Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast. My guest today is a very special person. I’m sure a lot of you know him from his presence online, he was born in Sierra Leone, spent most of his life in London and currently lives in Spain. He is a lover of knowledge and a very knowledgable person, has his own website and a youtube channel, is the awe inspiring, the super positive, the one and only David Mansaray.

Some of you might  know, that a couple of months ago, David interviewed me for his website and I've always had the thought of interviewing him for my blog in the back of my mind as well, I just couldn't come up with a suitable topic.

There were several things that I was considering, but because David is a fantastic, talented learner in many different fields and it so happens that he has decided to start learning foreign languages, I thought we could discuss something related to language learning in general.

David has read lots and lots of materials on the subject and talked to a lot of people and I always wanted to ask him what his own personal observations and opinions were, so I thought it would be great if he could share some of that wealth of knowledge with us. Hope you enjoy.

Vladimir

Basic language structures project

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Podcast transcription:

Hello this is Vladimir, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. It‘s been a very long time since I did a recording for my podcast and it’s been quite a while since I wrote an article as well and so I decided that this has to end that I have to dedicate more time to my blog and my podcast.

There were several reasons for not writing and not doing recordings, mostly because since the last time I wrote an article which was probably sometime in March or April - since then we’ve been having wonderful weather and I just felt bad whenever I spent time inside. And another reason probably is also the fact that it takes me a lot of time to come up with an interesting topic and something that I personally think would be worth writing an article about, let alone to do a recording about and it takes a lot of time to work on the article itself, to work out the details and if it's recording it takes a lot of time to work on the recording so that it looks good and sounds good. So whenever I was out in the beautiful weather and I was thinking that should go back and work on the recordings I just sort of postponed and postponed basically until now.

But the summer is over, unfortunately, but it's a good thing for my podcasting projects. In the meantime of course I was working on some languages and was learning some languages mainly Farsi and Polish and of course because I love languages and I love to think about how they work, how we learn languages and how we can learn them faster and all these things, I came up with several interesting things that I kind of developed and some of them actually turned into small research projects. Of course I didn‘t write an article now but at least I would like to do a podcast recording to introduce one of these projects because it is a long-term thing and it will take a long time until its really finished and until I can post the results. So at least what I thought I could do is do a little recording about this project and talk about it a little bit

So basically what I did and first, I’ll give you the name - actually it doesn't even have a name because it’s so complicated so I guess what I could call it is sort of like the research off the basic startup vocabulary and lexical structures necessary for a person to speak a language at basic fluency. To give you some background about this: back when I was learning Italian and then later mainly when I was learning Polish and then Farsi I realized that I was looking, while learning these languages I was looking for the same types of structures that kept popping up here and there in the language and that the structures were very similar in all of the languages whether it was Chinese, Italian or Polish. Back when I was learning Italian I actually did a little project where I was trying to sample all the vocabulary that I was using on a daily basis in Italian but back then I should’ve extended it and I should have mapped also the expressions not only the vocabulary.

When I started learning Polish and Farsi I changed my approach from a scholastic one, which is learning a language through grammar and textbooks and basically going from simple to difficult and I changed it to a system which I guess is called natural acquisition of a language which I have used at later stages when I was learning Chinese and proved to be very successful at least for me personally I thought was it was working out really well. So when I was learning Polish I basically had a great friend online on Skype and from lesson one I was just trying to talk to him in Polish and our lessons were basically me trying to say something in Polish and him telling me how to say that without really thinking about grammar at all and just writing these things down and then reviewing them and then moving on.

So basically just to give you an idea we would have a lesson and  probably the first sentence that I would want to say was, „Well, how do you say ‚hello‘“ and then he would say, „well this is how you say it“ and I would write it down and then we would proceed, because of course ‚hello‘ is the most simple thing that you can say and one of the most basic things, but I mean even at basic stages you need sentences like „how do you say ‚book‘ in Polish“. So this is a structure right „how you say something in the language“ and it’s a very useful structure because in most languages that you learn you if you want to learn through a discussion not a textbook you are going to use the structure very often. And whether you realize it or not there is a lot in this simple sentence „how do you say ‚book‘ in Polish? “ there‘s quite a bit of grammar in there and other things, but if you learn it as a structure you just bypass all of this because of course it is how natural acquisition methods work and this what they take advantage of.

So anyway I was proceeding through the language and I was writing down these expressions and later I started learning Farsi and decided to do that in the very same way which was just find a conversation partner and to do same thing - just start talking and try to say what ever I wanted to say and write down these expressions, than one by one review them and then just continue and continue.

So what I did was basically I produced two long, well one of them is very long, the Polish list for these basic expressions from lesson 1 to lesson maybe, well at least maybe 25 or 30. So there’s a quite a bit of expressions in that list. And I have another list which is in Farsi which has up until now 291 expressions in them. And of course because I had the experience with Italian and Chinese I knew that these expressions would more or less in Polish and Farsi and Chinese they would, I would be looking for the same things and I just wanted to map them out and see how and how frequent they are and when they occur in the language learning process.

So basically when I decided that I would like to research these expressions and sort of systemize them I had two tasks: the first one was just to simply sample them - I was already doing this, I was making these lists as we were having our lessons. And the second was to come up with an organized list and I will talk about technicalities later about how this is done and why it takes such a long time.

