The only way to learn languages is to learn as many “you don’t exactly know why but that’s how you say it” words and phrases as possible. The reason is pretty simple: the real languages we speak are made of those words and phrases, and learning them is exactly how we all have learned our native languages. If you translate “enough is enough” into Japanese verbatim, Japanese speakers won’t understand. Likewise if you translate the Japanese counterpart of “enough is enough”「いい加減にしろ」into English verbatim, English speakers won’t get it.
Nobody ever learns his native language through grammar study like they force you to do in schools. Instead everybody just learns “that’s usually how you say it” and “that’s not how you say it”, and consequently acquires the ability to build grammatically correct sentences, even when one doesn’t know the specific grammatical rules behind it.
There have been countless foreign-language learning methods and materials in the history of the world, but all you could learn with them is severely limited skills that serve very little purpose. Today more people have managed to learn foreign languages, especially English as an international language, but that’s not because teaching methods have improved over the years. Rather it is simply because of more travel, international media and the internet have given people more exposure to real living English, which has allowed them to learn “you don’t know exactly why but that’s how you say it” in English.
The fundamental problems with the existing teaching methods and materials are simple;
- They offer only what self-proclaimed “educators” arbitrarily deem as standard, appropriate and important words and phrases, not the real languages real people use in their everyday lives today
- They offer only a fraction of the vocabulary and phrases people really use. My experience is you need MINIMUM 10,000 words and phrases to function as an adult in public social life. To be able to exchange jokes with friends, discuss politics and economy, you will need another 10,000 on top of the base 10,000, totaling 20,000. Most of the existing teaching materials only teach less than a thousand, a couple thousands at the very most, which is only 1/10 to 1/20 of what you really need
As a result, the only thing you can learn is something that is not very useful in the real world. You hardly understand anything when you watch TV and movies in the language. You labor through one-on-one conversations when you can dictate the pace, but you will be completely lost in group conversations. Unless you have no choice but to use that language, you will fall into the vicious cycle of “you don’t use it because you can’t use it”, and “you quickly forget because you don’t use it”.
If you try to learn the real living languages on your own, the only way is to read things on the internet, magazines, watch TV and movies, while looking up words in dictionaries. However you will quickly realize that is an extremely inefficient, time-consuming method. If you use traditional book dictionaries, the vast majority of your time will be spent on physically turning pages, trying to locate the words you are looking for. Try it yourself and you will quickly find out that it can easily take a minute to look up one word, so if you are to look up 60 words, just turning pages alone takes almost 1 hour. Even if you use digital dictionaries, you will still spend most of your time cutting and pasting the word in the search box. And even the latest digital dictionaries won’t handle all conjugations, declensions and so on. If you use a “student” dictionary you won’t find many words/phrases adults actually use, and if you use a large dictionary you have to wade through a sea of irrelevant information. Or even those are not often up to date. If you have multiple words you don’t understand in one sentence, you have to do a lot of guesswork among possible combinations of meanings.
Just watching TV and movies won’t do any good either. We do not articulate every word when we talk. We can still communicate because the vast majority of the phrases we use are set phrases, so we can understand them from the context. One unknown word can throw you off even in your native language. You don’t stand a chance with a foreign language with which you only have a fraction of the required vocabulary.
Comprehensive dictionaries typically contain 100,000 head words. Not only is it humanly impossible to learn them all, it is infinitely inefficient because the vast majority of those are rarely used technical, literary, obsolete vocabularies. The existing thesaurus won’t help either, because they just list synonyms and antonyms without any context. It is impossible for learners to know their differences nor how to use which when. As you know, “get”, “figure out”, “see”, “take”, “follow”, “comprehend”, “fathom”, “grasp”, “construe”, “interpret” all mean to understand. You have learned which one to use when, through years of experience, but obviously you cannot expect the same from learners. Humans can learn and memorize a large amount of information with surprising ease when it all makes sense. However it is extremely difficult to memorize meaningless things like random numbers.
When I was learning English, I suddenly started understanding American TV’s and radios when my vocabulary grew over 10,000 threshold. It was the same when I learned other languages, and I believe that is the minimum required level for average adults to function in society. In addition you will need 10,000 more to be able to fully understand a wide range of topics on social, political, legal issues, satires, cynicism and then banter jokes with friends. You can handle routine business, or you go to college classes and you manage to follow the lecture for the most part with a foreign language. However when you go to a private party you will be completely lost. You don’t get any jokes. You cannot participate in rapid-fire discussions. This happens to every language learner, and it is simply because you don’t know enough of the colloquial vocabulary.
You may find it overwhelming to learn 20,000 words, but actually it is not very difficult when you learn them efficiently and systematically. If you don’t, you won’t be able to understand TV’s and movies, join fun conversations with friends and be effective at work. Again it will be the vicious circle of “you can’t use it so you won’t use it”. After all, you have accomplished it with your native language, even though you have done it over many years. You do have an advantage though, that you already understand the concepts of all those words unlike when you were a child. You just have to learn versions in a different language. The key for efficient learning is systematic learning, and I will discuss it in detail later.
