The Polish flag. Photo by Michal Zacharzewski from FreeImages

Język polski i ja / Polish and Me

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Not long back, a lively online language learning debate caught my eye. It was around the unassailable prominence of English as a medium for discussion in the polyglot community, and the irony of this within a community of a hundred other choices. Where is the diversity, the German, Japanese, Polish, Spanish articles? After all, we are spoilt for choice.

Of course, it is hard to get round this – not least because we all speak a slightly different set of languages. So, at least for now, English looks to keep its place as the most inclusive choice of language for discussion.

That said, I would personally echo that hope to see more blog and social media content in the languages I learn. Above all, being a blogger myself, it seemed like a good cue to lend a little ballast to the non-English side of things, to be brave, to publish non-English content.

Safe, comfortable English is a difficult spot to get out of, though. As a native English speaker, the reason for my reticence is probably one shared by many of my fellow anglophone enthusiasts: fear of mistakes, of others simply doing it better. That kind of anxiety is self-fulfilling; keep your fledgling skills too tightly caged, and they might just wither away.

Luckily, the chance came along to do a bit of writing along these lines, but with support. That made all the difference.

Good Timing

By complete coincidence, my iTalki Polish tutor Jan set a very appropriate homework task for me recently – a simple blog post, in Polish, about my personal history of learning the language. Writing from experience, like diary-keeping, can be an effective way to engage with, recycle and strengthen your language skills. But in this case, it gave me the opportunity to create something original – and not in English – for Polyglossic.

Now, the natural thing to do would probably have been to do this in one of my stronger languages. German, Norwegian or Spanish. You could say that Polish was simply in the right place at the right time. However, maybe that makes it an even better candidate. My lagging Polish is crying out for a bit of extra writing practice.

Let’s overlook for a moment (pretty please!) the discrepancy of this preface to it in English. Hmm. But for a first non-English post in a site full of them, it only seemed fair – at least for the time being. Baby steps.

Finally, huge thanks to Jan for the prompt and the copious corrections to this during class. Check out his own blog, Polish with John, for some fantastic original resources for learners. Any remaining errors below are completely my own!

Język polski i ja

Na Początku

Interesuję się językiem polskim od wielu lat. W latach dziewięćdziesiątych słuchałem polskiej muzyki w radiu u polskiego sąsiada, Pana Wilsona (jego prawdziwego polskiego nazwiska nie znam) i bardzo chciałem się nauczyć tego pięknego języka.

Ale wtedy nie było łatwo uczyć się polskiego. W bibliotekach nie było wielu materiałów do nauki. Jeśli ktoś chciał się uczyć hiszpańskiego, francuskiego, niemieckiego, dostępna była masa materiałów i książek. Niestety do języka polskiego był tylko jeden, bardzo stary egzemplarz “Teach Yourself Polish”. Było to wydanie z lat czterdziestych oparte na starej metodologii. Zastosowana była metoda gramatyczno-tłumaczeniowa. Pięćdziesiąt lekcji gdzie student musi czytać przykłady, nauczyć się listy słów, a potem zrobić długą listę tłumaczeń. Wtedy uważałem, że to było zupełnie normalne, że tak po prostu uczy się języków. To był błąd.

Brak mówiących

Nie było dostępu do mówiących. Pan Wilson nie lubił mówić po polsku (był starym człowiekiem a miał tragiczną historię i złe doświadczenia z wojskiem), a wszystko, co robiłem, było tłumaczeniem zdań nie mających praktycznego zastosowania. Tak nie da się nauczyć języka obcego.

Nawet słownictwo nie miało sensu dla mnie – słowa z lat czterdziestych, słowa I zwroty takie jak porucznik, pułkownik, polsko-brytyjskie przymierze i tak dalej. Myślę, że książka została napisana dla żołnierzy, którzy pracowali w polakami po wojnie. Po prostu nie mi pasowała. Ciekawe słownictwo, oczywiście, ale nie bardzo przydatne – na początku tylko chciałem rozumieć polskie piosenki! Ale nie było innego wyboru.

Nowy Świat

Wiele lat później, świat się zmienił. Nie tylko jest więcej książek, a też więcej metod, szerszy dostęp do materiałów do mówienia i słuchania w internecie, wszystko, co by mi pomogło jak młodemu studentowi.
Wniosek jest taki: nie da się uczyć się języka obcego bez słuchania i mówienia. Sama książka nie wystarczy.

Anki Stats : Review Graph

Language Learning by Numbers : Anki Stats

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If you use Anki to drill vocabulary, it’s tempting to sit back and let the app do all the work. Feed in your phrases, and simply let the algorithms work their magic.

On the other hand, if you really want to know what’s going on, you can dabble in the dark art of Anki stats.

Let’s face it, statistics are not everyone’s cup of tea. I’d be surprised if even half of regular Anki users take a look in the stats tab. Confession: I completely ignored the section myself for years. But with the start of a language resuscitation project recently, that extra information has become meta gold: a way to learn about my learning, and have more control over it.

In short, Anki stats allow us to view the past and see the future.

Get Him to the Greek

Way back when I started learning Anki, Greek was an active project of mine. I eventually rested that to focus on other languages for a while, so tagged my Greek deck as a ‘rested’ language in Anki.

Fast forward to 2020, and my Greek has been resurrected from its lengthy slumber. Firstly, I switched my Greek deck back to active in the Anki options. But given the lack of engagement for so long, I also went for the nuclear option: I reset all my Greek cards. I would drag those words and phrases back to the land of the living (languages) by drilling them all afresh.

The thing is, those active settings are now shared with my other active learning projects in Anki. Anki sets a maximum daily new card limit, which my revival Greek now takes up since I drill it first. That’s the plan for now, of course. But for the sake of planning, it would be great to know when my other languages will get a look-in again.

Stats Life

To keep on top of what’s coming your way soon, two sections in the stats are worth getting familiar with: Card Counts and Future Due.

Anki Stats: Card Counts

Anki Stats: Card Counts

Making sure the Greek deck is the one selected, I call up the Stats window. The number I’m interested in is New. These are new (or reset) cards that are queued to present during future reviews. Only when these have been drip-fed through will my other languages get a chance to serve up new words (if I continue to prioritise Greek).

