The Key to Learning a Foreign Language

In this post I discussed some common mistakes people make when they learn a foreign language.  I received several emails from people who were not able to comment because they didn't have accounts with blogspot, and so I am working on setting up a different platform that will be more user friendly.  In part because of the response I got to that entry, I want to spend some time explaining in greater detail why the right attitude, expectations, and processes are so important.  More often than not approaching a new language with the wrong mindset will only lead to wasted time, wasted energy, and wasted finances.  Working hard and not seeing any benefit is frustrating for anyone.

hint: your brain is King Kong, your will power is the woman, Ann Darrow could never possibly defeat the ape.  You want to be partners with your brain, because just like Ann could not overpower King Kong, you will never wear your subconscious down and master what your brain considers unimportant.

Fortunately, human minds are created very efficiently to filter through an overwhelming amount of information to find and keep only what is useful.  If your brain believes that the language you are learning is useful to you, then you and your brain can be partners in the learning process.  If your brain believes that what you are "studying" is superfluous or worthless, then your will-power will constantly grind against your brain in a battle that will only end when you burn out.
Often the harder you work to remember things, the quicker your mind wants to forget what you are focusing on! I think of the brain as a great storage facility.  Your brain only keeps things that are 1: interesting to you, or 2: important to you.  Anything that does not fit those criteria is promptly flushed out of your memory.  That helps to explain why two people can witness the same event and yet still have dramatically different memories regarding what happened.  In language learning, as soon as the stress of the next test is gone, FLUSH! The brain flushes away that entire vocabulary list, because those words were never interesting to you, and now the brain has decided that they are not important to you either.

true story

double your salary? good motivation to learn a language

I have two friends who, years ago, both decided to learn Japanese at roughly the same time.  One of them was employed by a company that was expanding rapidly in Japan, and offered to double this person’s salary if he became proficient in Japanese.  We’ll call him John.  The other friend loves video games, especially Japanese-made video games.  My video-game loving friend, we’ll call him Jake, had no other motivation to learn Japanese other than the fact that he LOVED these games, and on a regular basis Japanese writing would appear on the screen, and random voices would periodically shout instructions out at him in Japanese. 

Knowing how much important motivation is in language learning, I would have guessed, at the beginning, that John would completely annihilate Jake as they both set out to master a very difficult language.  I left for China.  Didn’t see either of them for about two years.  At the end of that two years, only one of them was fluent in Japanese.  Shockingly, it was Jake.  After only two years, with FUN as his major motivator, Jake had become FLUENT in Japanese.  He was reading, writing, and conversing in Japanese.  John, on the other hand, had suffered through two years of a grueling daily study schedule.  He studied so hard that at times that his frustration would boil over.  At times he HATED the Japanese language.  At best he would feel good when he could look at an article and be able to read it. 

Lets look more closely at what each of my friends did on their quest to learn a difficult foreign language.  Why is it that Jake seemed to play his way towards becoming fluent, and John seemed to work his tail off with little to show for it. 

First, lets look at John.  See if you can see yourself in this example:

John REALLY wanted to succeed.  He would double his income, JUST by learning Japanese.  Because he was so committed to learning the language, he did a number of great things.  He set goals, and wrote them down, he made lists of vocabulary words that he wanted to memorize.  He had his own private tutor, who held him accountable, gave him homework, as well as necessary feedback.  At first, he woke up early to study, but after a couple months he started sleeping through his “study” sessions.  He changed to lunch-time studying, and later to late nights.  Each time he changed his study time was due to his frustration with the language.  He felt like changing the time of day he studied might make the studying itself a better experience. 

After a few months, John noticed that his studying was really starting to slack.  He wasn’t enjoying Japanese, and started to dread that hour/day.  But he had committed himself to aggressive goals, and with few exceptions, he met his goals.  When he didn’t want to study, he forced himself to at least sit with a language book in front of him. 

Jake, on the other hand, didn’t set any goals at the beginning.  For him, it was just cool that he might be able to understand more of what was happening in the video games.  Within a couple of weeks of trying to figure out his language materials on his own, he realized that he could progress much faster with his own private tutor, and so he hired one.  Since John and Jake lived relatively close to each other, it wasn’t too surprising that Jake found John’s tutor, and so the two of them were taught by the same personal tutor.  (Although John had a pretty hefty head start...)

video games were fun for Jake

Jake started mimicking the sounds he heard during the games he played.  He played so often that the sounds were very familiar to him.  It was easy to copy them.  Almost as soon as he hired his tutor, he asked the tutor to begin by teaching him what was being said in the video game.  As soon as he figured out what they were saying, it was a snap to review those new vocabulary words. 

Within a few weeks he had completely mastered everything in the video games.  His tutor introduced him to Japanese aname.  He LOVED it!  Soon (within a matter of months, anyway) he was watching Japanese TV shows and getting by without English subtitles. 

Understanding the television felt INCREDIBLE!!  Jake couldn’t get enough of it!  During “class time” (individual time with the tutor) he would learn new grammar and expand his vocabulary, and after class, whenever he had a free minute, he would watch more Japanese television.  When he heard or saw something he didn’t understand, he would write it down so that the next day he could ask his tutor. 

