thank you for the post and the interesting perspectives. i'm esl and i've worked as an english teacher for the last 10 years. i got to the 'c2+' level in high school. i worked with kids first and now mostly teach business english. i've also learned french (pretty good) and japanese (a fascinating nightmare).
i love the 'symphony of the word' idea and the explanations with the dogs. i think that is EXTREMELY important, and should guide the whole learning process more.
this is maybe the most interesting part of learning a different language - it's not that we describe dogs with a different sound, but they are actually a different concept. this happens A LOT and is extremely important as it, in a way, teaches empathy and understanding; a 'dog' might be a very different thing for someone else. it's a more practical version of theory of mind, and a window into how different cultures are.
if you go with the 'learn XXX most used words and their translation' method, you'd learn that 'I' = 'watashi' in japanese. that's first of all, not true, second of all, really boring compared to the truth.
also, i had some success teaching, and the single most important variable was the motivation of the learner. it'd always be very slow or almost impossible if somebody was learning to impress another person, or 'just in case' or to 'order a meal in a restaurant'. however, i had some rocket speed progress when english was a door to some forbidden fruit (for kids) or a clear path to more money (for adults). e.g. i got a kid from failing the english class to being the best in school by watching and discussing 'breaking bad' with him.
when it's interesting and useful, it goes really, really fast. i see this is a big part of what you describe, i just wanted to highlight how big the difference can be, and that you should build the whole process around it. flashcards, vocab lists, schoolbooks are NOT interesting, and therefore almost always slower than presenting the kid something that they want to understand (i think this was a part of your post on presenting a kid with a piece of code). the reason and motivation for learning needs to be always in the centre. i feel like this might have something to do with the american failure to learn a second language that you describe. i believe it stems from a sense of superiority and lack of visible gain - 'what can i learn from these people if my government has dominated them militarly? clearly their model is worse'.
i learned a lot about teaching doing the celta course - you might want to look into their method, aimed at transforming native speakers into teachers in a month.
no self promotion, but i'm working on an app building around immersion, translation, and 'binary search'. the idea is you see a phrase and two possible translations and choose the better one. instead of clearly assigning X = Y, we learn what the sentence can mean, and what it doesn't, and narrow the actual meaning. there are no vocabulary lists, no other exercises, the user is expected to just immerse themselves in doing a lot of exercises quickly, like interactive, phrase-based anki.
i hope to use data + language models to make the sentences really perfect for each user. so you don't learn "100 most used nouns". you learn exactly the phrases you need based on your bio/social media/whatever context.
i'd love to hear your opinion on that, and how you think it could be improved.
thanks for your takes and good luck with learning! i believe there is no better adventure than feeling sapir-whorf on your own skin. i also strongly agree that the purpose of language is to communicate with other humans, so forums, chats, letters, etc might be a better idea than flashcards or some kind of memorisation with no partner.
>> "i believe there is no better adventure than feeling sapir-whorf on your own skin."
LOVE this!
>> "i had some success teaching, and the single most important variable was the motivation of the learner. it'd always be very slow or almost impossible if somebody was learning to impress another person, or 'just in case' or to 'order a meal in a restaurant'. however, i had some rocket speed progress when english was a door to some forbidden fruit (for kids) or a clear path to more money (for adults)."
Agreed. That motivation is a lot of what we're trying to gin up, with this approach. And, per Egan, we're trying to move beyond just equating motivation with practical gain, and add on aesthetics and bewilderment. The practicality comes from planning the family trip (or two) to the country; the beauty comes from novel mouth shapes and sounds of foreign words; the bewilderment comes from the culture's different way of thinking about the world.
>> "i also strongly agree that the purpose of language is to communicate with other humans, so forums, chats, letters, etc might be a better idea than flashcards or some kind of memorisation with no partner."
So many trade-offs on all sides! Authentic communication gives you so, so, much, but comes at a cost of having to schedule it, pay for it, and so on. (Also, it gives you more information than you brain can make sense of at once — I have my disagreements with the people who trumpet "cognitive load theory" above all else, but they're not wrong about that point.)
Flash cards, meanwhile, give you so little — but what little they give can be mastered quickly, and then used to support authentic conversations.
My hunch is that (unless one can do full immersion) a mixed approach is the best way to go — which is what Gabriel Wyner advocates. ("Talk to native speakers, and get lots of feedback" is an essential part of his approach, though one I haven't yet gotten to summarizing. It'll come in full force in the middle school years, though perhaps we should put pieces of it before that.) But you're a practitioner in this, and I'm just an interested onlooker — feel free to push back!
