can give a truly deep understanding of each individual member of that family, as you begin to make connections and colour between the lines.

What’s more, human languages share particular characteristics, regardless of family. There are common, abstract concepts across them, like nouns, verbs, tenses, moods (although they may appear vastly different, and be given differing names and explanations). Experience with the mechanics and terminology in one tongue can support your understanding in the other(s).

With a bit of organisational panache and sensible separation, it’s quite possible to handle multiple language projects. As always with matters of the mind, though, avoiding burnout is paramount. Take care, and you can keep that long-term, polyglot passion a joy, rather than a drain. And there is no need to give up that lexical gluttony, if it floats your boat!

If a big draw of language learning is enjoying the process, does it necessarily matter how quickly you progress? As linguists, we have the tools for language learning, fast and slow. Employ – and enjoy – them both.

Sidenote: the title for this post was inspired by the utterly fascinating “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Read it for an insight into our truly two-track brains!

A bear hunting resources. Probably not language learning ones, though. From freeimages.com.

We’re going on a resource hunt! Finding language learning freebies on educational sites

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We’re going on a bear hunt, sing the children in Michael Rosen’s children’s book of the same name, gorgeously illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. And that’s what much of my recent language work has felt like – if the bears are target language resources out in the wild of the web (a stretch of a metaphor, I know).

The children’s book reference isn’t by accident, as I have recently held in mind a recent podcast that suggested a lack of utility in them for language learning. The key argument is the use of low frequency vocabulary and lack of real-world application. Resources for youngsters, the advice goes, is the last thing a language learner should be plumping for.

However, I tend to disagree on two points – firstly, that this material isn’t useful, and secondly, that it features low-use, unhelpful vocabulary and structures. My own ‘bear hunt’ this week has produced some brilliant evidence of this.

Fun factor

First of all, children’s books are flippin’ fun! And fun means motivation, and motivation means staying power and progress. If you’ve found certain young adult books rewarding in your native language (like Harry Potter, for example), it’s a big carrot to get you reading in the target one.

But secondly, not all children’s books are about low frequency, fantasy words. To that end, my resource trawl turned up a very serendipitous find. It was a prize that convinced me more than ever of the utility of books for youngsters in your language learning arsenal.

Resource hunt bonanza

I am always on the lookout for useful digital media in my target languages. This week, on a regular trek through Google, I stumbled across an absolute goldmine. It was the website of Iceland’s education department, Menntamálastofnun.

A bit dry and official, you might be thinking. But in fact, the site is a treasure trove. Scores of school textbooks are available to download for free in PDF format on subjects from history to maths. Incredibly, for many of them, entire audiobook versions are also downloadable. Reams of reading and listening material, pitched at young adults; it’s almost too good to be true!

Not just stories

The key point here is that children’s books are not just about fantasy stories. They include non-fiction books that cover many aspects of life, from the prosaic to the historical and cultural. And that setting is a vital part of any language learning project.

Faced with such a richness of reading, it’s important to go for what you love. In particular, a set of books on Icelandic history, aimed at Icelandic school students, caught my eye. Written for the average Icelandic 10-year-old, the syntax isn’t complicated. But the ideas, constructions and concepts are incredibly useful for learning about Iceland. And, crucially, they are excellent practice for talking about why I like learning Icelandic myself.

Even much simpler books aimed at even younger students have their place. This primary school level book on the kitchen, for example, could never be accused of a lack of real-world application. Stuffed with food and cooking words, it makes for excellent prep for shopping and cooking in Iceland!

Spoilt for choice?

Admittedly, my Icelandic textbook find is a stroke of luck largely thanks to choosing a ‘small’ world language to study. The pressure on the government of a tiny country like Iceland to support the language is relatively high. In larger countries, there are any number of competing educational resource companies. Each is trying to make money from the textbook publishing market. In that environment, freebies are a rare and precious thing. (Note: that isn’t to say that there aren’t some tidbits, like this free guide to linguistics from Routledge.)

It is true that we are spoilt as Icelandic learners. It’s even possible to get full, official courses in Icelandic as a foreign language for free online. But that isn’t to say that a bit of hard digging on your own resource hunt won’t turn up educational goods in other languages.

True, books for youngsters may not always accurately model everyday, face-to-face language in the target language. But there is more to language than face-to-face use. And these resources make a captivating way in to many aspects of the target language culture, as well as wonderful motivators.

Have you found similar caches of free resources for school students in your target language? Let us know in the comments!

Headphones - perhaps to listen to Glossika with! From freeimages.com

Getting Polyglossic with Glossika : Making Language Learning *Massive*

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I’ve always liked the ‘mass sentences’ approach for supplementing and boosting your language learning. The idea is that you take a huge corpus of quality, target language sentences, and use them as your source material. It’s a quick route to massive exposure. It’s the idea behind Tatoeba, which is a fantastic, crowd-sourced resource. But, more commercially, it’s also the approach of Glossika, a popular resource in the polyglot community. I finally got round to giving it a whirl lately to see what all the fuss was about.

Glossika has been around for a while already. They are available in a very impressive array of languages (think: Routledge’s Colloquial series but for mass sentences). Until recently, they were chiefly available as book / CD sets, like this level 1 Japanese course. However, the materials are now available for subscription through Glossika’s website, making it much easier to trial and access their range.

