Stop Bothering Society, Poor Kid: Help Yourself!

People who know me, know that I am a firm believer in systemic inequalities. Our country has done a lot to reduce the legal barriers that inhibited certain races from realizing their full potential (though much still remains). That said, in a country that was built on slavery and did not fully protect the rights of Blacks in law until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you have to imagine that the way the country operates is still favorable to Whites. Even if you full equalized everyone in law and you enforced those laws properly, all American institutions and measures of success are largely based upon White measures of success. Specifically, the White middle and upper class. This article may make you uncomfortable if you are squeamish about talking about race and class (or dislike sarcasm), but my philosophy is that you cannot fix a problem by ignoring it and political correctness is the quickest path to inertia.

An article recently published in Forbes Magazine, entitled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” recently caught my attention. I responded to the article and then to the author’s response in forceful (and recognizable) terms My intent here is not to rehash my response, but to outline the problem with this author’s overly simplistic assessment and to go one step further by showing the math that debunks his “solution.”

Hey Black Kids, Follow the Binary Road!

Anytime someone who has never been poor or Black and who is not a kid decides to write a treatise on what poor, Black children should do…you should be apprehensive. In the article, a man who is a middle class (and always was middle class) technology expert gives advice to poor black children on how they themselves can and should lift themselves out of poverty. This advice includes:

• Getting good grades
• Using all the free sites on the web like Ted Talks, Cliff’s Notes (a real resource for understanding literature), Google Scholar and Project Gutenberg to do well.
• Finding study partners and using Skype to hone your intellect
• Making sure you get into an elite charter school or get a full ride to a private school
• Sucking up to the guidance counselor so that they help you find jobs, college, and other opportunities
• Learning software programming or computers or another "skill."

All of this advice builds to the conclusion that “Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.” (so, you see, poor, Black people are not smart because they aren't trying to not be poor...that is what you are saying, right sir?)

Wait, There Are Holes in This Guy’s Logic!?

Technology was good for this author: rather than giving him a healthy dose of my backhand, he only had to face my comments. As someone who grew up poor in a big city and who ended up going to Stanford, I actually have a lot of relevant experience to comment on this article (which he denied because poor kids, even after going to Stanford, are not smarter than he). A big part of his solution involves poor kids using computers, and he suggests that in the “unlikely event” that they don’t have one, they can just go to one of their wonderful public libraries.

The problem with libraries

As a child, I DID that. I went to the library, and I almost never touched a computer because poor kids (of all races) are competing with retired, unemployed, homeless people and others. Many computers also have a time restriction (in Chicago it was 30 minutes if someone is waiting, which they always were). Further, some of the things he mentions (google scholar, TED) can probably be accessed from a library computer. That said, most do not have the software or hardware for using Skype or for learning how to code. Further, if you don’t live near a library or it is in a sketchy area, the journey there could be dangerous.

Finally, I did a little calculation using Philadelphia to demonstrate the absurdity of his proposal:

According to the most recent census data, approximately 36,000 children in Philadelphia would be considered “poor, Black kids.” (I calculated this by multiplying Philly’s population by the percentage under age 18, multiplied by the percentage of people who are black, multiplied by the percentage of people who are “in poverty,” which probably understates the amount of people who might benefit from his “solutions.”) According to the Philadelphia Public Library Website, there are 68 public libraries. Not all libraries are open right now, no libraries appear to be open on Sundays, so I am again overstating the library’s ability to absorb people. Libraries are open from 9am to 8pm generally 5 days a week and 9 am until 5 pm on Saturdays (not all, but I’ll be generous). That means each library is open 3,285 hours a year. With 68 libraries, the whole system is open 223,380 hours a year. Let’s assume that each has an average of 20 computers (unlikely, but what the heck, we are white and middle class!). Then the system has just under 4.5 million computer hours to offer to poor black kids. That means, each of our 36,000 poor, black kids gets 125 hours with a computer per year if most skipped school for their allotment and if all other library patrons were banned from the computers. This also assumes perfect mobility and that all kids in poor neighborhoods have equal access to equally capacious libraries, which is a stretch.

Now, with about 1,200 of those library hours occurring during school time (40, five-day weeks lasting from 9am until 3pm), each library can realistically only offer 2,085 hours per year, reducing the system’s capacity to 142,000 non-school hours per year, and with 20 computers assumed per library about 2.8 million computer hours. This amounts to 78 hours per “poor, black kid.” How many skills have you mastered by dedicating 78 hours per year? Now if you assume that a kid needs about 30 minutes of homework help for the 200 days that school is in session, that leaves the kid with -22 hours for learning how to code. How many skills have you learned in -22 hours?

As I noted in my article on teachers correcting for systemic inequality, Chicago just moved to close most of its libraries on Mondays. With many cities facing budget shortfalls, the likelihood that public libraries can serve our nation’s poor as much as is needed to escape poverty is decreasing by the day.

