The One Thing You Can't Bullshit In Foreign Language Learning

Yep, no doubt about it. Compared to listening and understanding, reading and writing, and even speaking, are a doddle!

Thanks for yet one more fascinating helpful article.

I like your realistic, down to earth approach to language learning. I’ve read a few articles of yours, looking forward to reading more. So, questions about this article :How about different types of learners? Does this mean those who understand and retain information best by reading or images have less chances in achieving fluency? Also, why not speaking from the beginning? Learners are usually scared of speaking, of making mistakes, of their accent etc. Why not do both speaking and taking the time with listening more from day 1? I have the feeling that you include “communication” in what you call speaking here
(I agree with those who suggest language skills are 5 not 4, adding communication as a very different skill than speaking). Sorry for the absence of paragraphs, I’m not on the computer.

So very true!! Thanks for putting into text what I tell my students every year!

I found your observations both interesting and valid. Thanks for highlighting that an inordinate amount of time needs to be invested in listening in order to be able to have meaningful conversations in the target language. I have noticed that the time lag when a person reacts to output is also indicative of language level. Sometimes it is only a fraction of second that gives it away: How quickly you get the meaning and then are able to respond with the appropriate response. Especially at higher levels, how quickly can you come with answers in a quiz programme.

I have found that listening comprehension comes to the fore especially in tonal languages. It is virtually impossible to have a fluent dialogue without a solid listening comprehension base and in the case of a tonal language that may take several thousand hours.

Really interesting to hear how you did that test in the military. To me this raises the question if we can learn even more from the way interpreters learn their trade. Shadowing is of course one aspect. Is there anything else we can adopt from that profession?

Thanks to this article, it made me realize why clearly I havent advanced in my spanish language pursuit -- it’s because i neglected an important aspect of learning it, which is the listening part. I’m focusing more on this aspect by starting to listen to short Spanish files, while reading the transcript, then get the meaning of words i encountered the first time. Will listen and study one file throughout the day, until I know the file by heart. I’ll start today, by the way. Wish me luck!

I agree that reports of learning a language in a few weeks are sensationalized. They can even be discouraging for new learners who feel like they’re moving too slow. Unscripted conversations are hard on learners, but they’re essential. Great post.

Finally, I found a language learning blog post that is honest. I am native in Greek and let’s say fluent in English (depends on how you define fluency, but still) and currently on an intermediate level in the Swedish language.

I’ve been doing some googling around language learning facts, because I wanted to find out if other people experiences the same struggles that I do; I’m at a point that I can form my own sentences, can and already had a couple of small talks in Swedish and effectively read a text (obviously not a highly intellectual one, such as academic level etc). But I always reach a point that I think “How would I ever reach the point to express [insert a situation/feeling/opinion] in Swedish”? and then I get disappointed. So I thought about getting some insight from other language learners online.

What I MOSTLY found, was blogs of polyglots saying things like “you don’t need grammar”, “throw away your coursebook”, “speak like a native in 4 months” etc. I am a skeptical person in general, so I did not really believe those things. However, my meta-search on these resources didn’t find a lot of criticism. People like to thing that shortcuts, free meals, call it whatever you like, are there and that they are making the smart choice.

My approach differs, and as I can see by your post it’s close to yours. I will try to take more advice from you from now on, since it seems that I found a serious person on this whole thing.

Personally, my biggest problem in language learning now is the emotional roller-coaster; I successfully have a small talk and I feel I’m really close to ACTUALLY be consider a Swedish speaker (even better when this talk is oral). On the other hand, I reach a point where I can’t express myself, and suddenly I feel like I know nothing. I am sure many people can relate to that. I plan on working hard to get out of this.

Thanks for all your advice!

Mezzoguild recommends a few resources in his article. I have found the Glossika method to be quite good. Sometimes just learning verbatim standard sentences may be ok. After all, even native speakers tend to re-use and recycle ready-made sentences all the time.

I started my German study by reading a stick-figure picture book paperback, and listening to library German course stuff.

In order to sell a course—either responsible/irresponsible commercial or academic—the author/swindler, as the case may be, does have to make the case that:

”This course will have/features immediate communicative skills...” Blah, blah...
”...the way children acquire... naturally, etc....”