Now, one thing that always put me off was the price. Glossika courses are on the expensive side, approaching the Rosetta Stone level of pricing. At anything up to £100 per level on Amazon for the physical media right now, and with three levels in the core languages, that’s a hefty price to pay for the promise of fluency. The website, however, now adds a more affordable way to access the courses at $24.99 a month (billed annually, currently around £19).

Still, this comes in more expensive than other popular, paid web language platforms like Babbel (as little as £4.75 a month) and Memrise Pro (from $2.50 / about £2 a month). Admittedly, Glossika’s overheads are probably a fair bit higher, with that vast amount of native speaker recording they must have to do. But what benefits do you get for that extra cash?

What Glossika does well

I’ve now spent just over a week using the website, performing repeated Icelandic repetitions. Remarkably, I have already noticed an improvement in my speaking confidence. I think this comes down to two things.

Accent and prosody

The Glossika method is a fantastic way to train your ‘muscle memory’ for speaking in the target language. The listen-repeat method is a blunt instrument, and as old as the hills, but there’s little better for perfecting your accent.

As some of the sentences are quite lengthy, the system is also great for internalising prosody, or the natural rhythm, of your target language. This has the knock-on effect of improving your listening skills, too. After a week of Glossika, I felt that my comprehension of spoken Icelandic had edged forward.

Language patterns

The material also hammers into your head reams and reams of model sentences. On the face of it, you might take this as passive, parrot-fashion learning. In fact, though, the sheer number of them facilitates the pattern-matching parts of your brain. Tricky, colloquial turns of phrase start to become more familiar, and you start to pick up phrases that can act as adaptable frameworks for more spontaneous speaking.

Icelandic (much like German, Polish and Russian) can sometimes collapse into a blur of declensions and conjugations for the learner. The language’s particular mountain to climb (in my experience) is adjectival endings, which seem as numerous as the stars. Through a week of sentence modelling with Glossika, some of the trickier ones are finally falling into place through repeated exposure.

Glossika gripes

Nothing is perfect, of course. A couple of things stand out as needing attention and improvement in Glossika, namely:

Voice choice

Some of the voices aren’t the most mellifluous. The Icelandic voice grated on me a bit, and there were no alternative options (male/female voice, for example, like the uTalk software has done so successfully in the past). That goes especially for the smaller languages, where there is no variety of voice at all. If you don’t like the voice, you’re stuck with it.

Unnecessary conversions

One very weird quirk is that the translators have often opted to convert prices and measurements, quite unnecessarily. One example gives the English as ‘a buck, a Euro’, then gives the Icelandic as ‘120 kronur’. For a start, this is never going to stay accurate for very long, given currency fluctuations. And for another, what is the point? Surely it would be better to make both sentences reflect the Icelandic currency, give that it is an Icelandic course? Just odd.

Also strange is the choice of names and places for the sentences. I assume Glossika have tried to keep the sentence corpus similar between languages. This results in a slightly international flavour to people’s names and geographical locations given. That said, it would be nice to have a few Icelandic names and places thrown into the course. Instead of Brian, Mary, Madrid and Seattle, let’s try Ásgeir, Hafdís, Akureyri and Ísafjörður!

Alternatives to Glossika

The gripes are minor, though. On the whole, Glossika does seem to justify its expensive in terms of results. But, if you are still unconvinced about shelling out, there are a ways to get a similar sentence kick elsewhere.

Phrasebooks with audio

For a cheap, basic raft of target language sentences, you could use one of several tourist phrasebooks with included audio. The Rough Guide phrasebooks are pretty comprehensive, and a bargain at under a fiver (like their French phrasebook for just over £3!). Even better is the fact that the Rough Guide team has made the accompanying audio files available for free online, at this link. Perhaps not as massive as Glossika, but that’s scores of spoken sentences you can start with straight away.

Similarly, the In-Flight series by Living Language (such as In-Flight Polish) are handy and available for under a tenner each. They are so similar to the Glossika format that they almost double as a taster of the method.

Other sources of mass sentences

If it’s sheer numbers of sentences you’re after, look no further than Anki’s shared decks. Several users have created decks based on Tatoeba’s source material, some with sound included. And if not, no fear. With silent decks, you could try the AwesomeTTS text-to-speech add-on for Anki.

Finally, for the benefits of repetition and mimicry for your accent and ‘language muscle memory’, shadowing podcasts can provide a boost. For sure, podcasts are more chaotic than Glossika, lacking the didactic structure. With podcasts, you may have no clue what will come up. But there again, that unpredictability is a good mirror of real-world language.

Glossika – an unpolished gem worth a go

Certainly, you can replicate elements of the Glossika system using other materials. However, none of them quite have that large-scale, ‘sit back and soak it up’ feel that Glossika does. A very solid four stars from me, as those plus points far outweigh the niggles. With 1000 free repetitions (at least a fair few sessions) available for trial on the website, it’s definitely worth a test drive!

Islands can be language lifesavers (Freeimages.com)

Land ahoy! Islands, how they can help your language learning, and why you’re probably already using them

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Sometimes we get excited about a new big idea in language learning, only to get a pleasant surprise. It’s only something we’ve been doing all along anyway! And so it is with islands, a language technique a polyglot friend introduced to me recently. But why is it so effective? And are you already doing it too, without realising it?

