Not everyone will be able to use some of my strongest tools for studying foreign languages like being a dork and having a job that requires me to travel to other countries. Not everyone would be willing to live in a neighborhood where an FL is spoken. But there are ways to approach building vocabulary, using increasingly complex grammar structures correctly, and even pronouncing words in a way that approximates a native speaker that students can use to speak a language better. I offer some of the strategies I've used to study FLs to stimulate a discussion of strategies for learning other languages and to hopefully improve your retention of foreign languages. Even if you hated high school Spanish, I guarantee that many of you are sad that you didn't get more out of years of language study. Hopefully this will inspire some people to take up another language.
Memorizing vocabulary is a big challenge for a lot of people. It is boring to sit and learn lists of words, often words you don't care about right now (and may or may not ever care about). Some people just don't have great memories. The following are some strategies to improve retention (because at the end of the day, most things that are worth doing require some grudge work and you DO have to learn words, which often involves memorization if you are not immersed in the language).
Vocabulary Retention:
Use all four pillars of language learning to improve retention: read, say, listen to, and write the new word.
Don't memorize like a translator ("ok, perro is dog, perro is dog, perro is dog"). This sets you up to translate in your head, which will slow you down and impede fluency. Only say the word in the target language and instead of thinking of the equivalent in your native language, try:
- imagining a picture of the word (envision a dog and say "perro, perro, perro");
- thinking of things you associate with the target word as you say it (think of doghouses, collars, picking up poop, dog food, fighting with cats, tom and jerry, etc. while saying/writing/reading/hearing the word "perro");
- using examples of the concept you are learning (for example, if you want to learn the word for white in French, think "blanc/blanche" and then think of bedsheets, teeth, piano keys, chess pieces, paper, Germans, etc.); and,
- attaching the word/concept to a memory or a sensory perception (if you want to learn bread in Arabic, think khubz and then think of the smell of baking bread, your mom giving you bread with soup when you were sick ate age 5, etc.). Connecting it to your memories embeds it in a neural network AND gives the word some meaning to you.
- All of these strategies avoid setting you up for one for one translation and get you in the habit of thinking in the foreign language without any native language crutch. When you speak your native language, you don't think of words, you think of images, memories and concepts...so why would you try something else in the target language?
- Study before you go to bed, as you may dream about the target language or in the language and you are helping your hippocampus to convert that new material to long term memory.
- Try to remember the vocab you studied before bed in the shower the next morning (if you don't shower in the morning, you can do it while eating breakfast, on the train/bus, etc...or you could start showering; your friends will thank you).
- Refresh the material you studied a couple of days after to reactivate the material (you start forgetting material about 48 hours later if it is not used).
- Continue to review a week or month out to keep it active.
- Slip the new word into conversations, even with people that may not speak or even care about the target language (warning, you run the risk of saying "y'allah" or "vamonos" when you want to get your friends to get going).
- Go to neighborhoods where the target language is spoken and use your new vocabulary (and old stuff, but try to make an effort to be creative and slip in the new stuff. It helps to retain it, and it gives you practice being creative in expressing yourself in the target language, a key part of negotiating meaning when you can't express yourself exactly).
- Go to places that might have items that you just studied (if you just studied food vocab, go to a restaurant or grocery store, for animals go to the zoo, for clothes go to Target, etc) and then try to identify items you see in the target language.
- Teach someone else words. The most effective learning strategy is teaching someone else, so find some poor sap to convert into a foreign language learner and you will be doing yourself an epic solid.
Use words in sentences, even simple ones, in the target language that help you to recall the meaning of the word without making it a one for one translation.
Find a friend who is learning the language to be your conversation buddy. Speaking and listening are often intimidating with native speakers at first and you will simply not get enough practice if you depend on your class. A friend is a low-pressure way of practicing and simulating immersion while talking to someone you care about about topics of interest. Further, it is a great way to talk about people without them understanding you. My friend Derrick and I are both fluent in Spanish now because we would talk smack about people in high school (and we eventually got so comfortable in Spanish that regular conversations felt just as natural in Spanish as they did in English.).
Building vocabulary is much more effective if you set your own pace/goals:
- Don't wait until your teacher or textbook introduces something. If you need to say something or want to say it, learn how and use it. It'll stick better because it is relevant to you present tense.
- When you hear a song, see a tv show or movie, read a sign, etc., try to say it in the target language. For what you can't say, create a list of things in your environment that you'd like to be able to say and then learn that in parallel to class vocab.
- Bring outside vocabulary to a lesson. Your learning bolsters the learning of others and when you use those structures/words in class and someone doesn't understand, you create a teaching moment. When you teach, you retain, so it helps you and helps them. It is also a more natural circumstance for your class, as you gain vocabulary in your native language by encountering it not by memorizing it (despite what the GRE and SAT might have you believe).
