Ground-breaking Language Research

"The teaching of languages could be revolutionised following ground-breaking research by Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger."

This comes from an article on research being done on methods of teaching languages.

"Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns—even if you haven't a clue what it all means. "However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don't understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that," he says."

The problem I have with this is that it is not so ground-breaking or revolutionary, except to the mainstream media and educational system. To them, 'researchers' are making groundbreaking discoveries, meanwhile people have been using these techniques for years now outside of formal education.

Polyglots like author and radio personality Barry Farber, linguists like Steve Kaufman (Lingq.com), language professors like Alexander Arguelles (ForeignLanguageExpertise.com) and others have been using and touting variations of these techniques for years. It just goes to show how slow to accept change the established educational system is.

Not to take anything away from Dr. Sulzberger, it's important, valuable and necessary work. If this is what it takes to get these techniques into mainstream education then great. Everybody wins.

But these techniques are already proven. I wish that mainstream media wouldn't be so slow to notice, and that the mainstream educational system wouldn't be so slow to put them into use. It would make us all so much better off.

Daniel Tammett Learns Welsh?

Daniel Tammett might learn Welsh. If he does, he'll do it in a week. Not completely, perhaps, and certainly not with a perfect accent. But he'll have a good handle on it. Something that would take most of us many months, if not years.

He's done it before, you see. He was once challenged to learn Icelandic in a week and prove it on a television show in Iceland. He did. Not with a perfect accent and not completely, but he had a handle on it.

If you have never heard of him before, Daniel Tammett is an autistic savant. He has a supernatural understanding of numbers and mathematics, and a similarly unique feel for languages. I am ordering his book Born on a Blue Day in order to study how he learns language. Hopefully I can learn a little something from him. I'll post a review on the site eventually.

What is the Best Language to Learn?

The answer is entirely subjective, of course. If you want or need to learn a particular language, then that one is the best to learn. Nobody can tell you otherwise. But, what if you don't need to learn any particular language, and there isn't one that you find outstandingly appealing? Is there a way to put a number on it to determine objectively which one might be 'best'?

Here's one way to break it down. Spanish is the most commonly studied foreign language in the US. But what kind of return does knowing Spanish give you? On average, a college graduate who knows Spanish as a second language has a 1.7% wage boost over a graduate who doesn't have a second language.

In comparison, knowing French would give you an average of 2.7% boost in earnings. But, knowledge of German, Italian, Chinese or Russian would give you a 4% boost!

Why is that? I think it's a combination of how many people are studying (or not studying) a particular language (and therefore how many people are your competition) versus job opportunities with those languages. There are other factors such as what industries are relevant for each language which could skew those numbers one way or the other.

And how would a much less commonly studied language fare in comparison to those above. I would imagine someone knowing Polish, Vietnamese, Korean or Farsi may be highly prized in certain industries.

If earnings are a key factor in determining which language you will study, take a good hard look at the field you are in to find out which languages are most relevant. Then go for the one with the least number of people studying it. You will then have a greater chance of standing out!

Bring Back Greek and Latin

Up until about a hundred years ago, it was typical for a college-bound student to have already received several years of education (at least 4 if not more) in Greek and Latin, and a modern foreign language or two. This education would continue into college, possibly adding another modern foreign language. This is in addition to history, sciences and other subjects.

Then things started to decline. Here we are today and Latin and Greek are mostly nowhere to be found. Many colleges require 4 years of a foreign language but even that has weakened.
Yes, today we need to put effort into computer science and modern subjects, but overall there seems be a much less complete education than years ago, even though Latin and Greek form such a broad foundation for the other subjects that we study.

This article written by a Columbia College sophomore, is proposing bringing back the requirement to learn Greek and Latin in college rather than (or possibly in addition to) a modern foreign language. He makes a number of great points.

I'm all for it. I regret not having studied Latin and Greek and now I feel like I have to go back and make up for lost time.

Popling for the Unmotivated

So, let's say that you want to learn another language, but you don't really need to. You don't have a specific goal or time-frame in mind, it's just something interesting you've always wanted to do but never got around to it. You might be the kind of person who thinks about taking a class, getting a tutor or buying a language course, but may never actually take action.