Islands : sink or swim?

The islands technique is developed and elaborated by Boris Shekhtman in How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, a classic language hacking text now over a decade old. Personally, I have my wonder-tutor Marcel to thank for bringing it to my attention (as with so many other cool language learning ideas). It’s no exaggeration to say that he is a huge fan of the technique.

It builds on the concept of swimming as a metaphor for the beginner’s language proficiency. When navigating free, open conversation, the sheer unpredictability can leave you floundering. However, you can give yourself some dry land by setting up a number of islands as refuges.

These islands are short sections of text about key areas of your life and interests, committed to memory. You use them as ready-to-hand frameworks to plump out your conversation, or steer the conversation towards them to gain some purchase with your partner. They serve as familiar ground when you are on the high seas of target language speaking.

Sounds familiar?

The simplicity of this technique is its strength. But it’s also the reason that it probably sounds a little familiar already. After all, the preparation of short texts is a mainstay of traditional language learning. It is strikingly similar to the scripts technique popularised by more contemporary polyglot pundits. And I soon began to realise that I’ve been doing a form of it for some time already.

With several iTalki teachers, I’ve done some version of a prose-writing homework that mirrors the islands technique. It goes like this: at the end of a lesson, the teacher would give me a topic. I would have to write a paragraph or two on that topic for the next lesson, when we’d look through it, correct it together and talk in the target language about what I wrote.

These topics have centred on aspects of my own life – family, hobbies and so on – or general topics of conversation – social media, current affairs, travel and such like. After each one, I ended up with a ‘potted monologue’ that was corrected by a native speaker and well rehearsed through practice and discussion with the teacher. If future, real-world conversation throws these topics my way, I have raft of relevant things to regurgitate (or, as proficiency grows, adapt).

In short, I had been using islands for ages without realising it. And in your own language learning, I would bet that you can pick out similar elements. The best thing is thus eureka! moment, that realisation that I was already on the right track. Yes – islands can work for me, because the system fits so neatly into my current learning regime!

From habit to general approach

Of course, what I was doing roughly equates to the islands technique, but wasn’t particularly rigid or formalised. Like anyone doing weekly prose exercises like this, we can’t claim to have accidentally invented the islands technique independently. Certainly, lots of elements are there; but with no underpinning philosophy of learning, it’s not quite a language revolution in itself.

By contrast, the author synthesises these elements and more, usefully packaging them as a general approach. This more abstract overview acts as a more systematic scaffold to your learning. Rather than chancing across the magic that the technique can work, you begin to apply it regularly, to much more sustained effect. Not only that, but knowing the metaphor behind the theory – the idea of conversational safety and familiar fallbacks – prepares you for actually using the technique in the wild.

It is well worth reading up on what  Shekhtman has to say on the subject in his book. The rest of the short, sage volume is also packed with other practical advice beyond the islands method. It is no surprise that it continues to resurface amongst successive waves of polyglots.

Do you recognise elements of the technique in your own learning? Let us know in the comments!

Alphabet Texts

Textual Time Machine: Turning to the past for motivating target language texts

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Gary Barlow and Margaret Thatcher accompanied me on my language learning this week. This surprising turn of events was thanks not to celebrity friendships and psychic messages, but rather a lucky stumble across a treasure trove of motivating target language texts.

In truth, I was getting a bit tired of language learning textbooks. Dialogues about holiday scenarios and sanitised snippets of everyday life in the target language country weren’t sparking my fire at all. As such, I was struggling a bit to motivate myself to read.

Then, I happened upon the Icelandic media archive timarit.is.

Tantalising texts: balancing subject and level

It is not possible to overestimate the benefits of hitting upon just the right texts to motivate your language learning. There are two strands to bear in mind on that search, sometimes complimentary, sometimes conflicting: subject and level.

Subject is important to inspire you to read in the first place. For example, I’m not interested in race car driving at all. So trying to plough through an Icelandic magazine article on Formula One is going to turn me right off. Music or travel, on the other hand, and I’ll be hooked in – especially if the text contains some new information that will be interesting or useful to me personally.

Level is simply the complexity of the language. But level interacts with subject, at least in terms of motivation. If the subject matter fascinates you, even a very difficult text will be one you gladly pore over. And if you are familiar with the subject matter, guessing new vocab from context is a hundred times easier and less frustrating.

Textual Time machine

Enter timarit.is. It is a grand, online collection of digitised newspaper and magazine media by the National and University Library of Iceland. This incredible service makes accessible publications that stretch back decades, fully readable and downloadable in PDF format.

Now, you might well chuckle at my first searches. A whole world of information at my fingertips, and my first selection was anything but highbrow. I grew up during the boyband explosion, so anything that whips up nostalgia around that will pique my interest. So that settles it: what had Iceland to say about Take That in years gone by?

That’s the trick though: don’t shy from your geekiest interests. Be shameless! Dig around and find some material to explore and reminisce over. The whole point is to connect, to personalise, to enmesh your learning into your life – even the cheesy parts. There certainly was no shortage of vintage cheese on offer here, like this cutting on “Gary Goldboy“:

Tímarit (mbl.is)

Gary Barlow, 1996 (timarit.is)

Sometimes the time machine can throw some real zingers of historical nuggets your way, too. I happened across the following (probably apocryphal) story of said popstar moaning about the cost of beer in Berlin in 1996. Celebrity gossip ages quite well, it seems – still served with an eye-roll and a heap of scepticism.