The total currently reads 392. That sounds colossal, but at 10 new cards a day, I will have worked through them in just over a month. A month, that is, if I don’t add any more words for the time being! But that’s just the point: I can use the information here to make a more informed choice about how regularly I add more words to the deck. I am managing Anki, not the other way round.

Anki Stats : Future Due

Anki Stats : Future Due

Similarly, Future Due takes elements of the card count info, but lays it out graphically. This is incredibly useful – at a glance, you can see how the current crop of Greek words tails off after just over a month. By that point, I will have revised and learnt hundreds of Greek items. That’s also when my other projects will start popping in their fresh cards.

Taming Anki

Knowing your numbers is a little thing, but knowledge is power. Anki is no longer a black box spitting out words with no end in sight. I can see exactly where I’m going. And perhaps that’s the clincher for me, as a visual thinker. I like to see my way. (Incidentally, if you do too, there is an excellent heatmap visualiser available for Anki, too.)

Not everybody works well with woolly goals, either. The stats can give you a sneak peek into your language learning future. From that vantage point, you can visualise the finish line (or at least the next checkpoint).

By date X, I will know 500 words and phrases. That is powerful stuff.

You can be a surface user of Anki. It is tremendously useful even if you only use its basic functions. But getting a hold on your numbers can provide a world of support.

Shooting Stars : Logging can help you reach for the skies with your language learning! Image from freeimages.com

Task Logging: Realise You’re Smashing It

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If only we’d all be a little kinder to ourselves.

I read it all the time on social media: fellow language learners beating themselves up for not studying harder, longer, more often. It seems like everybody feels they’re not doing enough.

In fact, Covid lockdown has made things worse for many. Faced with all that extra time at home, how have we not turned into super-productive learning machines, devouring languages by the barrowload?

But far from egging us on, this type of chat is goal-wrecking. Feeling that we aren’t doing enough can be hugely demotivating. All that self-flagellation can have the opposite effect.

You simply give up.

Owning up

I raise my hand at this point. I am as guilty of self-criticism as the next learner.

I’m not doing enough. I’m not spending enough time on language X, Y, Z. I’m a bad student! I must try harder.

The thing is, it is difficult to fit learning into the busy lives we lead. No question. Few of us have the resources or options to be full-time, always-on students, and learning sometimes boils down to a bit here, a bit there.

But this was my biggest mistake: I thought a bit here, a bit there amounted to nothing.

So, to try and prove myself wrong, I started logging what I was actually doing. And the result was a bit of a surprise.

Looks like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, at the time, none of this felt like a lot. These bits and pieces were often just ten minutes or so, snatched around busy working days. Several of them were fairly passive activities, like listening to a podcast, or watching a short programme and making brief notes.

But just look how they add up.

The fact is that often, we simply don’t realise the cumulative effect of what we do. But the little and often approach pays dividends if you have a hectic rest-of-life in the background.

Logging logistics – the simpler, the better

So, how best to approach this?

As a productivity nerd, I’ve experimented with methods until the cows came home. Truth be told, there are as many ways to journal and log as there are learners. It’s worth trying out a few approaches to find what works for you.

Recently, I hit upon a winning formula that was immediately effective, but gradually morphed into something more streamlined. I started a logging cycle by creating monthly language report cards for each project. It worked really well straight off the bat. But since then, the multiple documents have slowly melded into a single list in recent weeks, and now it works even better. It’s highlighted one of the few hard and fast rules of learner logging (there aren’t many):

The simpler the logging method, the better: it is much easier to keep it up.

At first, I also tended to separate the more ‘meaty’ learning activities from repeated daily language habits, such as app work with Anki, Drops and Duolingo. Instead, I track these as regular tactics following the 12-week year system of goal setting. They have become so ingrained that I don’t even count them.

But there I go again, diminishing my efforts to nothing. Not counting these daily tasks as real work was another reason for getting a false impression of my efforts. The antidote – I moved my daily tick boxes to the same place as my log. So another rule learned:

Keep all of your logging, large and small, in one place: don’t overlook any of your efforts.

The magic of logging

When you get logging down to a tee, something magical begins to happen.

The act of filling your list up becomes a motivator in itself.

You start to take pride in that busy list of flag-lined milestones by the end of the week, and develop a mindfulness for even the smallest learning activities you might otherwise have written off as nothing.

The heart of that magic spark is the imperceptible accumulation of riches – in this case, educational ones. Just like regular savings pile up in a bank account, so do your little and often moments. The least you can do for yourself is make these many, miniature wins visible.

Logging needn’t even be in list format. I have a pad on my desk that I use to scribble down my language notes. During lockdown, I paid no attention to the number of pages I was filling up. But, one day, I suddenly realised that I have written reams and reams. It never seemed like a lot – but little, and often, it really was.

Smashing it – and not even realising it.

The language jotter that sits on my desk.

The language jotter that sits on my desk. Before I knew it, it was full.

I wrote this post as a personal pep talk – I needed to celebrate my efforts, and stop belittling them. But I hope it suggests a way for you to get that same satisfaction if you feel the drag  and don’t feel what you do is enough.

Look a little closer – you’re smashing it and you don’t even realise.

Use logging and journaling to remind yourself that you’re doing a good job, and give yourself a pat on the back more often.

Eurovision Cyprus 1993 - the song Μη σταματάς

Language Lessons from a Song [Eurovision 1993 : Cyprus]

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Bravo, inventor of the three-minute, throwaway pop song. Not only does it provide a little well-needed escapist entertainment, but it also doubles as a fantastic little language learning tool.

I’m far from the first language learning aficionado to use music to learn, of course. Many learners arrive at a new language after first falling in love with its music. And countless language teachers regularly spice up their classroom lessons with a pinch of pop.

But why is the simple song such a great medium for vocab mining? Besides the sheer fun of it. Well, for one thing, your typical chart hit is a nice and concise text to work with. It is the embodiment of bite-sized.