- Cognates: Languages with similar roots often share similar words. For example, the word cotton comes to us from Arabic via romance languages: Al-qutn (arabic) --> el algodon (spanish), el cottone (Italian), cotton (english), etc. Most words in Spanish that begin with al, actually come from Arabic. Spaniards incorporated the Arabic article for "the" (Al) into the word. Alcohol comes from Arabic, so take that Saudi Arabia. This can sometimes backfire, but in general will help you to understand what is spoken to you. Just remember that you want to be careful about how you say embarrassed and excited in Spanish, as you might say I am pregnant or horny if you use a cognate. Portuguese speakers should be careful about asking to hold a Spanish-speaker's baby, as you are likely to use a false cognate and say "Can I hit your baby?"
- Comparable Structures: Sometimes you can learn how to say a whole slew of words by learning the pattern for that structure in the other language. Many words that end in -tion in English are the same in Spanish, except they end in ción. Information = información. Knowing this, you can say the word action, traction, fraction, satisfaction, etc. It isn't a perfect system, but it will allow you to guess a lot. Can you guess what the words dignidad, humanidad, and ciudad are in English? What is the English ending that corresponds to the Spanish "-dad?" (again, not perfect, as pidad is not the word for pity, e.g.)
- Borrowed words/neologisms: As many new concepts (like democracy, technology) developed in a globalized era and many languages borrow, you may already know how to say words in the target FL using your language with little modification. Democracia in Spanish and DemocraTiyya in Arabic are not hard to figure out, neither is computadora or combiuter. Turns out English borrows heavily, so you've got a lot, despite President Bush's unfortunate assertion "It's a shame the French don't have a word for entrepreneur."
- Visit neighborhoods, stores, restaurants or even countries where the target language is spoken.
- Create a conversation club
- Join a meet-up group
- Find native speakers
- Listen to movies, tv, and music in the target language (and let me just say, The Mummy is pretty damn amazing in Spanish. Turns out the title, La Momia, is also a cognate).
- Date people who speak the target language (it'd probably be nice if you were attracted to them or say wanted to be with them, but love, like FL acquisition, is a complicated matter).
Conjugating Verbs and Declining Nouns
It is often really difficult to wrap your mind around conjugating verbs or declining nouns when your language does not do this, but if you want to speak any romance language, German, any Slavic language, and Arabic (among others) well, you will need to figure it out (do we do this in English? Turns out yes).
- It is much better if you use sentences instead of a chart because the chart isolates the concept from its usage. Create sentences like "I study at the library" and "She studies at the library" rather than saying "I study, you study, he studies, she studies, we study...etc). That way you are practicing usage and grammar together.
- If you feel like a chart is the way to go for you, it is easier to develop a pattern if you make sure that all the words are chantable and fit into a rhythm. For example, I tried to learn the plural form of you in a chant form, but saying "you all, vosotros/ustedes" was tripping me up because every other English pronoun (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) is monosyllabic. I started using "Y'all" for you plural to keep that rhythm. As a result, this Chicagoan says y'all. I also say howdy, but I can't blame that on an FL.
- Start by learning the regular verb pattern (if it exists) and emulating it with all verbs you encounter. You will make mistakes, but remember how kids go from "I goed" to "I went?" The same will be true for you. You will hear the irregulars being used if you are practicing with people and start to correct/refine. Also, sometime the regular pattern sounds really awkward/cumbersome and you get the idea that it is wrong: In Spanish, you should conjugate verbs ending in ir in the first person (I do, I eat, I read, etc) with -o. The verb "ir," however would just be "o," and you get the sense that there must be a better way to say "I go" and learn "voy" is the right way, not "o."
- Learn tenses you need, don't wait. The sooner you add a tense to your practice, the more versatile you will get and the better you can express yourself. This will give you confidence and make the language more useful to you, and thus enhance your desire to keep going. Again, you will make mistakes without formal studies, but you will start the refining and retention process all the sooner and you will be inspired more because you learned when it was relevant.
- Learn objects, prepositions and word order along with the verb (one reason I recommend sentences over verb charts). Some things that take indirect objects in English (I listen to her) take direct objects in Spanish (Yo la escucho). Sometimes a different preposition is used, I may "dream of/about you" in English, but "I dream with you" in Spanish (the verb soñar goes with the preposition "con" (with) rather than "de" (of). If you create an example sentence that includes an adverb to learn where they are placed in the target language, any prepositions that are needed, how direct/indirect objects are handled, you have a template to fall back on when in doubt.
So often, pronunciation is neglected, and this is sad because you may never sound like Antonio Banderas, but you don't have to sound like you learned Spanish at Walmart or Applebee's either. Here are some tips that may help you to sound more like a native speaker, even if you started to learn the language after the cut-off for acquisition (puberty):
- Listen critically to how a word is pronounced. Where does a native speaker put emphasis? How do they make a vowel or consonant sound?
- Watching a native speaker make sounds/say words is also underrated, but it will help you to make sounds if you see how natives form them. Look at how they hold their mouth, if they use their tongue or teeth. For example, I had a big breakthrough when I noticed that most Arabs don't move their upper lip all that much while speaking to form sounds. I was better able to use the language because I knew that more effort should be done by the positioning of the tongue and moving my lower jaw instead of my upper lip.