I strongly agree with fluk about motivation being the most important variable. It is a huge outlay of effort to do the Wyner method correctly. I have little doubt that it can work but the goal of the trip is so far away that it may be difficult to spur day to day effort. In addition, you'll probably want a motivating force that the students can access on a regular basis.
For Japanese, for example, you might supplement the program with anime or manga.
- It's a cultural product.
- It highlights the psychology of the people who speak the language.
- It is accessible at a whim - kids can read/watch daily or weekly
- It is motivating in an of itself
Whole family learning is great - probably the best you can do without a genuine immersion experience or access to native speakers. The flipside of this is that now the outlay of effort is distributed across the whole family. It makes things like flashcards and conversations more efficient because making them benefits more than one learner. However, the time cost is indeed high.
What I'm trying to say is that this method seems quite good but it also seems doubtful that most families would be willing to put in this amount of time and effort. That isn't really a problem- most families already don't put in the necessary effort to learn a language together. It just means that you are essentially providing diet and exercise type advice - good only if you follow it. This isn't the language equivalent of Ozempic, which works for most people without much effort or particularity.
Actually, an addendum to the “diet” metaphor: most diets work; the secret of dieting is to find one that you actually enjoy.
Now, I don’t think the metaphor is perfect — this approach to learning language has at least some objective advantages. (“Master pronunciation at the outset” is probably one of them.) But, if we design it well, it’ll tap into some of the deep pleasures of language that other approaches usually rush past.
That’s to say, it’s the unveiling of diverse joys that might be the best benefit here.
Agreed on this still taking lots of work! (Nice to hear someone say that, actually.) And I think you’re right that comics (in your language) might be an especially good path; I’ll be saying a bit more about that in the final post of this series, but your bringing it up makes me think that it would be super-helpful to find recommendations for specific comics (for specific languages) that might be extra well-suited for kids learning.
It's a good idea having a set of recommendations for specific languages. It once again reminds me that having a community of practice is such a helpful resource. People to swap ideas with, to commiserate and celebrate with- that is a big help. It's basically taking the 'whole family learns' to a larger level.
BTW I plan to read Wyner as soon as I can muster it. Hopefully it helps my practice and I'll have more takeaways to add here.
I think a big part of the challenge for teachers is finding the kinds of resources that are going to drive students' everyday exploration. This is probably quite language specific but I do think those products exist.
I strongly endorse comic books, by the way. Because so much of the context is filled in by the pictures you can get away with a much wider variety of language knowledge and fluency when reading.
Another very important factor is that you'll want to start this process relatively young. The reason is that language becomes complicated very fast. Students can quickly age out of level-appropriate language materials and then you get into a situation where the only materials they can access are either far too immature for their interest or aimed at adults and probably more on the functional/ communication side rather than inspiring wonder and excitement. That's not to say that you can't approach more complex, authentic sources at a beginner level, but you're creating more work for yourself in that case.
I have no defined age for starting foreign language learning, but honestly you could start as early as two with things like songs and picture books. Year 1 of primary school isn't too late, but depending on the child you can certainly start earlier.
I'm finding all of these language reflections fascinating (I just know about your work tangentially from a friend doing Science Is Weird and loving it, which is how I discovered your substack) -- my focus is Latin and Greek, so pronunciation is less a concern of mine, but I am a big advocate of fluency and meaningful language use, and one strategy I use is proverbs for vocabulary building; don't just learn a word -- learn a proverb. I'm currently doing daily proverb emails for Latin and Greek students (you can see blog stream at LauraGibbs.net), and I would be glad to volunteer to do proverb vocabulary banks for Italian or Polish if anyone adopts either of those languages (I speak both), and at a stretch I could also do Spanish and Russian (which I read but don't speak). And if anyone is interested in Latin or Greek, I am glad to volunteer my services (I'm currently developing a Latin course for a friend: LATIN WITHOUT CHARTS, doing case-by-case instead of declension-by-declension as Latin textbooks usually do, and do badly...). Best wishes for all your work! Laura (I'm at laurakgibbs@gmail.com)
This is a bit close to the line of too-much-self-promotion, but y'know what? It's on the GOOD side of that line — thanks for sharing this! (I say this mostly so other people can get a sense of what they're encouraged to do.)