Secondly, the language of popular music tends to be quite colloquial, and not too elevated. You can pick up some nice, common turns of phrase to use in conversation. That doesn’t stop it expressing some universal and familiar truths, though, as well as some lyrics that can provide lively talking points.

What’s more – and here is the clincher – pop music is just so incredibly accessible now. Where overseas music was once hard to get hold of, it is now just a YouTube or Spotify search away.

A Song for Europe

As far as prime examples go, nothing quite approaches the three-minute pop perfection of the Eurovision Song Contest entry. I have long had a deep-seated fondness for Eurovision songs as my learning tools of choice.

No surprise there, of course. Eurovision is the reason I know so many random bits and bobs of so many different languages (not to mention ‘love’ and ‘peace’ in all of them). The lyrics range between harmless cheese and works of poetic art (check out this rather dark classic from France in 1968). But they all make for brilliant vocab fodder.

Also, an added benefit of choosing a Eurovision song is the excellent lyrics database Diggiloo Thrush, complete with translations and transliterations to tailor the material to any learner’s level.

But don’t let me badger you into choosing Eurovision (as if I needed any encouragement). Any song will do! After selecting one, Google for the lyrics, and begin to work through, line by line. As you move through the music, record each new term in your preferred practice / drill tool. Anki is always forever my go-to.

Adding colour to your conversation

Whatever your source, the nature of the song can provide some very colourful additions to your conversational repertoire. It is a fun game to toss out freshly memorised song lyrics to tutors mid-flow, and see how naturally (and imperceptibly!) they fit into the conversation – or not.

This can occasionally lend quite the philosophical slant to your chat. “Some of us, my friend, are the beggars of happiness” I mused to one perplexed tutor in the middle of a practice dialogue on buying train tickets. Yes, lyrics-fuelled lessons are nothing if not memorable (and salience of our active language learning material is something we should all strive for).

All Greek to Me

I currently find myself levelling up my Greek, first learned twenty years ago through Eurovision songs and island hopping. Music (much like food) simply has to play a part in any Greek learning plan, naturally. By way of example (and to spread the love), here is my working for a particularly favourite Eurovision song of mine, Cyprus’ underrated 1993 effort “Μη σταματάς” (Don’t Stop).

By going through the text systematically, you see how much high-frequency vocab you can mine from working with even the simplest of songs. And of course, you get the added memory bonus of having the words and phrases lodge in your head with a particularly sticky ear worm.

So without further ado… Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you the conductor, George Theofanous. Let the music (and learning) begin!

Μη σταματάς

Verse 1

Στη ζωή μας όλοι ερχόμαστε γυμνοί In our life we all arrive naked η ζωή – life
έρχομαι (έρθω, ήρθα) – to come
γυμνός – naked, bare
Ίδιο τέλος μας ορίζει και αρχή The same end and beginning define us ίδιος – same; own
το τέλος – end
η αρχή – beginning
ορίζω – to define, designate
Μα είναι κάποιοι από μας, οι ζητιάνοι της χαράς But there are some of us, the beggars of joy κάποιος – someone
ο ζητιάνος – beggar
η χαρά – joy, happiness

Chorus

Μη σταματάς, στους ανθρώπους να δίνεις βοήθεια Don’t stop giving help to people σταματώ – to stop
δίνω (δώσω, έδωσα) – to give
ο άνθρωπος – human, person
η βοήθεια – help (cf. the verb βοηθάω, to help)
Μην προσπερνάς, μη φοβάσαι να δεις τα συντρίμμια Don’t walk on by, don’t fear seeing the debris προσπερνώ – to pass by
φοβάμαι – to fear, be afraid (cf. the word phobia)
τα συντρίμμια – the debris, rubbish, wreckage
Κι αν τη ζωή την πληγώνει συχνά η αλήθεια And if truth often hurts life πληγώνω – to hurt, wound
συχνά – often, frequentlyη αλήθεια – truth
Μη σταματάς, μη σταματάς Don’t stop, don’t stop  

Verse 2

Όσα έχεις τόσα έχω, αδερφέ Whatever you own, I own, brother όσα… τόσα… – what …, that’s what … (cf. ‘όσα δίνεις, τόσα παίρνεις‘, ‘you get what you pay for‘)
Μα είναι κι άλλοι που δεν γέλασαν ποτέ But there are others who never laughed άλλος – other
γελάω – to laugh
Ειν’ το βλέμμα τους θολό, και σηκώνουνε σταυρό Their sight is unclear, and they carry a cross το βλέμμα – look, glance, stare (cf. βλέπω, to see)
θολός – dim, cloudy, blurry
σηκώνω – to lift up (cf., σηκώνομαι, to get up)
ο σταυρός – cross

I said it was bite-sized – three minutes of music doesn’t take long to work through. And there is some great, high frequency vocab to take away from that.

Deconstructing a favourite song

As you can see, deconstructing a favourite song in a foreign language does sometimes take the mystery away from it all a bit. Didn’t it all seem a bit more serious and credible before I translated it into complete banality? Now, it all sounds a little bit over-the-top. Walking past the debris? Everybody arriving naked? Hmm.

That said, I will always love this song, and not only for the extra vocab it’s given me. I adore how the lads are taking it all so seriously. I celebrate the oomph the backing trio are giving it. And I applaud the cheesy sax solo.

Even if the juries didn’t quite agree.

Rodin's statue The Thinker. Perhaps he is thinking about Language Learning? Image from freeimages.com.

Language Learning Faultlines : When Words Diverge

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I had a language learning breakthrough this week. I finally got a handle on the two verbs for ‘to think’ in Greek: νομίζω (nomízo) and σκέφτομαι (skéftomai). Unlike the all-purpose English term, Greek is more discerning. It uses the former for general, more superficial matters of thinking and and opining. The latter, however, refers to the more serious business of deep cognitive processes.

The matter of different kinds of thinking is a distinction I should be used to, mind. Students of Norwegian must also get used to English ‘think’ spreading out across multiple translations. There is tenke – the actual process of thought. But then you have synes, to have an opinion about something. And tro, to believe, pops up where we might be tempted to use that catch-all think in English, too. That’s a hefty three-way split!