- Practice manipulating sounds in your mouth. Change where you say the sound from the front to the back of your tongue, from the throat to the nose, using more tongue or more teeth, etc. Find where it sounds most like what you hear a native speaker saying.
- Learn the geography of your mouth and locate how sounds are formed in that new geography. The alveolar ridge (the ridge on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth), the glottus, the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the throat, and the nasal cavity all play a role in proper pronunciation, and it will help you to mimic a native speaker if you understand how your mouth words. In Arabic, there are two different D, S, T, and K/Q sounds that vary based on whether you use your teeth or whether the sound is more in your throat or on your tongue. Similarly, there are three th sounds! It will impede you if you say them all the same, so you need to figure out what the difference is. Once you get that, you will be able to hear that difference better too.
- The use of tone and expression of emotions varies across languages, and you need to be very careful not to use your native region's way of talking if you want to sound fluent in the target language. This is tough for me, as I am a very excited speaker and I use emphasis and inflection heavily. That said, doing that in Chinese completely changed the meaning of what I was saying because it is a tonal language that uses tone to change words (the inflection on the word ma can lead to five different meanings...and referring to a Chinese guy's mom as a horse will probably not be well received). Even in non-tonal language, an authentic sound requires expressing emotions differently. My default, hammy way of talking may work great for an emphatic language like Italian, but if I cross the border into France, I am immediately an outsider as French is a language that is smooth, streamlined, and does not have a bouncy, sing-song quality to it. The import of this smoothness is so great that French will have some silent letters pronounced if it will enhance the flow of words in a sentence. Some languages use different words to convey strength of meaning rather than changing the tone: in Arabic, there are forms of a verb that are more intensive and so I would use a different form of the verb to convey "to slice" than I would "to cut to bits." This is important if you want to understand the difference between slicing bread or Charles Mansoning your family (yeah, I verbed him).
- Music, authentic conversations, immersion, multimedia and anything that allows you to practice conversing or listening or speaking will inherently be the best ways to hone your speaking and listening abilities, and thus your pronunciation.
There are some things that make the way we learn languages really problematic at a systematic level, but that you can't necessarily change as a learner forced into this setting:
- Kids should learn languages starting in infancy when their minds will learn the proper sounds that make up a language naturally, you probably started learning too late because schools start in high school.
- You learn on a block schedule and thus practice maybe 50 minutes a day if you are lucky.
- You learn once or twice a week and thus have too much time between lessons to forget what you learn.
- There is not enough speaking/conversation/listening built into the system.
- Textbooks are poorly written or offer exercises that don't stimulate learning.
- Your teacher uses ineffective strategies.
Now, you also may have poor study skills or habits that are not just related to FLs and you need to identify and fix those (it is sad that more teachers don't help kids in this regard, as it is essential to their approach in any class):
- You have bad study skills and haven't bothered to think about what conditions are most conducive and least conducive to your studies for a given subject (or all subjects). Libraries work for many people, but I can't study in an overly silent environment. Additionally, it is difficult to study a subject that requires you to speak and listen in a quiet environment. Write out a list of places, times, and conditions that work and don't work for you, and try to develop a plan for how to study in a way that works for you. Be aware that one condition may work for some subjects, but not for all subjects.
- You don't set goals for yourself and don't measure those goals. Why do you want to learn the FL? What do you want to get out of the studies? What do you want to be able to say? By when? What steps do you need to take? How will you know you've succeeded? If you can answer these questions, you have come pretty far in articulating a plan of action that will help you to measure progress and identify areas where you are struggling more to better focus your efforts and areas where you rock to encourage you to press onward.
- You don't take the subject seriously or find it personally useful. Stop being an ass. Find out how this will benefit you and how you can use it (and you can often use an FL) and remind yourself of it when you get discouraged.
- Do you have a strategy for overcoming a language learning difficulty? Post it!
- Can you think of examples for some of the suggestions I gave above? Post them!
Act on it!
- Go back to a language you've given up on and try some of the above strategies and see if it yields better results!
- Learn a new language!
- Try out your Spanish at Chipotle or the bodega on the corner. Try out your Amharic the next time you go out to eat Ethiopian. Revive that rusty language study that is lurking in the cobwebs of your mind.
- Are you a teacher? Try to provide some of these tips to your students and add your own. Start your students off right by helping them to identify their study style and to set and realize goals (and measure progress). It is a lot more useful to them to measure on their own terms rather than based on test scores. Intrinsic rewards, rather than arbitrary numbers will win every time.
- Are you a parent or friend of a language learner? Help them by giving them strategies and reminding them that they are just as big a part of success as their teacher is. Work with them to develop a study plan. Serve as their student so that they teach you and thus learn more. Take them to places where they are more likely to be immersed.
- Do you speak a foreign language that someone in your community doesn't speak? Teach it! Volunteer as a tutor, teach ESL (English as a Second Language), answer a question, offer constructive feedback to a non-native speaker that makes a mistake (see my previous post on language teaching to do it in an effective, specific and non-discouraging way).
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