Beer outrage (timarit.is)

Beer outrage, 1996 (timarit.is)

Our history – their eyes

Popsters aside, I am also a bit of a news and current affairs junkie. When I get fed up of the current dirge (which happens a lot lately), I turn to the recent past. Exploring political history, especially what happened in your own lifetime, can be an enlightening exercise.

Trawling the pages of timarit.is reveals an unusual passion: reading about my own country through the eyes of another. I spent a good few hours typing in the names of figures associated with big political events, then seeing the Icelandic take on them through archived, authentic texts.

Callaghan or Thatcher? They decide today! (Timarit.is)

Callaghan or Thatcher? They decide today! 1979 (timarit.is)

The marvellous thing about timarit.is is the sheer depth of chronology. Facsimiles go back to the turn of the 20th Century. I leapt from Thatcher, to Wilson, to Attlee, reading excitedly each Icelandic take on a turning point in my country’s history. Fascinated is an understatement.

Target language culture?

But just a moment: British bands and British politicians? It’s all a bit Anglocentric, so far. However, you can use these as a springboard for tropes closer to your target language. After reading about Thatcher, for example, I searched for the phrase ‘first woman’ in Icelandic. Which other trail blazers would pop up? Well, I wasn’t disappointed. I learnt all about Iceland’s – and the world’s – first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir.

Vigdís voted president! (Timarit.is)

Vigdís voted president! 1980 (timarit.is)

Of course, I have my own target language country fascination already: Eurovision. And there is no shortage of material there! I can’t explain how enthralled my inner nerd becomes when reading about the songs that I obsessed over for years as a superfan. Simply magical.

Eurovision Iceland 1992 (timarit.is)

Eurovision hopefuls for Iceland in 1992, feeling ‘well rehearsed’ (timarit.is). See here for the resulting live performance!

The fact that all this material is downloadable in PDF format is invaluable. I can simply load them onto my iPad (I use GoodReader for PDFs) and study them on the go.

Other languages

Timarit.is is a truly golden resource. As an Icelandic learner, I am beyond lucky to have open access to such a library. But where does this leave learners of other languages?

Sadly, while there are paid archives like the German http://www.genios.de/presse-archiv/, free materials like timarit.is are hard to come by. Perhaps Iceland’s size has made the task of collating and gaining rights for so much material a little easier than elsewhere. Still, even on paid-for sites there is some useful information.

The archive of German publication Spiegel is a good example. You can search editions back to 1946, although you must pay for the full issues. However, the cover thumbnails are intriguing in themselves as pieces of social history. They also contain a fair bit of useful target language in the form of headlines and subtitles.

Spanish news outlet ABC also offers its Hemeroteca (newspaper library) for information time travellers. I found this article on Spain’s first Eurovision victory, by Massiel back in 1968, particularly charming!

With a bit of Google search grafting, there should be something to find out there for all learners.

Archive sites are goldmines for language learners searching something a bit different to read. Do you have a favourite or recommended source of texts? Share them in the comments!

 

Let language learning turn your world into a kaleidoscope of colours.

Bouncing and bootstraps : my language learning week

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It’s been a busy week for me in terms of language learning (and everything else!). I’d call the underlying theme motivation, more than anything else, as I’ve had a well-needed injection of inspiration juice from various quarters. Bouncing and bootstraps is what it’s been about – and here’s why.

Matthew Syed’s Bounce

I picked up a copy of Matthew Syed’s Bounce as part of my general reading this week. It’s the kind of motivational myth-busting book I love. The author takes down the intimidating idea of exclusive ‘natural talent’, and shows how success in any field comes down to dedication and practice above all else.

This seems really pertinent to language learning right now. Currently, it’s very easy to feel in the shadow of some of the ‘reknowned polyglots’ in the language learning scene. Sometimes it really does seem like they have some elusive linguistic superpower, or are somehow special, and different from us. (Sidenote: I know that’s not the intention of most of them – naturally we’ll always try to showcase our skills and potential, rather than our weaknesses. I do it myself!)

What Matthew reminds us of is that anyone can reach these levels of expertise with some graft. Using the well-known 10,000 hours to expert rule, he explains how hard work, not some magical, inborn ‘talent’, is what gets you to the top.

Of course, the polyglot scene is all about maximising your language learning, and making those 10,000 hours of practice as efficient as possible. Perhaps we shouldn’t be feeling in awe of these gurus’ language levels, but rather the learning techniques they employ so efficiently. We could all learn from that.

Muscle memory – for languages

Something else in the book rang true in my linguist’s brain. It’s been mentioned elsewhere in dialogue about language learning online, as the idea is a familiar one: muscle memory. Syed talks specifically about the movement of skill from the conscious to the automatic parts of our brain. In particular, he uses the example of table tennis. A champion player, for example, had internalised his physical technique to the extent that he could beat all competition – despite having the slowest ‘innate’ reaction times of the whole group tested.

Practise a language long enough, and the process of making certain sounds will move into this internal, automated memory. Your mouth will begin to shape certain sounds instinctively. You’ll interject in the target language without thinking about it. Fillers will come as if you were born speaking them. That’s your muscle memory in the target language kicking in!