Well, all this thinking, it got me thinking. There are a fair few cases where English collapses meanings into a single lexical item, while other languages distrubute the nuances across different terms. Could English be a bit… woolly?

Woolly Friends

Woolliness of English certainly does rear its head from time to time. Just look at the word friend, which is a tricky one for English speakers learning Polish. It is tempting to head to the dictionary and lift przyjaciel as a direct word-for-word translation. But przyjaciel is a lot stronger than the pretty wide-ranging catchment of friend. Rather, znajomy or kolega are more appropriate choices in Polish, however cool and detached the literal translations acquaintance and colleague might sound to anglophones!

That said, it is impossible to make judgements when comparing these imperfectly aligned terms. The differences just are. Language learning discoveries like this do allow us to look at our own language critically, though. Do we overuse friend in English? Perhaps. But sometimes that ambiguity is quite useful – especially when hedging our friendship bets. And what of Icelandic’s multiple words for animal tail? We might scoff, but someone, somewhere must find that a useful division!

Knowing Me, Knowing That

Of course, we have to mention the classic terms mismatch. This is the one most school linguists will get to know through French, German or Spanish. And it is extremely common in Indo-European languages. It is the infamous know vs. know faultline, and a Twitter discussion on this pair is probably what got me thinking (yes, back to thinking) about this whole topic a few weeks ago.

Plenty of languages distinguish between knowing a fact and knowing a person. We have savoir / connaître (French), wissen / kennen (German), wiedzieć / znać (Polish) and saber / conocer (Spanish), to name but a few pairs. Others, conversely, collapse the two kinds of knowing into one, just like English does. Greek simply has ξέρω (kséro). Russian has знать (znat’).

Shaking hands and language learning. Image from freeimages.com

I know you, but do I know you? Image from freeimages.com

English, of course, used to make a distinction, as did other languages which lost the split. Before today’s know, Old English had witan and cunnan. Elsewhere, English has quietly dropped other nuanced pairs in this way. Take ask and ask for, referring to slightly different actions, but using the same verb. Look to a close cousin of English, like Norwegian, and they are separate terms: spørre (to ask, for example, a question) and be (to request, ask for something). Needless to say, Old English had both āscian and biddan before the former encroached upon the space of both.

Time to Come Home

We can round off this little wander through mismatched pairs with a couple of fairly fundamental human concepts with a lot of variation: time and home. Now, full-on linguistic determinism has had a bit of a drubbing. But while we may not experience these concepts differently from human to human, we still like to talk about them in different ways.

In English, we simply have time. That can be a period, a length of minutes, hours, days, or the general concept of the fourth dimension. Or it can be an occasion, a moment. I saw him three times, we say – just single points on a continuum.

However, many languages split these ideas up. We observe the passage of Zeit (German), καιρός (kairós, Greek), tíð (Icelandic), tid (Norwegian) and czas (Polish). But referring to a single moment, we talk about one Mal, φορά (forá), sinni, gang or raz. For fellow Greek learners and dabblers, this nice recent video sums it up well. (The channel is a fantastic language learning find, incidentally!)

And finally, to home. Whether you are going there, or are already through the front door and on the sofa, English uses the same term. But frequently, other languages use multiple terms to specify direction or position. Icelandic even has three – heim (homewards), heima (at home) and heiman (from home). This should be no surprise, since it also has hér, hingað and héðan for here, and þar, þangað and þaðan for there. That is three directional alternatives where English has dropped all of its hithers and thithers to favour just one. Is English poorer – or just simpler – for it?

The Lesson for Language Learning

Maybe the woolliness of English is not such a bad thing. The traction of English globally could partly be down to these multiple meanings bundled into single terms. Or perhaps broad sweep words like these even arose as a consequence of global use, collapsing categories and precise terminology that would otherwise add a fair bit of learning mileage.

All of this singles the language out a little unfairly, of course, given that English has more than its fair share of precise and verbose jargonese. And, on the flip side of the coin, plenty of single terms in other languages have multiple translations in English. Take the Greek word γήπεδο (yípedo) which can variously mean stadium, pitch, field or court.

But whatever our take on it, it is useful to remind ourselves of the patchwork of mismatches and poorly overlapping translations. Why? Because it is vital to our learning approach to grasp that different languages – even closely related ones – never map onto each other perfectly. As language learners, we never deal with simple, substitutive, one-to-one relationships, despite the apparent authority of dictionaries, phrasebooks and vocabulary guides.

My own takeaway from this? A reminder to rely less on learning via translation and using my native language as a crutch. This is one reason that my 2000 Polish words experiment was not exactly the path the fluency, for example. (Disclaimer: I went into that expecting the outcome, and have done plenty to remedy it since!)

Instead, it is good practice to seek out ways to internalise structures directly in the target language, so you can use them without having to compare them mentally with your own on the fly. Read plenty, and listen to lots. The less often you leap from your target language, the better.

And that brings us right back to thinking. When those interlanguage differences become so insignificant that you no longer notice them, you have really started to think in your target language.

A clock on a wall. How long is the perfect one-to-one online lesson? Image from freeimages.com.

Online Language Learning: Counting the Hours

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How long should one-to-one online language lessons be? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? An hour? Even longer?

I spend a lot of time in online lessons on iTalki. There, as on similar sites, the norm is the hour-long lesson. Although other options are sometimes available depending on the individual tutor, they are not a given. Many tutors only offer 60-minute sessions.

The trouble with an hour

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the idea of the hour-long lesson in itself. A full hour to work systematically on your language, one-to-one, can be great. However, it does depend on the teacher. If you strike it lucky with a tutor who organises meticulously and uses varied and engaging resources, an hour can fly by.

This does require a skilled and experienced tutor, though. I have worked with a handful of excellent teachers on the platform, who make an hour work really well. I get solid results in that setting, and I stick with them for that. But since iTalki tends to foster a more casual and informal vibe than traditional face-to-face lessons, the full whammy can sometimes feel a bit too long with others.

It depends on the student, too, of course. I won’t let myself off that lightly! An hour – plus the pre-prep and the post-housekeeping (adding words to Anki, etc.) – represents a substantial chunk of a busy day. You might end up, like I do, spacing our hour-long lessons across ten-day to fortnightly stretches, just to cram everything in along with work and general ‘life stuff’. At that pace, you risk losing momentum.

