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Table of Contents
Language is Sound
The Program
Six Qualities of Successful Language Learners
Language Proficiency
Building a Vocab Collection
Free Listening
Active Listening
All About Speaking
Learning Activities
How to Read to Learn a Language
21-Day Language Blast
References
About the Author
Introduction
If you've bought this book, then I assume you've decided to learn a new
language.
Congratulations! Sometimes mustering up the courage to make a lofty
goal is the hardest step.
I'll never tell anyone that learning a new language is easy, because it's
not. It requires effort and time. But it's not impossible either. People from all
over the world, from all walks of life, have done it, and there's no reason to think
you can't either.
You should always be skeptical when taking language learning advice,
because there's so much bad info out there and unfortunately a few snake oil
salesmen. For that reason, I'd like to mention my credentials briefly.
I studied Modern Standard Arabic in the US Navy and worked as a
translator both during and after my time in the military, for a total of five years.
Recently, I taught myself German and Spanish to varying levels of proficiency,
without having taken a class in either language, by using the techniques I discuss
in this book. I also have a bachelor's degree in English from the University of
North Florida and I've been a technical writer for the last several years.
This book is the result of over a decade of experience working with
language. Many language learning books are written by linguists—that is,
language scientists. I'm definitely not a scientist. My advice stems from getting
my hands dirty with language and words, as a student, a translator, a professional
writer, and a self-studier.
I'm by no means the most talented language learner in the world, or
anything even close to that. I'm pretty decent, though, at communicating
complex topics. Really, I started writing about languages at my website
(www.languagesurfer.com) because I saw people who wanted to learn languages
make some pretty big, easy-to-spot mistakes. I wanted to provide them and
others like them some no-nonsense, straightforward advice that could actually
help. And I wrote this book for those same reasons.
Before we get into the meat of the book, let me give you one last
thought: You never have to be perfect in a language to benefit from it. The
tagline of my website is "The Art of Imperfect Language" because I don't want
people thinking that perfection is the goal. Language learning is not a pass/fail
endeavor. You do not need to know your new language flawlessly to make
friends, read books, work, study, watch television shows, or travel.
If you enjoy the journey and start getting what you can out of your new
language as soon as possible, you'll see some reward for your efforts and stay
motivated. And that motivation will snowball into further improvement, until
sometime down the line you'll find yourself living the language.
Good luck!
Language is Sound
I studied writing and literature in college, but one of my most important
lessons about languages wasn’t learned in class.
After high school, I joined the Navy, learned Arabic, and worked as an
Arabic translator for a couple years. It was tough but rewarding work.
I got out of the military and went to the University of North Florida in
Jacksonville to get my English degree. I was 22 and desperately trying to
understand works by Dickens, Salinger, and Vonnegut. I was also broke, so I got
a job as a writing tutor at the university.
All kinds of people came in to the tutoring center, usually because our
building was air conditioned and provided relief from the Florida heat. One
group, however, really stood out to me: the deaf students. UNF has a well-
respected deaf studies program, which often attracts students who are deaf or
hard of hearing.
The deaf students I worked with at the tutoring center were very hard
working and intelligent. Yet their papers were sometimes difficult to read. Every
now and then I just didn’t understand what the students were trying to say, and if
I offered a correction, I was often met with resistance, even belligerence. It was
like they just couldn’t imagine that they could be wrong.
It was a little confusing. They were motivated students. I wanted to help
them, and I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to. And I still remember one blonde
girl who I was tutoring. She started getting snappy at me when I was trying to
help her put her sentences together. With her sharp words, I felt my ears burn red
with both irritation and embarrassment.
Then one day the tutoring center held a mandatory training session with
a counselor from the deaf studies program. She told us that deafness not only
hindered a person’s ability to listen and speak, but also to read and write. She
said that since deaf students couldn’t hear language, they didn’t really
understand viscerally how words fit together. They were essentially doing their
best to arrange words according to rules they've been taught, the way a computer
programmer puts together code. And the result was language that was, at times,
impossible to understand.
One tutor in our training session suggested that any developmental
delays in reading and writing might be attributed to the fact that English is a
second language to deaf students, with sign language being the first. Yet the
counselor insisted that this was not the case—it was an issue more akin to a
learning disability, and if we didn't acknowledge just how difficult reading and
writing without hearing was, we were doing the deaf students a disservice by not
providing them the instruction they needed.
I'm by no means an expert in learning disabilities or special education,
but I trusted (and still do trust) the counselor's words, which I've since learned
are backed up by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (1).
And of course I’m not putting down deaf people at all. In fact, I’m
impressed with all that they do accomplish with spoken language. I’m also not
suggesting that there aren’t deaf people who can write well, because I know
there are plenty who can. To get to that point, though, they had to overcome
much more than the general population has to.
The bottom line with all this? If you can’t hear a language, then you are
at a severe disadvantage when you’re trying to learn it. This doesn’t just affect
your ability to listen to or speak a language, as one would expect, but also your
ability to read it and write it.
With that new perspective, I was able to try different approaches with
the students. When I knew just how much they had to overcome and exactly
what their challenge was, I had a better idea of how to tutor them, and I was also
able to become more patient.
That’s also when I got my epiphany:
Language is sound. And sound is the key to unlocking our brains’ ability
to learn a language.
When we’re learning a language, our ability to hear it isn’t just helpful.
It's vital. I don’t believe it's an exaggeration to say that sound is the master key
that unlocks a language. Before we can start remembering words and
grammatical rules and all that fun stuff, we first have to hear the language's
sounds and rhythms.