So what I realized when I was coming up with these lists was that.. because my aim was to come up with a list of the first 1000 or 2000 expressions that people come across naturally when they start picking up a language. There is a tremendous amount of analysis that you can make with this data. For instance if you come up with data of this sort where an adult is learning a language such as Polish and Farsi and you can compare which expressions came earlier in the learning process and which came later and of course this is very independent and individual because maybe the topics that you were talking about in the first lesson required a little bit more of past tense in them, or maybe the topic required more conditional and so on so it is very individual when it comes to the order of occurrence of these expressions. But what you can do is for instance you can compare the Polish and the Farsi lists with the Chinese - which expressions came first and which came later and you can do several things with this. I realized that just because it's so individual, it‘s basically a list which relates to my language acquisition process and specifically Polish and Farsi so I had to come up with a second point of reference and that point of reference is basically a frequency list of these expressions so what I’m going to do when I’m done with this and when hopefully I’m going to speak at a basic fluency level, I‘m going to record several hours of dialogues and I will transcribe them into a written format and run an analyzer program on the data and see the frequency of occurrence of these expressions.

So ideally what I will have at the end will be two lists. The first list will be a list of occurrence of these expressions as they appeared in the language learning process - which ones came first and which ones came later in the language learning process and the second list will be a frequency list of the same expressions based on how often they appear and a pop-up in dialogues and real-life situations. And then in the end I will combine these two lists and come up with a final list of expressions based on their frequency and the order of their occurrence.

As you can imagine, this is not a very easy thing to do and there are several problems when it comes to this. Just name a few for instance the data entries themselves: if we have expression for instance „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. This a set phrase that we use very often. When I put it as an entry should I say „to forget what one wants to say“ which would be the neutral form, or put it in the entry as I encountered it „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“ or should I.. in this case this would probably also be the most frequent one but this is not the case for every expression. Sometimes there is a different form of the same expression which is more frequent than the one that I used so the question is which one should I enter into the list. Is it the neutral form? Is it the form that is the form that I encountered the expression in or is it the most common form, the form that most people use.

Then of course, and this is a technical thing and I will talk about this later again, but when I‘ll have the two lists where the first will be the frequency and the second list will be the occurrence list, which one will have the priority when I combine them and I will talk about it later how I’ll actually do it, because I will not do it manually. I’ll have a program to do it for me.  Will the occurrence list have priority over the frequency list or the other way around or will there be a ratio of priority between them which would be 60 to 40 or 70to 30? I don't know. This is something I have to figure out and maybe I will really end up doing all of these things manually because it is just a very sensitive thing to work with for me personally to come up with a list like that, if I really want to have good results and in this sort of research I need to put in as much effort as I can so probably I will actually end up doing these things manually.

The next thing is that, well, how will I know at what time I'll have enough expressions. I set my goal to about 1000 - 1500 expressions but if for instance I will actually hit the mark of 1500 expressions and I will say: „This is enough. I can start I can start combining the two lists and I can start coming up with the end result.“ Is it really going to be enough? Are the expressions that made it to the first 1500, are they really the most important ones, or are there some that I just didn't get the chance to use and are much more frequent in real life speech?  So this is this is another problem that I will have. And then there are some certain small technical issues that are related to the frequency lists because I told you that what I will do is that I will record several hours of spoken Farsi and I will translate that into English and I’ll have a text file which will serve as a databank and which I will use with some software that will count the frequency of the expressions in there. So let’s just take the instance of the expression that I used before „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. So this is a very long expression „I forgot what I wanted to tell you“. That‘s eight words and programs that sort of analyze word frequency, if you only want to analyze word frequency it's very easy. The program basically tells you how many times the word occurred in the text and it knows that it's a word because there is always a space key after or before this word. So whenever there‘s a space key and whatever's between the two space keys is counted as one data entry. But if I have an expression which is „I forgot what I want to tell you“ it is of course going to be much more difficult and so probably I will have to go through the text and manually sort of correct the data, for instance delete the spaces between the words, so it will form one long word and because maybe the expression will be in a different form, like I said: „he forgot what I wanted to tell you“, or „She forgot what they wanted to tell us“ but it’s still the same structure so I’ll still probably have to edit the text file so that the expressions are in their most frequent forms, so it’s going to take a long time.

There are several other things. Once I produce this list - if I ever do it - there are several other things that I will be able to do with that sort of data. For instance, once I‘ll have the data from the dialogues I could analyze how many times for instance the first, second and third person in verbs occurred. How many times I use plural or singular. How many times the past tense, future tense occurred and then many other things and this for me personally is very interesting.  Maybe there have been studies like this and probably there have, but for me personally I have never seen in a textbook mentioned how many times the second person plural is used, because I have the feeling and this is just a very personal feeling that that when I use verbs, I mostly use the first-person, second person and third person singular and less so I use the second person plural. It might not seem like such a big deal but you know when you're a beginning student for instance, especially if you are maybe not of Indo-European language origin, if you’re Chinese or something like that and they throw at you all the three persons and two numbers of the verb, you are overwhelmed by them. If you’re learning languages like Italian for instance where you have three verb groups, I think it would be pretty useful for the students to know that there are three persons and two numbers, but that the second person plural for instance is not used so often lets say in direct speech or maybe the third person singular and plural are used much more often in the news, so maybe you can look out for that and maybe concentrate and do your best to  remember the first-person singular and so on and so on.

Another thing that this list could serve for, could be a basis for a natural acquisition language learning course. I know that there are several people who use word lists, gold lists or 10,000 sentences methods, but like I said I don't really know how these lists came about and who and how decided which sentence will actually make it into 10,000 sentences list and which will not. I have a feeling that to get you off the ground and get you speaking you need much less than 10,000 sentences you just need.. I‘m not saying it‘s going to be only 1500 sentence structures, but I'm saying it is much less than 10,000 sentences.

The whole point of this is basically to get you to a basic fluency level which for me personally is a level where you can start enjoying the language learning process, because all you have to do is talk to people and learn most of the things out of context and to get you there you could just memorize all these expressions that could get you off the ground and then they let you learn a language in the natural way without really having to think too much about grammar and think too much about what is going on in the sentence structure and so on.