Non-logistical problems with the article

Now, aside from the absurd idea that every kid can get the computer access they need to be able to use technology to solve all of their problems, there are many more problems with the author’s arguments:

1. Think back to high school…how was your guidance counselor? I lucked the heck out and I had a great one who helped me apply to colleges, but with a parent that had not gone to college and being in one of the worst public school systems in the nation, the likelihood that this is a sure path is very low.

2. When you are in a single-parent home or have no parents or your parents are working so much that they cannot help you with homework, how do you get good grades? How do you find out about all of these tech resources? How do you know to read interesting middle class guys on Forbes.com to save you from your poverty?

3. The Harvard Business Review recently wrote several articles that note that most people fail to achieve their goals because they are contingent upon things outside of themselves (for example, if I set the goal "get more hits on my blog," that is outside of myself, because you choose to come here, I can't force you...better goals might be: write more posts, leave the link to my blog in other fora, and use social media to attract people to my blog, all of which I can control). Getting good grades depends a lot a teacher’s subjective assessment, having enough food to be able to concentrate on studying/homework, having utilities to be able to see or not shiver to do your homework (or to go online if you are one of the many poor black kids with computers!), or having access to homework help.

4. I noted that the system is probably rigged in subtle ways to favor its creators: higher income whites. Kids are actually quite receptive to this, and kids have to have a lot of willpower to overcome the stigma that being studious often comes with. Many poor black kids get teased or bullied if they try to be studious, often for “acting white.” An educated child also experiences a lot of distance with their less educated family, which can make it tough to keep fighting an uphill battle.

5. The article ignores entirely the severe disadvantages with which most poor kids enter the public school system. The lack of preschool or structured afterschool programming sets them up to be disadvantaged going in. Further, given the amount of tracking (assigning kids to a regular or more accelerated class which usually determines their future trajectory), many kids may already be routed into the “slow lane" of public education.

6. If kids need to fight to get into good schools, then you are admitting that the public school system is failing them in a disproportionate way, which is antithetical to the point of PUBLIC education, as I noted in my article on charters. As the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman” clearly shows, there is not enough supply of charter /private school seats for poor pupils.

7. It is really hard to fight for 78 hours of public library time after school while also getting a job or internship care of your amazing guidance counselor. Further, what if you are an older sibling caring for your younger siblings?

8. Did you skip childhood? Do you know how hard and counterintuitive it is for a child to be that self-disciplined? Part of the advantage that all higher-income kids have is that they are embedded in a web of discipline that is geared toward doing well in school.

9. This article is incredibly paternalistic (I won’t go so far as to say that the author is racist, because I think he believes his ignorant, ill-informed ideas and thinks that they really are a way to help poor kids.). One, it assumes knowledge of something that the author has never experienced. Two, it assumes that poor, black people should work themselves into the ground to be qualified to serve people like him and his business needs.

10. The article completely removes all culpability from the system or from wealthier people. It is rather unfair that his kids, which he notes “have it a lot easier” and not inherently smarter than their lower-income counterparts, do not have to bootstrap their way to the top. I can’t help but wonder if the author were writing in 1840 if the article would blame slaves for not working hard to cozy up to their masters, save up, and buy their freedom. Life is unfair, but let’s not pretend like this is good for our country. We need to attract and keep good teachers. We need for kids to have proper nutrition. We need for kids to have more equal opportunities to succeed or take advantage of an extra-curricular program/job (within the bounds of child labor laws, please!). We need excellent guidance counselors and capacious libraries. We need safe streets. We need to enable working parents to better participate in their kid’s education and put food on the table.

If I Were an Ignorant, Middle-Class Dude

This is my challenge to Gene Marks, the author of this article: put your money where your mouth is. You, as a high-tech employer are probably suffering from a dearth of high-quality talent, so you benefit from having more people to choose from. Further, as a father, it should concern you when kids are unable to escape poverty and realize their full potential. As a taxpayer, you subsidize all the kids’ education that gets wasted when they drop out, their higher incidence of crime (prison is costly!), their higher likelihood to have a teenage pregnancy, and their lower wages that may push them onto the dole. You have a vested interest as a businessman, father, and taxpayer to help poor kids succeed.

I therefore challenge you to go to North and West Philly and take a handful of poor children under your wing. Find them consistent, regular access to a computer and help orient them to all the tools out there. Give them internships. Help them to learn a skill. Give them strategies and structure to help them navigate their school, extracurriculars, and college effectively. Then report back to everyone on all the challenges your article didn’t account for. Report on the amount of resources that it took for you to succeed.

Mr. Marks, my issue with your article was not that the solutions themselves are bad. I used several of them to succeed: I worked my ass off to get good grades and get into magnet schools, I befriended my high school counselor, I went to the library most days of the week, and I taught myself one (and then several) foreign languages. My concern is that it is impractical to expect a kid without any guidance to even think to do all these things, especially when they are logistically improbable. So help some kids to think of these solutions and to carry them out. I want more kids to succeed like me, but I know that my success and theirs is tied to the amount of people who are willing to offer extra guidance and to the ability of the school system and libraries to support and reinforce these kids’ successes.

