Use music, TV, movies, radio and the internet to ingrain your target language in your brain

The following is a guest post by Susanna Zaraysky, author of Language is Music, of which I recently received a free review copy. Susanna speaks seven languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Serbo-Croatian) and has also studied Hungarian, Hebrew, and Arabic. She has taught English in Argentina, Bosnia, and the United States.

Who remembers a TV commercial jingle from their childhood better than what their spouse or parent told them to get at the grocery store yesterday?

We can all remember certain melodies and songs better than we can rattle off a list of vocabulary words or pronunciation rules our teacher taught us in French class this morning.

I broke my CD player replaying the difficult guttural sounds from my Al Kitaab pronunciation CD for Arabic. I had to press rewind so many times to hear the letters and pronounce them. I would have been better off listening to a fun Egyptian Arabic pop song by Amr Diab and registering those sounds to a melody rather than learning them in isolation on my CD player.

Music imprints sounds in our memory much better than a pronunciation lesson in class or a CD that ends up breaking our CD player from overuse.

Music is an essential element of the human condition. Neuroscientists have shown that music engages more parts of our brain than language. Some stroke survivors can sing and dance to music but can barely speak. Music gets deep into our psyche and memory. It sticks. Conjugation charts and vocabulary lists don’t stick. (Read Dr. Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia for more information on how music effects the brain. This book made me realize how I learned languages using music.)

Harness the power of music to make foreign languages stick.

I know how powerful music is because I studied 10 languages and speak seven (Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, and French) with perfect or almost perfect accents. I was able to do this because I listened to language like music and internalized the prosody and melodies of the languages. I also studied grammar, but it’s a lot easier and more fun to study grammar rules when you actually like the language you are learning. Plus, you remember the grammar rules better when you know verses from songs that display these rules, irregular verb conjugations, idioms, etc.

Unfortunately, many foreign language classes focus primarily on written exercises and rote memorization. Some people who try to learn on their own bury themselves in grammar books only to find themselves unable to speak well and comprehend native speakers. I’ve met people who have spent more time than I have studying in a language class or on their own. But when we were in the country where our target language was spoken, they were almost inept at speaking and understanding, while I was conversing freely with native speakers. Why? I used music and media in the target language to make the language part of my life.

Below are some suggestions from the over 70 tips in my book, Language is Music, on how to put the fun in language learning using music, TV, radio, movies, the internet, and other free and low-cost resources.

Language Hacking Guide review: Great guide for conversation, but no focus on reading or writing

I think I developed a crick in my neck while reading Benny's Language Hacking Guide from nodding my head in agreement so much. Although we took very different language-learning paths, it was clear while reading his book that the strategies we'd each came up with separately are very similar. While I can't say that I agree with him on every point (and I'll highlight some of those disagreements below), his book is definitely full of great strategies that, if implemented, will surely increase your ability to converse in your target language.

However, his book purposefully focuses on only two of the pillars that hold up the language temple: speaking (especially speaking) and listening. Writing and reading have been consciously ignored (although you'll certainly make some gains in both writing and reading by following the advice in the guide). Here's how Benny describes his take on writing, which I presume applies even more to reading:

Writing is not social enough for me to care about it. For people with academic or professional goals for their languages then my guide isn't for them. For people who want to improve their relationships with natives, then some of my tips help and I intentionally didn't discuss improving writing skills because of this. [I don't] care about [my] writing level…

So if you're looking for an all-in-one guide to tell you how to improve your speaking and listening and reading and writing, as Benny says, his guide isn't for you. Following the Language Hacking Guide, the gains made in writing and reading are really just incidental to the gains made in speaking and listening. For a book that purports to be a language hacking guide rather than a foreign-language conversation hacking guide, this is the only major issue I'd note.

Nevertheless, given that most language learners seem to pull off the reading/writing side better than the speaking/listening side, I'm not sure that this is a wholly bad thing, as long as you know not to expect much advice on reading and writing.