The only thing that you will need to learn is which part of the structure is permanent and which part is a substituent block and usually these blocks are nouns or adjectives or other verbs and so on. So like I said for instance if you have the expression: „I forgot what I wanted to tell you” then you know that you can change all the pronouns: „He forgot what she wanted to tell us“, and so on.

Another thing that I could do is to translate this list into other languages. The basis will be English. I don’t know how well this will work until someone tries it out so I don‘t even know if it’s useful as a language learning tool and how useful it will be but by translating this into other languages at least you will see is that these expressions do exist in all of these languages in and how they are used and how they are said.

Of course with languages as different as Chinese there‘s going to be a whole bunch of expressions that Chinese have and we don't have simply because of cultural differences or simply because of the fact that Chinese works in a completely different way but I have really realized that even in such a distant language as Chinese is, I'm looking for the same things to say and you can say these things in Chinese as well, but usually in a very different way. And this is actually one of the things that I want to achieve later on if this list ever makes it – to translate the list into Chinese.

In conclusion I just want to say that obviously this is going to take me forever because my main two order of occurrence lists for Polish and Farsi.. the Polish one is ready but the one for Farsi is not ready yet and I'm basically quite far from making it complete so it’s going to take a while but I'm working on it steadily. I have three Farsi lessons per week and I add about 30 expressions about 20 to 30 suppressions every lesson. So it’s going to take a while but steadily I’ll get there and by the time I do that I hope to come up with a computer program that will help me combine the two lists and another program that will help me with the frequency computations with the dialogues data.

In the end for me of course writing the article is also very difficult, because English is not my native language and to write articles in English is more difficult than writing them in Slovak. There is also always the option to write the article first is Slovak and then translate it into English but either way takes a lot of time so I really don't know when I'm going to finish this. I just really hope that will, because think it's an interesting project at least for me to work on.

I know that this has been done before many times. There are linguistic departments all over the world that research language acquisition, secondary language acquisition, native language acquisition and definitely they research also the necessary vocabulary frequency and so on.  I‘m not influenced by them so I don’t know what methods they use and I wanted, without this influence, with my own system come up with this basic expressions list and maybe compare what I come up with and what they come up with. I know that there are very professional people working in these departments and definitely speak a lot of languages. I have maybe the advantage that I’ve been learning languages as different as Chinese and Polish and Farsi and Italian and then combine the expressions and the knowledge of these languages and come up with a list of these expressions which would maybe be ordered a bit differently than with what the linguistic departments would come up with.

So that’s about it for the project. Like I said I don’t know when I'm going to finish it. It can take a very long time but I hope I do and in the meantime I would like to do some more recordings maybe with topics that would not be so specific, maybe talk a little bit about motivation when it comes to language learning, maybe talk about pronunciation and all these things that a lot of people ask me about and so I hope to talk to you soon, take care and have a good time. Bye bye.

Learning a difficult language – Part 2.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin, Part 2.

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

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For more information see Part 1

Pronunciation

Mandarin pronunciation is difficult and important at the same time. Mandarin is a syllabic language. Every syllable is a morpheme, so simply put every syllable has a meaning (please see typology of Chinese for further info). But what makes Mandarin pronunciation so difficult and important? It is difficult, because almost every sound in Mandarin within the syllables is different from the sounds we have in our European languages so you have to learn how to pronounce and recognize a whole deal of new sounds. Some sounds differ only slightly, some I cannot get down until the present day. And why is pronunciation important? Because as I mentioned since every syllable in Mandarin is a bearer of information and words usually consist of only one or two syllables, even a slight change in sound that you might not notice as a beginner might make others not understand you. It is not the problem of not being able to get your point across, it is the problem of not being understood at all. If you mumble a word in a western language or mispronounce a great deal of it, because of the fact, that western language words are usually pretty long and not every syllable is a bearer of information, you have a very high chance of being understood, but since Mandarin words are so short, every sound counts.

Vast unknown vocabulary

Another reason that makes Mandarin difficult throughout the entire learning process is, that there are almost absolutely no cognates in the language – words that you could relate to because you already know them from other languages. Most of the words in Mandarin are of Chinese origin. The Chinese language has a very long history so some words might only be 3 years old but some might be 3000 year old and the system of how these words from different time periods came to existence is slightly different too. It is also a subject to debate, whether the language of China in which the Analects of Confucius were written (roughly 500 BC) and say Tang dynasty Chinese share a continuous development, so it might be, that even words of purely Chinese origin are built up in a completely different way. The reason why I’m saying this is that there is no “safe” system which would help you guess the meanings of unknown words of Chinese origin based on the first 500 – 1000 words that you learned before. In other words knowing more and more words of purely Chinese origin will not automatically make it easier for you to recognize new words of Chinese origin as you go.

When it comes to loanwords in Chinese, they come mostly from Japanese or transliterated Sanskrit which are again two very distant languages for a westerner and only recently (100 years) words from western languages have been entering into Chinese. The problem is that the way they are transliterated you will probably not know that it is actually a western word that you hear or see. In short, you have to learn almost every single Mandarin word by heart, simple or difficult, international or strictly Chinese.