Typically, you experience this at that click moment, when you realise you are thinking in the target language. It’s the autopilot feeling when you’re finally comfortable waffling away in it. I get it in German, for example, Deutsch being my oldest and strongest foreign language.

More surprisingly, it appears elsewhere even in languages I’m not so comfortable with. I’ve trained myself to interject frequently in Polish, so dropping a właśnie (exactly!) or świetnie (great!) happens almost without thinking now. And that’s still at a pretty basic level (A2). So you can leverage linguistic muscle memory at any level.

It’s a great book for a bit of a pep-up. You can get a second-hand copy from 78p on Amazon right now, so it’s worth a couple of quid if you need a bit of enthusing!

Language learning challenge and support

Of course, getting in that amount of practice is easier when you have support. I know I’m guilty of slacking off a bit when left to my own devices. So how can we encourage ourselves to get Syed’s golden 10,000 hours in?

To this end, I’ve been gaining bags of motivation from a new group I’ve joined on Facebook. It’s been literally pulling me up by the bootstraps with my Icelandic, after months of half-hearted attempts and disorganised dribs and drabs here and there.

Growing together

A good iTalki teacher friend of mine is running the group, which, for the moment, is a limited pilot. Around a dozen of us are signed up, which is a nice, cosy number for a group like this.

Each member picks a language, and an improvement goal based on the European framework. We each have a schedule to report back to the group – either in writing or video update – about progress in our chosen language.

It’s the kind of accountability exercise that has had very positive results in the field of professional coaching. Peers motivate each other, keep each other on track, and – crucially – learn from each other.

Choosing which language to target was particularly tough, considering that I’m actively working on three at the moment (Icelandic, Norwegian and Polish). Add to that two further languages I’m maintaining (German and Spanish), and I had to think long and hard about which one to throw this special lifeline to. It was a close-run contest, with Icelandic narrowly pipping Polish. Not that the others will cease (I’m too much of a junkie for that!). They’ll continue in the background – it’s just Icelandic that will receive the shot-in-the-arm this time round!

Return to Duolingo Mountain

Talking of Polish, I’ve also rediscovered the joys of Duolingo after a few months of consigning it to the back of my mind. As a starter, I always found it a little dull in the first few lessons. However, returning to it with a slightly higher level of the language has been a revelation.

The ability to ‘skill out’ of the first lessons through tests has revitalised the app for me. I’ve now leapfrogged over the early material, and am using it for 5-10 minutes a day for sentence drilling. As I suspected, I now find Duolingo much more useful as a maintenance / drill tool. I think it’s really cementing the foundations of my elementary Polish.

If only Duolingo had an Icelandic course!

Little gratitudes

On the subject of support, I’ve also been inspired by the presence of friends lately. I’m constantly heartened by the regular newsletters of ‘happiness guru’ Nataly Kogan, who recommends making of note of your gratitudes every day. It reminds me to be thankful for language learning friends like Marcel above, for example, but also for friends who spur on my language learning through home baking treats, amongst other things (thanks for the flapjack, emmafull!). My Mum makes a mean apple crumble, too (carrying the baton forward from my wonderful Nan). Food for the brain and soul.

I’m also pretty grateful for the Swagbucks site in recent weeks, which is keeping me happy with the occasional free iTunes card via surveys and such like. Excellent for purchasing langauge learning apps and subscriptions! Especially handy if you spend a fortune on these things (as I’m sure many of us do).

Sunset over Stourbridge

Another reason to be grateful – lovely sunsets over my home town earlier this week.

What are you grateful for in your language learning world this week? Let us know in the comments!

Shipwrecks in Scotland (from freeimages.com). Perhaps Doric was spoken aboard these vessels?

Doric Scots: Treasure Trove of Nordic Gems

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As language learners, we often focus on cultures that are far-flung. With our eyes and ears fixed on the far away, any richness around us can end up playing second fiddle. But occasionally, when you take a moment to pause, you realise the beautiful relevance of the local to your learning. So it is with Doric Scots and my journey with learning Icelandic and Norwegian.

Doric Scots

Doric is the dialect of Scots that is typical of Northeast Scotland, particularly Aberdeen and the surrounding fishing towns and villages. It boasts a very particular vocabulary of its own, which differs a fair bit from the Scots heard elsewhere in the country.

Although based in Edinburgh when I’m here, I’m lucky to be surrounded by friends and family who speak this colourful, unique and linguistically intriguing variety as their home tongue.

Scandi-Scots

The most curious thing is its substantial overlap in vocabulary with North Germanic languages. As a student of Norwegian and Icelandic, it is constantly throwing up nice surprises. Now and again friends will use a word that is unfamiliar in English. However, there is often more than a slight chance that it has a cognate somewhere in Scandinavia.

It’s certainly true that some of this North Germanic vocabulary is well attested throughout Scotland. Bairn (child) and kirk (church) are two that even south-of-the-border anglophones will recognise.

That said, Doric adds a whole raft of other northern terms like thole (bear, stand) and muckle (much, lots) that give the dialect a special Nordic twist.

Routes and roots

How they ended up in Doric, but lost to the rest of English (and even Scots), is unclear. Perhaps they were brought here by Viking invaders who assimilated into the local culture man hundreds of years ago. Maybe they travelled here by more peaceful routes via visiting sailors, fisherman and traders. There again, maybe they were more widespread, longer ago – perhaps standard English used to have these terms, and has since lost them.

