Teaching yourself languages
In order to learn a foreign language well, you must always invest much focused energy using intelligent study methods
and good study materials with systematic regularity over long periods of time. In order to succeed, you must take
and maintain active control of the learning process. Studying a language with a teacher as one would study other
academic subjects all too often results in students remaining in a detrimentally passive mode, expecting their teacher
to control the process and somehow impart the language to them. A good teacher may inspire you and provide you with external
structure and discipline, but if you are a sufficiently serious and mature student, you are better off teaching
yourself a language than enrolling in a course. In our day and age, good books with accompanying recordings are
inherently better resources than living teachers for obtaining a foundation in foreign languages.
One particularly valuable resource and support network for studying a language on your own is an online language learning
forum where I
am a moderator and where you can obtain guidance on materials and methods for self-study.
As guides to self-study, I have made the following demonstration videos:
These videos demonstrate and discuss the proper form for using my technique of shadowing or listening to and
simultaneously echoing a recording of foreign language audio that accompanies a manual of bilingual texts.
I gained my foundation in most of the languages I taught myself in my active learning period several years ago by
beginning to study them in this fashion, and if I myself were to embark upon the study of any more new languages,
I would most certainly start out by doing this exercise. As it is, I am hard put to find the time to maintain all the
languages I have studied already in a balanced fashion. Now, in order to produce this video to demonstrate the proper
technique, I found it necessary to really and truly do the exercise and not just go through the motions. Thus, I chose
to do it with Mandarin Chinese because this is the language I most regret not having learned before. My Chinese
pronunciation is confessedly atrocious, but it is infinitely better when I am shadowing than when I am not, so please
do not let this fact detract from the true purpose of this video, which is to demonstrate the correct posture and
practice of this genuine learning exercise.
In order to shadow most effectively, it is important to observe three points:
1. Walk outdoors as swiftly as possible.
2. Maintain perfectly upright posture.
3. Articulate thoroughly in a loud, clear voice.
Whenever I have taught this technique to groups of college students, they have inevitably found it difficult to develop
proper form. Initially, they find it strange to study while in motion and would prefer to remain seated. Once moving,
they find it hard to break out of a comfortable stroll, and they are chronically inclined to slouch. They are also very
much prone to muttering hesitantly or even just listening silently.
Different people learn in different fashions, and it may well be that the most effective way for you to use this
technique is in a less military fashion than I am demonstrating. However, I have experimented with every manner of using
this technique, and I have always found that compromising any of the above three points even slightly reduces the
efficacy of the method to a very great degree.
Thus, I encourage you to treat this technique as a genuine form of exercise and to attempt to learn the proper form
just as I am demonstrating it here (I am marching back and forth for the sake of the camera; you may find such a defined
space congenial, but you may also prefer to hike a trail). In the context of a college class meeting twice a week, it
generally takes at least a month under my tutelage for most students to develop good form. However, I think that more
motivated students learning it under more intense circumstances could certainly learn it more swiftly.
In the video, you see me initially shadowing without looking at a book, then while looking at one. You will want to
shadow without a book when you are in the very initial stages of language study, focusing on phonetics only (= "blind
shadowing"), before you study any individual lesson, and then again finally after you have worked through your lessons
thoroughly. The ideal book for shadowing contains the transcription of the recording on the left hand page and an
annotated translation on the right hand side of the page. In several distinct sub-stages of shadowing, you read these
texts in different ways to come to understand more and more thoroughly what you are saying.
Thus, in order to use my method of shadowing most effectively, you need:
1. The proper form and correct procedure, as demonstrated here.
2. The right kind of manual and other equipment (e.g., earphones rather than headphones).
3. The discipline to practice with systematic regularity -- 15 minute sessions are probably ideal, though you may want to start with
only 5 or 10 and you may work up to 30 -- at assigned intervals throughout the day (the more intervals, the faster the progress).
4. The knowledge of how to pace yourself correctly in terms of finding the proper balance of review and new material.
This video demonstrates the proper form for transcribing languages by hand as I do in my "scriptorium" exercise.
In order to do this properly, you should:
1. Read a sentence aloud.
2. Say each word aloud again as you write it.
3. Read the sentence aloud as you have written it.
The whole purpose of this exercise is to force yourself to slow down and pay attention to detail. This is the stage at
which you should check all unknowns in grammars or dictionaries, although that would have been too tedious to show in
the video.