A good chunk of the book actually has application far beyond language learning: maintaining a positive mentality, staying motivated, being productive, moving from introversion to extroversion, etc. I feel like he could delete the language-learning references and turn the book into some kind of general self-help guide, but as those are definitely things that are helpful in learning a language, they're well placed in the guide. And, to echo another review, Benny's enthusiasm bursts through and it's hard to not be excited about going out and speaking a language after reading the guide. And let's not forget the numerous moments of humor to be found.

Turning away from the content itself, the guide is a pretty-pricy $39 (and will be going up to $49 at some point). It's advertised as over 200 pages long, but that's in slide format (i.e., like PowerPoint slides); the printer-friendly PDF version of the main text of the guide that comes with the package weighs in at only 55 pages, as opposed to the 195-page slide version of the main text. That was actually good news for me; a 200+ page book would be a bit more weighty than I'd expect from a guide, but it was in fact a breezy read. The whole package consists of the main text of the Language Hacking Guide (195 pages in slide format, 55 pages in printer-friendly PDF format, and an ePub version that prints out as 123 pages on my computer), 6 worksheets, a list of "conversational connectors", and over three hours of audio interviews.

So what's the bottom line? I strongly recommend this guide for anyone who wants to learn how to speak and learn how to speak quickly, although you might want to consider something else if your focus is on improving your writing and reading. (Disclosure: Benny traded me a copy of his guide for a copy of our book once it comes out, so while I didn't exactly get it for free, I didn't shell out the $39 either. I'm also participating in Benny's affiliate program, so if you click on a link to the Language Hacking Guide on this site and then buy it, you'll be giving $23.40 of that $39 to me (you can always click here to give it all to Benny).)

For the rest of this review, I'd like to look at a number of specific points in Benny's book, which I've put in three groups based on my own opinion of them: agree, agree but I'd add more, and disagree.

Lulzes from Benny's Language Hacking Guide

As you might know, I've been reading through Benny's Language Hacking Guide. I hope to post my full review of it later today, but for now I thought I'd share a few of the highlights of one of the things I enjoyed while reading the book: its humor.

Using vocab reps to put my son back to sleep

My two-year-old son often wakes up in the night to discover that he's rolled away from us. Not liking that, he'll start to cry. If he gets himself too worked up, it can be a pain to put him back to sleep. But there's a little trick that we've discovered that works like magic.

If you say a word he knows, he repeats it. If you keep saying words he knows, he'll keep repeating you. He'll do this until he falls back asleep—often mid-word.

Convert more of your time to target language time

Native-language time vs. target language time is a zero-sum game. Though not as nerdy as this zero-sum game (which, btw, is available in numerous languages).

Continuing my posts inspired by Benny's Language Hacking Guide, Benny and I both clearly agree that there is a lot of time that can be reclaimed during your day that can be put towards language learning. He covers it in a chapter called "Making Time" (p. 159), while the current manuscript of our book has it under "Maximize time spent getting exposed to the target language" (Benny wins in the "punchy titles" category).

The basic idea that both of us describe is taking a look at any time you have during the day and seeing if you can eke more target language time out of it. This means converting dead time into target language time and converting time used for other languages into target language time.

To give you an example of how you might want to look at your time, let me show you how I currently apply the analysis to myself.

The three milestones in learning a foreign-language accent

When learning a language, your accent will go through at most three stages, as shown here:

In the worst-case scenario, you'll start with most of your speech being unintelligible, i.e., native speakers don't know what you're saying. This is more like if you're going from, say, English to Chinese than, say, Spanish to Italian.

If your accent does start out unintelligible, it won't stay that way for long. Once you start speaking (and this should be happening early and often), you'll quickly reach the next milestone of most of your speech being intelligible, i.e., native speakers know what you're saying, even though your accent might very well be extremely strong.