Not knowing for certain lends these special words a delicious mystery. Words are stories, histories, and trying to fathom their beginnings is a unique delight of etymology.

It’s also worth pointing out, along the way, that there once lived a full-blooded, bona fide North Germanic language on Scottish soil: Norn, a language close to Faroese and Icelandic, which flourished until relatively recent times on the northern isles. Little surprise, then, that the language group still has such a presence in some modern-day varieties of Scots.

Memory tricks

But beyond the delightful surprises, could these similarities have a more practical purpose?

Spotting links between the local and the far away object of study can be a huge support when it comes to memorising vocabulary. It assists in creating memory hooks – multiple points of reference that pin a new word into the neural net of your brain. Rather than a single pair of points – English and Icelandic – you can now create a memory that is fixed by a third point, the Doric translation. Noting that gráta (to weep) corresponds to Doric / Scots greet holds that entry much faster in memory.

Examples

Now, I am a backseat etymologist. The list below is not based on extensive research of mine, but of frequent questioning of ever-patient friends and extensive excursions on Wiktionary. As such, here is a list of some touchpoints I’ve spotted between Doric, general Scots and North Germanic languages. It is far from complete or exhaustive, but shows some nice crossovers between Doric, Icelandic and Norwegian.

I have checked these entries with handy Doric-speaking friends, as well as the brief but brilliant Doric word list here. My conclusions proceed from superficial observations (and lots of fun trying to spot patterns), so please let me know in the comments if you know a different etymology, or reason for the overlap.

Doric / Scots terms with Nordic analogues

  • bairn : child
    🇮🇸🇳🇴barn
  • bide : wait / stay
    🇮🇸bíða (‘stay’ in Doric Scots – archaic English sense of ‘wait’ matches Icelandic bída)
  • breeks : trousers
    🇮🇸buxur 🇳🇴bukse – a word the rest of English has all but lost (although you can still hear britches / breeches in old cowboy films!)
  • claes : clothes
    🇮🇸klæði (cloth – the more usual Icelandic term for clothes is föt) 🇳🇴klær
  • ee / een : eye / eyes
    The plural in -n is remarkably similar to the Norwegian øyne (eyes)
  • fit / far : what / where
    The interesting thing here is not that the words have cognates in Doric – after all, the Standard English what / where come from the same route. What is interesting is that the Doric retains an initial fricative sound, just like the Nordic counterparts 🇮🇸hvað / hvar 🇳🇴hva / hvor
  • ging : go
    🇮🇸ganga (walk) – the Doric retains the Germanic -ng- that the shortened Standard English root has lost
  • greet : cry, weep
    🇮🇸gráta 🇳🇴gråte
  • het : hot
    Still close phonetically to the Standard English hot, although the different vowel echoes the Icelandic heitt
  • hoast : cough
    🇮🇸hósta 🇳🇴 husta (and also, husten in German!)
  • mate : food
    🇮🇸matur 🇳🇴mat
  • muckle : much
    🇮🇸mikill
  • oxter : armpit
    🇮🇸öxl (although this means ‘shoulder’ in Icelandic!)
  • quine : woman
    🇮🇸kona  🇳🇴kvinne – also note that Standard English has a cognate in the word queen
  • smit : infect
    🇮🇸smita 🇳🇴smitte (and of course, the Standard English word smitten in a more figurative sense)
  • thole : bear, stand
    🇮🇸þola
  • tint : lost
    🇮🇸týnt (it is not clear whether Doric only retains the past participle, or also an equivalent to the infinitive týna – to lose – too)
  • tow : rope
    🇳🇴tau
  • teem : empty
    🇮🇸tómur 🇳🇴tom

Much as we can do this with Doric Scots and Nordic languages, you can scout English for other traces of history that can help your learning adventure. Greek, Latin and more have made their mark in similar ways. As well as memory aids, the payoff is a deeper, richer understanding of the language you call your own mother tongue.

Often, learning a foreign language can teach you much about the lesser-spotted intricacies of your own – particularly the twists and turns of its pathways through social geography and history.

Trying to complete a Rubik's Cube - a case for micromastery?

Micromastery: chunking and rationalising your language learning

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Always on the lookout for new learning hacks and tips, I’ve been digging into Robert Twigger’s Micromastery this week. The premise of the book is simple: learn new skills by breaking them down into manageable chunks and deal with them in a systematic, gradual way.

Six steps to mastery

The system is not so much a concrete plan for learning, as a set of principles to break your learning into pieces, and conceptualise and organise your first steps with them. The author uses a six-part approach as a framework to your first steps in a skill:

  • The entry trick
  • Overcoming rub-pat barriers
  • Background support
  • Payoff
  • Repeatability
  • Experimentation

And, while a bit of this is reinventing the wheel, I found them to be a good reminder of the importance of a structured approach in learning. As a sometimes overeager linguist, a Micromastery approach could organise my educational nourishment into regular light bites, rather than a colic-inducing binge.

So how can these Micromastery tricks help us to learn languages? The book doesn’t explicitly deal with languages, so you’ll have to do a bit of rethinking. But those six conecpts can provide a handy guide your first steps in a new language. Here’s my take on just a couple of the six concepts above.