Laura, have you taken a look at our pattern WORLD PROVERBS (https://losttools.substack.com/p/world-proverbs)? If not, do; I'd love your feedback on it! The final post in this language-learning series will talk about proverbs, actually (along with jokes and songs and such); I'll love to get your thoughts on it then. In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on (1) where to get good proverbs in a native language, (2) how to pick good ones, and (3) how to learn them. And maybe anything else.
Ooooh, I am glad you are looking at proverbs already. (And apologies if that seemed like self-promotion; I put a lot of OER online and have done so for decade; am just eager to share)
Some quick thoughts:
There are usually good proverb collections for any language you want to look at, often with English translations. A book like Stone's World Proverbs that you used there for your post is less useful IMO, but books like that can be a great place to snag bibliography for more culturally-specific books. The Internet Archive is a fantastic source for these books, as many of these proverb collections are older books that are in the public domain. Books not in the public domain are often available as cheap used books. Be careful, however, with unsourced websites. There is a lot of unsourced "fakelore" (faux folklore) online, especially proverbs. (Although some proverb websites are excellent.)
When proverbs involve poetic devices (and the best ones usually do), that is usually lost in translation. That does not mean the translated version is without value, but it's definitely not an equal to the original. The best proverbs are like tiny poems!
Sometimes proverbs are connected to fables, which can be great for language learning. (My academic speciality is Aesop's fables, which is how I got interested in proverbs and started using them in language teaching; I've been doing this for decades.) Proverbs also have a lot in common with riddles and very short jokes.
For me, the key to using proverbs for language teaching is to make a spreadsheet, one row per saying, and then using the columns to tag the verb(s) in the saying, the noun(s), and the grammatical construction(s). You can then use filters the columns to adjust the level of language difficulty you're aiming for while also using text search for specific vocabulary. That's my approach anyway.
For students, making proverb flashcards WITHOUT TRANSLATION is great; most proverbs split very naturally into two halves: you put one half on one side, the other half on the other side, and then use the flashcard to practice, using one half to prompt the other half if you see what I mean.
Am just glad to help with any proverb-related language learning activities since this is already something I am engaged in actively all the time. :-)
thank you for the post and the interesting perspectives. i'm esl and i've worked as an english teacher for the last 10 years. i got to the 'c2+' level in high school. i worked with kids first and now mostly teach business english. i've also learned french (pretty good) and japanese (a fascinating nightmare).
i love the 'symphony of the word' idea and the explanations with the dogs. i think that is EXTREMELY important, and should guide the whole learning process more.
this is maybe the most interesting part of learning a different language - it's not that we describe dogs with a different sound, but they are actually a different concept. this happens A LOT and is extremely important as it, in a way, teaches empathy and understanding; a 'dog' might be a very different thing for someone else. it's a more practical version of theory of mind, and a window into how different cultures are.
if you go with the 'learn XXX most used words and their translation' method, you'd learn that 'I' = 'watashi' in japanese. that's first of all, not true, second of all, really boring compared to the truth.
also, i had some success teaching, and the single most important variable was the motivation of the learner. it'd always be very slow or almost impossible if somebody was learning to impress another person, or 'just in case' or to 'order a meal in a restaurant'. however, i had some rocket speed progress when english was a door to some forbidden fruit (for kids) or a clear path to more money (for adults). e.g. i got a kid from failing the english class to being the best in school by watching and discussing 'breaking bad' with him.
when it's interesting and useful, it goes really, really fast. i see this is a big part of what you describe, i just wanted to highlight how big the difference can be, and that you should build the whole process around it. flashcards, vocab lists, schoolbooks are NOT interesting, and therefore almost always slower than presenting the kid something that they want to understand (i think this was a part of your post on presenting a kid with a piece of code). the reason and motivation for learning needs to be always in the centre. i feel like this might have something to do with the american failure to learn a second language that you describe. i believe it stems from a sense of superiority and lack of visible gain - 'what can i learn from these people if my government has dominated them militarly? clearly their model is worse'.
i learned a lot about teaching doing the celta course - you might want to look into their method, aimed at transforming native speakers into teachers in a month.
no self promotion, but i'm working on an app building around immersion, translation, and 'binary search'. the idea is you see a phrase and two possible translations and choose the better one. instead of clearly assigning X = Y, we learn what the sentence can mean, and what it doesn't, and narrow the actual meaning. there are no vocabulary lists, no other exercises, the user is expected to just immerse themselves in doing a lot of exercises quickly, like interactive, phrase-based anki.
i hope to use data + language models to make the sentences really perfect for each user. so you don't learn "100 most used nouns". you learn exactly the phrases you need based on your bio/social media/whatever context.
i'd love to hear your opinion on that, and how you think it could be improved.
thanks for your takes and good luck with learning! i believe there is no better adventure than feeling sapir-whorf on your own skin. i also strongly agree that the purpose of language is to communicate with other humans, so forums, chats, letters, etc might be a better idea than flashcards or some kind of memorisation with no partner.
