Language Learning Crash Course: from slightly more than zero to slightly less than advanced

A colleague at work asked me for some tips on learning German and her situation and goals were fairly common so I thought I'd write up some notes here.

For the specific scenario under consideration, and to ground what follows: my colleague's mother tongue is not English, but she wants to learn German since she now lives there. She's interested in all the skills and wants to be able to read complex literature and philosophy, for example, but in the short-term building up spoken abilities is the main focus and intention. She knows a few words / phrases here and there but not too much more than that.

🪨 Context / Foundations

I'll start with some general context and foundations that I think should form the basis for what follows:

• If you're about to invest a bunch of time / effort (and probably money, either in the form of your time or for books/teachers) into learning a language you should make the investment in a spaced repetition system like Anki. It'll repay the effort you put in and is anyway a more efficient way to learn.
• Use focused feedback of various kinds to improve your ability to do things with your target language. This can take many forms, but it's a core principle that you should keep returning to. For example, this might mean feedback on pronunciation, or sentences you're writing, or even words that you're studying (in the form of active recall with Anki).
• Pick good quality materials to support your study. For some languages (popular / commonly-spoken languages) these will probably be cheap. For lower-resourced languages these are often eye-waveringly expensive. Bit the bullet. Good materials make a big difference, though it's worth taking advice from someone who's studied the same language as to whether a particular book is good or not.
• Stay laser focused in what you do / apply the 80:20 principle. With language learning, especially at the early stages, there's a fair amount of boilerplate work that just needs to be done (see most of the things in the first 'True Basics' section below) and there are strong reasons why you should do those things etc. Basically: stick with these things and don't deviate too much. (This only applies if you're trying to be as efficient as possible in your language learning. It's entirely within reason that you'd not need to be efficient, in which case many options open up!)
• Related: Be clear about what it means to level up. There are a million and one things that you could do at any single point during your language learning and it helps to be clear about what you're doing and why, then work on it, complete it and then reflect and move onto the next thing.
• Ingest comprehensible input where possible. This is a deep topic, but the basic idea here is that you should try as much as possible to read authentic materials that are almost completely within your capacity/level to understand. Ideally they should be interesting materials and you should be motivated to understand their contents. (Note that spoken conversations can be comprehensible input as well!)

These are the core foundations that I (with a half-dozen languages under my belt and experience learning bits of quite a few more, plus lots of time spent reading about and trying out language learning methods) believe are at the core of any efforts you should take. If any of the above are unclear, it can be useful to clarify (with me, or with some other source) but don't get too lost down the (deep) rabbit-hole of methodology as it will detract from your original goal.

All of what follows assumes that you're serious about your language studies and are willing to invest some time into it. To my mind, this means something like 30-60 minutes every day minimum, six days per week. You'll see the most progress early on and it can actually help to invest a little more time early on since seeing your fast progress will increase your motivation in turn, but only you know your circumstances and what works.

🍼 True Basics

This is the phase where you start from nothing and no knowledge to where you have learnt some of the most commonly used words and phrases as well as have a good understanding of the pronunciation and basic grammar. Depending on how much time you put in, this phase should take somewhere on the order of 2-5 weeks.

The things you should work your way to accomplish here include:

• learning some basic spoken phrases that you'll use frequently (think 'thank you', 'good bye', 'how much is …', counting from 0-100, 'what does … mean' and so on). You can get these (and the pronunciation for them) from many places on line or in a basic phrasebook.
• learn roughly 600 of the most frequently-used words for your target language. Many languages have something called a 'frequency dictionary' (or an equivalent list published online) which orders the words of that language in order of how common those words are. There are different approaches to exactly which list to pick (go with a Gabe Wyner 625 list if it exists (here's an extract/preview for German), otherwise go with the Routledge frequency lists, otherwise try to find something else!), but basically you are aiming to bootstrap your language abilities. The 'why' behind this is that first 500-100 words make up a really high % of the words that you'll see in any text (80+% depending on the difficulty of the language) so if you invest in those common words earlier you'll be in a good place to progress forward.

You'll want these materials to end up into Anki so you can continue to be tested on them so you don't forget them. Here, for example is a card I created for a word that means 'ripped / torn' in Arabic.

I get shown the picture and then need to come up with the word in Arabic for that concept. Note that I chose a quirky image on purpose.

• Learn the alphabet: (I'm thinking of languages like Russian / Arabic etc here, and not something like Japanese / Chinese). You're in this for the long-haul, and most comprehensible input that is efficient for you to ingest is in the form of written texts so you should just bite the bullet and learn the alphabet and how to pronounce it. It's not that hard! Even an alphabet with a bad reputation like Arabic can be learned in a weekend.
• Get a basic understanding of some core grammar. Good phrasebooks will usually have a section where they spend a few pages outlining how the language works with some basic grammar. (i.e. things like 'verbs always go at the end of sentences' or 'nouns take a bunch of different endings depending on the role a word has in the sentence', and so on.) You're not trying to master any of this, but you are trying to bootstrap your awareness of some of the core structures of how a language works.
• Try to listen to the language being used / spoken. If possible, try to make whatever you're listening to also something that you can mostly understand. (For some people this might be family or friends conversations, for others this might be other audio materials at a beginner level.) The goal here is to start to get the sound and feel for the rhythms of the language to bury its way into your ear.

How / What?: Basics

There are many (many) options at the total beginner level. My go-to sources / methods are some combination or selection of the following. It's really hard to give generic advice here so YMMV, but all these are suitable for this level:

• Michel Thomas course (if it exists for your language, do all courses / extensions that exist (usually 2 levels plus a vocab extension pack)). These are audio courses that will give you a solid basic foundation. As an alternative or sometimes additional option, you might want to try Pimsleur courses (again, if they exist). These are not cheap, but they're a good way to get going.
• Frequency dictionary and/or lists: Gabe Wyner's Fluent Forever app is based around the concept of frequency dictionary lists so if it supports your language then you can either use that app or just get the raw word list and create your own flashcards + study those basic words.
• Something like a Duolingo / Drops / Language Transfer course if it exists for your language. These are a double-edge sword since Duolingo by now has quite extensive courses available for popular languages. I wouldn't recommend using it as your core source of studies because the likelihood is that you'll drop away from your studies before completing it. That said, they do have mostly solid materials and they have spaced repetition (of some kind) built in so if you're someone who lives to complete things and can invest a bit of time into moving through the materials quickly, then these kinds of courses aren't the worst idea. (But definitely see them as a means to the wider end and not the core of what you do.) If you're someone who where possible prefers to study / learn away from technology / apps, try the excellent 'Assimil' books / course as the equivalent for this. (Note that this section potentially takes you very far off from the 2-5 weeks estimate I mentioned above. Only you know the extent to which you can afford to really invest in foundations.)
• Very easy readers. Again, if your language is popular then you might have access to these kinds of readers. Sometimes they're developed for children, but other times they're also available for adult students too. You're looking for something (it'll often be advertised as such) with a small / limited vocabulary size of words used. This is on the border with the next phase of study, so this can and will also be part of what you do next.