A more brain-friendly approach?

For me, for the majority of lessons now, there is a better way: plumping for sessions of just 30 minutes at a time. There may be fewer tutors that offer them, but they are worth the hunt.

For a start, since language learning is embedded in a busy life already, the 30-minute format mirrors the way I fit other activities into my schedule too. Just as I grab half an hour here, half an hour there, shorter lessons can be squeezed into a lunch break on the busiest of days. This way, classes are both less disruptive and a lot less painful to keep up as a habit.

Secondly, best practices around attention span and pacing during independent study support the idea of shorter, snappier and more effective lessons. When approaches like the Pomodoro Technique chunk our time against a maximum span of 20-25 minutes, then long, amorphous online language lessons should ring alarm bells. We need either shorter sessions, or very conscious and deliberate pacing of longer lessons for optimal learning on the part of the tutor. In the fairly informal setting of iTalki and similar platforms, the former is a lot easier to achieve.

Spaced learning

Combined with a more regular timetable – easier to achieve with shorter sessions – half an hour also respects the old little – but often adage. Why wear out a tired brain lumping all those minutes together, when you could spread the load? Techniques like spaced practice / repetition rely on the fact that the brain works on new material in the background between study sessions. Shorter but more frequent lessons give it the chance to do the same.

That said, I did initially worry that half an hour might be too brief to get anything substanital achieved with my tutor. A lot of that comes from the pressure of the norm. It can be hard tofind the self-assurance to question that and go against the grain. Maybe, that little voice says, there is good reason that many tutors only offer a full hour.

But in practice, it just works for me. Cumulatively, the effect is just as much learning with a lot less learner fatigue. And given the short window of time, the determination to eke the very most out of the lesson is all the greater.

Shorter online language lessons: worth the extra

There is one extra consideration to take into account. The minute-per-minute ratio between hour-long lessons and their shorter counterparts is not quite even. Generally, there is a price disadvantage for the student with shorter sessions. Understandably so, since, as a former teacher, I know well that there is a minimum time layout for topic-based prep for your students, regardless of the lesson length.

That said, I find that the extra cost is worth it for the attentional and organisational benefits. Looking for new teachers, I now filter based on lesson length offered. I am much more likely to go for the half-hour squad, especially with community tutors.

Ultimately, the teacher rarely loses out in my case. As I can fit them in more easily, I am much more likely to book a more frequent classes if I have the shorter option. The result: a much more lucrative student!

Online teachers, please consider adding a 30-minute option to your menu if you haven’t already. There’s nothing like having more options as a student to make these choices and have a little more control over your learning calendar.

How long is your ideal online lesson? Let us know in the comments!

The Liffey, Dublin. Dublin City University provides some excellent MOOCs via the FutureLearn platform. Image from freeimages.com.

A Model for MOOCs : Dublin City University Setting the Standard for Language Learning

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This week I completed the final week of one of Dublin City University’s Irish language MOOCs on the e-course platform FutureLearn. And I can honestly report that it was one of the best online language learning experiences I’ve had.

If you are new to MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – then you might be surprised at the number of platforms offering free learning through them today. They have been around for some time, with the open source Moodle being one of the first frameworks to bring structured, online learning to the fore in 2002.

Back then, hosting courses tended to be an in-house affair. Colleges and universities set up the first e-learning departments to maintain them alongside teaching staff. I was part of one of those early teams as a subject tutor and technologist, and they were exciting times to work in education.

Now, of course, MOOCs have become a burgeoning industry in their own right, with big names like Coursera, FutureLearn and edX hosting courses from institutions across the world, with free and paid tiers.

Where are the languages?

One reason you might not have had crossed paths a great deal with MOOCs as a language learner is precisely because of the subject. Unfortunately, courses offering foreign language teaching are a little scant. You can find plenty of courses taught through the medium of other languages, like this Coursera course on business negotiation in Spanish. But if you need solid basic-to-intermediate language tuition, you have to look quite hard.

Take a look at the course catalogues on any of the frontrunners, and you will see a glut of courses on business, policy, science and tech. Not surprising perhaps, as these exposition-discussion-assignment kinds of subject fit quite neatly into the online mould. Teaching a multi-sensory, multi-skill subject like languages effectively online takes a bit more imagination.

Fortunately, some e-learning teams have more than risen to the challenge. FutureLearn’s Irish 103 by Dublin City University is a great example of that.

So what makes it special?

Irish 103

DCU struck gold with this one for several reasons. For a start, it is a really personable course, with the team very visible throughout. From the get-go, there’s a humanity and a warmth that makes it a very comfortable place to be. That extends to the forum and chat, which is busy and full of attentive course staff. The right mix of people makes or breaks a MOOC, and the recipe is just right here.

The teaching itself is also top-notch. Big wins for me include the following:

  • Lessons are full of one-click spoken Irish support. This includes Irish words in longer descriptive / explanatory paragraphs, which is invaluable for pronunciation practice.
  • Each of the four weekly sections consists of multiple, manageable chunks with a page per point. You can easily dip in and out to fit learning round a busy schedule – no need to leave anything half done.
  • It is a safe and welcoming community where participants are constantly invited to contribute. Use of Padlet, SpeakPipe and social media strengthened learning across the skills while encouraging sharing and peer support.
  • The cultural aspect is very strong. As a grammar geek, I can sometimes focus solely on the language to the detriment of social and historical context. The course placed the language right into its cultural setting, meshing language and culture seamlessly through multimedia and storytelling. I found myself researching traditional Irish music and learning more about the feadóg stáin (tin whistle) and bodhrán (winnowing drum) well beyond the course materials!
  • The external linked resources like teanglann.ie and tearma.ie are well selected and hugely helpful. They enable the learner to build up an invaluable online personal reference library for further study. You not only learn words and phrases – you gain tools.
  • There are lots of references to points covered in previous and future courses in the same series. This gives a sense of cohesion and progression, but also of being a step on a guided journey to more advanced topics. There is a 10X and 20X track, and I already look forward to what else is ahead.

