The wheel of language learning
I hear all the time that one should learn a language. To broaden one’s horizons, to acquire a life skill or to complete a well rounded education. But should you learn a language? Furthermore is it possible for you to master a language without living in a foreign country? What is the best approach to learning a language? I believe that to properly answers these questions it is helpful to consider a thought device which I will call the learning wheel.
This way of conceptualising certain processes is taken from a method Jeff Bezos uses to plan the business strategy of Amazon, called The Amazon Flywheel. You create a circular diagram of actions, where each action is connected to the next with an arrow, and each action makes the next action easier. For example, a simple cycle might involve two actions, exercise and sleep. If you sleep well, you will find it easier to exercise the next day, which will make you more likely to sleep well and so forth. A key point is that the wheel is often very difficult to move to start with and requires a huge amount of effort, but when you get it spinning it will start to spin on its own.
These kinds of processes can be very powerful, and they map well onto language learning. In order to learn languages most productively you should aim to create as many wheel-type processes as possible. Ways of learning a language which connect in a circular fashion.
I believe to learn a language best you should try to make these processes central parts of your life. Learning a language to mastery is a significant undertaking that involves a mass of information to absorb. In my opinion it is difficult to do unless you integrate it deeply into your daily life.
You shouldn’t learn a language unless you can achieve a situation where you have a wheel-type process. This applies for the specific skill one wants to learn, e.g. a wheel-type process for learning to speak a language is the key to learning to speak it.
People try to learn languages for many reasons. Some simply like the sound of a specific language, others feel like they want to have a second-language generally and then pick one. Most courses and teachers will try to sell you reasons why their language is objectively worthwhile to learn. However you must make decisions based off of your own situation, both because no language is useful to everyone, and because you are unlikely to learn a language for which you have no specific use. The population of people who speak Mandarin or Spanish is extremely high however there are very few native speakers of these languages in Britain for example. No language is objectively easy either, the difficulty of certain languages is irrelevant compared to the difficulty of learning a language if you have no-one to practice it with.
To show what I mean by the wheel of language learning I will explore specific areas to show its application. There are as far as I see, three broad areas in which wheel-type processes can be set up: reading, digital media, and speaking.
If you read actively in your first-language, you have an advantage in learning a new language. You can set up a process by which you read in the language of choice. As you read you will increase your fluency of understanding, and by looking up unfamiliar words you will increase your vocabulary. This will make it easier to read. Your enjoyment of reading will also increase making you more likely to read in the language and incorporate it into your day-to-day life. As your reading speed increases you will be able to practice more in less time increasing the overall efficiency.
There is an additional circular process whereby as your level increases you can read harder books. A typical trajectory might be from children’s books, to teenage fiction, to popular fiction, to non-fiction, to literary fiction. As one’s second-language literacy improves you will be able to read more books that you will enjoy and so to improve faster.
The second key area in modern language learning is digital media. I mainly concentrate on tv that I can stream or download. However one can use amongst other things podcasts, music, audiobooks, live streams and games. Most digital media can in some way be switched out with equivalents in a different language. All of these sources practice the skill of listening comprehension.
As one listens to the target language one becomes better at recognising the spoken forms of the language, at understanding grammar and if one checks unfamiliar words, one’s vocabulary grows as well. Most people find listening harder than reading, as there is the additional level of decoding sound information into words. As with reading, the improvements one achieves with practice allow one to enjoy the media more, and to push to listening to more complex media.
There is a key cyclical process in listening that one might call fixing. When one first listens to another language one hears it as one confused babble, rather than as individual words that one doesn’t know. But, as one’s vocabulary improves, one starts to have fixed elements that one recognises in the speech one hears. For example, one of the first things one learns is greetings, even just with these phrases one can begin to break apart what one hears into separate elements i.e. what comes before and after these greetings. These reduced elements are easier to process and to learn. This in turn will increase the number of fixed elements.
The third area, and for many people the ultimate point of language learning, is speaking. It is also the hardest area to arrange into a self-reinforcing learning structure without already living in a country that speaks the language, or knowing someone who does. Although this is a tricky problem to overcome, it is also arguably pointless to try to become good at speaking a language if one’s situation has no requirement for it.
If one lives in a country which speaks one’s target language the wheel is simple. One speaks the language and improve’s by practicing, this opens up more language use situations, as well as eventually the possibility of getting to know native speakers, and thus more opportunity to practice.
If one already knows someone who speaks the target language fluently and is willing to speak it with you, then it is a question of practicing with them more and more until you can take the step to only speaking to them in that language.
All aspects of the wheel-type learning we have considered are also present when speaking. It is in many ways the most intense aspect of learning a language. As one improves, one becomes faster, and more natural, with a wider range of vocabulary. The available topics of conversation will expand as well as the complexity available in the simplest areas. There are cyclical elements not just in one’s own increase in confidence and ability to practice but the comfort, and enthusiasm of the person one is practicing with.
It is important to underscore how hard it is to move the wheel to begin with, one should expect to watch entire tv shows with minimal understanding, to read anywhere between 10–50 books before reaching a comfortable level, and to spend a significant proportion of time speaking before reaching fluency.
Not only is it a long journey but there is very little of a sense of progress. Often it can feel as if you are not improving. I believe the principle problem of language learning, and what most courses or solutions in some way try to circumvent is the frustration of not having an indicator of progress.
Most apps and courses try to give you a false sense of progress, in order to make you feel as though you are learning. However apps in particular are generally inefficient. Artificial sources of language, don’t get easier in the same way as natural sources. They often will have artificial limits on complexity, or have little relation to the language one is trying to learn.
However I do support the use of beginners courses in order to deal with the three gateway barriers to the kind of language experience we have been discussing. Namely the alphabet (if your target language has an unfamiliar script), grammar, and basic general competence. By basic general competence I mean the universally applicable information an introductory course will provide such as linguistic information about the language, the elementary vocabulary, and so on.
My general approach to language learning is to convert aspects of one’s own life into the language. It is not a question of learning a language as a separate task but rather converting the things you do into the language. By concentrating the majority of your energy on wheel-type activities you will improve exponentially.