Well, here's something for you. Popling.net has a downloadable application for you. It's free. It's effortless.

The program pops up a small window on your screen every once in a while, displaying a flashcard with a fact for whatever you happen to be learning. You can answer it or you can ignore it and it will go away for a little while. Then another will pop up.

They have lots of pre-made sets for different subjects, including for some interesting languages, like Indonesian, and of course the more common languages like Spanish, French and Chinese. An extra feature is the ability to make your own sets, so it is quite flexible and useful for just about anybody.

I just love their tag line - A website + desktop app for people who want to learn, but lack motivation.

Languagelab.com in Secondlife

A few posts ago, I wrote a little bit about SecondLife. I mentioned a company actively teaching languages in Secondlife. After doing some research, I've found them.

They are called LanguageLab. There are dozens of language community sites that use state-of-the-art internet resources and techniques to help people learn a language. But LanguageLab takes it a step further by creating an immersive 3D environment, or rather using the unique online interactive world of SecondLife. Thus far, they are focusing on teaching English, but they have plans to expand their products and teach other languages. This is grounbreaking stuff, and this may be a glimpse into the classroom of the future.

Hindi Podcasts

I'm a big fan of podcasts for language learners because they are free, frequently produced, and are generally loaded with real-life vocabulary and dialogue. I have recently added 2 podcasts for learning Hindi to the Hindi page. There are not many free resources for learning Hindi, so these 2 come in handy.


ISpeakHindi.com
Cuttingchai.com

You may also notice that, although I don't recommend Rosetta Stone in general (at least until I can evaluate the new Version 3), I do recommend it for learning Hindi. There really is nothing else as comprehensive to learn Hindi. Since Rosetta Stone has expanded all of their languages to the full 3-levels, their software is just the most complete solution for learning Hindi for the average self-learner.

Universal Letter-Writing Week

The week of January 8 - 14 is Universal Letter-Writing Week. I don't know who came up with this idea, but it struck a chord with me. We're not talking about an email letter here but a real hand-written letter, which is a dying breed.

I thought about applying this idea to learning a language. I like actually writing things out when I am learning a language. It somehow sinks in better when I physically write something, rather than type it. Even though we have shiny flash card programs and audio courses, it still works for me to just sit down and study and write sentences in a new language.

Writing a letter to someone, whether to a real person or just as an exercise, seems like good practice to me. You can find penpals to exchange letters with here. Writing to a real person is much more in the spirit of this Universal Letter-Writing Week, but in case you don't have someone to send a letter to, writing one as an exercise is just fine.

Languages in Secondlife

Secondlife.com is an online interactive world of truly massive proportions. Rendered in 3D environments, people from all over the world perform ordinary internet functions like chat, form social groups, buy and sell things etc. in a completely immersive environment.Virtually anything can be created or built.

For language learners, there are tons of opportunities to meet people or just experience a virtual world immersed in the language you are learning. Just a brief view of Secondlife opens up a world of potential uses for language learners.

I have little knowledge of Secondlife and no real experience with it. But, I suspect that the possibilities just hinted at in most language community sites could be taken to extraordinary new heights in Secondlife. I already know of one company using Secondlife to teach language (I'll go through my notes and find out more about that and post on it later) and I'll bet that others will follow.

Would anyone having any real experience with learning or using a foreign language in
Secondlife care to comment on it and shed some light?

Sentence Mining

Here is a very interesting article on putting to effective use an SRS program with a technique this blogger calls 'sentence mining.' Glowing Face Man (yes, that's what he calls himself) uses Spaced Repetition software to accumulate and memorize vocabulary, phrases and whole sentences to learn and absorb a new language. It is similar to the 10,000 Sentence method, and is kind of a stripped-down do-it-yourself version of Lingq. I have been using one of these SRS software systems for a little while and find it indispensable. He goes into extensive detail on what an SRS is, what 'sentence mining' is and how to use this concept to learn a new language. His blog also contains lots of other valuable insights into learning a language.

http://www.glowingfaceman.com/2008/12/sentence-mining.html