Then it's time to get settled in for a bit, because the path between merely being intelligible and sounding like a native is often a long one. Over the course of plenty of speaking, you should be able to push your accent forward. As you get closer to sounding like a native, you'll probably need more concerted efforts (as opposed to merely speaking) to work out the kinks, but doing so will get you closer and closer to the native milestone.

That said, there's not necessarily a need to sound like a native. If you can do everything you need to do after the intelligible milestone but before the native milestone, then you could very will be happy with leaving it at that.

Grammarly responds to complaints about not disclosing their pricing

This post is part of a four-part series on Grammarly.

1. Grammarly: Misleading website kills my desire to learn about their service
2. Grammarly responds to my claim that their website is misleading
3. Grammarly: Impressive response to complaints reignites my desire to learn about their service
4. Grammarly responds to complaints about not disclosing their pricing

Additionally, you'll find my review of Grammarly for English-learning purposes here.

After I put up the post regarding Grammarly's response to the complaints raised on this blog, Max Lytvyn, one of Grammarly's founders, wrote back once again, which started another email back-and-forth, with pricing being the main focus this time.

In short, while Grammarly intends to make it easier to get pricing information without first providing contact information, Max defends their existing system based on industry norms and their need to figure out which users are entitled to discounts due to Grammarly having agreements with their schools, etc. I argue that they can meet this requirement and still be upfront about it.

How to learn Japanese without saying a word

If you came here to find the secret sauce for doing what the title suggests, I hate to disappoint by telling you that you'll actually need to say lots of words to learn Japanese. However, you'll also have to learn some things that aren't exactly words as we typically think of them. I'll let Ken Tanaka and Remy February enlighten you on a few of these.





As a bonus, Ken Tanaka and Remy February will also enlighten you about the restaurant chain affectionately known as ファキン Fakin . I'll warn you now that Fakin is not pronounced like "fakin'" in English, and the video plays on the word's similarity to a certain obscenity in English. Proceed at your own risk.

Write a blog, but write it in your target language

In Benny's Language Hacking Guide, he recommends writing a blog (p. 51).

There's just one massive problem with his suggestion.

He suggests you do it in your native language.

There is no such thing as "difficult" in language learning

Not applicable to languages.

I'm currently reading through Benny's Language Hacking Guide, and one of the points he makes is that he labels language issues as "different" instead of "difficult" (p. 30). This is dead on.

If a five-year-old native speaker can figure it out, you can too. And they usually can. When I took Russian back in high school, my teacher told us that five-year-old kids were doing just fine with many of the cases that foreign learners struggle with. And I can tell you that my own five-year-old daughter is doing just fine with Japanese, English, and Chinese. If you're reading this, I'm pretty sure your cognitive abilities are superior to just about any five-year-old, and if they can do it, you can too.

When something is different, it means you need to spend some time to figure it out. Depending on how different something is, the amount of time you need to spend will vary. Saying something is "difficult" is really just drawing an arbitrary line in that amount of time and considering anything past that line to be difficult.

But it's not difficult (remember the five-year-olds). It's just takes more time.

There is no such thing as "difficult" in language learning.

Pic from tacodelgato on Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0

Language learning by the images

I'm a big fan of using graphics to convey messages, and of course I like to include them on this blog. The following is a collection of recent graphics used here. Click on an image to see the original post.

Are females better at learning foreign languages?

This lady's mad language skilz have failed to impress her friend.

It looks like babies aren't the only ones we guys should be jealous of for their language abilities. According to Cracked:

The areas of the brain responsible for language are over 17 percent larger in women than men, making them the well-hung studs in the horse stables of conversation. Not content to just be bigger, women's brains also multi-task; processing language in both hemispheres while men generally keep the conversation going with just the dominant side of the brain.

Looking at children learning their native language, The Scientific American adds this:

Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.