Grammar

A lot of people say that Mandarin grammar is easy, or go as far as saying that Mandarin has no grammar at all. But this is not true of course. Right now I can think of maybe only five people – foreigners who speak almost grammar perfect Mandarin. It is by no means easy. It is easy from a westerner's point of view because there is no past tense in verbs and there are no cases in nouns, but Mandarin “grammar” is difficult in many other ways. Among other things, I have come to one conclusion: Every language has a system that can be scientifically summarized, mapped out and grouped into units based on similar features which we call grammar (ex.: Italian are, ire, ere verbs). Mandarin also has a system of rules of course – people would not understand each other otherwise - that can also be summarized and categorized but my conclusion is that in order to categorize everything to fit a westerners point of view, one will end up with so many categories and rules in Mandarin, that there are almost just as many Mandarin unique sentences in existence – it is almost as if every sentence had it’s own rule, so you might as well go ahead and learn these unique sentences by heart instead of learning the rules of grammar. Why should you learn a rule which only applies to one or two sentences?

Writing system

Memorizing characters

Even though I think this is the smallest problem but it is additional burden nonetheless. A thing that I don’t understand though is why a lot of people, including some respected scholars say that Chinese is a difficult language mainly because of Chinese characters. After graduating from the Chinese department, having studied Mandarin for 3 years constantly and almost reaching advanced fluency in it, I can honestly say that Chinese characters (reading/writing) are the smallest and I go as far as saying the easiest part of the entire language learning process. Chinese kids up to the age of 6 know maybe 10 characters but speak native Chinese. Illiterate Chinese speak native Chinese. Characters have nothing to do with this and only require time. There are a lot of them, that is true, but they are based on a relatively easy system so learning them is not that difficult and it only leaves you with a lot of time but no special skill required for you to learn them. If only had I known all of this earlier.

When I was learning Mandarin and finally saw that I was making notable progress every day I stopped learning new characters altogether. I was concentrating on the sound purely and from that point I also never wrote anything down in pinyin. I was learning through conversations and by watching TV. What I forgot I forgot what I remembered I remembered. Then later when I was reading comic books or chatting online with my friends and I saw or had to type in a word I only knew the sound of, I saw the character and remembered the approximate shape of it almost the first time. This way it was a lot less stress in my opinion. Until now I do not know what I must've been thinking when I was learning hundreds and hundreds of characters which I didn’t know how to use or never or rarely used before. I am almost convinced that characters that you need, will keep popping up and you will not have to make any special effort in remembering them. I am also convinced that it is much better to first learn the sound of a word and then much later learn the character for it, because it is not very practical to know a character for a sound that you do not know how to use. When it comes to characters I also hear a lot of people argue that by writing the character by hand you have this amazing memory aid and that the character seems as if it were burned into your brain and that you can remember the words so much better this way. That is a big mistake in my opinion, because if you do that and you are learning Mandarin the traditional scientific way, at this point it is not only the difficult sound of the word, the tone (or usually 2 tones) that you have to remember, but also the character/characters, every constituent part, stroke order, and so on. No wonder learning Mandarin takes so long…I say, forget about the characters and tones, but learn the system of how characters should be written, learn the 500 most common ones and wait for the rest to pop up and learn them as you go.

Hand-writing characters

When it comes to hand-writing characters I also think that in the end it is very easy and very useless for beginner and intermediate students. The only difficult part about handwriting is the time you need to learn how to handwrite the characters and the energy to remember them, which is only a terrible and unnecessary burden in the beginning and intermediate stages and handwriting characters will be much more fun to learn after you have learned how to read Mandarin fluently anyway. As I said before, knowing how to handwrite characters is a very fancy thing to do, but only learning the concept of handwriting and learning how to handwrite the basic 50-100 Characters is absolutely fine in the beginner/intermediate stages.

Conclusion

After saying all of this it might seem that Mandarin is impossible to learn, but it is not true of course. As I said at the beginning the aim of this recording is not to discourage, but to describe and say what can and can’t be can’t be achieved while learning Mandarin. When it comes down to it, the biggest problem is that a whole different mindset and approach is needed. If Mandarin were really so difficult, Chinese little kids wouldn’t be able to learn it and this is not true. Millions and millions of kids in China, or foreign kids in China learn Mandarin effortlessly to native fluency. The problem is the system. I am very sorry I have been studying Mandarin the way I have. Even well into the learning process, as I was putting so much effort into my studies and I still wasn’t even conversationally fluent with the most basic of topics, stumbling up upon words, stuttering in sentences, not being able get my point across most of the time, being tired even after a 5 minute conversation and not understanding what people were saying most of the time, I didn’t take the time to reflect. I mean I did think about my Mandarin studies all the time. I was trying to come up with a better strategy but only within my westerner’s point of view and I didn’t think about the whole concept and didn’t think that maybe I was wrong and that the way we westerners learn Mandarin now is completely wrong as well. I think that because of learning Chinese I really understood what it means to learn a foreign language, because all the languages that I have learned before really seem like dialects of European to me now. While learning Mandarin I realized how much less I had to learn while learning German or Italian. Our culture, history, vocabulary are the same. They vary a little but compared to Mandarin, they are all the same. It is nicely reflected in the learning process. If you improvise and say something in Mandarin and even if maybe your pronunciation and vocabulary is good, people still give you a blank stare and don’t understand you. And the reason is that as I said in the beginning, Mandarin developed in a different time and space. Chinese just would never expect a sentence said like that in that particular moment or context. Of course it might happen to you once or twice while learning German, but definitely not several times in every discussion and it is something that is very delicate and something that requires a lot of time and thus makes Mandarin challenging time wise as well. If I look back at the time and effort that I have put into learning Mandarin, I probably could have learned..well I don’t know maybe 4-5 western languages to advanced fluency. Never believe anyone who says that he or she has learnt to speak Mandarin fluently in a couple of months. It is absolutely impossible. Also never believe anyone who says he or she has mastered Mandarin in a couple of years. I would also be very skeptical about anyone who would use the words to “Master Mandarin”. One would have to go through every possible life situation in Chinese to literally experience the unique sentences I was talking about in that short amount of time and it is just impossible. You are not only learning another language, you are learning a new way of conveying your thoughts into a new language.