📚 Invest in sentences and your comprehensible input

At this point, somewhere in the middle of the basic phase and on your way to the next phase, you'll want to start investing into generating your own sentence-level comprehensible input. One way is to take the 600+ word frequency list and use those words as the basis of making basic sentences. Note that these can and will be really basic. You will likely want to do this in collaboration either with a teacher, or a friend or someone who can correct the things you're writing / producing. All these sentences and materials should then be fed into your spaced repetition system / Anki. For example, here's the back of a card where I'm being tested to produce a particular phrase that was missing (where the ... is in the sentence).

There's a picture above it to jog my memory if the sentence doesn't. And you can't hear it here, but there's also audio for the missing word / phrase. You'll want to be generating a lot of these kind of cards, not only because vocabulary learning in the context of actual sentences / real language is extremely powerful but also because it solidifies the root grammar structures, syntax and common ways of building language in your mind.

🚘 Middle Earth: Getting Independent

Some people actually stop here. If you're just going on holiday and you want to be able to be active using the language, understand some basic things and have some simple conversations, you actually don't need too much more. Everything you do from here on is because you are interested in levelling up and (eventually) reaching greater comprehension of a wider variety and level of materials.

This middle stage is where a lot of people get stuck. It's important to know that the intermediate plateau is a real thing and you will need strategies to not end up here forever (or quit, which will also eventually happen if you stay here for too long). (I wrote a whole book about strategies to get out of the intermediate plateau for Arabic, but the first section of the book applies to any other language as well. The book is available for free along with a bunch of audio interviews with language learning experts.)

The specifics of what you do in this middle stage is also heavily dependent on what your interests / motivations are for studying this language. In other words, are you mostly interested in getting really good at spoken conversations + listening, or do you actually not care about spoken language at all and mainly want to be able to read authentic materials without ever needing to to speak to anyone?

Core parts of this stage:

• continuing down the road of the frequency dictionary. Probably at the end of this stage you want to have mastered at least the 2000 most frequently used words, but ideally you'd get through most of the top 5000 most frequently used words. There are lots of ways that you can accomplish this, and it shouldn't just be a case of you rote memorising the words. Everything you do in this phase should be intertwined with comprehensible input of some kind, and vocabulary should always be learned within the context of authentic language but there are lots of ways of doing that so you'll have to figure out what applies best for your situation and needs.
• collocations / context: at this stage you want to be maximising your input to the core structures and ways your target language is used. Most words don't exist in a vacuum, and the further you get down the frequency list (or the more advanced your language source materials get) the more small bits of context and shifts in how individual words are used will make more difference. All of this is just me repeating that you should be reading and exposing yourself to lots of pieces of language.
• skill-dependent exercises and approaches: this is unfortunately vague, but depending on your interests and motivation you'll want to do one thing or another. For speaking, to give some examples, usually what I recommend is that you tackle a series of 'islands' that are defined by your interests. This means starting with a situation or a kind of conversation that you know you want to be really comfortable having. Perhaps you want to be able to talk about your daily routine, or maybe you want to be able to talk about food and the things you eat or cook. Then there are a series of things you'd do to prepare for mastering this 'island': gathering relevant vocabulary, thinking through the kinds of questions and/or answers that would come up during the conversation, generating some possible options or prepared answers or questions, practicing those with yourself and then later others, and so on. But really there are a million different ways to slice this depending on your interests and specific circumstances.

How / What?

What does this mean in specific? Some variation or combination of the following would be common:

• reading a lot in graded readers (hopefully these exist for your target language)
• graded listening: again, these hopefully exist for your language
• italki lessons or targeted spoken practice with a teacher (depending on what specific approaches you take)
• Clozemaster or Glossika: these are two tools that allow you to work your way through the most frequently used words using spaced repetition and context-rich language selections. Both also offer some kind of audio component. You might not need this if you have a solid method / rhythm already going with your use of Anki, but it's worth trying out at least to see if it clicks.
• writing sentences / paragraphs, then having them corrected, and then using the corrected versions of the language in Anki along with cloze deletion (a variation of what I showed above with the sentence and then a word or phrase missing that you have to guess) to practice the language used in a particular sentence.

😎 Onwards: Independent Study Land

At this point in your journey, you're at the B2 level and maybe soon to be C1. Your goal and process at this point is independent study: you're choosing materials and areas motivated by your interests. If you're still going + studying and you reached this level, the process never ends from here on out. It's just an ongoing set of little deep-dives into lots of different areas depending on your needs and interests.

Everything at this level is dependent on the skills you're working on, and your needs in terms of vocabulary / topic areas. Your vocabulary goals will be to move from the 5000 most frequent words on out into the next 5000-10,000 words after that, but usually it doesn't make sense to look at a literal frequency list for the words beyond 5000. For starters, they often don't exist, and your 'next words' will differ from person to person. You'll likely have a bunch of sub-areas that you get good at beyond the core 5000. For example, for me, I got really good at medical vocabulary (cardiology + neurology) in Dutch but I'm much weaker in other areas. The specific areas you spend time on will be driven by your needs and interests.

How / What?

Almost everything here is driven by specific needs, but it will involve and include:

• lots of learner-driven comprehensible input
• needs-driven activities (whether you're still focused on spoken prowess vs reading vs listening vs writing)
• open-ended practice like the kinds of tasks recommended by my (free) CoachBot self-study tool.

Going deeper

Most of what I wrote above was some concrete thoughts on paper that would serve as the basis for a conversation and I'm fully aware that lots of details were buried within or barely mentioned. Usually what I'd do after sketching out this overview is drill down into your individual situation and start to sketch out a more specific / precise plan, but this is a blog and I don't do coaching professionally any more!

Nevertheless, it's useful to be aware of the bigger picture and I hope that this blog served as a highly general overview that can drive further exploration and experiments in your own language-learning journey!

Getting Out of the Intermediate Language Plateau: Arabic Edition / Principles

[This is part of a series on getting out of a language-learning plateau at the intermediate-advanced level. Check out the other parts here.]

Seasoned language learners are familiar with the concept of the 'language plateau'. If you're learning a second language for the first time, you will inevitably reach a point in your studies where your progress seems to flatten. You will find this place and period extremely frustrating.

When you are in your plateau, it's hard to improve because you're already at a point of (some kind of) self-sufficiency. You can express yourself. You understand most of what is going on in a conversation or TV series you watch. You can write things and people will understand what you're saying. You could (and many do) stop your studies at this point and still be 'functional' in the language.

Getting out of this flat, dead zone is what I want to talk about today. It's hard, but it's by no means impossible, and making this kind of progress is possibly the most valuable work you'll do in your language studies, because all of it will be specifically tailored to your needs.

The starting point, though, is to identify your current status. What can you do? You don't (necessarily) need to take a formal language certification test to get a grade, though that can sometimes be useful. The kind of measurements you want to take are more subjective. You want to take stock of your capacity in certain situations, what level you are able to achieve in different contexts (your skills in reading will be different from writing vs listening or speaking, for example) and you want also to assess your experience on the cultural level as well -- i.e. how much experience do you have navigating all the unspoken parts of culture, whether that is body language, or behaviours and so on.