Act on it!

• Write Mr. Marks or comment on the Forbes article and encourage him to accept my challenge. Write other businessmen and encourage them to offer guidance and cultivate a generation of leaders from the lower-rungs of the socioeconomic ladder of society.
• Take a kid under your wing and offer them access to some of the great tools that Mr. Marks suggests. Consider Big Brothers and Sisters of America or the scores of other organizations working to help kids overcome poverty.
• Fight to keep your local library system open more, give it more resources, and help kids to use them for success.

Speak out!

What other problems do you see with the solutions that Mr. Marks offers? Which of his solutions do you find salient or salvageable?

What do you think it takes for a poor person or someone who suffers from institutional inequality to make it if the system is unable to help them?

-----

For those who are curious, here is what I wrote to the author:

“Sir, as a white kid who grew up on welfare in a single-parent home and went on to graduate from Stanford, you might think that I would support you. Instead, I am so incredibly disappointed in your ignorant “recipe” for success. I got into a magnet school that my mom found out about by sheer accident. I went to the library and read a lot because it was the only place with adequate heat and electricity. The problem? I got evicted more times than I can count. Our utilities got shut off so often. I did not, contrary to your “teacher friends’” assessment, have a computer at home. Had I known about any of these tools (likelihood is that I would not have and that my mother would have been even less likely to as a waitress working 15 hours a day 6 days a week), I still wouldn’t have been able to use them. What library system could accommodate all the poor kids (of any race) to help them to realize this goal? Where would I find the time to use these resources when I started to work at age 15? Where would I get my stamina to study “coding” when we didn’t have enough food to eat dinner that day? It is articles like these that perpetuate the systemic ignorance of the role class and race play on success and prevent us from real solutions. You clearly do not understand what it is like to be poor, and your blindness is a danger because this article will only reach those who are well enough to-do to have an impact on policies that directly affect your mythical “poor black kid.” And those policy makers will make terrible choices that entrench systemic racism and class division even further in our country. Shame on you.”

Here is his response:

“Thanks for your comment. I still stick to what I wrote, and believe that the opportunity is there for everyone if they study hard and get good grades, use technology to help them get good grades, apply to the best schools they can, get help from their guidance counselor, and make sure to learn a good skill.”

You be the judge. Don’t accept inequality of opportunity. Don’t blame the victims. When one person succeeds, we all benefit in concrete ways. Our country’s future depends on everyone being proactive, not washing their hands of blame.

Be a Better Learner of Foreign Languages

My last post focused quite a bit on the failures of language teaching, but if you took away from that article that the failures of students (or yourself) to learn a foreign language are going to be completely remedied by improving teaching, you are kidding yourself. There are exceptional teachers that will waste all their effort to help their students and that will get jack squat in return. I know, we all love to blame teachers, cut their benefits, and pretend like parents and students couldn't possibly be part of the problems our education system faces...turns out, that's probably a little misguided. This post is designed to compliment the article on foreign language teaching with proactive strategies that language learners (or those supporting a language learner) can use to prepare themselves and better acquire a new language. And teachers, giving your students the tools to effectively learn is something you can do to set them up for success, so this article is also directed at you.

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?

Time your studies and refreshers in a way that is compatible with how the brain commits things to memory:

• 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.
  

Use that new vocabulary, even if it doesn't always make sense:

• 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.
  

Stop studying when you cease retaining, and don't think you'll be effective right after a study marathon or reading 100 pages of a novel.

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).
  

Use natural overlaps between your language and the target language to guess new vocabulary:

• 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."

Find ways to immerse yourself:

• 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).
  

This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it will give you several possible ways to improve how you learn new vocabulary and get you to give an FL another chance.

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).

1. 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.
2. 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.
   
3. 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."
4. 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.
   
5. 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.

Pronunciation!

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):

1. Listen critically to how a word is pronounced. Where does a native speaker put emphasis? How do they make a vowel or consonant sound?
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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).
   
6. 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.

Hopefully these strategies for learning a language will prove useful to you or to someone you know (or teach) that is learning an FL. And, to give everyone the catharsis they need after reading many of those pronunciation tips..."that's what s/he said."

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:

1. 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.
   
2. You learn on a block schedule and thus practice maybe 50 minutes a day if you are lucky.
3. You learn once or twice a week and thus have too much time between lessons to forget what you learn.
   
4. There is not enough speaking/conversation/listening built into the system.
5. Textbooks are poorly written or offer exercises that don't stimulate learning.
6. Your teacher uses ineffective strategies.

Knowing these problems exist and developing strategies to work around the system or a bad teacher will help you to be a more effective learner. If you have irregular classes (twice a week, say), create a space in between to avoid language decay.

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):

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
3. 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.

Speak out!

- 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).