Language.
It’s a pretty cool thing, quite useful.
I can still remember back when I was a toddler, about 2 years old learning my first language,
English.
My Mom taught me how the order in English is subject verb object, and helped me make
flashcards so I could memorize vocabulary and helped me for hours and hours to get the
different verb tenses right.
Fast forward several years and In college I came over to Japan on a foreign exchange
program where I would learn another language.
About two years after arriving in the country, I took and passed the highest level of the
Japanese Language Proficiency Test.
To be fair, I did live in the country, but the concepts I’ll discuss in this video
will be effective even if you don’t have access to native speakers.
Lately there are all kinds of great resources and techniques on language learning.
In particular, spaced-repetition system-based virtual flashcard programs like Anki are popular
and very useful, but… is that really the most efficient way to sink language into our
brains so it can be used on the fly?
After all, how many parents have to give their child a deck of flashcards for review to help
their kids reach fluency in their mother tongue?
Of course I was kidding earlier and I learned English through magic like every other baby.
In this video I’d like to discuss four not too often discussed points that I think are
important when it comes to language learning.
Acquiring language efficiently through context Two is Maximizing input
Three is Practicing your listening and pronunciation at the same time
And four is Making sure the experience of learning is positive
First allow me to take a moment to demonstrate something, so just listen for now.
If you already speak Japanese, it might be harder to get my point, but hopefully you’ll
still see what I mean.
Timu o shoukai shiyou.
Timu wa neko janakute kaeru janakute hito da.
Hito no karada ha ironna bubun ga aru.
Tatoeba atama, mune, ude, ashi ga aru.
Ok, so Just listening to me, how much Japanese did you learn from this?
Maybe 0%.
What if I repeated it or spoke slower, would you learn more Japanese?
Most likely not.
Let’s try it one more time, but pay attention to the screen.
Timu o shoukai shiyou.
Timu wa neko janakute kaeru janakute hito da.
Hito no karada ha ironna bubun ga aru.
Tatoeba atama, mune, ude, ashi ga aru.
Mushi ja nai kara me wa mutsu toka janakute futatsu ga aru.
Ude mo futatsu, Ashi mo futatsu, Mimi mo futatsu ga aru.
How about now, maybe 10%, 20% or even just one word?
This is the simple difference between acquiring language and not.
What I’m trying to demonstrate is the concept of comprehensible input, as did second language
acquisition scholar Stephen Krashen did in this lecture of his.
"das ist meine Hand. fristenzidast hand(??)"
"In my opinion, we all acquire language the same way.
We acquire language in one way and one way only, when we understand messages, or when
we understand what we read.
We call this comprehensible input.
We've tried everything else, we've tried grammar teaching, drills and exercises, computers,
but the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand, comprehensible
input.
So anything that helps make input comprehensible - pictures, knowledge of the world, realia,
helps language acquisition."
In the 1970s and 80s Krashen put forward a group of hypotheses about language learning.
The first claim of his we’ll look at is that there is acquisition and learning and
Krashen says improvement in language ability is only dependent on acquisition and not learning.
The difference between acquisition and learning is tricky but it’s kind of like the difference
between getting a joke and having someone explain the precise reasons why that joke
should be funny.
For example, a horse walks into a bar and the bartender says...
"Hey, why the long face?"
Or a whale walks into a bar and the whale says “Woo...oooo...woooo”.
If you thought this was funny, you didn’t have to consciously work out why it was funny.
the processing was done on a subconscious level.
In Krashen’s book Principles and Practice in Second Language acquisition, he says “Acquisition
of language is a natural, intuitive, and subconscious process of which individuals need not be aware.”
Similarly, you can learn words by having someone tell you “The Japanese word for Persimmon
is kaki.”
On the other hand, what’s necessary for acquisition is sufficient comprehensible input.
Something like this: Ringo o taberu.
So, even though you might not know any of the words I just said, you could comprehend
the pictures I supplied, and based on that context, you could acquire the meaning of
Ringo and Taberu.
When I provide you with another example, Biiru o nomu, you may have deduced something about
Japanese grammar as well.
That’s right, the verb comes at the end.
The point is, you have this massive pattern recognition device jammed into your head and
when you understand the meaning of the message, your brain will naturally pick out vocabulary
and deconstruct grammar patterns based on the context - and this is not something you
actively and consciously perform.
Okaikei senroppyaku nanajyuu hachien ni narimasu.
Kane aru Kara! Kane Nee yo...
This leads me to one of the most helpful things - simply watching television series without
English subtitles with focused attention even though I couldn’t understand most of it.
"And today, I wanna talk about dictionaries.
You can look up the word 'get' in the dictionary and you get 8 or 9 different definitions...
and you can read that, close the dictionary and you won't remember much of what was there.
Before I went to Vietnam, I got this phrasebook and dictionary.
I came away able to use one word.
Kaman, which means thank you.
Nothing else stuck, zero.
This was essentially useless."