>> "i believe there is no better adventure than feeling sapir-whorf on your own skin."
LOVE this!
>> "i had some success teaching, and the single most important variable was the motivation of the learner. it'd always be very slow or almost impossible if somebody was learning to impress another person, or 'just in case' or to 'order a meal in a restaurant'. however, i had some rocket speed progress when english was a door to some forbidden fruit (for kids) or a clear path to more money (for adults)."
Agreed. That motivation is a lot of what we're trying to gin up, with this approach. And, per Egan, we're trying to move beyond just equating motivation with practical gain, and add on aesthetics and bewilderment. The practicality comes from planning the family trip (or two) to the country; the beauty comes from novel mouth shapes and sounds of foreign words; the bewilderment comes from the culture's different way of thinking about the world.
>> "i also strongly agree that the purpose of language is to communicate with other humans, so forums, chats, letters, etc might be a better idea than flashcards or some kind of memorisation with no partner."
So many trade-offs on all sides! Authentic communication gives you so, so, much, but comes at a cost of having to schedule it, pay for it, and so on. (Also, it gives you more information than you brain can make sense of at once — I have my disagreements with the people who trumpet "cognitive load theory" above all else, but they're not wrong about that point.)
Flash cards, meanwhile, give you so little — but what little they give can be mastered quickly, and then used to support authentic conversations.
My hunch is that (unless one can do full immersion) a mixed approach is the best way to go — which is what Gabriel Wyner advocates. ("Talk to native speakers, and get lots of feedback" is an essential part of his approach, though one I haven't yet gotten to summarizing. It'll come in full force in the middle school years, though perhaps we should put pieces of it before that.) But you're a practitioner in this, and I'm just an interested onlooker — feel free to push back!
I strongly agree with fluk about motivation being the most important variable. It is a huge outlay of effort to do the Wyner method correctly. I have little doubt that it can work but the goal of the trip is so far away that it may be difficult to spur day to day effort. In addition, you'll probably want a motivating force that the students can access on a regular basis.
For Japanese, for example, you might supplement the program with anime or manga.
- It's a cultural product.
- It highlights the psychology of the people who speak the language.
- It is accessible at a whim - kids can read/watch daily or weekly
- It is motivating in an of itself
Whole family learning is great - probably the best you can do without a genuine immersion experience or access to native speakers. The flipside of this is that now the outlay of effort is distributed across the whole family. It makes things like flashcards and conversations more efficient because making them benefits more than one learner. However, the time cost is indeed high.
What I'm trying to say is that this method seems quite good but it also seems doubtful that most families would be willing to put in this amount of time and effort. That isn't really a problem- most families already don't put in the necessary effort to learn a language together. It just means that you are essentially providing diet and exercise type advice - good only if you follow it. This isn't the language equivalent of Ozempic, which works for most people without much effort or particularity.
Actually, an addendum to the “diet” metaphor: most diets work; the secret of dieting is to find one that you actually enjoy.
Now, I don’t think the metaphor is perfect — this approach to learning language has at least some objective advantages. (“Master pronunciation at the outset” is probably one of them.) But, if we design it well, it’ll tap into some of the deep pleasures of language that other approaches usually rush past.
That’s to say, it’s the unveiling of diverse joys that might be the best benefit here.
I agree with this totally. It's about finding the diet that you can stick to.
Agreed on this still taking lots of work! (Nice to hear someone say that, actually.) And I think you’re right that comics (in your language) might be an especially good path; I’ll be saying a bit more about that in the final post of this series, but your bringing it up makes me think that it would be super-helpful to find recommendations for specific comics (for specific languages) that might be extra well-suited for kids learning.
It's a good idea having a set of recommendations for specific languages. It once again reminds me that having a community of practice is such a helpful resource. People to swap ideas with, to commiserate and celebrate with- that is a big help. It's basically taking the 'whole family learns' to a larger level.