The way I see things now is that Mandarin should also be learned as naturally as possible, but the problem is, that if you were to learn it only in a natural way, it would take a very very long time so the catch is to develop a system in which one could preserve, enhance and expand the natural acquisition process of a language to its maximum potential and speed up the process as much as possible by introducing the necessary amount of suitable information at the right time.

In the episodes to come, I will try to talk about how I would learn Mandarin if I had the chance to do so again and I’ll try to design a framework for learning Mandarin which will be based on the combination of the best one can get from natural acquisition, while speeding up the process as much as possible. I will also try to work on a completely new approach for the development of good pronunciation based on listening and speaking only and develop a conversation basis consisting of the aforementioned unique sentence structures. In the optimal case these unique sentences should also consist of the most important and frequent sounds in Mandarin. This project is something that will require a lot of time and energy and it might as well happen that I will not be able to finish it, but I will do my best nevertheless. I also might have a very interesting guest participating in this small project, so I might have a big helping hand.

Well, there you have it. This is it for today's recording. Thank you all for reading or listening so far and I hope to talk to you in the following episodes soon. Bye bye.

Learning a difficult language – Part 1.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

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Table of contents

Introduction

General reasons

The difference of Mandarin

Inner logic of Mandarin

Specific reasons

Sounds

Tones

Pronunciation

Vast unknown vocabulary

Grammar

Writing system
Memorizing characters
Hand-writing characters

Conclusion

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. First of all I’d like to apologize, for the fact, that it took me a while to upload this article, but there are a number of reasons for that. I originally wanted to continue my recordings with the “Learning intermediate languages” series, but didn’t have that much inspiration in the past few weeks and had much better ideas for a recording about difficult languages instead, so in the following series I would like to talk about learning difficult languages. Unfortunately since Mandarin is the only difficult language I’ve learned, these episodes will be about Mandarin only and will relate to learning difficult languages as a whole only to a certain extent. Another reason for publishing my recording so late is, that I didn’t want to record an episode only for the sake of putting something online and as it takes me some time to write a presentable article, it took me almost 3 weeks to publish this one. In this first episode of the Learning a difficult language series, I will try to talk a little about what I personally think makes a language difficult and why I consider Mandarin to be a difficult language. In the episodes to come, if possible, I will try to look back at my studies and step by step develop a learning strategy for us westerners on how to learn Mandarin from scratch which will be based on listening and speaking only.

Like I said in previous episodes, I divide all the languages that I’ve learned or studied into 3 simple groups based on their difficulty. I have not learned that many languages in my life and there are some people on youtube for instance who have studied 40,50, 60 or even more languages and I am sure they could give you a much more detailed division than the one I use, but based on my experience I use this simple 3 group system.

When it comes to difficult languages, there is only one difficult language that I’ve studied and that is Mandarin Chinese. Before Mandarin, I have already reached a very comfortable level in a number of western languages and even though of course it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t that difficult either when I look back at my studies now so of course when I started learning Mandarin, even though I was aware of the fact that it was a very very difficult language to learn, I was confident I could learn it well and I was confident that I could learn it fast and I think this was the first big mistake that I did.  It took me a very long time and a lot of nerves to get to the level of Mandarin where I am now and only about 3 months ago, I would not trust myself to do a podcast of this sort, because I didn’t have enough confidence in the language and thought that if I was not really comfortable with Mandarin myself, I should not be in the position to give advice others. It was only recently that I finally had a relatively good feeling about my skills, therefore now, if possible, looking back at the whole learning process in this episode I would like to talk a little about my reasons for why I think Mandarin is a difficult language to learn. It is by no means meant to be a discouragement for people who learn or want to learn Mandarin, it is just a description of what makes Mandarin difficult and what can and can’t be done in order to speed up the learning process. These reasons as everything I say are completely subjective and represent only my point of view and my own experience.

So first I would like to talk about some general reasons that make Mandarin a difficult language to learn.

General reasons

The difference of Mandarin

The first and probably the most important reason for why Mandarin is so difficult for a westerner is the fact, that it is distant from our languages in every possible way – in width, depth and time. Of course it has different sounds, grammar and vocabulary, but it has also developed them in a completely different time and space. Speakers of Mandarin are so far from us in every possible way that while learning their language you necessarily also have to take into account historical, cultural and structural differences of the society where this language is spoken and the dynamics that take place in it, otherwise you might just not be understood. These inner dynamics of the society and their isolated continuous development over a very long period of time are completely different from what you have previously known from the west and are something that is much less of a factor while learning western languages and these differences need to be taken into account, because otherwise you will have big problems communicating with native Mandarin speakers.

Inner logic of Mandarin

The inner system and logic of the language (I do not mean different grammar, but the way you convey thoughts into sentences, not the way you say things, but the way things come to be said) is the most difficult part. Of course there is the pronunciation, the tones, the vast unknown vocabulary, to some extent the characters as well, but the way things are said proved and proves to be the most difficult part of the whole language for me until this point. Everything else can be learned with practice but for this, you need to have a feel and a lot of time. The way you want to express your most basic of thoughts (again, it is not the grammar or the image, or structure of the Mandarin sentence that is different, it is the sheer basis of the concept of the way that things are said) is so different from anything I knew that it made improvisation and expressing even the most basic of sentences in Mandarin almost impossible without previously having heard the sentence I was about to say in real life context before, having to use exactly the same sentence I heard or a slightly altered one, otherwise I was not understood even though my pronunciation and vocabulary were correct. This makes improvisation a very very difficult thing to do and since improvisation and relaxed discussions in different life situations are the best way to practice and develop any language in my opinion, it is something that can be done only very very slowly in Mandarin and is one of the reasons, why Mandarin is so difficult to develop.