A bit later on, I tried my hand at plenty of books but refrained from looking up every
word.
This is a really simple but important concept, how many new words, phrases and grammar structures
can you feed your brain when you’re looking up every word as you read a book?
You’d take about half an hour to get through one page.
For the same amount of time, a television show can blast you with far more words, phrases
and grammar.
A book can too if you’re not so trigger happy with the dictionary.
And, it might not feel like it, but these bits of cloudy information can stick in your
head at the subconscious level just waiting for the right context to reveal their meaning.
Engineering Professor Barbara Oakley explains here that we have two modes of thinking - the
focused mode and the diffuse mode.
The focused mode is where you’re racking your brain trying to use your focused awareness
to figure something out, whether it be a math problem or what’s going on in a TV show
in a foreign language.
The diffuse mode works in the background where you’re relaxed and not straining on one
thing, it can see the big picture and make connections.
This is thought to be why people so often get ideas in the shower - you’re relaxed,
probably not focused on anything in particular, so your subconscious starts turning its pattern
recognition gears to give you insights your conscious mind couldn’t see.
You might not have any luck picking up many words or phrases while watching or reading
something, but when you go off and do something else, your brain relaxes into the much more
flexible diffuse mode and uses its powers of pattern recognition to piece out some meaning
from the heaps of language information you were just exposed to.
Now I’m not saying that the fastest way to become fluent in a language is to never
open a dictionary, but you’ll want to invest a majority of your time on inputting a bunch
of content into your head from media, books or just paying attention to people around
you.
Earlier we saw that according to Krashen, acquisition, but not learning can trigger
improvement in a language.
But, it seems deliberate “learning” can trigger language “acquisition” - for example
let’s say you had watched this before: "omae, ore no keeki kuttaro."
"iya" and you knew that "ore no keeki" just means
“my cake,” but for the life of you couldn’t figure out what kuttaro means.
You were guessing it means steal.
Then you learn from a textbook or dictionary that kuu is a very casual way to say eat!
Then it all clicks, you realize kutta would be the past tense of this verb and you figure
kuttaro must be the same as kutta darou.
Now you’ve acquired a new word and a new colloquialism and put all the pieces together
to fully understand what this guy was saying.
"Omae, ore no keeki kuttaro."
"iya."
This is the “Aha!” moment indicative of new language acquisition - similar to a joke,
it just happens at the subconscious level.
Another key to this is watching television without English subtitles.
A study from Barcelona looking at Spanish speakers trying to learn English found that
the worst way to learn was by putting Spanish subtitles on an English movie.
This resulted in 0% improvement in their English ability.
Watching with no subtitles provided a 7% improvement, but watching the show in English, with English
subtitles provided a 17% improvement.
Now You might be thinking how are you ever going to learn anything if you do all this
input without any any speaking practice?
This is where another part of Krashen’s theory comes in.
"And this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you.
Certainly came as a surprise to me.
Talking is not practicing.
It means if you want to improve your spanish, it will not help you to speak Spanish outloud
in the car as you drive to work in the morning.
I used to think those things help, now I think they don't."
You don’t technically have to open your mouth to acquire the language.
This was demonstrated in 1962 when E. Lenneberg described the case of a boy who could not
speak due to congenital dysarthria.
When Lenneberg tested the boy, he found that the child was able to understand spoken English
perfectly.
With that said, ...you should open your mouth at some point.
Pronunciation is of course very important.
But pronunciation is… hard.
Some noises in the language you’ll notice you just can’t make because you never have
before.
"That's not tool bro.
That's n...
That's not tool bro."
This brings me to a technique called Shadowing: What you do is basically listen to some audio
of a native speaker talking and you just mimic their pronunciation and intonation.
Not every word though - depending on your level it could be two syllables at a time,
three at a time or two words at a time and so on.
Shadowing is generally thought of as an advanced technique you should use to master intonation
and polish up your accent.
But, even from Day 1 it can be a super efficient way for improving your pronunciation and at
the same time your ability to recognize phonemes in natural language.
That is to hear natural language.
And being able to hear natural language is important.
Because when people speak naturally, there are certain phrases where their speech gets
run together.
Like “What are you doing” becomes “W’t’ya’doin’”
Watch how in this scene, Abe Hiroshi turns tokoro ga kou yatte into "tocolocuerte" "tocolocuerte..."
A 2015 study from Japan looking at two groups of English learners found that indeed, shadowing
made a statistically significant improvement in phoneme perception for both groups.
Look in the description for some tips on shadowing so you can get more out of it without frustrating
yourself into hating the language.
So That’s it - Three things.
Focus on learning from context, Load up on the input and get plenty of content in the
target language and you can use the same audio source to practice listening to natural speech
and pronunciation.
I realize this leaves many questions regarding language learning and that this there’s
tons of useful techniques and approaches for learning a language that I haven’t addressed
here.
So please leave a comment if you have any questions and and check the description for
more information .