MOOCS – what you make of them

Clearly, I got a lot from this MOOC. But as with all resources, they are also a product of what you make of them. As well as engaging with the course materials, I found it useful to write down key vocab and phrases each week for my own revision. I also made a lot of use of Anki, adding new words to my Irish deck to practise outside the course. With PDF transcripts and other convenient formats for stimulus material, it is nice and simple to copy-paste into your own notes.

Any successful MOOC allows you this freedom to be creative with the content by doing the heavy organisational lifting. It was this chance to take my foot off the organising pedal that I found particularly valuable, in fact. As an avid planner and box-ticker, I enjoy organising my own learning. That said, organisation is a beast all of its own, and takes lots of time. Here, the course structure took over. The confident, clean style (partly down to FutureLearn’s sharp, clear interface) reassured me that I could let the MOOC handle all that, while I enjoyed the journey.

In short, learning on #FTIrish103 simply felt effortless and effective. The best indication of the value I attached to it is that it fulfilled my ‘what could I be doing instead’ test. Whilst trying to avoid falling into obsessive Duolingo point-chasing, Irish 103 seemed like the obvious worthwhile alternative. It is absolutely purposeful and directed.

Going on a MOOCs hunt

I was lucky to stumble across Irish 103. I was already learning Irish and Scottish Gaelic independently, for a start, so it matched my current learning projects. And that is largely a matter of luck – I am still on the lookout for similar courses in Greek or Polish, which would be very helpful right now. Frustratingly, the search goes on in that direction.

However, all is not lost if you fail to turn up a relevant course (or a MOOC in a new language fails to tempt you to dabble in it!). As already mentioned, if you already have some proficiency in the language already, you could try a course for native speakers in any subject that takes your fancy. The ‘mainstream’ foreign languages like French, German and Spanish are best represented here.

Alternatively, you could choose the path of the geek – my personal favourite. Moodle is still very much alive and in constant development, and free to download. You can install this on your own web server, then dive straight into course creation. Moodle is fairly easy to get to grips with, and you can get up and running with week-by-week course plans of your own very quickly. For a completely open source solution, you could even use public domain resources as a base, like the Live Lingua materials for instance, and create drill activities from them with Moodle’s built-in quiz features.

And then, of course, you can share your wonderful, inspired MOOCs with the rest of us. Sometimes, making – for yourself and others – is the best route to learning. If you can inject as much imagination and subject passion into it as the Irish 103 team, you’ll be on to a winner.

Irish 103 opened my eyes to how good language learning MOOCs can be. I’m already looking forward to Irish 104!

Language learning - we evolve continuously. Picture of a page from a Greek dictionary. Picture from freeimages.com.

Evolving as a Language Learner : Changed for good

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Life is a journey, and our paths through language learning certainly reflect that. Through our experiences with languages, we constantly evolve.

Old habits fade as they prove themselves less effective. And new ones get grafted on, particularly as we learn from others. The online language learning community is a goldmine of fresh approaches and novel techniques to try. Last week, I talked about a chance spot on Twitter that led to me back to a brilliantly effective listening strategy. In the words of Glinda (there must be a few Wicked fans amongst you), I do believe I have been changed for the better by my friends and colleagues through such lucky circumstances.

It is helpful to take stock of your evolution as a learner in this way at regular intervals. For one thing, it is a well-needed confidence boost to notice how you gradually hone your craft over time. For another, it is very meta – you learn about your learning – and that bird’s eye view of your language learning approach can inform how you develop further. I have certainly spotted a shift in my own behaviour over the last few months in particular.

So how have I changed for the better lately?

Keep it active

First off, I did away with a rather convenient excuse for being lazy.

The thing is, we all like the idea of shortcuts. I’ve been chasing them for years, spurred on, I must add, by the indefatigable legions of ‘get fluent quick’ peddlers. After all, their claims are hard to resist. The notion of passive learning is one in particular I fell for. At its most extreme, it covers techniques like subliminal or sleep learning – nod off listening to your learning material, while your subconscious takes care of it all, silently and efficiently. I was fascinated – and ultimately disappointed – by this as a young language enthusiast. 

Older and wiser, the idea of passive learning in rather less snake-oily formats still grabs me. But its hold is weakening. Although nobody will wake up fluent in German from a night of slumber accompanied by Goethe or Schiller on the headphones, there is something in the idea of creating your own immersion environment to soak up the language effortlessly. Put simply, having language all around you simply gets you in the mood.

That said, it is no magic pill. Working actively and regularly with the language through techniques such a dictation represent the real elbow grease. Instead of doing the minimum and hoping ‘it will all stick in the end’, I am much more likely to put the hard work in now – and enjoy it, in the knowledge that it brings better results.

At least in my experience, passive absorption is only truly effective in a dynamic target language setting – that is, working or living for some time abroad.

This is not to say that we can’t gain a little benefit from setting up immersive environments with an aim to (very gradual) language acquisition. Passive listening is by no means a complete dead duck, and I still use it as a way to attune my ear to a language before an iTalki lesson, for instance. And it is still a rewarding and fun experience to ‘target language up’ your home.

Language rage: Chasing the points

In the same get fluent quickly and easily! (flashing neon sign) vein, we have the ubiquitous language learning app. In this age of casual, gameified learning, there is an app for almost any tongue you might care to learn. And don’t get me wrong – I love that. I am a self-confessed Duolingo fiend. As a leg-up into a new language for beginners, or a daily vocab-boosting tool for more intermediate learners, it is hard to beat. As an app developer myself, I wish I had produced a tool like that.

But I stand up now in my Appists Anonymous meeting and proudly proclaim: I am a reformed addict. When I realised that it had become all about chasing the points and moving through the leagues, it dawned on me: the technology should never become the end in itself.

I still love apps like Duolingo and Drops, and spend a little time on them every day. But now, I use what I call the “what will I gain from this” test. When the urge takes me to go on a Duo points binge, I ask myself: what will I gain from this? Is this a productive use of my time? Are the things I would get more from for the same time outlay? If so, should I maybe give those priority.