These were the two general reasons, that make Mandarin difficult in my point of view, which I am guessing might relate to any difficult language a student might want to learn. The following set of reasons are specific to Mandarin and relate to other difficult languages only to some extent. In this section I would like to talk about which individual structural parts of Mandarin are difficult to grasp for a westerner and why.

Specific reasons

Sounds

Mandarin words are very very short and sound very similar to the untrained ear. Mandarin sentences are also very short. They contain fewer structural elements than a western language sentence and are very contextual. As a result you have the same information flowing into your brain in half of the time, which is incredibly difficult to get used to and because of the contextual nature of Mandarin, if you do not know the language very well, you will probably not correctly understand a given sentence in isolation and will require the preceding and following sentences as well. Another problem is, that Mandarin contains a great deal of sounds which do not exist in our western languages and therefore it is also difficult to first realize what sounds you just heard before you actually start decoding the information that these sounds hold. It of course happens in fractions of seconds but when added up, is a great great burden for the brain in the initial phases. I will try to give you a simple example based on the simple sentence What is your name. If you are a westerner and you hear these two following sentences one in Chinese and one in Italian: ni jiao sheme ming zi and Come ti chiami – you would have very little problems phonetically transcribing the sounds of the Italian sentence on a piece of paper, even if spelled wrong, but written phonetically correctly, whereas you’d have very big problems transcribing the Chinese sentence. The first problem thus is not the fact that you’re having problems understanding what you hear it is about not being sure what exact sounds you hear in the first place. It took me… well I don’t even know how long, until I could speed up my brain to the pace of the information that a Mandarin sentence contains. Even when it comes to the most simple of sentences, it still is a very difficult task in the beginning stages and make communication and relaxed conversations very tiring.

Tones

Tones are another problem, but now I realize that they are mainly a problem because of the way that they are explained and taught to western students. Tones are something that we are not very used to. We do have tones in our languages but they rarely change the meanings of syllables, which is a permanent feature in Chinese. When it comes to tones, more then ever I hate myself for studying Chinese the way I did and the way I was told.. yes there are 4 tones in Mandarin as everyone knows and I am convinced more than ever that it was the biggest mistake anyone ever did, when he explained to students, that there are 4 tones in Mandarin. Chinese themselves do not know that they have 4 tones and speak perfectly well, I don’t understand why students of Mandarin should know it. Tones are extremely important of course, but the way they are explained to students is very academic and not practical. This ‘scientific’ approach to Mandarin might be suitable for some, that maybe do not have such a good hearing or just cannot move on with Mandarin otherwise, but is terribly energy consuming and for instance completely destroyed my Mandarin pronunciation. In a later recording I will talk about this a little more as this topic deserves a whole set of recordings. For the moment, I would like to say that it should be stressed to a student that the pitch of a Mandarin syllable is extremely important and that the student should make his best effort in reproducing it based on what he hears and never look at tonal graphs, charts, numbers, explanations or ask about the number of tones for that matter. All of this mentioned information is too complicated for the brain to process in the short amount of time it has to do so and is instead much more practical to concentrate on the simple sound and rely on aural memory purely. It is also insane to expect from students to be able to reproduce almost perfectly the tones (pitch and curve both) in even the shortest of sentences and it is even more insane to ask them to reproduce them almost correctly the first time. In other words, the student is required to look at the tonal chart and pronounce the tone based on the sound and image he sees. The student is also expected to get very close to the correct pronunciation on his first try (listen and repeat). This is almost impossible, because you need to hear and not see the tone at least 50 times to realize what it sounds like and not what it looks like on a piece of paper, so no graph will help you and is a big interference instead. Not to mention the fact that I think now that it is very confusing to talk about the fact that Mandarin has 4 tones, extract these tones and talk about them in isolation and rather permanently merging them with specific syllables and meanings. The reason for this is that among other things Mandarin is multiplied by 4 this way. A good example is the syllable Gei3. This syllable can only be pronounced in the third tone and only has one possible meaning - to give. So the only way you can hear or say the word to give in Mandarin is to pronounce the word Gei in a low tone. But you as a student of Mandarin do not know this. If you study Mandarin the traditional way, you are prepared for the fact, that the syllable Gei has 4 tones and thus has at least 4 different meanings, so when you hear this syllable in speech, you don't trust your ears and literally overhear a word that you know how to pronounce as the tone itself doesn't make it distinctive enough for you as a beginner/intermediate student. I say forget about the fact that there are 4 tones, but be aware that there are some syllables that can be pronounced high or low. Based on whether they have a low or high pitch they are linked to completely different specific meanings (makes much more sense this way). Also, don't worry about making mistakes which will get you speaking faster, but never forget that the pitch of a Mandarin syllable is extremely important and do your best while trying to reproduce it based on what you hear only. After hearing the syllable for the 200th time you will eventually realize, what makes it distinct and why and when you get blank stares from Chinese. It might seem too long but honestly, how many people speak Mandarin with correct pronunciation and have mastered the syllables natively? Even people who've been studying Mandarin for years including myself still don't sound native, so making mistakes in the beginning is no big deal.

