{"id":508,"date":"2009-03-25T23:17:57","date_gmt":"2009-03-25T21:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=508"},"modified":"2009-03-26T15:11:59","modified_gmt":"2009-03-26T13:11:59","slug":"learning-languages-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=508","title":{"rendered":"Learning Languages Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m making vague plans to go to Argentina<\/a> in August, so I’ve started brushing up on my Spanish. I’d learnt Spanish for a month before going to Peru in 2001, but haven’t used it since, and have forgotten everything but Hola<\/em> and, of course, Hasta la vista, Baby<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve been considering how my personal language learning experiences tie up with advances in language theory, what with greater access to this knowledge thanks to the internet. <\/p>\n

I studied French for two years at university. During the classes no English was spoken, and I also didn’t practise daily. I didn’t speak it again from the end of 1995 until 2000, when I travelled to Madagascar for a month. I did some very superficial revision before I went, but found I recalled it reasonably well, and Madagascar was a great place to learn, since almost no one spoke a word of English. By the end of my month there, I was comfortably able to spend my last penniless day in reasonable conversation on a park bench.<\/p>\n

As Tim Ferris points out<\/a>, it’s a much better use of time to re-learn a language when you need it, rather than try to keep it up when you don’t. My lesson from this experience was that, if we know something reasonably well, that knowledge can be recalled with minimal effort when needed.<\/p>\n

I learnt Spanish for one month before going to Peru in 2001, practising an hour a day. The software I used back then, Learn Spanish<\/em> by Knowledge Adventure, impressed me at the time. I learnt enough Spanish in a month to bumble around Peru, assisted by enough shared English, Afrikaans and French vocabulary to speed things along, and, probably most importantly, was aided by the average Peruvian’s enthusiasm and fluency in English. However, it didn’t take long for me to forget all my Spanish, while retaining some smidgins of French, which I hadn’t spoken for much longer.<\/p>\n

From this I learnt that, with regular progress, we can achieve a lot in little time. My month of learning Spanish was vastly more efficient than the 16 or so learning French. However, because I didn’t persist beyond this month and the month of travel, I never got to as good a level as with my French, and my recall was much poorer.<\/p>\n

One of the great debates in language learning was between systems that advocate almost exclusively using the language being learnt, mimicking how a child would learn their first language, and using English (or the home language) fairly extensively as you learn the new language.<\/p>\n

My French learning was the former, and, although quite effective, since the extreme alternative of translating everything as you learn, memorising grammar rules and so on, is extremely slow and inefficient, I found it frustrating not being able to use English to understand the concept. Perhaps I understood a cartoon showing a man extending his hand to another as a greeting, when in fact it was a fight. I’d then wasted the time making a false association, which then had to be unlearnt. Limited English to clarify context would have been useful.<\/p>\n

There’s been much progress since 2001, and learning a language, with all the tools and information available online, is much easier than it used to be. Resources I’ve found useful include Tim Ferris’s How to Learn Any Language in Three Months<\/a>, Why Language Classes Don\u2019t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate (Plus: Madrid Update)<\/a>,
\nHow to Resurrect Your High School Spanish\u2026 or Any Language<\/a> and Wikibook’s How to Learn a Language<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, however, I discovered something potentially much more useful. The concept of Spaced Repetition<\/a> (also discussed<\/a> on the interesting Glowing Face Man blog<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In my language learning experiences to date, I’ve been frustrated by the amount of time wasted on repetition. I never seemed to get the balance right. I was either waiting too long between repeating work, and then recalling it poorly, or wasting time repeating work I knew well too frequently. <\/p>\n

Of course theres an optimum period for repeating new information in order to best memorise it. The spacing effect<\/a> indicates that we best remember when we study a few things over a long period of time, rather than a lot in a short space of time.<\/p>\n

So, as an example, spending three hours today learning 20 basic phrases, and then nothing for two weeks, could result in less recall, and more time spent, than spending 10 minutes every day.<\/p>\n

It also indicates that there’s a diminishing return the more time we spend. So although spending 3 hours a day will result in a better outcome than 10 minutes a day, the returns per minute spent will be higher in the latter.<\/p>\n

One of the difficulties with most books, CD’s, flash cards or software is that you will too often be covering work you know well, and too infrequently be covering work you don’t know well. You have to listen to the whole piece of audio to get the benefit of the three words you don’t know. If I know the word for dog really well, repeatedly being tested on this, or hearing this, is a waste of time, albeit good for your ego. Not being tested on the word cat, if I don’t know it, is also a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n

Hence the concept of spaced repetition. Topics well known are repeated infrequently, and topics poorly known are covered more frequently, with the magic being in the algorithm to determine this. Of course, this is a perfect opportunity for software to assist. I’m aware of two Free software spaced repetition applications – Anki<\/a> and Mnemosyne<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I’ve only used Anki, and although it’s as buggy as a swarm of midges on my setup, regularly crashing when loading or editing text, that’s a minor inconvenience, and I’ve found it very useful. The only comparison I could find between the two was Anki vs. Mnemosyne<\/a>, on Glowing Face Man, with Anki getting the nod. Anki seems to cater particularly well for learning Chinese or Japanese.<\/p>\n

So, in summary, to learn a language effectively we need:<\/p>\n