Principles of Skill Acquisition

Now a slight detour into some more general principles of skill acquisition. Some of this is derived from my own personal experience, other parts from interviews with experts in this field (such as my conversation with K. Anders Ericsson, who more or less invented the field of expert performance studies), and other parts still from reading a bunch of books on the subject.

Three things are relevant here:

1) Stretch

When you're learning a new skill, you want to step outside your comfort zone. This is usually difficult work, and work that is mentally (and possibly emotionally) taxing. Thus, if you want to get better at speaking in Arabic, you'll need to speak more, but at the beginning this practice (i.e. talking with other people) will feel pretty horrible, simply because you're not used to doing it. It's a paradox that you need to do the thing to get better at doing the thing. It is this difficulty, pushing yourself a little past what you're capable of doing, that allows for personal growth. (I wrote about this in an entirely different context a few weeks ago with respect to my attempts to get better at climbing.)

2) Lots of practice coupled with speedy feedback

These two parts (practice and feedback) go together. It isn't practice alone that will allow you to improve, but rather the combination of making efforts to use new skills alongside getting some kind of feedback that tells you when you're getting it wrong vs when you're not. An implication of this, too, is the reality that this kind of practice is going to involve you making lots of mistakes. This can feel crappy, especially when you're getting immediate feedback on exactly when this is happening. You need to adopt a flexible mindset, if possible, in which you see the mistakes as indicators of growth rather than as any kind of personal or intellectual failures on your part.

3) Know what you're practicing and focus on that

This is basically Ericsson's principle of "deliberate practice":

"Rather than chilling out in the comfort of skills you've already acquired, as an expert-to-be, you're relentless about heading to the frontier of your abilities. The practice shouldn't be so difficult that it overwhelms you—that would be depressingly demotivating, but not so easy that you're unconsciously languishing. In other words, you're arranging for flow, that space where you're right at the boundary of your abilities."

See also this summary of the routines that 'experts' tend to have around deliberate practice:

They can only engage in practice without rest for around an hour.
They practice in the morning with a fresh mind.
They practice the same amount every day, including on weekends.
They only have four to five hours of deliberate practice a day.
If they don't get enough rest, they can get overtraining injuries or burnout.

If you're hoping that 'using the language' in a general and non-specific way will get you out of your plateau, you'll be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to exist in the plateau zone without improvement ad infinitum. If you want to improve at a certain skill, you'll need to isolate that element and focus on it in a targeted way. This can be vocabulary, or speaking about a certain topic, or even something as small as 'using conditional sentences'. Whatever it is, you'll only get better if you concentrate your efforts.

Customisation & Your Individual Needs

Learning languages at the post-intermediate level will be a different experience from what you are used to in the early stages. Early on, you're doing a great deal of necessary-but-boring work to learn basic patterns, vocabulary and grammar.

Once you have mastered that, and you can explain yourself in most basic contexts, you reach the point where you have to customise. There's a great deal of science and research behind this claim. Check out this talk, by the always stimulating Alexander Arguelles, for an overview of some of that research.

You'll need to pick which areas you're most interested in. This is the hard work of advanced language studies -- you pick one area or context, conquer it, and then pick another area and repeat. This fulfils the princicle of focus that I mentioned above.

To give an example from my own studies. My current big push for Arabic is to be able to read serious fiction (i.e. short stories and novels written for native speakers). I've written previously that this was a personal goal, but various realities of how modern literature is written really make it hard to take the leap into complex native-reader-level fiction (especially novels). Arab writers like to use many synonyms (for poetic effect, or perhaps as an attempt at pretension?) for words, so when reading I often find myself stuck referring to dictionaries the whole time. Fortunately, a new textbook offering graded literature at just that 'stretch' level was released recently, which is allowing me an entry point into that world. None of the texts are simplified, and the language is hard and the number of unknown words is pretty large, but it's not too far down the scale of difficulty.

On Making a Self-Study Plan

My next post will cover and offer a host of suggestions for resources you can use to get out of this plateau / dead zone. Before you start reading through and diving into things that seem interesting, I'd strongly advise you take the time to figure out your specific goals. "Improve my Arabic" is not a useful goal. It's too unspecific. Even "improve my spoken Arabic" may not be particularly useful at the intermediate-advanced level. Once you figure out your goal, write it down somewhere. Maybe stick it to your wall or on the inside of your notebook. It's good to be reminded why we're doing the work.

Once you have your goal, then you want to set yourself small targeted bursts or challenges to push out into your stretch zone. You don't want these challenges to feel like you're straining against the limits of what you are capable. You want it to be just challenging enough that you feel uncomfortable, but not so much that you are constantly questioning yourself and your abilities in any kind of fundamental sense.

The scale of these challenges will be pretty variable, so examples will span a range of tasks from taking a week to learn and read deeply in a niche topic, to something more longer-term (over six months, perhaps) like my modern literature challenge. The characteristic that you need to look for, however, is that you'll be able to tell when you're finished with the challenge. Part of defining the goal is finding a specific (and somewhat measurable) definition of what it means to have achieved what you want.

Then the rest of the trick is basically keeping moving, tracking your progress and achievements along the way. There are various ways of doing this, some of which will depend on what else you have done in this regard. You can add in things like Beeminder to encourage compliance and regularity, or you can do that in other ways.

When I work with people 1-on-1 to learn a language, a lot of what we do is figuring out this kind of ongoing goal setting and progress assessment. (If you want to learn more about this, click here and read through what I offer).

The next posts will offer a roadmap to the different resources available to the intermediate student of Arabic and some of the ways you can utilise these resources. It won't be exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that most will find something of use in them. Feel free to get in touch if you have specific things you want me to tackle in terms of skill development in Arabic.

Mastery-based Learning with Launch School

It’s a new week, so we have a new podcast episode for you. Matt and I spoke with Chris Lee of Launch School about his approach to online education. We discuss the different tradeoffs and considerations that come into play when a curriculum is being put together.

To my mind, mastery-based learning — where you don’t advance to the next stage until you’ve really mastered the topic at hand — really shines for things where you have some kind of longer-term goal. Just because it’s a good approach doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. In Chris’ words:

We started this to try to figure out education. It was not a money making endeavor. So to us, teaching became the engineering problem to solve. I was not a proponent of Mastery Based Learning before Launch School. Mastery Based Learning or Competency Based Learning is not unique to Launch School, it’s a well known pedagogy in academic papers. But it’s really hard to implement.

Think about a physical classroom. Mastery Based Learning means that a student gets to occupy a seat in that classroom for an indefinite amount of time. That’s a really hard promise to make when our schools are tasked to usher through students. It’s not about training students and making sure they understand every topic, but getting people through.

You can download and listen to the episode over on the main Sources & Methods website here.

In Afghanistan, watching someone learn to code for the first time

I recently had the opportunity to observe how a total newcomer to coding / computer programming starts their learning journey. She was embarking on this journey in Kabul, which brings some special considerations that I thought I’d outline here.