If you don't trust Cracked as a source (and, really, why would you?), and if The Scientific American still isn't enough, how about the National Center for Biotechnology Information? They write:

Our results suggest that females have proportionally larger Wernicke and Broca language-associated regions compared with males. These anatomical differences may correlate with superior language skills previously demonstrated in females.

Translation? While dudes may drive better (sorry, ladies, Cracked told me so), the ladies got some mad language skills that men just can't match.

Here's the thing though: these studies seem to be focusing on native-language acquisition. I did some quick Googling around, but I couldn't find anything that provided any convincing evidence of the same for foreign languages. Does the same apply?

Babies are masters of the world's consonants and vowels

"I so pwn u." —Baby

Think you're a good language learning? You ain't got nothing on a baby. From LiveScience:

At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue from a foreign one.

They can't even see clearly across a room, and they're already figuring languages out.

"Big deal," you say? You can recognize your own language easily? Well, how about this one?

Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages on Earth, and they can hear the difference between foreign language sounds that elude most adults.

That's right. All languages on Earth. Those weird D variations in Hindu. If you're Japanese, Ls and Rs. If you're Hunanese, Ls and Ns. Run into a pronunciation you just can't get? It's so easy a baby could do it. So no more excuses from you.

Well, except that your mind works a little different from a baby's, so you might want to take a tactic that's slightly different from lying around cooing and crying.

Pic from _nezemnaya_ on Flickr | CC BY-ND 2.0

When and how to use paid online tutors for language learning

The following is a guest post by Milena Mitic, a native-Serbian speaker who also speaks English and is actively studying Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. In the comments to an earlier post, she noted how she has been making use of various paid online tutors for language learning. As I’ve never used any paid online tutors myself, I was interested in hearing about her experiences, so I asked her if she would write a guest post on the topic, and she kindly agreed.

It took me a while to discover that something very interesting is going on in the world of teaching; although I’ve been a heavy internet user for many years, I found out about online tutoring just six months ago. It is comforting to see that I’m not the only one who was completely oblivious of this revolution in teaching; many people think, when I mention online classes, that I’m talking about recorded sessions and not live interaction with a tutor who just happens to be on the other side of the world. So, just to make it clear, in case anyone still has any doubts, paid online tutoring works just like paid “offline” tutoring; you just use Skype or virtual classrooms instead of going to evening classes or meeting your tutor face to face.

These virtual classrooms are basically platforms offered on various online tutoring websites, like eduFire or WiZiQ, where you and your teacher can have voice and video chat, as well as sharing a “blackboard” and the presentations and documents that you are using during the class. Both of you can make changes to these documents (typing, drawing, highlighting, etc.) and both of you can see what the other person is doing. Some websites, like the Spanish-teaching 121Speech, use Skype + Google Docs for their classes, and this works very well too. You can then save the notes from the classes to go through them later. These virtual classrooms offer a possibility of one-on-one as well as one-on-many classes.

Some of you might be asking why use a paid online tutor when you are already on the internet where, as we all know, variations of everything can be found for free ☺. Well, in my opinion, there are situations where paid tutoring is a better choice.

What good grammar checkers are out there for foreign languages?

I just did a review of Grammarly, a grammar checker for English. In the comments on that post, for French, Damian recommended BonPatron (short texts are free, and the pro version is €9.99) and Antidote ($69).

Milena asked for suggestions in Spanish and Russian in another comment on that post. I've never made much use of grammar checkers, but, as I noted in my review of Grammarly, they could be quite useful. Accordingly, I'd like to broaden Milena's request: do you know of any other good grammar checkers in any language (including English)? If so, please drop a line in the comments!

Motivation is crucial in language learning, but must be considered together with efficiency

If you're not motivated to learn a language, you won't spend time learning a language. If you don't spend time learning a language, you won't learn a language. So no motivation means no learning.

It's pretty much just that simple, but let me add a corollary to the rule: if doing something is going to kill your motivation to learn a language, stop doing it. This gives you a free pass to ignore any language-learning suggestions (including, of course, my own) that would kill your motivation.