BTW I plan to read Wyner as soon as I can muster it. Hopefully it helps my practice and I'll have more takeaways to add here.
I think a big part of the challenge for teachers is finding the kinds of resources that are going to drive students' everyday exploration. This is probably quite language specific but I do think those products exist.
I strongly endorse comic books, by the way. Because so much of the context is filled in by the pictures you can get away with a much wider variety of language knowledge and fluency when reading.
Another very important factor is that you'll want to start this process relatively young. The reason is that language becomes complicated very fast. Students can quickly age out of level-appropriate language materials and then you get into a situation where the only materials they can access are either far too immature for their interest or aimed at adults and probably more on the functional/ communication side rather than inspiring wonder and excitement. That's not to say that you can't approach more complex, authentic sources at a beginner level, but you're creating more work for yourself in that case.
I have no defined age for starting foreign language learning, but honestly you could start as early as two with things like songs and picture books. Year 1 of primary school isn't too late, but depending on the child you can certainly start earlier.
I'm finding all of these language reflections fascinating (I just know about your work tangentially from a friend doing Science Is Weird and loving it, which is how I discovered your substack) -- my focus is Latin and Greek, so pronunciation is less a concern of mine, but I am a big advocate of fluency and meaningful language use, and one strategy I use is proverbs for vocabulary building; don't just learn a word -- learn a proverb. I'm currently doing daily proverb emails for Latin and Greek students (you can see blog stream at LauraGibbs.net), and I would be glad to volunteer to do proverb vocabulary banks for Italian or Polish if anyone adopts either of those languages (I speak both), and at a stretch I could also do Spanish and Russian (which I read but don't speak). And if anyone is interested in Latin or Greek, I am glad to volunteer my services (I'm currently developing a Latin course for a friend: LATIN WITHOUT CHARTS, doing case-by-case instead of declension-by-declension as Latin textbooks usually do, and do badly...). Best wishes for all your work! Laura (I'm at laurakgibbs@gmail.com)
This is a bit close to the line of too-much-self-promotion, but y'know what? It's on the GOOD side of that line — thanks for sharing this! (I say this mostly so other people can get a sense of what they're encouraged to do.)
Laura, have you taken a look at our pattern WORLD PROVERBS (https://losttools.substack.com/p/world-proverbs)? If not, do; I'd love your feedback on it! The final post in this language-learning series will talk about proverbs, actually (along with jokes and songs and such); I'll love to get your thoughts on it then. In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on (1) where to get good proverbs in a native language, (2) how to pick good ones, and (3) how to learn them. And maybe anything else.
Ooooh, I am glad you are looking at proverbs already. (And apologies if that seemed like self-promotion; I put a lot of OER online and have done so for decade; am just eager to share)
Some quick thoughts:
There are usually good proverb collections for any language you want to look at, often with English translations. A book like Stone's World Proverbs that you used there for your post is less useful IMO, but books like that can be a great place to snag bibliography for more culturally-specific books. The Internet Archive is a fantastic source for these books, as many of these proverb collections are older books that are in the public domain. Books not in the public domain are often available as cheap used books. Be careful, however, with unsourced websites. There is a lot of unsourced "fakelore" (faux folklore) online, especially proverbs. (Although some proverb websites are excellent.)
When proverbs involve poetic devices (and the best ones usually do), that is usually lost in translation. That does not mean the translated version is without value, but it's definitely not an equal to the original. The best proverbs are like tiny poems!
Sometimes proverbs are connected to fables, which can be great for language learning. (My academic speciality is Aesop's fables, which is how I got interested in proverbs and started using them in language teaching; I've been doing this for decades.) Proverbs also have a lot in common with riddles and very short jokes.
For me, the key to using proverbs for language teaching is to make a spreadsheet, one row per saying, and then using the columns to tag the verb(s) in the saying, the noun(s), and the grammatical construction(s). You can then use filters the columns to adjust the level of language difficulty you're aiming for while also using text search for specific vocabulary. That's my approach anyway.
For students, making proverb flashcards WITHOUT TRANSLATION is great; most proverbs split very naturally into two halves: you put one half on one side, the other half on the other side, and then use the flashcard to practice, using one half to prompt the other half if you see what I mean.
Am just glad to help with any proverb-related language learning activities since this is already something I am engaged in actively all the time. :-)