I have tried to learn many languages on my own including Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Korean and more. I have spent an enormous amount of time and energy and while I can get by with Spanish and French, I have never been able to reach the level of native speakers (I have never been to the Spanish-speaking world, and I only spent 5 days in Montreal). Again the reason is simple. There is no good self-learning material around. All Spanish textbooks and dictionaries say “shut up!” is “callate!”. However when you watch Spanish movies, more often than not native speakers will say “que te callas! (= that you shut up)”. I personally have never seen Spanish textbooks that mention the latter as an alternative command-sentence form. All German textbooks I have seen say “wait!” is “warte!”. However when you watch German movies, everybody says “warte mal!”. Italian speakers often add “ma (= but)” at the beginning of questions. For example, instead of “che ridi?” (= what are you laughing at?), they say “ma che ridi?”. Of course I haven’t seen Italian textbooks that mention this usage. You may think these are small details but these are enough to trip learners over, and these are just a tip of the iceberg. There are some textbooks that claim to teach “street languages”, but they almost always go to the other extreme and are just filled with dubious and mostly vulgar slang. There is no, or at least I myself have never seen any, teaching material for any language that covers everything from formal to informal in depth, the language that everyday people really use in the real world.
There are many expensive language teaching programs that rely on games and puzzles, but that sort of gimmick only slows you down. They may be good for kids but if you are really motivated to learn, you need the language for your life and work, then you don’t have time to waste going through them. This is not just about language learning but what really prevents people from learning things is not lack of fun. Again, we can learn things very quickly when everything makes sense. Even if you use games and puzzles, if the subject is confusing and not clear, we can never learn effectively.
The language teaching material that really works is the one that teaches the words and phrases the real people use, as much as and as efficiently as possible, without wasting learners’ time and energy.
It has also been said often that only children can learn foreign languages effectively, but the existing school education has never effectively taught foreign languages. Instead virtually all children who speak foreign languages fluently are either those who lived in those countries, whose parents are native speakers of the languages, or those who go to special schools like American-French schools, and are all in environments where they have to use the foreign languages. On the contrary, adults often find ways to avoid using foreign languages. People who are stationed in foreign countries for work still do most business with compatriots using native languages. English speakers can easily live without ever speaking local languages in many European countries. At home the internet gives you everything you need in your native language today.
There are many people in the world who speak 4 or 5 languages. The caveat is, virtually all of them live in environments where they need to speak 4 or 5 languages, like at the border of multiple countries. Learning language is not about intelligence, and certainly not about special talent. It is all about exposure to living languages. That is exactly what learning “you don’t exactly know why but that’s how you say it” words and phrases is all about.
Aside from the existing teaching methods and materials do not teach enough of the real living languages, there are following other problems;
Grammar-centric teaching doesn’t work
The languages we speak are not just words arranged mechanically according to the grammar. Again, they are groups of “you don’t know exactly why but that’s how you say it” phrases. For example, an English phrase “enough is enough” won’t be easily understood in Japanese when it is translated verbatim. Instead Japanese say “いい加減にしろ (=”Keep it at an acceptable level)” in the same context. As you can see the verbatim translation of the Japanese version probably won’t immediately click with English speakers either. Especially because English and Japanese are completely different languages with nothing in common, verbatim translations based on grammar only produce unnatural sentences at best, but more often than not difficult to understand.
Nobody learns his/her native language through the conventional grammar-centric teaching method. Children just learn everything through phrases. Eventually they will learn the grammar by naturally finding the underlying common structures in sentences. Even in adulthood, we do not have detailed technical understanding of the grammar of our own native languages. Instead we all understand the grammar as “you don’t know exactly why but that’s how you say it”.
Strong vocabulary is by far the most important thing for communication. You can even say accurate grammar is not even essential. When a learner says “I yesterday movie watch”, it is easy to see he meant to say “I watched a movie yesterday”. However, if he doesn’t know any of the words “watch”, “movie” or “yesterday”, it will be very difficult to understand what he is trying to say.
Because teachers nit-pick on the minute, insignificant grammatical details and punish students for every error, students become weary and lose sight of the real objective – communicate using languages. Focus on strengthening vocabulary, stop worrying about minute grammatical details and use languages to communicate. You learn through “you don’t know exactly why but that’s how you say it”, and you will learn grammar naturally, and actually with far better results.
Another big problem with the existing grammar-centric teaching is that they classify grammatical elements into multiple levels, and they only teach one at a time. The entire process takes years in the conventional school systems. The problem is, in everyday life you need to use pretty much the entire grammatical concepts all the time. Have you ever thought about not using past tenses or conditional statements when you talk to a child? Never.
The truth is, none of the grammatical concepts is too difficult for anybody. It is often said that subjunctive moods in Romance languages are very difficult, but I’ve never met a single native speaker of Romance languages, including young children, who struggle with them. The case systems of Slavic languages are the same thing. Uneducated people may not know difficult words and literary expressions, but you never find anybody who cannot use correct verb tenses in his/her native language. Even someone completely drunk and incoherent can form grammatically correct sentences without any problem.