Competitive, game infield apps can be great motivators, but great time drains too. Control them. Don’t let them control you.

Social Bookending

Many of our community are runners-before-walkers. It comes from studying a subject from a point of passion, a fuel that pushes us on to skip the starters and devour that juicy, advanced content as soon as we can.

While that is a happy place to be – languages are joy, after all – I now take time to revisit the social building blocks, the prosaic scripts of the everyday, too. I wrote recently about spending time on the social bookends of foreign language communication, the day-to-day transactional ‘glue’ that frames the meaty, interesting stuff we really want to say. It is a transformative habit. It has made countless iTalki lessons immeasurably smoother and more pleasant.

What’s more, the lovely feedback I received after writing that post made me realise that it is something we are all tackling together.

If you love an academic bent to your language journey, the wallowing in grammars and arcane vocabulary, this can be one of the hardest shifts to make. But it pays off. Not least in a language like Greek, which I recently picked up again. Greek language and culture is the apotheosis of social bookending. χάρηκα, τι κάνεις φίλε μου, πώς είσαι, αμάν, λοιπόν, έλα βρε παιδί μου! You can reel off three or four in a row before you even get started. And you will sound like you know the language MUCH better than you really do. Winner.

No baggage

Finally, life is replete with ‘should’ and ‘supposed to’. Our language learning world is no different. For years, I felt some moral obligation to focus on one or two languages at a time. However, that limit-your-options stipulation is baggage from a pre-internet world where we had to choose just one or two languages at school.

But there is no have to in self-directed learning today. Everything is out there fo the learning.

And why not go for it? Dabbling is an extremely healthy habit that can bolster your main language projects. It is also a tool to cast a wider net, offering an excellent route to greater cultural awareness. And there is no better time for that.

Leaving the polyglot guilt behind is a game-changer, and my fellow community dabblers reaffirm that every day through their enthusiastic, shame-free social media shares. I am glad I embraced it.

Taking stock

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. I keep going, and I keep evolving. I am open to ideas. The online community continues to be a source of huge inspiration, and I am forever grateful for that. So, what next?

Well, who knows? And that is the exciting part. I like to imagine myself writing this article again in a year or so. And I like to think I might surprise myself.

How have your language learning habits changed over the years? Let us know in the comments!

Dictation exercise in Icelandic by Richard West-Soley

Dictation Inspiration : Back to basics with listening comprehension

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Sometimes a really helpful technique is staring you in the face, and you fail to see it. Or you see it, and you fail to use it, for whatever reason. So it was for me with dictation, the wonderfully straightforward listening activity that other language learners employ with great success.

Dictation – or Diktando, as many know it – needs no introduction. It is one of the simplest language exercises around. Simply listen, and transcribe. It is the ultimate in cheap, accessible techniques, too – you just need a source (a podcast will do), and pen and paper.

But, for some reason, I had completely ignored it up to now.

Ignorance is no excuse, to my shame. For a start, Linguascope has featured a dictation exercise in each of its Beginner units for years – and I even developed it. Legions of kids had benefitted from my use of it in a resource, but somehow, it was not for me. Perhaps it was that association with the beginner level that put me off. I want to maintain and improve a set of languages beyond A1 for the most part, and dictation always seemed like a kind of pre-learning, preparatory, elementary game, something that put sounds before meaning.

But that was exactly what I needed.

Listening denial

I struggle with listening. I am certainly not alone in that, and I gain a lot from listening to teachers speak about improving students’ listening skills in the classroom. But at the same time as acknowledging that it is my toughest challenge, I still chug along in a bit of denial. It will just click of its own accord, I think. It will all fall into place. Maybe I just need to listen to a few more podcasts. I just need a bit more passive exposure.

It is partly the tendency to run before we can walk that leads us to these places. But what I really needed was a back-to-basics, purposeful, sounds first approach to listening. And dictation was sitting there, beckoning.

Dictation inspiration

Luckily enough, the activity popped up on my feed recently via one of the community’s most popular voices, Lindie Botes. I spotted a tweet in which she shared a podcast dictation she was working on, and was impressed and intrigued:

https://twitter.com/lindiebee/status/1258418252255911940?s=20 

Here was dictation in use at a higher level, by someone with the same ambitious language goals as I have. Lindie’s approaches always command a lot of respect in the community. So, I thought, perhaps this did merit a revisit.

Spurred on, I chose two languages I speak reasonably well (B1-ish), but struggle to get past the listening barrier with: Icelandic and Polish. I set aside some time in the week for dictation tasks and selected my materials. It was easy to find sources to unleash myself on. For a start, I could pick from any of the woefully neglected podcasts that I subscribe to and never get round to listening to.

Warts and all

One thing quickly became clear: dictation really exposes your listening weaknesses. Now I understand what I was afraid of. All your difficulties, your neglect and your lack of practice are laid bare, warts and all. But finally, you see them – and only then can you work on them.

The thing about close listening is that you pay intense attention to the ebb and flow of words in the target language. You get to know how they run into each other, how they affect each other in terms of coarticulation. I realised I could know every word and every syntactical turn in a sentence, yet still not catch it until the fourth or fifth listen. For a grammar geek, in the habit of examining the nuts and bolts in isolation, this task was clearly well overdue.

But on the upside, another thing came as a complete surprise: the mindful nature of longer dictation exercises. That intense focus draws you into something of a flow state after a few minutes. Before you know it, a look at the clock confirms half an hour has passed without you noticing. Rather than the boring, mindless activity I assumed it to be, it was positively absorbing.

In fact, it took me back to my teenage years as a fanatical Eurovision nerd, pausing and rewinding cassette-taped songs to scribble down barely understood lyrics. I would take hours to get them right, no doubt ending up with some half-accurate, half-phonetic mush I could at least try to sing at the piano. I still warble some of those misheard lyrics in the shower, even today.

Letting go of perfectionism

But that, of course, is one of the biggest lessons dictation has to offer us. Aiming for perfection is more likely to scupper than to assist. Because, despite all of the technological crutches like playback looping and variable speed, you will struggle with some phrases.