When I started learning Mandarin I was constantly asking myself – is it really possible to speak a language like this? Every syllable has one of 4 possible tones, how can anyone speak Mandarin and have in mind all of this information? All the different meanings of syllables with the same sound, the difficult pronunciation and on top of that 4 possible tones, which change in combination with other tones…and of course no one can speak effortlessly like this constantly bearing in mind all of this information. This is a scientific analysis of Mandarin sounds, not the language. The language is very simple and straightforward for anyone born in its environment, but very alien when scientifically explained to us western students because we are used to something completely different and historically, linguistically and culturally developed in a different way. Our languages also do have tones, but they rarely change the meanings of words. We use them naturally and don’t even notice that we are doing so and we are perfectly capable of learning tones as adults as well. Mike Campbell for instance has found a fairly complicated system of permanently present tones in American English, where some of the tones have the same feature as Cantonese for instance (low rising, mid rising and so on. Please see his video for reference - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvWXg_lxVTM) and a lot of foreigners studying English do master these tones without even noticing. I don’t know who and why applied a scientific approach to learning Mandarin and why that person decided that it was the correct way to teach it, but he made things a lot more complicated and difficult than they already were. I also don’t know why everyone else including me has followed. Just for reference, since I have dropped my conscious concentration on the 4 tones my learning speed became 4 times faster and made me save a lot of energy, time and preserve my nerves.

With all this said, however it may be, the fact still is and remains, that Mandarin has 4 tones and even later when I completely changed my approach, they were an additional burden throughout the learning process.  Continue to part 2.

Learning a simple language - Part 3

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Hello everyone,

last week I did a recording on how I would learn a simple language (Slovene) and because the recording got a little bit too long, I divided it into two parts. This is the second part of the recording. Enjoy.

1. The reason for doing all of this listening work is to be able to understand 95% of everything that is said before you go to Slovenia. Like I said in the earlier recordings, speaking is something that you can only learn well in the country where the language is spoken (for the most part) and so you eventually will have to go there anyway but this way you will save lots and lots of time and energy.
2. I would continue listening to the newscasts until I get to a point where I would not need a dictionary anymore, because I would understand the words that I hadn’t heard before out of context. And I would just keep listening to the newscasts for the pleasure of listening and information itself and get deeper into the language. Understand how some of the more complicated wordings are used, under what circumstances and so on.
3. Once I’d be more comfortable with all of this, I would either find a language exchange partner or go to Slovenia for at least 3 weeks which is not such a bad idea to do in the summer.
4. Once in Slovenia, I would spend a lot of time with Slovenians but this is a little tricky and I think it is necessary to say that the friendships should be honest, since I have seen a lot of people here in Taiwan make fake friendships or get into relationships just to practice Mandarin which is so not fair. Going into Slovenia is finally the point when you start improvising and see what happens :)
5. If you have trouble with pronunciation just work on and think about it anytime you have the chance. Try reproducing the sounds on your own by always changing the position of your tongue a little and listening or recording yourself all the time. Ask your friends to mock you and make fun of your accent for 10 seconds, that’s when you will realize what you are doing wrong.
6. I heard Stuart Jay say that a good trick is to listen to the speakers of the language that you are about to learn speaking English and see what mistakes they make in pronunciation while they speak English, because those are exactly the sounds that you need to learn in their language. You can also extend this to see what awkward sentence constructions they use in English because these are quite possibly the ones that you will need in the language you are learning as well.
7. While you’re in Slovenia buy a lot of books. Detective stories worked best for me as they keep me attached to the book even though the reading is a pain because I want to know how the book will end. As I said, reading is something that will take your language knowledge to a different level.
8. When I get back home, I would use MSN or skype to voice chat, but text chat as well with friends in Slovenia. By text chatting you can work on your grammar, spelling, written language and so on.
9. After getting home, I would also read the books that I bought in Slovenia. The text should not influence my pronunciation anymore. Because revision is so important, what I usually do, I circle in the words that I don’t understand, look them up, draw a line to the side of the page and write the translation over there. The logic behind this is, that after I read 10 pages I flip back and revise, the circles around the words make the words easy to spot on the page and the translation far away from the word makes the revision possible, because if you write the translation right next to the word itself it’s useless.
10. When it comes to writing, I would first start writing short essays. I would first start by writing them in my native language with a subsequent translation into Slovene. This is quite important, because if you write something directly in Slovene without having any previous experience with writing in Slovene, it will be extremely incoherent. You will concentrate on details rather than the message. After the first 4-5 translated essays, I would start writing directly in Slovene and have it checked by a friend.

That’s what I would do anyway. Learning a simple language, if you have enough time and devotion to a very good level should be relatively easy and should take a relatively short amount of time. If you listen to me speaking Russian in my recording, it took me 2 and a half months of listening back home and one month in Russia to get to that level. I think this could be achieved under 2 months but you would have to be in Russia all the time, but than again it is no race, I would only do this if I had time restraints because of employment requirements or the like.

The above only would be a general scheme, I never learned Slovene and because every language is different of course the system would have to be adjusted on the way.

Learning a simple language - Part 2

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I said in the last recording that the language learning process should be natural and no “textbook science” should be used to explain it to the learner as I think language learning is no science just a very natural process that should be expanded to its maximal potential and I think the brain should do most of the work on its own. This doesn’t mean that one should not take the advantage of all the shortcuts to help him understand the language better and learn it faster. These shortcuts – grammar tables, word lists, mnemonics, sound recorder and so on can speed up the process a lot. In this recording I would like expand this thought a little and in order to make it as demonstrative as possible, I would like to talk about how I would go about learning a simple language, because I think explaining something on a specific example is the best thing to do.