Whenever I have taught this technique to groups of college students, they have inevitably found it difficult to develop
proper form. They tend to rush through the exercise all too swiftly, and to write silently and carelessly. In truth,
copying large numbers of pages mechanically is still a better language learning exercise than many other forms of studying,
but it is only a fraction as effective as doing the scriptorium exercise properly. If you can develop the habit of doing
the scriptorium exercise with correct form, I believe you will find it to be an excellent means of refining and polishing
your knowledge at the intermediate and advanced levels. You can also use a variant of this exercise at the beginning level
while doing translations by reading the English sentence aloud initially as well.
In the context of a college class meeting twice a week, it generally takes most students at least a month under my
tutelage in order to develop good form in this exercise. However, I think that more motivated students learning it under
more intense circumstances could certainly learn it more swiftly.
In the video, I chose to write a sentence each in three different exotic languages in an endeavor to hold the viewer's
interest in watching someone write long enough to demonstrate the technique. In order to do this actual exercise
meaningfully in terms of improving your overall functional command of a single given language, you should do the exercise
for at least 15 minutes, in which time you will probably be able to transcribe an entire page.
Reviews and Recommendations for Self-Instructional Material
In order to teach yourself a language, you need to choose good materials, which can be difficult because all language
courses are packaged and marketed to present themselves as the best for all students, and as the one and only set of
materials that you need in order to attain fluency. Now, in truth, in order to systematically study any language,
you need to have recourse to four or five different methods or approaches, and certainly not all of those that exist are
either inherently good or suited for all types of learners.
Foreign Language Learning Series Video Reviews:
In order to help students select the best and most appropriate autodidactic materials, I have embarked upon a series of
video reviews and demonstrations of those foreign language learning series that I have found most useful in my own
language acquisition.
If you find the information that I provide on these videos helpful, I recommend that you pause often and examine
the pages I am trying to show you. Watch in the "full screen mode," use the "zoom" feature, and, if the "higher
resolution" option is not available, try adding &fmt=18 directly to the end of the URL to get a slightly higher resolution.
Thus far I have provided reviews of the autodidactic language manuals produced in the following series:
Language Schools and Courses
Here follow some thoughts on choosing language schools and courses if, despite the consideration that self-instruction is
inherently more likely to lead to success, you still feel that you must take classes, either because you need the academic
credits or because you know that you lack the discipline to maintain a regular study routine on your own.
A course in language X 101 offered at an elite university is neither necessarily nor even likely to be superior to a
similar course offered at a small cultural center. If you have any leeway at all in choosing a course, your two
main considerations should be class size and frequency of class meetings. It is a simple given fact that, in order
for language instruction to be successful, classes should have no more than 10 students and they should meet every single
day of the week. Nonetheless, for administrative reasons, most language courses enroll far more students and meet
only twice or thrice a week. No matter how great the reputation of the teacher may be, classes meeting under such
circumstances are inherently compromised. When it comes to the teacher, at the beginning level it is not
particularly important that he or she be a native speaker; in fact, someone from your own background who has struggled
to learn the language will probably be able to provide better explanations of difficult points than someone whose chief
qualification is being a native speaker.
All in all, you are more likely to learn a language in a special intensive program than during the course of a regular
semester. Going abroad for a home-stay immersion experience is always an excellent choice once you have attained at
least an intermediate level, although it offers no particular advantages before that. Here in the United States,
the most reputable academic intensive summer immersion programs are those at
Middlebury College and at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Monterey also offers both a shorter intensive winter program and options for individually tailored private study year round.
If you are more of an executive or other professional than an academic, then you may also be well served in finding
private tutoring by some of the larger language-industry schools, such as
Berlitz,
Executive Language Training,
International Language Plus or
ABC Language Exchange in New York or
San Francisco.
In choosing an intensive program or having one designed for you, keep in mind that true intensity is only possible
to a certain degree. While you can immerse yourself thoroughly in a foreign language at the advanced level by
living it, during the earlier actual learning stages, this is not possible. If you must learn a language by an
immediately impending deadline in order to accept an assignment, then you may have no choice but to study for 8
hours a day for 8 weeks; however, if do you have the choice, it would be more efficacious and more productive to study for
4 hours a day for 16 weeks. In any case, intensive study time is always most effective if it is broken up into
distinctly differentiated chunks of disparate activities.
