Effective Language Learning: Just Listen and Read
Hi there Steve Kaufmann here.
I often get asked to provide subtitles or a transcript for the videos that I do in other languages. I simply don't have time to do this. You know, it's basically all I'm able to do is to do some of these videos every now and again and I'm just not gonna provide transcripts but people are welcome to do so if they want to do so. What I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to, more or less, cover the same ground here in English that I covered in my two most recent videos in Chinese and Japanese, so that might help you. With the Japanese what I've mentioned, first of all that we are going to have another hang out and I'm actually planning to have it on Thursday at 4 pm Pacific Standard Time which is midnight, Greenwich Mean Time or Coordinated, whatever is called UTC or something time.
In other words, you know, one hour to the East of Europe, I guess. So if you wanna join me, and we don't know what language we're gonna be speaking, probably English but if people wanna come in Japanese or in other languages that's fine. That time slot does work for Asia, so hopefully we'll have some participants from Japan or China or Korea.
So if you can make it, please come to the LingQ page at google plus or let me know here at my youtube channel. So it's the first point I've mentioned. And the second point is I want to cover this issue of input-based learning. It goes by different names, in Japan is called (Japanese words) in other words listen a lot. Or read a lot, listen a lot. And basically that's what is amounts to. It amounts to spending most of your time listening and reading and working on your vocabulary and becoming familiar with the language rather than on output-activities or grammar-focused activities. That doesn't mean that there is no output or that people don't look at grammar, but it just means that the bulk of the time is spent on listening and reading and building up vocabulary. And why do I think this is a better way to learn languages?
I have five reasons. First of all, because it works and it works very well. Some of the best polyglots on the Internet, or the famous Kató Lomb. If you study their methods you'll see that it generally involves a lot of reading. 100 years or so, 150 years ago, and of course today with the available new technology, listening. So, and in my own case, it works for me. And my most recent experience was Czech, where for the first 8 months I only listened and read.
And then gradually started speaking and stepped up speaking. Just prior to going to Prague and I could understand everything the locals said to me when I got there. My speaking, which was already call it a low intermediate level, stepped up to maybe a middle intermediate level while I was there. You have to continue speaking, of course, but I was able to do all of that because I had a sound basis in the language and that sound basis came from a lot of listening and reading. Number two, it's easy.
You can do it anywhere. You can do it while driving, washing the dishes – as I do – or exercising. Similarly with reading, particularly now. There is a LingQ iPad app, so if you're studying on LingQ you can do so on your iPad. You can also print content and read it. You don't have to go to a classroom and spend half an hour to get there and half an hour to come back. Also, in terms of effectiveness, if you're listening or reading, you're 100% with the language. In a classroom, half of the time you're having to listen to other students who may not use the language as well as you do and so, to my mind, it's much less effective than time you spend alone with the language. The third reason to input-based learning is effective is that you're not making mistakes.
A lot of people are afraid to make mistakes. If you're forced to speak, you'll make mistakes. You're listening; you can't make a mistake when you're listening. You might misunderstand something or your understanding might be a little fuzzy at times. You may have the wrong interpretation when there are words you don't understand. None of that matters. That's part of the process and things that are unclear and fuzzy at an early stage will eventually start to become clearer. So you're not really making mistakes, but you're in that stage of your learning where the brain is gradually becoming more and more familiar with the language. You're learning more and more words and, of course, things are going to be unclear to you. So that's an advantage. A fourth advantage of listening and reading is you can choose what you want to listen to and read.
Obviously, the first month or so you're stuck with beginner material which is often not very interesting, but I encourage people to move beyond the beginner material as soon as possible to get into things of interest. I certainly find that if I find something of interest, even if there are a lot of unknown words, I'll work hard with that text because it's of interest to me. When I was learning Czech I was able to learn so much about Czech history, the history of Central Europe and the political situation in the Czech Republic. When I got to Prague I had all this wonderful background. Finally, learning via an input-based approach is cheaper.
You don't have to spend anything. You can go to the library or find content on the Internet. There are systems like LingQ, which is much cheaper than going to class. It may be that someone else is paying for the class, but that doesn't change the fact that the class is expensive. Inherently, because you have a trained professional there in front of students, someone has got to pay for that. I'm not saying you shouldn't go to class, but if you do, I believe the main emphasis should be on input-based learning. Input-based learning has a drawback, and that is for it to be effective you have to be motivated, disciplined, a self-starter.
You have to be curious about things and go out and find content of interest. You have to have the confidence that you can succeed. This is often the problem with inexperienced language learners who have never really become fluent in another language. They can't visualize themselves as fluent, so they kind of half defeat it before they start. They think they'll never get there, and if you think that then probably you won't. You have to be a positive, confident, motivated, independent learner. However, if you go to a class and you aren't a confident, motivated, independent learner, you won't learn either. I mentioned in my Chinese video that they did a study of Chinese immigrants to Canada and found that in seven years (they followed about 3,000 immigrants who were taking ESL classes at government-sponsored schools) there was essentially no improvement, statistically no improvement.
Those who spoke well when they arrived spoke well and continued to speak well, and those who didn't speak when they arrived still couldn't speak very well. That's just to say that very often in a classroom environment if the learner is not motivated, in other words doesn't have all the qualities required to be an independent learner and to take advantage of listening, reading and input-based learning, they won't be successful in the classroom either.
So the classroom can provide a lot of social benefits and feedback and so forth, but even if you're in a classroom, make sure that your main emphasis is on listening, reading and building up your vocabulary.