1. First of all I would not learn a language just to learn a language. I mean there has to be more to it than just to learn a language for the sake of learning so if I were to start learning a new language I would already have a very good reason to do it like for instance I really liked a song in that language, or the culture of Japanese manga and so on, because correct and lasting motivation is very very important.
2. As we are talking about learning a simple language, let's say I would like to learn Slovenian, because when I was in Slovenia it was fascinating to turn on the Slovene radio and feeling like they were speaking Slovak I just didn’t understand anything. I loved the sound of the language, the signs written in Slovene and so on. I also for instance heard that Slovenian is one of the most conservative Slavic languages in terms of grammar, which all is quite a good motivation to start with. Learning a language for securing a better financial future is not enough.
3. As I said, I regard Slovene as a simple language and I can go right ahead and skip all the language courses online and language course books explaining the language to a student and I would first go straight to itunes and look for all the Slovene news podcasts, preferably with talk shows, that I could find and by trial and error choose the 2-3 most professional ones and eventually chose only one. Alternatively I could look up an audiobook but that could be tricky because “bookish” language tends to be slightly different from real life language (although very good for broadening your vocabulary and getting your knowledge of the language to the next level) and could get boring with time. News casts, political talk shows are the best in my opinion, because the language is well elaborated, contemporary, it’s exactly what you need, to learn the level of Slovene you aim for. Why newscasts? Because if you are lucky, they will talk about things you already know from the news you’ve read in another language making your task even easier and if you are really lucky, some news podcasts are updated several times a day, so you can download a new episode as often as you like without getting bored by listening to the same one over and over again.
4. I would then look for Slovene hip hop music. By hip hop I mean the good old school hip hop with a nice melody and good lyrics, something catchy that I could listen to over and over again and eventually sing/rap over and over again. I would look for hip hop because I enjoy it and because it contains much more words than a normal song. This is a very good way to work on the sounds of the language.
5. I would then just give it a shot and start listening to the newscasts just to see how much I understand since as I mentioned before, because of Slovak being so close to Slovene, I could almost say I technically already “know” Slovene, I just don’t know how to speak it yet and don’t understand that much.
6. while listening to the newscasts for the first couple of times I would concentrate really really hard to try to understand the content, even though naturally it would be almost impossible, but this way I could see which words I could recognize, see what really stands out, remember anything that is really obvious to my ears like funny differences between Slovak and Slovene.
7. I would not write anything down or read anything for the first couple of days and only listen to the recordings to get the hang of the sounds, because I might get a lot of negative influence on my pronunciation from written Slovene.
8. next I would find a good online or pc dictionary (definitely not a paper dictionary) and start pause rewinding the recording and guess the spelling of the sentence sections that I would not understand. I say sentence sections because what you might see as one word might actually be 2 or three words. This is something you will find out really soon once you start using a dictionary.
9. I would however definitely write down the new words that I encounter and revise them every evening, because without revision the whole laborious process of looking up the words is completely useless. I know revision is a pain, but it has to be done.
10. VERY IMPORTANT, at this stage, while you are still home and not in Slovenia, during the revision it is not important to remember how to say the words in Slovene by heart, it is only important to understand what they mean when you see them written or hear them spoken. First of all it saves up a lot of energy, there is a lot less stress during the learning process and it is so much more fun and motivating because you seem to be making gigantic progress.
11. When you start searching for the words in your dictionary I would first suggest looking up absolutely every single word that you don’t understand and after a while you will probably realize yourself which words do not need to be looked up, because you will guess them easily out of the context without knowing their translation and then only look for words that you just cannot move on without. These are the keywords of a language that you will later need in order to start speaking.
12. Do not listen to the recording and read the accompanying text of the recording at the same time. Do not look at the text. It’s much more effective to only listen to the recordings and let the ears do the work and not the eyes. Language is most importantly represented by sound in the end and an alphabet is only used to write it down so sound is definitely much more important. Plus looking up the words only by hearing them and trying to understand the system around them on your own is a big part of the learning process. You will learn so many things as you go: spelling, grammar and so on
13. I would heavily rely on mnemonics while learning new words. I probably will do a separate recording on this. I heard someone say that this is actually completely wrong and that you should not use mnemonics because you will end up remembering a ton of mnemonics and not the actual words. Absolutely not true. You will eventually forget the mnemonic and remember the sound as the information will shift from one part of your brain into another as you use the word more and more. This is my personal experience and the experience of many of my friends, so I think using mnemonics is a great language learning tool.
14. Well into the listening process, if your observation skills are good, since Slovene is so close to your native language or the language you already know, you might automatically notice how different the grammar is, how the cases are different or used under different conditions or how the past tense works and so on.
15. What I would do next, after I’d get fed up with listening and would like to go into more into detail, I would go online and look for grammar tables of the Slovene language. Since I was listening to the language for some time now, and since my native language is Slovak, looking and understanding tables should not be a problem. I would just map out everything that would be absolutely the same as in Slovak, literally cover it with my hand or color them with a black marker and only look at things that are different and memorize those using mnemonics
16. At this point I still would not worry about speaking the language. I would only want to know how to say some set phrases for fun, in other words, no improvisation, only the things that I remember absolutely automatically. Improvisation in a language is something that I think should be done later. Sometimes you have this urge to use every new word that you’ve learned just to see how it works, but no need for that now, since you don’t even know how to construct the most basic of phrases. My friend Luca says that one should start speaking as soon as possible, but I am not sure whether I can agree with that. It is so difficult to start improvising in the beginning and takes so much effort and is accompanied with so many errors, that I really think that in the beginning stages one should only use set phrases, securely used or heard many times before - these simple two three word funny sentences and then gradually build up on those and start improvising, because here the rule – the more simple the better is definitely going to work. If you start improvising at an early stage, you might end up learning a ton of the things wrong. Even though you can build on these mistakes and remove them later, I think it will double your effort. There is nothing wrong with starting to speak as early as you can, I would just keep it simple. No complicated structures. Simple automatic questions and so on.