For years, I’ve wondered why some things worked for learning
languages, and some didn’t. I’ve also wondered why some people seemed to
succeed, and others not so much. For instance: • Why did two years of Spanish
class in high school not allow me to hold even a very basic conversation in
Spanish?
• When I was going through language school to become a translator,
why did some students do well, and others not so much?
• When I lived in Germany, why did some of my colleagues—really
smart American engineers—have such a hard time learning German in the
classroom, while guys who went to bars or had German girlfriends seem to pick
it up almost effortlessly?
• Why did my translator colleagues who worked on translating written
Arabic documents eight hours a day for months or years at a time not really
improve their language skills?
That last point was particularly confusing to me. I would’ve thought that
given their natural aptitude, their education, and the amount of time they spent
with the language, those translators would’ve become experts at Arabic. But
they were really not much better than when they had left language school.
Could sound be the missing link that kept everyone from progressing?
Like I said, I’m no stranger to languages. I worked as a translator in
poorly lit rooms for several years. The pages of my Arabic-to-English dictionary
are tattered and dog-eared.
Later on, I lived in Germany and taught myself enough German to
survive around town and have small conversations with my neighbors.
Recently, I’ve been studying Spanish and have taught myself enough to
understand magazines and telenovelas and be able to socialize with my Latino
neighbors.
And perhaps most significantly, I’ve been a professional writer of
English for years. These days I’m a technical writer by trade, and some of my
non-technical writing has been published on several popular websites.
What I’ve learned in all my languages—even my native English—is that
language is something of a mystery. What makes it work can’t quite be
explained.
There have been attempts in the past to remove that mystery and make
language more robotic. The 18th century intellectual Francis Bacon, for
example, wanted to create a scientific language that was more precise and
logical, something like the language we use in biology to give animals their
scientific names (2). But nobody communicates that way, because nobody thinks
that way. That’s why the average person still calls a coyote a coyote and not a
canis latrans.
But why? Why isn’t language more logical? Using English as an
example, why does “bear” sound like “bare” and mean something completely
different? How do we keep track of things when the plural of chicken is
chickens, but the plural of deer is deer? How can Americans say “the team is
winning,” but the British say “the team are winning”?
It’s not because we learn the right answers, or understand them. It’s
because we hear the right answers.
What is a Language?
A language is a system that humans use to communicate among
themselves. (In this book, I’m of course referring to human languages and not
computer or animal languages. I’m also referring specifically to languages with a
spoken component, and not sign language.) Linguistics is the formal, scientific
study of language. It’s an important field of study, but its practitioners—linguists
—disagree all the time about how grammar works, how words function, and
even what language is and isn’t. But using commonly accepted ideas, I’m
comfortable saying that every language has its own specific set of sounds, its
own words, and its own grammar.
Sounds are distinct audio component, which vary from language to
language. English, for example, has at least 24 consonant sounds and 14 vowel
sounds, with some dialects having more of each. In comparison, Arabic has 28
consonants and 3 vowel sounds, claiming some sounds that English doesn’t have
and lacking some that English does have. Furthermore, even in the same
language, this set of sounds may vary from one geographical region to the next.
Words are kind of like codes. They are symbols with a meaning attached
to them. English speakers know that the word “apple” generally refers to a real-
world equivalent: a very specific fruit that grows on a tree. Words can refer to
physical objects, actions, qualities, abstract ideas, and on and on and on. Alone,
they’re surprisingly vague. Even “apple,” whose physical-world referent is
pretty easy, is ambiguous. If someone says he has an apple, does that mean he
has a red one, a green one, a fresh one, a rotten one? Words are like malleable
little chunks that can be combined with each other to form more concrete—but
still malleable—ideas.
Grammar refers to an ordered way to put words together to give them a
meaning. If you just utter a list of words—for example, coming, us, car, toward,
that, right, is—then you’re not telling anyone anything. But if you align those
words according to a set of rules, then you’re all of the sudden telling people
“that car is coming right toward us,” and everyone knows to get out of the way.
As a community, the speakers of a language agree on the ways to put words
together.
People interact with language in four ways: listening to it, speaking it,
reading it, and writing it. Each of these is a separate skill: The skill of listening
requires the ability to recognize language that is spoken.
The skill of speaking requires the ability to produce language that is
spoken.
The skill of reading requires the ability to recognize language that is
written.
The skill of writing requires the ability to produce language that is
written.
That seems kind of straightforward, but it’s a little tricky if you really
get down to it. Being able to produce language is much more difficult than being
able to recognize language, so listening is much more forgiving than speaking.
As the listener in a conversation, you have to deduce what the other person is
saying, but with a little intuition you can get the meaning even if you miss a
couple words or don’t understand a couple grammatical points.
On the other hand, when you’re the speaker, you have to produce the
right sounds, produce the right words, pronounce the words correctly, and then
put together words with enough grammar so that the other person understands
you.
Furthermore, language learners react differently to written language than
they do to spoken language. Some students will do better with reading because
of the way their minds work, while others will do better with listening. With
reading, you can be more careful and re-read something over and over again to
get the meaning. But listening provides intonation, stress, and rhythm, all of
which provide contextual cues.
Additionally, spoken communication is often full of pauses, informal
grammatical constructions, and repetition. Written communication, on the other
hand, is often put together more carefully.
Even though these are all separate skills, they overlap. For instance,
being in a conversation requires you to be able to understand what the other
person is saying, so speaking requires a high-level of listening ability.