First off, coding in Afghanistan? I actually happen to think it’s not the worst thing someone could do with their time. Power outages and internet costs, while better than they were in previous years, still make the prospect of spending hundreds of hours learning skills a precarious proposition. (Outside Kabul, just to give some context, even big cities like Kandahar are starved of electricity. When I was down there recently we had a couple of hours per day at best.) But all that to one side, there’s a need for skilled professionals in the computer science / engineering world and there seems to be a decent amount of room for remote work. (Note that there’s some debate about the extent of the shortage but I don’t think it’s getting ahead of myself to suggest that proficiency in computer science will be a valuable skill in the years to come.)

If you are going through university in Afghanistan you’re teaching yourself anyway, to some extent. The quality of the tuition — even in some of the private universities — isn’t great and the job market doesn’t reward degree certificates; it rewards competency, something which you aren’t necessarily going to get from a degree / certificate. To use some of the free resources available online would seem like a smart option. Worst case, you make yourself a little more employable because you took some initiative and have skills to contribute to a new employer. Another scenario is that you have some skills you can market around the world, all from the convenience of your home.

All of this requires English. It’s an unfortunate fact that there really is no way round learning English if you want to teach yourself computer science skills. There are ways round it, especially at the beginning, but if you’re going to progress you’ll really have to have a decent level of competency at understanding technical documents / tutorials and the like. I wish it was otherwise, but that isn’t changing any time soon.

I wanted to recommend my friend learn via some resource that was at least partly in her native language, Dari / Persian. After all the fanfare of recent years about how young people are learning how to code around the world in a variety of languages, I was a bit disappointed at the options available. For Dari, there were basically no options. One site, code.org, had some initial courses that had been translated into Persian, but it was the Iranian version / dialect and this caused some problems in comprehending the instructions later on. Worse still, the courses were only half-translated. Videos in between units were in fast idiomatic English, with scenes and situations that seemed representative of some alien universe. Yes, it’s nice that Bill Gates was there to explain how variables work, but first let’s slow down and explain what a variable is, preferably without flashy graphics that don’t actually explain the topic.

There were various assumptions made about students’ experience and skills in mathematics. Early units in the code.org syllabus expect you to understand basic geometry and some algebra. I guess you have to start somewhere, but I wish there were ways of teaching this starting from an earlier baseline of understanding.

I had initially thought that a good way to get my friend thinking about some of the bigger issues would be to have her use a Raspberry Pi and handle some basic Linux administration but that ended up being too many new things at one time. Some of the much-vaunted tropes about learning to code really don’t make much sense.

One other practical problem turned out to be that code.org is a data-hog. My friend ended up having to spend a non-trivial amount of money recharging her 4G phone (from which to tether her laptop) because code.org used fancy javascript animations and who knows what else. I feel like this is a serious symptom of a blind spot in Silicon Valley’s efforts at some kind of cultural imperialism. They can’t imagine themselves into the shoes of a nascent coder, so they produce these bloated websites that mean that while someone can maybe code for an hour or two using fancy javascript animations, maybe they won’t be able to afford the hundreds of hours that it takes to become competent.

I feel like better skills to teach at this level are more fundamental: how do you figure out the answer to a problem? how do you solve problems in general? This is actually the real skill that you want someone to master, not whether they can get a turtle to draw a circle in 4 colours, and this skill is not taught at all in these courses. (A corollary: how do you find good / worthwhile problems? or how do you figure out what things are worth working on? None of this is taught at all).

The kind of education provided by sites like code.org gets it backward. In this way of seeing the world, you can get busy ‘learning to code’ but it won’t necessarily fit into your life and you can’t really make real progress without other external guidance and support. The dream of universal education for a young person in somewhere like Afghanistan, delivered by these kinds of programmes, seems more smoke and mirrors than a real ladder towards education and real skills.

Italian Comprehension: Putting Myself On the Hook

I'm currently scheduled to do some archival work in August that would greatly benefit from being able to understand written Italian. That's a little under two months away from now, so I've been thinking about how best to approach this problem.

I'm only interested in comprehension, and not in production, of language, so this would seem a great opportunity to get a little bit of grammar and then immerse myself in some comprehensible input. I bought a quick-and-basic grammar overview and have set myself up with Clozemaster. (Clozemaster is a great way to learn vocabulary through context. I wrote about it previously here.)

I'm posting about this less-than-two-month mini goal here for a little bit of public accountability. I will in no way be fluent by the end of it, but I hope to be able to make my way through an archive of materials in Italian, or at the very least to know what is worth properly translating and what I can skip over.

There's rumoured to be a Beeminder/Clozemaster direct service connection in the works, but until then I'll use Clozemaster's own daily reminder tool. A più tardi.

On Reading in Arabic: The Evidence

[This is the second post in a series on the importance of reading when studying Arabic (or any other language). Read the first post here.]

It is notoriously difficult to study and show which are the most efficient methods to study second languages. For starters, everyone is slightly different, so it's hard to compare between individuals. Learning a language is also such an involved pursuit (taking place over all hours of the day, and in the mind, where microscope or dictaphone can't usefully reach) that it is impractical to follow the student for all twenty-four hours of the day.

Having given the pitch for why I think reading is so important for students of Arabic, today I wanted to summarise a study that was carried out from 1970-1977. This study, by ElSaid Badawi, is entitled "In the quest for the Level 4+ in Arabic: training Level 2–3 learners in independent reading" and can be found as an article in Betty Lou Leaver and Boris Shekhtman's fascinating (and underrated / underred) edited volume, Developing Professional-Level Language Proficiency. Given its somewhat obscure provenance, it's unlikely you'd come across this fascinating article in the normal course of your day, hence my interest in summarising it for you here.

Badawi offers an overview of his experience running the CASA (Center for Arabic Study Abroad) programme between 1970-1977. This programme was originally started in 1967 for advanced-level students and the idea of it was to give a year of intensive study in order to really catapult students into real competency in being able to read, speak and use Arabic in a professional capacity. (Badawi begins his article with a justification for reading, but I'll skip those details since their is a great deal of overlap with what I've already written).

The original CASA curriculum in the 1967-era programme was established around a 3000-word vocabulary list, reading of some short passages using those words in context, a grammar book and two long 'authentic' texts that would be covered over the course of the year. The students found this dull and unrewarding, however, so CASA's administrators decided to design a new course based around familiarising students with a 'language domain of their interests'. In other words: allowing them to read things that were related to their interests and professional trajectory.

Students taking part in the programme were assessed (prior to joining) as being at a high level, but their vocabulary was generally limited to political subjects. They had a poor understanding of morphology and little to no facility with semantics. They had, Badawi writes, bad reading habits in Arabic: too much focus on sentence structure, engaged in 'parsing-based reading' and with only a minimal grasp of the "semantic role of punctuation". In that last case, this is the way Arabic uses words, phrasing and sentence constructions to signify the meaning of a sentence, whereas in English a lot of those meaning structures are conveyed through punctuation. Most of all, students suffered from an 'excessive / crippling' use of the Arabic-English dictionary, which was identified as an obstacle to spontaneous and contextualised language learning; words were quickly forgotten.