Entry trick

The ‘entry trick’ rang bells immediately. Specifically, Twigger describes this an easy way in to the skill that pays off immediately. For example, it could be learning to balance on a static board before launching into full-blown surfing.

Where have we heard that before? Well, in languages, it mirrors advice from Benny Lewis and others to start your language learning journey with simple, rote scripts. Like stabilisers on a bike, they support solid skills-building whilst protecting the student from the stress of full-blown grammar and vocab cramming.

The chunk-by-chunk system also lends itself well to thematic language learning like this. Rather than throwing yourself at an amorphous mass of grammar, focus on several, well defined themes to script out, week by week.

True to the author’s promise for these entry tricks, there is the immediate payoff with using scripts. You quickly learn something practical and useful straight away. The reward is both self-satisfaction, and, hopefully, the ability to impress target language speakers early on in your study.

The rub-pat barrier

Twigger’s second point is particularly pertinent to language learning, too. Essentially, the rub-pat barrier is the author’s way of describing things that are difficult to do together (as in rubbing your tummy and patting your head simultaneously).

Now, language learning is full of these moments to overcome. If you’re anything like me, then conversing and not panicking is a pretty important multitasking trick to master in the early stages! You can probably think of many more, such as speaking without pause and not getting verb / case endings wrong, for example.

By anticipating these ‘rub-pat barriers’ before we come up against them, we can prepare ourselves. For example, speaking crib sheets help me to feel I have a safety net in target language conversation. Moreover, mindfulness techniques can be great anxiety-busters – I’ve had great success with the excellent Headspace.

The real rub (!) is that you usually have to experience these barriers before you know they’re there. And you only find that out by throwing yourself into the skill. Sometimes it might be possible to foresee these kinds of difficulty when planning a new skill routine, but you’re a gifted learner if you can spot them all before they rear their ugly heads.

Background support

New skills require more than just a learner – they take materials, other people, paraphernalia and so on. Precisely these things are what the book dubs background support. This encompasses the resources – human and otherwise – that will form the scaffolding around your language project.

I did appreciate the nod to individual circumstances here. The truth is, sadly, that not everyone can afford the equipment to learn certain skills (the author uses surfing as an example). Fortunately for linguists, materials need not cost the earth; sometimes, they cost nothing at all.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, other people can form our background support as linguists. Making sure you have a good buddy network to check in on you – even recruiting family and friends who aren’t learning with you – can help keep you accountable and on track.

Repeatability and Experimentation

And then, we have two of the most vital skills in the set for linguists: repeatability and experimentation. The ability to repeat a skill is the end goal of the linguist: to communicate, to perform language X/Y/Z countless times in the future. And, with each act of recall and review, those neural pathways strengthen and extend. If anything, the notion of repeatability is a reminder to work very regular, active use of the language into your daily routine.

Experimentation goes hand in hand with this, and maps onto the particularly exciting stage of language learning: linguistic creativity. It’s that moment when you start to substitute words in your rote sentences to create brand new, unique utterances. In Twigger’s example of baking, you might start to play around with new ingredients. In languages, you push yourself to geek and tweak the framework material you learnt in your scripts.

Micromastery – a starting point for your own approach

Clearly, the book’s core principles have offer a guiding hand when devising your study plan. Choose your chunks carefully and plan your study calendar bearing the six points in mind, and the system could really be of benefit. Bear in mind, however, that language learning is a cumulative process; at some point, these individual chunks need to join up. The approach is perhaps a little sketchy on forming the whole skill from the constituent parts.

However, the whole idea does speak to the polymath in me. As a general framework for learning multiple, cross-curricular skills, it’s concise and based on common sense. There are elements in there that lend themselves to any kind of learning.

The book has received mixed reviews on Amazon. In part, this might be down to the slightly woolly examples the author uses to illustrate the system. Drawing circles, surfing and baking somehow fail to light the imagination, and a bit of extrapolation to your own world is necessary.

With a bit of effort to graft the ideas onto your own learning goals, Micromastery is well worth a read. There’s much to motivate here, if only to reiterate the importance of clear objectives at the start of your journey.

Elephants (not the Evernote elephant)

Evernote : Language Hero Sidekick

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Think language learning apps, and all the specialist ones tend to come to mind first: Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise and so on. But there are a couple of general tools I use all the time in my language learning. In particular, Evernote has become an utterly indispensable part of that suite.

So why is this unsung hero is a mainstay of my learning routine?

Organisation

If you spend a lot of time writing in the target language, whether creating vocabulary lists or translation homeworks, organisation is key. And with the ability to create multiple notebooks and notebook stacks as standard, Evernote is hard to beat in terms of simplicity and ease.

In my Languages stack, for example, I have a separate notebook for each language I study. And that stack keeps my study notes separate from the myriad other things I use Evernote for. That could be anything from work week planning to travel itineraries. It’s out-of-the-box ready for your sprawling, cross-curricular life.

Evernote Tags

However, Notebooks and notebook stacks are only Evernote’s topmost level of organisation. And it’s true, plenty of note-taking apps work this way.

But what adds granularity to that is the powerful tag functionality. You can add custom tags to any note, adding descriptive – and searchable – terms to help sort and find work later on. The thing is, most people end up with hundreds of documents. This is a given if you study more than one language. Tags add an element of power search that is invaluable.