Instead of piecemealing, you should feed learners all the grammatical concepts from the beginning. Again, there is no need to perfect your grammar in a hurry. You just need to understand how each grammatical concept works. Small mistakes won’t hinder communications. Focus on building vocabulary which enables you to broaden the topic you can discuss and understand. You will spend more time actually using the language, and your grammatical kinks will be ironed out quickly.
The existing dictionaries/thesauruses/vocabulary builders don’t work
The existing dictionaries, thesauruses and vocabulary builders are all based on head words. However in real-life languages, we treat words and phrases equally instead. For example, in English there are numerous phrasal verbs. “Give up” is one of the most important phrasal verbs, but “give off” is not as much. The existing vocabulary builders only rank the head word “give” as one of the most important words, which is correct, but they put all phrasal verbs of “give” under it, without telling learners which one is really important. To all intents and purposes, “give up” is not a derivative expression of “give”, rather it is a separate, independent word/expression, and should be treated as such.
Even with the head word “give”, aside from the main meaning of transferring the possession of something, it also means something bends or stretches under pressure, but that meaning is not nearly as important as the main one. However the existing dictionaries don’t explain any of that, so learners have to wade through a muddle of information themselves.
Recently it looks like the internet has been used to survey which words are used most frequently, but they don’t seem very useful, because many of the articles on the internet are written by professional writers in literal languages, and they do not necessarily reflect the real spoken languages.
If your native language is English, then none of English-to-a-foreign-language dictionaries really work either. In English there are many words that mean “understand”, like “comprehend”, “fathom”, “grasp”, “get”, etc., and it is the same case in other languages. It is simply impossible to make 1-to-1 relationships of words in two different languages. When to use which word depends on situations, contexts, or sometimes personal preferences, and it is impossible for dictionaries to tie everything together.
Also some languages have a specific word for a certain concept, while other languages don’t and use other ways to express that concept. For example, in Japanese there is no single word for “available”. Instead the concept is expressed by sentences like “the product is still in production”, “the item is in stock and you can buy it”, “he has time to see you”, etc.. The existing dictionaries usually try to make one-to-one word relationships between languages, and most often fail to capture differences of logics and nuances. As a result if you translate using them, your sentences will be decidedly unnatural. The truth is, two languages, especially those that belong to different language families like English and Japanese can never be matched word by word, and cannot be fully represented by traditional dictionaries.
Another problem with the existing vocabulary builders is they focus too much on nouns. It is a big problem because nouns are actually the least important when learning foreign languages. The materials for school students are full of animal and plant names for instance, but not only we rarely talk about hippos and rhinos in real life, even if we don’t know the word “hippo”, we can easily substitute the idea by saying “that big African mammal live in water” or something. However if you do not know verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, it would be a whole lot more difficult, or impossible in most cases, to communicate the idea to others.
Traveler phrase books don’t work
You might think I’m contradicting myself: I did say that language learning is all about learning words and phrases. While it is absolutely true, the problem with the existing traveler phrase books is, they cover too narrow a range of language and fail to help build any meaningful language skills.
As I mentioned previously, in order to learn a language in a meaningful way, you will have to cover all the bases, if not in complete depth. Otherwise, you wouldn’t understand the underlying grammatical rules, and all you understand is the phrases exactly listed. It would be like trying to memorize Greek hymns or random phone numbers. They don’t really make sense, and you will never be able to memorize many things that don’t make sense. On top of that, native speakers you encounter are most unlikely to answer your questions using the exact phrases in your traveler phrase book.
A difficult part of language learning is, you will have to have a certain level of fluency to do meaningful communications. I have seen many immigrants in the US, and you notice either one speaks sufficient English, or one doesn’t really speak it at a meaningful level. The more you work at it, the faster you get better. The better you get, the more you use it and the cycle continues. If you don’t work at it, the opposite cycle of “you don’t use it because you can’t use it” continues.
Many language learning materials claim that you only need to study for 15 minutes a day, and in a few weeks you will be fluent. That will NEVER happen, unless your definition of “fluent” is “being able to say a few greetings”. You have spent your entire life expanding your vocabulary, even though you haven’t necessarily done it in the most efficient way. That cannot be replicated with 15 minutes a day for a few weeks, no matter how.
You will never learn to understand foreign languages just by listening to them, even if they are spoken slowly
Language teachers have been telling us to just listen to foreign languages and “get your ears used to their sounds and rhythms”. However we will never understand dolphins’ communications just by listening to it. We will never understand advanced quantum physics discussions between college professors just by listening to the recording either. Unless you learn and understand the underlying concepts and technical terms of quantum physics, you will never understand anything.
Meanwhile you wouldn’t talk even to your very young children slower than you talk to older children. The speed of speech is not a factor in understanding. If you are familiar with the phrase, understand the concepts and terms used in the phrase, then you will understand it regardless of speech speed.
You DO need to know “dirty” words. You just don’t have to use them yourself
If you don’t know “dirty” slang terms, you could embarrass not just yourself but others also, by innocently asking them what they mean, for instance. Whether you like it or not, slang is a significant part of real living languages, and we don’t need teachers to decide if we should know it. When you have the proper knowledge, you can judge yourself whether you use it or not.
Okay, so let’s see how you can actually use this material in the next section.