The programme sought to encourage a switch in its students: "a change of attitude toward Arabic from that of a language they are being taught to one which they should start learning". The responsibility, at this level, generally should switch from the teacher to the students.

The programme was split up into three semesters / terms:

• Semester 1: 8-week summer programme

This was made up of introductory cultural classes (based around Cairo, Egypt, where students were living. It offered classes to bring students up to a competent level in functional colloquial Arabic. (Students could solve all their problems and interact with Egyptians in a functional way, following the course). There was also a component of media Arabic where students would become familiar with the formalised language used in printed and spoken contexts.

• Semester 2: 14-week autumn programme

This semester was for allowing students to gain a higher competence in MSA. Reading was one of the core elements here (news reading became effortless and there was some inclusion of classical language as well). Colloquial Arabic was encouraged through the reading of plays (which often used colloquial/dialect expressions and language). An intensive reading programme was added alongside this to boost confidence.

• Semester 3: 14-week spring programme

The final semester included three graduate-level courses in subjects of the students' interest / choice. There was also some training in 'Educated Spoken Arabic' (i.e. the discussion of high-culture topics).

The Intensive Reading Course

The core belief behind the programme was that reading was important to the students' knowledge of Arabic in a fundamental way. All the other skills would benefit and develop alongside the reading done as part of the programme. There were different kinds of texts available and a selection criteria for what kinds of reading took place:

Finding materials for intensive / analytic reading was easy. The harder issue was finding materials suitable for extensive reading, i.e. the kind of wide-reading that students are able to do with some level of ease. Arabic poses a particular problem in this regard, given its 'wide range of active vocabulary in use', and the 'complexity of the morphs-semantic system'.

Plays were believed to be the best for extensive reading. They carried a "high degree of word and sentence redundancy", usually had only a single theme and were of moderate length. (It was found that reading two 200-page books was much more satisfying than reading a single 400-page book). Plays also lend themselves to real-life activities. There is also the possibility of watching the plays being performed (or, now, on YouTube).

Novels were also considered useful, but the fact that dialogue is used only minimally means that they were kept for later in the semester. Short stories were denser in meaning and language use and thus harder. They were included in the programme, though, for the sake of variety.

Overall, texts were chosen for the language structures used rather than for their literary value / content.

Reading Texts

The course had students reading three items each week. Usually one novel or a play (a long item) and a short story and a 1-act play (i.e. two short items). These were generally from the same author, and difficulty would escalate over time. All texts were authentic and unabridged. Ideally they were selected from leading literary figures and they would all be texts for which no English translations already exist. Selecting these texts was hard at the beginning, but over the years they settled into a broad pattern, escalating in difficulty:

• Group 1 (first three weeks)

Plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim (short and long). These were good because he uses a lot of redundant vocabulary, follow familiar thematic sources to those with which students would have been familiar, used a lively dialogue and generally contained "straightforward language".

• Group 2 (5 weeks)

This consisted of works by Ihsan Abdul Quddus, a journalist, novelist and short story writer. These works tackled themes from social phenomena and thus were appropriate to a young audience. They referenced local customs and expressions. They included fewer dialogues in the novels and short stories. They had a lucid structure and controlled range of vocabulary.

• Group 3

This was works by Yusuf Idris, blending MSA with colloquial idioms, Qur'anic citations and quotations from the hadith literature. These were at a higher difficulty level.

• Group 4

This was a mix of items chosen for special topical interest or artistic value. For example, in the final week, students read Fathy Ghanem's 1958 novel Al-Gabal. They also tackled some of the non-famous novels by Nagib Mahfouz.

Mixed in these various groups were shorter items: one-act plays and short stories. There was generally a balance between length of a text and its linguistic difficulty.

Reading Instructions

I found this section of the article the most interesting / instructive. Students were told the following:

• The beginning of a story / text is always the hardest. You don't know what's going on, who the characters are and what the context / scene is. Bear with it. A lot of this will be scene-setting. You can always return back to it later on.
• Arabic has a lot of redundancy. Compare what you are stuck on with what follows and check if you can figure out the meaning that way.
• Continue reading as long as you can make out a story or theme for yourself. Don't worry or second-guess yourself as to whether what you understand from the story is the same thing as what the author intended you to understand.
• If you find a word or part of the structure you don't understand and stop, DON'T look the word up in the dictionary unless:
  • you have failed to guess the meaning
  • there is nobody around to ask the meaning
• Mark / highlight the words you were able to guess in the text. Mark the words you were able to do without understanding.
• Make a list of cultural features that you'd like to be addressed in class.
• Mark and make a list of any expressions and grammatical features or constructions that you want addressed in class.

Classes

Class sessions were essentially there to ensure that students were keeping up with the reading volume. Students would narrate their understanding of the texts they had read, and would raise any issues they wanted to learn more about.

Classes were also a good time to increase students' semantic understanding -- allowing students to identify shared roots and usages in different contexts and forums.

Students submitted written responses / follow-ups to the text in the class with the teacher present. A weekly conference with students gathered feedback on the choices of texts, allowing teachers to adapt the programme depending on the ease/difficulty perceived by each individual cohort of students.

Results

By the end of the 14-week programme, students had read an average of 2500 pages of authentic Arabic texts. Graded text levels showed that their language was improving. They were encouraged by managing to review words and structures that had been marked as 'hard' earlier on in the semester. (Usually 25-40% of these words had become intelligible to them, despite no vocabulary learning strategy specifically targeted at learning these words.) The graduate-level courses (all taught in Arabic, obviously) of the final semester were also a proving ground for students.

This reading programme increase students' competence and was transferrable to their other skills. (Yes, even their spoken Arabic.) Reading helped with writing. Reading 'complete texts' did a lot for the morale of the students at the intermediate-level, too. And the literary focus of the content was useful for students even if their interests didn't lie in that particular area.

My next post about reading Arabic will detail some options that are available to the intermediate-level student of Arabic, and some practical considerations resulting from this article.

You need to be reading more to get ahead in Arabic

“Millions of language students are trapped in vicious circles. They complain that they cannot understand what they read in the foreign language because they do not know enough words. So they do not read and they do not increase their vocabulary, and so they continue not to be able to understand. Then perhaps someone tells them how important reading is and persuades them to try again. So they sit down with their dictionaries, and they look up every single word that is new to them, and very often many words that are not new but that they 'want to be quite sure about'. At the end of three hours they have got through half a page in a book, or half a column in a newspaper. They do this for three or four days, and then give up in despair, oppressed by the tediousness of it all. They are convinced ­ quite correctly ­ that they do not know enough words to understand ordinary books and newspapers. As a result their vocabularies stay more or less the same size as they were, and they complain that they are making no progress. They either become permanently frustrated and depressed, or just give in and give up. And it all happens because they have spent more time with the dictionary than with the language itself.” (Source: Gethin / Gunnemark - The Art and Science of Learning Languages, p. 89)

Reading is unjustly maligned. Lots of students of Arabic pass through Amman, Jordan, where I'm currently based, and it's not uncommon to hear the refrain, 'I'm interested in learning how to speak, not to read and write.' This blog post is about how you should be reading, EVEN IF spoken is your ultimate goal. I hope I can convince you of this fact, and entice you with some of the ways reading will enhance your study and understanding of culture and history.