No they don’t. Apart from babbling and picking up a preliminary phonemic inventory, infants keep their ears open and their mouths shut. They are mapping the features, static and dynamic, of the real world into semantic and syntactic representations.

This does take a long, long time, but it’s the best place to start. Total Physical Response cultists have taken things a bit too far in some cases, but they have the right idea. In the beginning, as long as someone is making appropriate non-oral, or minimal oral (yes/no; ya/nein; ne/aniyo, etc.) responses, he or she is making good acquisitional progress. After a month they can work on phonetic output by successive approximation.

If I had to choose one skill to be strong at, I would choose listening comprehension too because, as you say, it’s the skill that let’s you soak the language around you—all of it: vocabulary, grammar, intonation, usage…

I think is a good idea to work on all language skills though. Learning full phrases, for example, will allow you to recognise them as units more easily when you hear them and thus help you improve your listening comprehension faster.

I agree 100%, with the caveat that listening should, wherever possible in the early stages, be accompanied with some sort of active response. In other words, basic greetings can be mirrored, according to culture, with slight gestures of: high-fiving, bowing, nodding, fist-bumping, arm-spreading, smiling, eye-contact (or avoidance, where appropriate). Just slight muscle-movements will suffice. Classroom activities can be shadowed by imaginary book-opening, page-finding/turning, arm-raising, etc.

When the input becomes increasingly abstract, that will become somewhat impractical but then in the upper intermediate and advanced stages, real conversation will be taking up a greater load anyway.

Thank you sooo much for this-one of the best language learning articles I’ve ever read; this made me realise I’m not crap at language learning, I just need to practice listening more.

Very well said all the complication and benefits of having knowledge in foreign language!! Learning part of second language is easy but it’s hard for the first couple of years to catch what different language speakers are saying at once.

I so agree. I am new on here, but don’t know how many times I have heard someone...usually their grandparents for example came from Mexico. They will say that they understand Spanish, but can’t really speak it. I say that they are full of BS. But I am just a beginner in Spanish as well, but I did reach a 2 level proficiency in German as an Army linguist, so I have some reference. Have other out there heard this common line that the person can understand the language, but just can’t speak it very well? Thanks.

i grew up in Australia with Ialian parents and i can understand a lot what is being said but i do not speak Italian.

I believe it’s the rule, rather than the exception (even for L1 people), that comprehension > production. Vocabulary provides a simple frinstance: Almost everyone recognizes words that they really cannot throw comfortably into a pragmatically well-constructed sentence in casual conversation. I would struggle to use words like ‘egregiously’ and ‘pusillanimous’, but I know what a speaker (or writer) is driving at. They are something like ‘over-the-top-bad’, and ‘dishonest’, and I can only hope I spelled them correctly.

I completely agree with the points you have. I took the IELTS before and the listening section has all types of English accents

Do you know where to found test for the ADF?

just a quick question.... for the dlab the adf give, do they give you a paper and pencil to work with? and exactly how fast do they read out these questions?

It was all done on computer (no paper) and from memory I think it was naturally spoken speed.

Very true observations. It is essentially the Turing test of foreign language acquisition. It’s easy enough if you’re “scripting,” it’s when someone asks the robot a super novel question (or makes a novel comment.) Syntax is not equivalent to semantics. That’s when the rubber hits the road. I’ll never forget this experience when my FIL told me in his native tongue “all dogs have gonorrhea” and I went outside and told my husband I must have misunderstood because I heard him say that all dogs have gonorrhea.

Nice post. This has also been my experience. I also find that the better my listening gets, the more natural my speaking gets, and it seems to relate directly to noticing things around me. With Korean putting the radio on all the time when I’m driving over the last couple of years seems to have helped a fair bit.
I’ve found that the method outlined in on a site for learning Telugu that is based on the Birkenbihl method interesting. It seems like an efficient way to learn to understand a lot of simple content quickly with courses like Assimil or Teach Yourself or something similar. Of course then you’d have to move on to harder content. Global listening of difficult content that you can’t understand also seems to be good for adjusting the ears to the sounds of the language. I figure it’s necessary to have some tolerance of ambiguity/not understanding things to do this second type of listening. I’ve noticed a lot of my students really hate listening to stuff they don’t understand but actually I quite like it.

