Can we speak our way to fluency?
Hello, this is Steve Kaufmann here. Steve Kaufmann the Founder of LingQ and over at my blog, The Linguist on Language, I've had a very interesting exchange. It began with an interview that I posted as a podcast -- an interview with Bennie the Irish Polyglot. That generated more back and forth than just about anything I've ever done on my blog, so there was a lot of interest. And I think there was interest because Bennie and I, while we agree on many things, we do disagree on certain things with regard to language learning.
Bennie the Irish Polyglot – You can see references on my blog and you can go to his blog to learn more about what he does, but he is someone who is very-much committed to traveling the world; to live two or three months in different countries. And his view is that the best way to learn a language is to go to the country for two months or three months, after which you can achieve what he calls “You can speak the language pretty well”, he says. He's not very clear. He doesn't really define what “pretty well” is, although you can ask him. He claims that, somehow, this method is uniquely effective and he particularly seems not to appreciate an in-put based approach to learning, which he occasionally calls “not human.” So, you know, I've had lots of exchange on this thing, so I'd like to talk a bit more about it. And, also, of course, having had that exchange gives me time to think about different approaches to language learning. So I kind of want to get at what I think is my view on all of this after having had that exchange.
I firmly believe and the more I think about it I think the words of wisdom from that lady, whose name I can't remember, at the University of San Diego who said there are three things in language learning: The attitude of the learner, The time you have with the language, and Your ability to notice what's happening in the language. Those are the three big factors. No matter how often I talk about language learning up and down and I push LingQ and Bennie pushes his system and somebody else pushes some other system -- some people like Rosetta Stone -- it still boils down to those three elements: your attitude, the time and your ability to notice or things that you can do to help you notice.
So, obviously, I think Bennie and I agree on attitude. You have to be positive. You have to feel you can do it. Where we disagree is how you spend your time and this is where it becomes this issue of speaking. He believes that from the first day that you start into a language or as soon as possible, you should get yourself over to where they speak that language and start speaking it.
My view is that whether you do that or not doesn't matter. I'm not saying that it's an ineffective way. I think as Katie said, on one her comments to the discussion, people have been learning languages that way for thousands of years. Sure they have, but when you speak to someone in a different language, even at the very earliest and particularly at the early stages, mostly, you're listening. So I remain convinced, particularly after having heard Bennie and also having had a chat with Megan who's another learner and she has a slightly different approach -- she has the radio going in the background all the time – that listening is the key. And I would add that I think reading is a form of listening. Because when you are learning a language, until you get very good in the language, when you read you're vocalizing, so you are connecting to the sounds of the language. You may be vocalizing them slightly incorrectly, but the writing is, in a way, a recording of something that would otherwise have been said because speech begins with speaking and therefore with listening. Until they had tape recorders or mp3 players, we recorded things by writing it down, so it is also a record; a recording of speech. It's a form of listening. You have to get the language in you.
If you are so inclined or if you happen to live in the country where the language is spoken and if you have friends that tolerate you coming along and occasionally bumbling something in their language then, by all means, speak, but the main activity is listening.
I went back to my book and my experiences in Japan where I did a lot of listening to tapes and reading, but I had a person by the name of Nikusaki who was my assistant at the Canadian Embassy and he was just extremely patient, extremely friendly and he was extremely longwinded. So if I said something to him I got 10 minutes back of explanations and that again was listening.
I know that in Japan and in many places people say I just like to talk in Japanese and talk about (?????). They want to have conversations and somehow they're going to learn through their conversations. You will, if you hear a lot of native speakers speaking, in my view, but I think that the benefit of listening to non-native speakers speak the language is minimal. That's why I think if I had a classroom, as I've said in one of my previous posts, I would let the kids read and listen on their iPods rather than having to listen to each other or even to speak to each other because the actual act of speaking itself doesn't bring the language in to you. As I have said before, obviously the goal is to speak. Bennie likes to suggest that my goal is just to read. Well, no, my goal is to speak and I speak. If I say I speak a language it's because I speak it. I may not speak Portuguese very well, I may not speak Russian very well, but my goal is to speak. And I like to speak it, but I like to speak it a lot more now that I have had my input.
The further along you get in a langue the more you're likely to speak and the more you're likely to enjoy your speaking, but the idea that you're going to speak your way to fluency I don't believe. I think the speaking, which is what Bennie does and what others do who like to speak right away and my wife is that way, she wants to speak right away, she's not going to listen to an iPod, but what it does is trigger the native speaker then to speak, so then you are able to listen again because it's the listening that brings it in. As I've said before, when you speak and you stumble and struggle then it also helps you notice and that was the third issue – noticing -- but there are many things that can help you notice. If you write you notice that you haven't got the word. If you speak you notice that you haven't got the words. If you have your writing corrected you notice where the mistakes are. If you review words in (?????) that helps your brain to notice. If you look at text in LingQ where the words you have looked up are highlighted in yellow that helps you notice.
So everything boils down to obviously the attitude, to begin with. I agree with Bennie, we shouldn't be timid, but on the other hand we shouldn't force ourselves to speak too early. As I said in my interview, if I were going to go to a country, like say Russia, I want to wait until I'm good. Then I go to Russia and I can really enjoy meeting up with people and speaking to them on a variety of subjects and finding out about Russia and finding out about their lives and so forth. To go there and stumble when I have no words for three months, I don't believe that that's a good approach, at least not for me. I think we have to be very careful in all of this that we don't write off somebody else's approach. Bennie calls my approach inefficient, inhuman, I don't know, whatever. No, it's not what he likes to do. What he does is not something that I would like to do and I give reasons for it. But I know there are people who don't have the patience to listen and initially you have to listen often to the same stuff and initially you're reading uninteresting stuff because you haven't got the ability. You don't have enough words to read anything more interesting. So some people don't want to do that, they want to start talking and that's fine. The important thing for those people, though, is that they continue to want to improve and that they continue to try to notice what's happening in the language; otherwise, they will develop a sort of defensive level in the language which enables them to say a few things with a limited vocabulary and they never push themselves beyond that point. And we have many, many examples of immigrants here and in other countries who achieve that level and it's then called that their level is fossilized. I prefer, if people are genuinely motivated to improve, that they avail themselves and they spend a lot of that time – that second element of time – and they spend it on a lot of listening and reading. If they don't like, to some, the impersonal nature of listening to exciting interviews on the iPod, which I love to do, but some people don't like to do that, go find and engage people in conversation, but they main thing you'll be doing is listening and listening, hopefully, to native speakers. If you're interested go to the blog, there were 55 comments on this thing. I say you can't speak your way to fluency. You have to get it in you and you have to spend a lot of time listening. If you don't like to read that's too bad, because reading is also very, very effective and it is human because humans write and humans read. So, there you have it. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.