A large part of my book on getting out of the intermediate plateau in Arabic language learning is about the importance of reading.

Reading is the most useful activity to help an Arabic student stuck at the intermediate level. Even if your priority is to be functionally competent in a dialect, reading is still useful because it brings holistic improvements to your language abilities as a whole. The basic approach that I outlined in my book runs as follows:

1) Find good materials

2) Read lots of material at an appropriate level

3) Keep going and be regular

4) Cross-check for performance

Only the final point needs explanation. When you are reading lots of things in Arabic over a period of a few months, you may not be aware of how you are improving, or at what rate. For that reason, it’s worth putting in place some checks and points to review every month or two.

There are a number of different tactics we can use when reading, and I’ll get into the details of these below, but for now you should bear in mind that it helps to switch around the reading tactics that you’re employing every so often. At a very high level, you can shift from deep / intensive reading to wide / extensive reading. You can find ways to write and speak that will help you ‘activate’ the words and topics that you’re learning.

The primary benefit of reading is that it increases your vocabulary. After you’ve done a few years of Arabic study, you will probably realise that the way the language works (particularly the way the verb system supports how words are generated / derived) means you really need to work on your vocabulary if you’re going to emerge into the advanced levels of comprehension. Moreover, the size of this challenge — the number of words, that is — is such that whatever tricks or skills that got you this far aren’t going to be useful or efficient in surmounting the problem.

This is where reading comes in. If you can split the words you know into active and passive categories, reading is immediately helpful in increasing your passive vocabulary. (Active vocabulary are the words that you can produce easily in writing or in conversation, while passive vocabulary are the words that you can recognise when you see them in Arabic, but couldn’t necessarily produce or use them yourself). When you read books at the right level, you can figure out the meaning from the context. (This is how we learn new words and figure out meaning in our native tongues). This will rapidly increase your passive understanding of texts (and, to a lesser extent, things you hear). There is some transfer of these words into your active vocabulary, but that transition is not guaranteed and it usually takes a bit of extra work. This work usually involves writing of some kind.

At its core, the work of increasing your vocabulary comes down to how many times you are exposed to a particular word (or words). The more you are exposed to it, and the more contexts in which this happens, the better that will be for your ability to feel comfortable with the word. For example, if you hear the word for dish in a kitchen, a cafeteria, or in a restaurant, you will remember it when you have to order a meal at a restaurant.

From this perspective, reading is cost-effective and time-efficient. It is much faster to pick up a book and read it than to have to schedule a lesson, or distract someone from what they’re doing. You are also much more likely to find a varied stream of content by using written materials than if you solely rely on conversations or videos.

Being able to read is a valuable skill. Numerous studies have shown that your ability to be professionally useful in a language benefits far more from reading skills than spoken ability. Many people tend to discount reading from their skill set because they feel like it will take them too much time to learn how to read. And even though this book discusses listening and reading practices, reading is key to intermediate Arabic study. By not reading Arabic you are missing out on a great opportunity and a great way to distinguish yourself from your peers. Think what you could do and add to your work, career or discipline if your reading ability in Arabic was as good as that in English.

Reading connects you to other people, generations and eras. It’s the easiest way to mind-read and time-travel on the market! If you’re stuck in a country outside the Arab-speaking world, this is how you can get in touch with people, their culture, their history, their entertainment and all sorts of other dimensions. In terms of efficiency, reading is at the top of the list in this sense.

Reading is a badge of competence, both in how peers see you but how Arabic-speakers perceive you. If you are able to confidently navigate the written word, you’ll have more opportunities, people will take you more seriously and you’ll have a generally better quality of engagement as a result. Given that the way to reach that is enjoyable and — all things being relative — not too time-consuming, it’s harder to see reasons why you wouldn’t want to be reading more.

If a command of dialect / spoken Arabic is important to you, or your writing, perhaps, reading offers a break from that skill work and affords great opportunity for cross-training. The words you learn while reading can and do transfer over to other domains.

Arabic written by professional writers (whether fiction or non-fiction) often has the unfortunate tendency to be very verbose, using multiple synonyms for a similar meaning. In fact, finding an obscure yet beautiful adjective is almost a badge of achievement for many writers, particularly in older generations. This makes taking the dive into authentic reading materials for language students much harder. Luckily, publishers have been busy at this and a large number of intermediate- to advanced-level readers are being released. This is good news as you can now easily bridge the gap between basic textbook sentences and authentic material, whereas this wasn’t as possible even a few years ago. (It wasn’t the case when I first studied Arabic, for example). There are also a number of useful technologically-enabled services which allow you to ramp up and gradually increase this difficulty level. Moreover, you can follow your interests much more, whether you’re interested in fiction, politics or history, there are appropriate materials available. When you don’t read Arabic, you’re actually missing out on this huge conversation and discourse which is happening right this moment - whether its on Twitter or in op-ed columns - and which has been happening for as long as there have been Arabic speakers and writers.

Reading is an incredibly flexible skill to practice. You can do it almost anywhere, using physical books or digital materials. It works for short as well as long time slots, and, best of all, it’s fun! Particularly when you’re working on extensive reading, you can really lose track of time when reading a good novel or following whatever blog covers the topic that really interests you.

[This is the first in a series of posts on the importance of reading in learning Arabic. The next post will summarise an academic study of the role of reading in bringing students up to the highest levels of achievement in their Arabic proficiency.]

Language Learner's Journal: Leaving Qasid

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

After two-and-a-half intense months, I've finished my course at Qasid. Though this didn't always feel easy to see on a day-to-day basis, it's extraordinary how much students there learn over a short period of time. On my first day, I couldn't produce full sentences other than my go-to greetings and "I'm an American journalist in Brazil," and over the weeks there, comprehended and participated in discussions about women's rights, marriage customs in different cultures, literature, colonialism and occupation.

Even if it kicked my butt (or because it did), I leave with a great opinion of the school. Qasid's teachers are extremely well trained in how to instruct students in an immersive method – we only occasionally resorted to English words when, say, our teacher wanted to make sure we really understood a grammatical point at hand. My listening comprehension soared, as did my ability to read texts (each week's lesson in our textbook revolved around one or two native texts). Also, I had the great fortune of my class whittling down to only two students, which meant that for three hours each morning, my classmate and I were responsible for answering every question and participating fully in every discussion. So much opportunity to speak in a comfortable, mistakes-are-fine-and-expected environment turned me into something of a chatterbox, though my enthusiasm is several steps ahead of my accuracy.