So true - you cannot fake unscripted conversation! Although I have to say my comprehension has always been higher than my speaking skills and my ability to communicate freely in another language has always been the last skill to come.

Great post,
I’ve applied for a Cryptologic Linguist role with the Royal Australian Navy and will have this test in a couple of weeks. I’ve also looked at the RAAF role you described too but am more excited about a life at sea.

Thanks mate.

Best of luck with the test!

I strongly agreed with everything except the bit about immediately discounting anything that tells you to speak immediately: both the speak-immediately and the silent period methods can be effective depending on a multitude of factors the most important of which is the learner themselves which dictates what will and won’t work for them. Also, speaking immediately doesn’t preclude doing a lot of listening and work on listening comprehension.

Anyway, I have absolutely found that listening comprehension is, by far, the toughest part of learning a language, my experience matches yours, yes, definitely. I also find that my preferred method of dealing with this is movies--movies in the language in question with subtitles in the language in question (the one being spoken), that’s massively important. I find that maybe 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 or so foreign language movies will have subtitles in the language spoken. Luckily right now I’m learning Spanish which is one of the easiest choices in terms of available learning material (e.g. there are more Spanish-language movies available on Amazon on DVD than any other foreign language, around 11,000 vs 6,000 for French, the next most prolific one). My personal favorites so far are Maria Full of Grace and Pan’s Labyrinth, for what it’s worth.

I like your work, keep it up.

Cheers,
Andrew

I agree! Thanks for putting this so succinctly.

Arabic is a serious problem in the area, as no one speaks according the rules of Modern Standard, which is the basis of most Arabic courses. I learned Arabic first in Morocco, then Modern Standard, then Levantine. It was better than courses.

I’m looking for more structured ways of learning languages beginning with listening comprehension. That’s how babies start: listen for 1.5-2 years, then make up nonsense, then speak.

Do you have any suggestions on how to improve listening comprehension?

Came across your website as I was looking for information regarding the Signals Operator Linguist specialist testing. Your website was the only one I found was useful. I’ve sat the initial JOES Day (Now referred to as the YOU Session) where you sit the general aptitude test and are filtered to suitable jobs.

Do you have any tips or advice on how I could prepare for the specialist testing? As you’ve passed it, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

G’day Jade.

As they tell you, there’s no way you can study for this exam. You either have the right aptitude for it or you don’t.

However, one way you can ‘warm yourself up’ for the test is to go over some basic grammar for languages you don’t know (pay special attention to affixes) and listen to audio in those languages to try and spot certain grammatical features.

So for example in Modern Standard Arabic, the suffix -uka on verbs generally means “you (m)” as a direct object, and -uki means “you (f)”. So listen to Arabic audio and try to hear these suffixes.

You won’t be doing a real language like Arabic but it will help prepare you to listen for these features.

When you do your test, they’ll explain affixes and other grammatical rules for the artificial language and then get you to listen to recordings and translate them.

Hope that helps! Good luck :)

Regarding listening practice, do you have any thoughts on the relative merits of, for example, an hour a day over 4 months versus 4 hours a day over one month ? To what extent can you compress this practice to achieve results in less time ?

That’s actually a really good point.

If you have the time and devotion to spend four hours a day listening rather than one I’m sure your listening comprehension will improve at a faster rate.

The only problem is there does come a point where too much study can be detrimental and cause you not to retain as much information. Even in an immersion context abroad there’s only so much you can handle each day before you feel tired and overwhelmed.

I’d like to other peoples’ opinions on this though.

Love the post Donovan!

Thanks Jared :)

> The learner might be able to say a lot in their target language but as soon as a native speaker says something which warrants a response, it’s going to be very obvious whether or not the learner actually understands what’s being said.

I basically agree with this, but I would put it a slightly different way. Comprehension indeed takes a great deal of time to build, but more telling still is your ability to engage in that scenario. You may feel that you’re confident and you can talk about a lot of things, but being exposed to natives and the completely arbitrary gamut of topics they are prone to bring up is the real test of how agile you are.