In fact,  I found that slowing down to 50% often hindered comprehension. This is because sounds that are articulated quickly together change their quality. We are used to hearing that occur at normal speed, but at a snail’s pace, sounds can just sound weird.

For instance, I was certain that one Icelandic phrase was undir röklunum, searching desperately for the meaning of the non-existent second word. Finally, I played the phrase at normal speed, and realised that it was actually undir jöklunum (under the glaciers), with the -r affecting the quality of the following j-. This is a nice illustration of how over-focus on word-level language can hamper progress.

Dictation exercise in Icelandic by Richard West-Soley

One of my far-from-perfect dictation exercises in Icelandic

For a perfectionist like me, dictation can also be helpful in diminishing the pathological need for 100%. If you get stuck down a phonological rabbit hole, you must simply move on, else the whole activity grinds to a halt. Your heart will sink the first few times you leave a gap, but more and more you find that the following material fills in enough context to go back and complete the rogue snippets.

Likewise, dictation involves letting go of ‘neat work’ compulsions. I am a stickler for a nice neat page of writing (no doubt the former teacher coming out in me). As you can see from my scrawl, dictation necessitates rather a lot of amendments and crossings out. You have to accept the rough with the smooth. Perhaps the boldest claim yet: dictation, not only great language practice, but also a cure for OCD! 

Dictation exercise in Polish by Richard West-Soley

Dictation exercise in Polish

In short, I am a convert. I am becoming a better listener for giving this language learning staple a fair chance. I will continue with these exercises, perhaps even as a daily tactic. Just a regular ten minutes or so in weaker languages could make all the difference.

Is dictation one of your language learning strategies? Do you have particular techniques or a novel take on the exercise you find useful? Let us know in the comments!

Kigali Conference Centre. Image by By Raddison - https://www.radissonblu.com/en/hotel-kigali, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74779948

Unhiding African Languages : Redressing the bias

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It is fairly uncontroversial to state that we live in troubled times right now. Try as many of us might to separate languages and politics, it is impossible to keep our neat, studious worlds sealed from the social shifts taking place.

Current discourse around racism in particular encourages us all to interrogate our own philosophies and world views. As open-minded, curious language learners, we might naively assume we are more immune to cultural bias than most. We point to the fact that we explore, consume, and learn about other cultures to become something more worldly and understanding.

It is true that language is a periscope to peer over the wall and see lives lived differently. But we fall foul of one big, structural fault:

An entire continent is hidden from our view.

The near absence of African languages from the online community is a serious blindspot for all of us. For example, take the Niger-Congo languages. Just short of a billion people speak them. They represent the third largest language family in the world. But they are practically invisible in those social media circles that celebrate language learning.

African languages and Western bias

We might try to defend this in several ways. Chiefly, there is “I simply have no interest in them“. That view, however, is difficult to separate from a position of power in a colonial backstory that devalued African languages from the outset. As universities opened in Sub-Sarahan Africa, they were in the Western mould. Teaching and research was – and continues to be, despite activism – overwhelmingly anglophone or francophone. The resulting lack of academic activity around indigenous languages means that African languages are simply not represented within Western education systems to the extent that other foreign languages are. Students – and adult learners – lack the exposure to them needed to spark any initial interest.

The knock-on effect is a lack of accessible learning resources for African languages. Check any bookshop – aside from the odd text like Colloquial Swahili, where would you start if you wanted to learn, say, Luganda or Kinyarwanda?

And this lack of mainstream text books is more than simply an inconvenience. How many of us, for instance, have spotted a potential new language project after chancing upon it during a bookshop browse? Estonian, spoken by just over a million people, might catch your eye as you peruse the shelves in Waterstones. But Igbo, with around 18 million speakers, is most likely out of the race before the start whistle sounds.

We might also try to counter the argument by pointing to the visibility of other, non-Indo-European groups in language study. Japanese, Korean or Chinese, perhaps. But then, these are large, prosperous societies with considerably more prestige capital and global clout than African nations. They do not struggle for global visibility.

So if the issue is structural, it is wrong to talk of any individual fault. It is the system we are embedded in. But we can do something to push back against it.

Bursting the bubble

If institutionalised content is not available, turn to the people. Many African content creators have used YouTube as a means to open up their languages to the world. From the brilliant Made In Igbo channel, to the personal projects of others in Kinyarwanda and Luganda, great, free content is just asking to be liked and shared.

And of course, it is not just about the words. Through exploring and interacting with online content, you catch glimpses of a whole other world. Music, film, fashion – all otherwise absent from our mainstream media. I came across this great Rwandan pop song via a short tutorial video on the channel theoisback:

Just compare the invisibility of this media with the cultural exports from richer, more powerful regions, which find their way into every nook of our lives. It is not a question of quality, but of the power to be seen.

You can break through the book barrier, too. If you prefer to explore more traditional course materials rather than online resources, then the Live Lingua project is an eye-opener. As a collection of materials from decades of language teaching for the US Peace Corps, it offers courses on languages you never see on the High Street. Just like YouTube videos, they also include cultural insights that begin to fill in the gaps of our bubble world view.

What difference will it make?

As single actors in a colossal, ingrained system, we may well wonder what difference we can possibly make. What good will it do to undo the institutional invisibility of African languages in our individual lives?

But our greatest tool is our community – our networks to discuss, share, inspire. Dabblers, try some Swahili (Duolingo has a good basic introduction) and let others know about it. Find authentic content you enjoy and share it on social media. Together, let us raise the visibility profile – and prestige – of African languages as much as possible.

When we do journey outside our bubble, it enriches us. We realise that there are a million and one ways to ‘do’ language, and we barely even scratch the surface with the narrow selection on our path. But, ultimately, we learn the lesson of co-humanity. We produce language using the same linguistic building blocks, the same brains, the same bodies. As human beings, there is so much more that unites us than divides us.

Certainly, Africa is not the only hidden, underrepresented part of the linguistic globe. We could have the very same argument about South American indigenous languages, aboriginal Australian languages and so on. But at this juncture in history, redressing this particular imbalance seems critical, pertinent, urgent.

In the face of our current societal challenges, it might seem such a tiny thing to do. But it is something.