Also, a delightful unexpected benefit about Qasid is that a group of students and teachers stay the afternoon there in their study halls. That meant that while I worked on my computer after class, I was often surrounded by chatter in Arabic, both teachers engaging their students in fusha and many students who were native dialect speakers chatting amongst themselves.

That said, after speaking with several other language students and journalist colleagues, consulting Alex, and thinking about my goals, I decided to switch tracks from my original plan to study two terms at Qasid and then move back to the U.S. for a summer language institute to instead focus on ammiya here in Amman. I work a part-time job to support my studies, while most Qasid students are full-time exchange students. If all students there were exhausted from their homework load, I was 150 percent so. Journalist after journalist tells me they wish they had better dialect skills and, not being someone who has a "good ear," i.e., I don't pick up much language without studying it in a methodical way, I think it will be important to focus on a dialect in a structured setting.

Still, I'd consider going to Qasid again in the future. In fact, I was part of a test group to try out a new study tool the are developing that would supply easy-to-access audio and videos to accompany texts and vocabulary we study in Qasid's textbooks. It looks like a promising way to bridge the gap between reading comprehension and pronunciation of the words in the text, i.e., I often recognize words in a text based on their consonants and long vowels but am mentally (and inappropriately) filling in a fatha each time I don't know the short vowels.

As for my next steps: I've enrolled in a twice-a-week ammiya course at Sijal and am already enamoured with the class. I tested into the advanced level, though the other students in the class are far ahead of me in dialect. That said, unlike with Qasid the first time around (when I asked to be placed down a level because I was having difficulty following the class), I felt comfortable sticking to this level since I indeed understand the majority of the lesson. I'll also be taking private lessons to complement the group course.

Another choice I've been happy with is that I've also moved to a far more happening place than my last home in Shmeisani, which has meant a world of difference in terms of just having daily interactions. I try to look up the words of things I'm looking for before I hit the streets (most recently, شمعة، سبانخ، و لوز بدون ملح). I find most people are very willing to speak with a foreigner in Arabic, though this sometimes involves my telling strangers who respond to me in English "بحكي الإنكليزية شيء، انا برازلية). I will reflect on the merits of this and some broader thoughts on expat language learning/daily usage in a future post.

I've also become a social media and technology ascetic, logging out of my accounts and using them only when something necessary is at hand. In addition to being an old soul who believes that technology is eating away at humanity and rewiring our brains like substance addiction, seeing the Facebook I see every day anywhere else in the world is not one of the reasons I came to Amman. It's pleasant to let my eyes wander while I sit in a taxi or service and try to speed read the signs around me before they're out of sight. I don't think I risk جهالة anytime soon – I read plenty of news (it's part of my job), but it's confined to a couple of hours of work a day, and then I'm free.

And as for that free time, another upcoming blog will be about independent study methods post-Qasid that I will develop with Alex to make sure I keep up the reading skills I learned there even as I switch into a dialect course.

Core Language Learning Beliefs

I have previously written about my core principles relating to learning. I contrasted fundamental principles and beliefs with the idea of 'life hacks'. Today I wanted to get more specific and write an initial set of core beliefs that motivate and shape both how I study languages myself and how I encourage others to do the same through my coaching work.

Not all of these beliefs are based in rigorous science, by any means, and one of the things I hope to return to is the extent to which my personal experience (i.e. 'the way I've always done it') has dictated these beliefs and choices about language learning.

I'll return to these over time to check whether I still agree with them. But for now:

1. Anyone can learn a new language.
2. The speed which you learn a new language depends on the approach you take, the amount of time you invest and the resources at your disposal.
3. Just fixing the approach (your attitude & your work plan) can transform your speed and your ability to learn.
4. (But), in the end, you have to invest the time. (Ideally, especially for total beginners, 1-2 hours per day, 5-6 days per week).
5. Beginning a new language is both the most fun and boring stage; fun because every day you're increasing what you can do at a really amazing rate and you always feel like you're improving, boring because there's very little creativity to learning a bunch of words and drilling semantic structures.
6. We live in a golden age of resources and opportunity. (This will get even better in the coming years, with computing power and applied linguistics producing custom materials to support your learning.)
7. If you only speak English, perhaps pick an easy language that's closer to English (like French) so you can gain confidence before biting off something harder like Arabic or Mandarin Chinese.
8. Students (mostly) want to speak as their first priority, but of all the skills, reading is a better and more useful focus.
9. Nobody can teach you a language; you have to learn it.
10. Confidence is key. Polyglots are confident about language learning because they've done it before and thus know that it is possible. (Conversely, most newbie language learners set the bar far too low in terms of their expectations of themselves).
11. Everyone is unique, but you should probably cover the bases in terms of what you study and how you study it.
12. Having professional capacity in a second (or third) language is probably the best way to distinguish yourself in the research and 'knowledge work' marketplace.
13. Life is a subjectively fuller and richer experience with more languages.

Language Learner's Journal: Keeping Pace

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

I had a low low and a high high in the same week, in fact, one day after the other. I hope that may underscore that preparation and, after that, confidence/stubbornness are the motors for getting new words and sentences out of my mouth.

On Monday, I wrote in my daily study log that I was tongue-tied and could barely get a complete sentence out in class. On Tuesday, I happened to be the only person to show up to class -- and thankfully, I was prepared, having read the night's text and done our homework on making the أمر (command) and using what seems to be a bit obscure but indeed nice use of the أفعَلَ to express admiration or astonishment, like, ما ألذّ هذه الكنافة. That meant for three hours, I was one-one-one a teacher in each class (and, in fact, with an additional instructor, since an observer/trainee came along too). And for those three hours, I was a chatterbox. I talked about a vengeful husband who cast a spell on his wife to turn her into a donkey (we were, if these are a set of familiar references to you, on the "1001 Nights" chapter of Al Kitaab Two), traded commands with my professor (!كلي الحلويات العيد الحب), and described the Seven Wonders of the World with our new قواعد.

I make many, many mistakes. I routinely use incorrect prepositions, mispronounce words whose consonants I know but whose vowels I flub, and fumble conjugations. Alex has said that speaking a foreign language is 80 percent a confidence game, which felt like what happened between Tuesday and Wednesday, which was not a time when I got 80 percent better at Arabic.

On that note, a few helpful tools that helped me hit a high note this week:

Daily study log: I mentioned this above, and as simple as it is, it is useful to reflect on highs and lows and how I'm spending my time. Alex made an excel sheet that adds up my total times spent reading, in conversation, etc, each week. It also keeps me a little in check because when I use a timer to log how long an exercise takes me makes me a bit more efficient and, say, not give into some mindless cyborg urge to check my social media or Whatsapp because... if I do, then I'll kick myself when I see I took an hour and a half to do a simple exercise.

Reverso: I had been asking around for dictionary recommendations, and Alex turned me onto Reverso. I've seen this site before but haven't consistently. In addition to a translation, it includes a list of sample sentences of that word used in context. Many of their examples are short and punchy and easy to absorb even when I just need to look up a word while I'm in the middle of a reading assignment.