This is true in our native language(s) too, we’re simply not able to have a meaningful conversation about absolutely everything, yet we are very good at engaging on almost any subject whether we know it or not. Thus our “foreign” language ability is a striving to approximate this.

Thanks a lot Kevin! :)
How long have you been learning Turkish for?

Great to connect with another language learning blogger too!

My Turkish has been dormant since 2008 for many different reasons but I’m slowly getting into the habit of studying little by little. The only problem I’m having is finding someone to practice with (as you’ve experienced yourself being an Australian, the difference in time zones has made it challenging to keep in touch with my friends who speak my target language). My wife and I are working towards my dream of living in Turkey for several months in order for me to reach C2 level in the language :)

I find this article to be inspirational. Too many language blogs out there go off about how easy it is to achieve fluency in a language when in reality it’s a lot of hard work and dedication. While this is true to an extent that learning a language is easier than many people make it out to be (i.e. North Americans) but it can be discouraging to those struggling with their language goals. For example, if I go around telling everyone I meet, “Learning another language is super easy! In a few months you’ll reach fluency!” and they struggle with it this could make them feel inadequate or incapable of learning another language. I think the best approach is to say, “it’s a lot of work but totally worth the effort.”

Anyone can spend a few weeks to a few months studying a phrase book and appear to be fluent but when confronted with topics by native speakers not mentioned in the phrase book they are SOL. This is the current state of my Turkish right now.

I had a similar experience when I joined the United States Army.

Anyone who had foreign language proficiency on their enlistment papers was made to take the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery). The test sounds fairly similar to the one you’ve described in that the government uses a made-up language to test aptitude for learning foreign languages but it has both an oral and a written segment.

I had forgotten about that experience actually, so I’m glad you reminded me! I’ll have to write a post about my experience.

Hi Mike.

I think the audio material was actually provided to the Australia Defence Force by the US military. You and I might have done the same test. :)

Mike,

Do you remember what language the test was in? My father took the test years and years ago, and his recollection was that the language used was Esperanto. I took a similar test a while back as well, and the language used was Kurdish (this was before most anyone had ever heard of Kurds).

I’ve met more than my fair share of non-native Thai speakers (as in foreigners) at various and sundry schools here in Bangkok. Even ones who had good intonation and sentence structure seemed to struggle when deciphering regular speed normal (colloquially) spoken Thai. This seemed to occur even if they knew the topic being discussed.

I think you bring up a very valid point. Personally I rarely use the term “fluency” (because it can mean many different things to different people). Instead I use; “fluidity in speaking” (pausing when a native speaker would, using cadence in speaking like a native speaker, instead of having that “chopped up” foreign speaker sound to the language).
Interesting post, thanx

Thanks Tod.
Very true.

I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences with the Thai language in future. It’s a language that I’m hoping to tackle over the next year or so.

Purely out of curiosity, are you still going ahead with the Air Force position? That particular position is the only full-time ADF career I’ve ever considered

It’s definitely a possibility for me, David.

Have you gone through the recruitment process yet? There’s also a cryptolinguist position in the Navy.

So very true. Fluency means a lot of different things to people, but honestly, until you can listen, and comprehend conversations in your target language, you shouldn’t really claim to be proficient.

Agreed!

Thanks, Desmond.

You are 100% correct. I am an American who ls currently living in Bogota, Colombia and the way that the people speak here in NOTHING like what was on the audio cds that I listened to prior to coming here. CDs don’t use real language spoken as natives speak. For me listening is the HARDEST thing to do. I ask questions but don’t understand the answer.
Jerry Bauer, ssp
Bogota, Colombia

Thanks Jerry.

True. I had the same problem in Egypt when I first started using audio that was unnatural and slow. I didn’t have a clue what people were saying.

This is why I urge people to start off with completely natural audio material from the very beginning. There’s no such as ‘advanced audio’ - it’s ‘natural audio’.

Just keep surrounding yourself with the language and you’ll improve (very handy being in Columbia! :)).

I absolutely agree!!! It doesn’t help to learn to paraphrase sentences from a book.