The whole process of tagging can fine-tune your language study to the nth degree. Amongst other things, I tag my language learning notes with descriptors like grammar, homework, writing practice, vocabulary, lesson notes and so on. As such, notes never disappear into the ether. I can retrieve every note for review with a simple tag search, respecting the time spent creating them.

More than text

Throughout self-taught language courses as well as one-to-one lessons, I’ve amassed a ton of PDF worksheets, sound files and other multimedia educational items. The beauty of Evernote is that these can be attached to notes and filed away with them, always findable. This is so much better than my former, clumsy folder system on the computer.

This extends to webpages too, like news articles or blog posts in the target language. If you’ve worked on a news article as part of a language homework, you can keep the original article along with your notes and vocab lists. You’ll never come across old notes and wonder what text they are referring to again!

Language scrapbooking

Attachments can be more fun than simply worksheets and listening comprehension files, too. I’m a big fan of language scrapbooking – keeping a visual log of your linguistic travels through ephemera like holiday snaps, menus, tickets and other items you pick up on your journeys. For one thing, it makes your connection to the target language culture much more personal – and that can only help with motivation and memory.

However, I’m also very anti-clutter. Keeping hold of countless tram tickets, leaflets and snaps of signposts in foreign languages would just be anathema to me. So, I let Evernote lend a hand! You can scan items straight into a note via the app, or embed multiple pictures into a single document from file. They’re tagged, commented and scrapbooked without any of the mess left hanging around. Excellent for OCD-minded linguists like me.

Shared notes

Language learning is often best as a social activity. Whether it’s a study buddy, fellow classmate or teacher,  sharing what you do with someone else makes your learning much more dynamic.

In Evernote, this is a piece of cake. Any note can be shared with a button click. This makes light work of distributing vocab lists, or sending your homework to your teacher, for example.

What’s more, you control the permissions granted to the shared party. Keep your vocabulary master lists or curriculum plans as ‘Can view’ only in order to retain complete control over them. Your students / buddies will always see your most up-to-date version when shared. On the other hand, give your teacher ‘Can edit’ privileges in order to mark, correct and annotate your writing homeworks. Fantastically simple!

Sharing language learning notes in Evernote

Sharing language learning notes in Evernote

Incidentally, the Evernote text editor is a rich text editor with ample formatting features for your foreign language writing. The desktop program offers just enough tools without the clutter of a fully-fledged Word Processor.

Plan with tick boxes

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest difference. For me, it’s tick boxes in Evernote. As a list-making obsessive – I plan my language goals  using a 12-week year approach with concrete objectives – I can get my list fix within Evernote itself.

Again, I can’t underestimate the value of keeping all of these items – planning as well as the actual learning material and my notes on it – together in one service.

Evernote tick list

Evernote tick list

Cross-platform

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Evernote works cross-platform. This allows for a very flexible study workflow. For example, I like to work actively on my notes in the desktop program. I’ll use the mobile app to review my notes on the go, as well as scanning in visual items as attachments, or recording audio notes. Occasionally, it’s handy to flip this, and use the mobile app directly to do my language homework on the move.

Having all your rich, indexed notes in a phone can be incredibly handy for the travelling linguist. It’s the perfect place to store speaking crib sheets to support your speaking when in the target language country, for example. Likewise, in a Skype lesson, having a list of useful phrases available in the palm of your hand can be a lifesaver.

Two devices with a free account

With the free account, you can install Evernote on two devices. That’s been enough for me, for the most part, with the app on my laptop and on my phone. However, you can upgrade to a premium account for unlimited installs (useful if you often switch between a phone and tablet when on the move). A premium account will also give you a lot more space for data-heavy attachments.

Evernote is star software with a multitude of real-world applications. It’s part and parcel of how I learn languages now, doing a superb job of holding masses of material together for me.

Are you also a fan of the green elephant? How has it helped your learning routine? Let us know in the comments below!

Edinburgh, home of EdFringe (Edinburgh Fringe Festival)

#EdFringe 2018 : Picks for Language Lovers

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EdFringe is here again! And, as always, there is something for everyone in the festival, including us language lovers. In Polyglossic tradition, here are some picks for learners – or simply the culturally interested.

As always, the shows on offer are a mixed bag, some featuring target language, and others in English, but with links to the target language countries. Whether for language learning practice, or for cultural exploration, there should be something to keep linguaphiles happy this August in Edinburgh.

French

German

Italian

  • Neapolitan Songs
    The title says it all, really. Romance, Naples, beautiful music – for lovers of Italy, this one-date only concert looks worth noting.
  • Violetta
    Continuing the musical theme (and who can blame them, considering the country’s musical heritage?), the group Opera Allegra put on this contemporary twist on La Traviata.
  • Luca Cupani: God Digger
    Like Henning and Vince above, this is a chance to catch a bit of Italian comedy – in English. With four-star reviews, Luca looks like a good bet.

Spanish

Also gaining a bit of of purchase in the jostling of myriad shows is Specters [sic], a play in Ukrainian with English subtitles. A little different, and an unexpected treat if you are studying the language.

Of course, this is a miniscule representation of the shows on offer this year. Hopefully, some of the above will grab your interest if you are in the city during August. Apologies to all the wonderful shows we missed. To trawl through the multiple offerings yourself and buy tickets online, visit https://tickets.edfringe.com/. And have a wonderful #EdFringe!