Time matters: Even a few extra hours a week need to be taken into consideration. I've decided, for the time being, to stop casual meetings I had been arranging with an language partner each weekend. One, I get a lot out of speaking to my teachers after class and with my fellow students, which I do twice a week when I stay for an extra conversational section at Qasid. And two, I was spending a lot of time getting to and from the weekend exchanges, loitering over ordering tea and trying to find cafes where without much smoke or noise. Exchanges for students at our level can be little disorienting without clear rules and intentions for what we will do, and Alex backed me up when I said I felt like we weren’t getting much out of our time, saying that he, too, didn’t usually find language partner arrangement to work well.

Time matters (2): Time also matters in the long run, and, after consulting with Alex several times, I changed my plans for how I will spend the next several months. I realized I would fear feeling overwhelmed or incomplete if I went to an intensive summer Arabic program in the United States, which is largely in fusha and starts in June. I also decided to leave Qasid after this term to focus exclusively on Ammiya in a new course and in private lessons. Alex's advice and answering my many questions about how to include and prioritize dialect in my language learning were invaluable to making that decision, even if he also made many arguments in favor of the summer program, which I plan to keep on my radar for a future summer.

I feel at peace with that choice because I've already been studying fusha for a year and a half, and I don't expect it to slip away from me if I still find ways to practice what is important to me. I've been speaking Portuguese for ten years and I still learn new things (the other day, "você parece estar comendo a sua língua," or, "you look like you're eating your tongue" – you look like you're having trouble expressing yourself); Spanish has been with me for half of my life and the same is true. Rather than honing my sights on some sort of “Well now I’m finished" endpoint, which the summer program had been in my mind beforehand, I’m reminding myself that language, like exercise, is useful to us precisely because we don’t are not trying to "finish" with it.

How to learn a language without a teacher

A key belief at the foundation of my language coaching work has always been that teachers aren't needed to learn a language. Younger people and students of mine seem to understand this far more readily than people who grew up in a culture where 'learning a language' meant taking a course or enrolling with a teacher.

I was very pleased, therefore, when I discovered that someone else had given a talk on this topic at last year's Polyglot Gathering. Lýdia Machová offers 'Language Mentoring', which is essentially the same idea as the language coaching that I do. I found the talk fascinating as a fellow practitioner, but I think there's lots of wisdom there for anyone seeking to study languages outside the classroom. Indeed, the whole point of the talk is sort of that 'outside the classroom' is in fact the place where language learning should mainly be taking place.

Some people, she explains, want to be taught a language, but what she tries to do in her work is show them how to learn. It may sound like a semantic difference to most, but it is crucially important.

Nobody can teach you a language. You have to learn it yourself. Wishing otherwise is to avoid the fact that real work has to happen when you're learning a language. This is a hard lesson for many to hear, but it is certainly something I stress to all new students I work with: you have to do the work.

Check out the rest of her talk for more on this solid approach to self-study and why working with a coach can help boost your language-learning efforts.

[For more information on working with me to learn a language, visit languagecoach.io/coaching. If you're learning Arabic, check out my new book, Master Arabic.]

Actual Fluency

I was interviewed by Kris Broholm on the Actual Fluency podcast last week. This was a real pleasure to do, since I've been listening to that podcast more or less since it first started.

You can listen to the interview/episode here. Our conversation was fairly wide-ranging, covering topics like whether to start Arabic by learning the spoken or written form first, how to learn languages when there isn't much in the way of materials available, and what kinds of meta-skills I've found useful in my own language learning journey as well as that of the students I coach.

How to learn a page of verbs

Someone sent me a list of verbs that they were hoping to memorise. They wanted some tips and suggestions for different ways to approach the task. You can see part of the image above. Verb, translation and a sample sentence where the word is used in context.

Arabic verbs are unique in that they often share a similar / familiar rhythmic pattern (da-da-da), so it can sometimes feel like they're all the same.

I sent him the following suggestions and thought it might be useful for others so I'm reposting it here. For verbs, it helps to attack from multiple angles simultaneously.

• Make sure you understand the meanings
• Make sure you know how they sound. (Use Forvo or check with a native-speaker if there's any confusion)
• Go through and say them out loud. Take time with each word, saying it out loud a number of times. Get a sense of the physicality of the word
• (Ideally, add them in Anki, though that's more for long-term preservation rather than short-term passing a test etc)
• Look up each word on Reverso Context. The online dictionary will give you a translation and then a bunch of different examples of other sentences using that word or verb. Look to see how it's used. Study the examples and try to identify what is unique about the word - its meaning may not be exactly translatable into English/French.
• Look up each word on Tatoeba. Repeat the same steps as you did for Reverso Context in the previous suggestion.
• Go to Google News and type in the word in Arabic. Take a look at the examples that come up. Copy them out onto a piece of paper if you feel like the language is interesting.
• Try using them in a sentence out loud. First repeat the sample sentence given in the example. Make sure you understand how the word is used in the context of that example. Then make a sentence of your own that uses the word. Say it out loud. Make another sentence.
• Write two sentences for each of the words. Try not to go through the list in order. Either do every other word, or pick at random. Point is, don't get used to going through the list in order, since that'll only make you good at remembering the list rather than the words on their own. (BONUS: Post these sentences to Lang-8, get corrections and make Cloze Deletion cards on Anki so that you're not just learning from single word cards, but you're learning words in context.
• Do Back Translation with the sentences you've just had corrected on Lang-8. First translate them into English on a new sheet of paper / file on your computer. Then close the original Arabic sentences and see if you can translate the sentences back into Arabic from the new English sentences. This will really test your command of the vocabulary and phrasal structures you just learned. You can do this in writing or just orally.
• If you have problems with spelling, use Iverson's lists: Take a blank piece of paper - A4 is good (or whatever the US equivalent is) - and write a list of the words you have to learn today on the left side of the page. Try not to take up too much space. Maybe it's 20 words. Write them down on the left side of the page. Then take a ruler or draw a line alongside that list and to the right of the line, (perhaps in a different colour pen), write the translation of that word. Do that for all the words. If you don't know the word, then the memorisation image/association hasn't stuck, so you can look up the correct answer and make sure that your association sticks this time. Once you've completed this first test, take another piece of paper (or, better still, something thicker like a book so you can't cheat) and cover up the first column. Now you only have your answers to look at, and you should draw another line and then write the translations. (i.e. translating things back into the original language). Do all the translations for the list, then check whether you got them right. Then you should repeat this until the entire piece of paper (both sides) are covered with translations back and forth. If you write small-ish, you should be able to get a good 6 or 7 rounds of translations/testing in (if not more). Perhaps don't do all of these sessions at once. Do one side of the page in one go, and then leave other sessions for later in the day (for reasons I'll explain now). Once you've taken the time to make the sound association, write down the list of words that you're learning that day on the page as described in my blogpost. Do one round of translating them. Then during the day, every so often, do another round, translating the words back and forth etc.

There are other ways you can practice words, but this is probably enough to get started with. You don't have to do all of these steps, though if you get through them all I pretty much guarantee you'll be better off than doing none of them!