Clearly, Jake enjoyed his language learning experience much, much more than John.  John “worked” much, much harder than Jake.  So which is more useful in learning a language, enjoying the process, or working hard?  For Jake and John, the proof was in the pudding.  After two years, Jake was already completely fluent in all aspects of Japanese.  He could read and write, and it made him feel great to be able to do that.  John, on the other hand, could say some memorized phrases, he still remembered most of the two essays that he memorized earlier, he could spell out words and could tell you how to translate over a thousand words from English to Japanese.  What John accomplished in two years was no small feat, but he was far from fluent.  There was no question that Jake had progressed far, far beyond the level that John achieved.  They both studied for about the same amount of time, and even worked with the same tutor.  They both had set schedules for studying.  The similarities, however, stopped there.


In a future post I want to go into greater detail on why Jake's experience was so much more enjoyable and effective than John's.  For now, I feel like it would be impossible to understate the importance of learning your material in a way that excites you, so that the brain believes the material you are working with is both interesting and important.  
until next time...

3 essential foundations for learning Chinese (or any foreign language)

To me, language is really beautiful.  I think language is what makes us human.  Without language, we would not be able to share our thoughts with others.  Without language we could have no thoughts, only instincts.  Learning a second, third, fourth, or 25th language not only enriches you through exposure to different ways of thinking, but it also helps you understand your own language more succinctly and completely.  The better you can use language (your native language or any other,) the more complete and whole your thoughts can be developed.  With that development comes a deeper, richer, more enlightened life.

When I was in Beijing, it was normal for people to arrive and ask "what is the best way to learn Chinese?"  Perhaps because I learned my Chinese in classrooms and in my interactions with Chinese friends (as opposed to intense military training courses or religious missionary service), most of these people were referred to me.  In the future, I'm simply going to point people to my blog when they ask how I learned Chinese, or what I recommend they do to learn the language.  As I build my blog, I hope that it can be a useful tool for anyone who visits China.  I want to pack this blog with as much information as possible to help people get along well in visits to China.  In this entry, I'll focus on the basics of language acquisition.

Laying a good foundation for learning another language

firm foundation

I think there are really three things that lay the foundation for successful language acquisition: attitude, expectations, and  approach. 

1) Attitude:  The right attitude will rescue you time and time again throughout the language acquisition process.  There will be times when you feel REALLY stupid.  You have to decide to find the humor in the situation and agree that it's okay to make a fool of yourself.  Decide now that it is worth the humiliation to be able to eventually master Chinese (or whatever language you are focusing on).  One thing to keep in mind, is that all the extra attention you receive because you made a silly mistake in front of others will make it far easier to remember this mistake and avoid it in the future.
I think most of the time people freeze up and stunt their own growth it is usually because of one word: insecurity.  Learning a language is no different.  I'll talk about insecurity in greater detail in a future post, but if you feel like you can never win, or that everyone else seems to be having an easier time figuring things out than you, those are good clues that you might be insecure (in your second language).
*Decide to be willing to be put in vulnerable positions in life and laugh at yourself
*Open yourself up to the possibility that you can be successful, imagine how you will feel when you are beyond your current stage.
*Reward yourself for small successes and breakthroughs in bravery.  When you do something that is outside of your comfort zone, stop afterwards to reflect on how you successfully faced your fears and came out okay.  Focus on how good it feels when you look back and can see the growth in yourself.  

2) Expectations:  A necessary aspect of the right attitude is to adjust your expectations.  Adjust your impression of mistakes.  I make lots of mistakes!  Your Chinese teacher probably makes loads of mistakes.  In fact, you probably constantly make mistakes when you speak English!  If you ever want to be fluent in Chinese, you will first have to make tens of thousands of mistakes.  
The key is to come into your language experience expecting to make mistakes, and decide ahead of time that mistakes are normal, healthy, funny, and wonderful.  Decide to be okay with that.
If you expect to have fun, expect to make mistakes, and expect to succeed, you will.  You will succeed and you will have a riot all along the way.

3) Approach: first, it is important to realize what language acquisition is not.
*learning a language is not memorizing a list of vocabulary words
*not working out grammar like you would a math equation

*not passing quizzes and tests in school
*not perfection.

a very very poor foundation

I believe it is often counterproductive to try to learn a language through vocabulary lists.  Especially if you are learning your second language, (as apposed to having already learned a second language) because it might be difficult to keep in mind that many words in English have several different meanings.  One of the fun bonuses of learning a second and third language is you begin to be more aware of the multiple meanings of a single word.  There are thousands of examples of words that, if you change the context involved, you also change the meaning.  Usually each different meaning has a different translation in a foreign language.  Also, remember that the words in the foreign language often also have multiple meanings and can only be accurately interpreted in context.  More often than not, only one of those meanings is going to correspond accurately with its English counterpart.  Basing language acquisition on a list of comparable vocabulary lists leads to using "strength" when you mean "courage" or "cold" when you mean "angry."  The list of possible mistakes is endless.  So if you are going to memorize something, do not memorize lists of words, at least memorize phrases that are in context and express an entire thought. 

Language is communicating thoughts, understanding someone else who shares their thoughts, giving and taking directions, etc.  
I will share other posts about more specific things that you can do to learn a new language or reinforce a language that you worry is slipping away from you.  For now, decide that you love your target language, and begin studying the people and culture that use the target language.  Use what you know as much as possible.  You don't have to speak to native speakers to be able to use your language skills.  www.italki.com is a fun website that allows you to meet native speakers from any language around the world, and you should be able to find dozens of other ways to keep up on your target language, if you are committed to it.

I will need to fill in the gaps with a lot of the advice on this post with more complete posts in the future, but really the focus here is that for you to truly succeed in learning a foreign language, your mindset needs to be aligned with success.