But if something is only going to damage your motivation and thus merely reduce the time you spend learning languages, you need to consider how much more efficient that thing is before giving it the old heave-ho.

Grammarly review: Most useful for advanced English learners, but has tough competition from free sites

Grammarly bills itself as "the best grammar checker and proofreader" for English-language documents. They've provided me with a free premium account (which I'll be giving away to a reader this upcoming week; if you want to be that reader, click here) to review.

To summarize, Grammarly is only going to be of use to more advanced English learners, due to the fact that (1) its engine aims at correcting native speakers' mistakes, not those of non-native speakers, and (2) all of its explanations are in English. So if your mistakes are somewhere in the ballpark of a native speaker's (and many advanced learners' mistakes are), and you can understand their explanations, then you're in good shape to make use of Grammarly. However, given the free corrections you can get on sites like Lang-8, it's probably not necessary for most language learners to invest in a premium account on Grammarly.

When starting a language, strike a balance between reading/listening and speaking/writing

When learning a foreign language, what you can write and speak is a subset of what you can understand when reading and listening; you simply can't write or speak something that you haven't already put in your head through reading or listening.

If you emphasize reading and listening, then what you can understand when reading and listening will increase more quickly than what you can write and speak. On the other hand, if you emphasize writing and speaking, then what you can write and speak will increase more quickly than what you can understand when reading and listening. This can be summed up in the following chart:

Looking at this chart, it's easy to see how you can only expand your writing and speaking as far as your ability to understand when reading and listening. As your writing and speaking approaches the limits of what you can understand when reading and listening, you need to expand what you understand when reading and listening. Otherwise, your writing and speaking will stagnate.

This, however, hardly means that you should focus on reading and listening while pushing off writing and speaking to some amorphous point in the future.

Trying to learn grammar primarily through exposure is inefficient

Even with instructions, you're probably not going to pull this off.

Imagine that someone gives you a cake and tells you to figure out how to make the same cake. A trained chef might be able to do that just by looking at the end product, but most people wouldn't stand a chance. Let's say they then give you all the ingredients you need to make the cake and then ask you to do the same thing. Making this cake would be cake (painful pun intended) for a trained chef, but the average person still wouldn't be likely to make anything close to the original cake. Now let's say they give you instructions for making the cake as well. The chef could probably pull off the exact same cake and the average person could probably get pretty close as well.

Now replace the cake with a language, the trained chef with a polyglot, ingredients with vocabulary, and instructions with grammar rules, and it holds up just the same; you need the grammar rules to bring it all together, and getting them quickly will help you bring it all together quickly.

I noted in an earlier post that the process of improving your language ability is fundamentally the same for each component of the language. The first two steps consist of identifying something you don't know and then figuring it out.

In my debate on how to approach grammar with Steve Kaufmann, I argued that his method for learning grammar is slower than mine. His approach to figuring out the things he doesn't know is one of the main reasons I think his method is slower.

Let's illustrate this with some imagery.

Scientists: Speaking multiple languages gives your brain a turbo boost

Hey, you, polyglot: has anyone told you how awesome you are today? No? Then David Marsh, specialized planner at the Continuing Professional Development Centre of Jyväskylä University in Finland, can take care of that for you:

[T]he ability to use more than one language brings an individual a considerable advantage…

[E]specially the research conducted within neurosciences offers an increasing amount of strong evidence of versatile knowledge of languages being beneficial for the usage of an individual's brain…

[The] six main areas where multilingualism and hence the mastery of complex processes of thought seem to put people in advantage … include learning in general, complex thinking and creativity, mental flexibility, interpersonal and communication skills, and even a possible delay in the onset of age-related mental diminishment later in life…

[T]he multilingual shows superior performance in handling complex and demanding problem-solving tasks when compared to monolinguals…

[I]t is likely that multilingualism produces a special advantage in utilizing a person's brain capacity as creatively as possible.