How To Study a Language – My Approach

I’m going to explain my study method based on learning fairly simple languages like Spanish or French. Learning time needed will obviously increase for more difficult languages. Also, these are things that have worked for me, they may not be as effective for you.

Language learning has been an important part of how I spend my free time for about 5 years now. During those 5 years I’ve come to know what types of courses will destroy my motivation, and what will keep me going.

The reason I’m mentioning motivation first and not specific techniques is because I believe this is the definitive factor between success and failure. You can have the greatest course in the world that will teach you a language in record time, but if it doesn’t keep you motivated you may as well throw it out of the window. After all, if you don’t have any inclination to study then it makes no difference what course you use, it will simply sit on the shelf gathering dust.

For me, finding a course/technique that was going to make language learning feel less like a chore and more like an activity that I don’t mind doing, was the most important task. Because, the truth is, I really don’t enjoy studying. Some people love getting into the meat and bones of grammar, or learning new vocabulary, but I find it tedious. However, I know that at the end of it all I’ll have something that will be practical, that I can be proud of, and that I can pass on to my kids in the future.

I also know that after x amount of hours I’m going to stop doing formal study and start reading books and listening to native material. This is when the first real pleasures of language learning start to emerge for me.

When learning Spanish I lost count of the number of courses I tried, but one thing I discovered was that the likes of FSI, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, and Rosetta Stone were a mild form of psychological torture. Although I finished Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, I was ready give it all up.

Part of the problem was that theses courses constantly test you with drills, and repitition. I always felt like I was doing an exam. Every time I picked up one of these courses I thought ‘Jesus, here we go again’.

Fortunately, I’m a curious fellow, and knowing that the internet is full of all sorts of useful advice (if you know where to look) I began researching Spanish study methods. By chance I came across a thread discussing a course called Assimil, and a study technique known as shadowing.

Assimil appealed to me instantly because it didn’t involve drills. It had a lot of repetition (unfortunately that’s one thing you cannot escape from) but the style of the course allows a certain degree of flexibility. The course consists of 100 1-2 minute lessons. On one page you have the dialogue in the target language, and on the other side you have it in English. Underneath the dialogue are grammatical notes. I desperately need a course that is not grammatically heavy. Accompanying the book are four CDs that contain all of the lessons read by the native speakers. Depending on which course you get, you’ll learn around 2,000-2,500 words. Some popular languages also have an advanced course.

The method I use to study these courses is simple. I spend about 20 minutes per day familiarising myself with 2 of the dialogues. For another 30 minutes I listen to the lessons and shadow the material. This means that I speak at the same time as the speaker on the CD and try to mimick as perfectly as possible their accent, while trying to match the meaning to the words. Then I spend another 10 minutes shadowing older lessons as a review.

How is this different from the drills on other courses?

The main difference is that no one is prompting me to translate something. I’m not straining myself to remember sentences and getting annoyed or frustrated when I get it wrong. For example, in Pimlseur you’ll hear ‘how do ask someone if they want to have dinner with you this evening?’ After this you have a limited time to try and answer. You can pause the tape if you want but it doesn’t feel any less frustrating. Rather, with Assimil, I’m just repeating whatever is said and doing my best to understand it. There’s no pressure at all to memorise anything.

I’ll continue this study method until lesson 50 and then I’ll go back to lesson 1. I’ll still study lesson 50 and above but this time I’ll spend an extra 15 minutes each day translating the first lessons from English to the target language. Any words I get wrong I’ll put into my SRS in my ipod. Anyone not using an SRS or doesn’t know what it is, visit this useful post on how to use SRS for language learning. Essentially it’s an advanced form of flashcards, but I’ll leave it to you to find out more.

To be more clear, on the day that I’m studying lessons 50 and 51, I’m also translating 1 and 2. On the days I’m studying lessons 52 and 53, I’m translating lessons 3 and 4. I continue this until the end of the course. There’s no pressure if I get things wrong. I can alter my study times according to the difficulty of the lesson, and if I want I can translate all the lessons again just to make sure I have them down pat.

With Indonesian, I really wasn’t ready to translate from English to Indonesian after lesson 50, so I translated from Indonesian to English. Then I went through the course a thrid time, and then a fourth time. Again, I haven’t lost my motivation partly because I don’t feel like I’m being tested. I’m doing all of this at my own pace and can change things when I want.

What happens when you finish Assimil?

If it has an advanced course I’ll do exactly the same with that. If there isn’t an advanced course then I’ll look for suitable level pocasts to listen to. I’ll also start reading books. If possible I’ll find graded readers or children’s books. For Indonesian the best thing I could find was the Harry Potter collection. This poses a slight problem because it is slightly above my level. However, this is remedied by reading the Indonesian version side-by-side with the English version.

I simply read a sentence, try to understand it, check for meaning by looking at the English text, and if there are any unknown words I’ll put them in my SRS to be memorised later.

For those of you lucky enough to be learning a language that has a lot of audiobooks, you’re in for a treat! By ‘audiobook’ I mean books like Harry Potter that are read by professional actors. The technique I use here is called L-R and is more fully described here. This post is getting long enough so I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail about it.

The first time I used this was with the first Harry Potter book in Spanish. I listened to the audiobook while reading the English text simultaneously. So whatever the Spaniard was saying I was reading the equivalent in English. I would essentially be matching the English words with the Spanish sounds.

This will be reasonably tough at first but it becomes easier as time goes on and as the pattern finding machine that is your brain, begins to make more and more connections. Remember, I’m doing this when I’m at an appropriate level. I have around 2500 words under my belt, and lots of reading and listening practice. Another important point is that you must have an unabridged copy of the audiobook, it must match the text perfectly.

I did this twice for the 1st Harry Potter. It’s 8 hours long so that’s 16 hours in total. After this I listened to the audiobook again but this time with the Spanish text in front of me. Then I listened to the audiobook again with the Spanish text, but I actually shadowed the actor as he spoke.

At the time I felt like I wasn’t making much progress with it. But I decided to listen to the audiobook alone and to my surprise I could understand just about everything. I then did the same process with Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. After that, I’ve never looked back. I’ve read a fair few books and listened to a good number of audiobooks.

Some of you may be wondering about my speaking ability. The truth is, I never had a speaking partner until after studying the audiobboks, but as soon as I sat down with him I could chat away, albeit awkwardly at times. When I left England I didn’t speak Spanish for about a year, I hadn’t studied it, and I’d read only about 4 books, yet when I met my new speaking partner, we would chat for hours just in Spanish.

I’ve used Assimil, and this method, with French, Indonesian, Italian, and Spanish. I’ve finished 6 Assimil courses. I’ve spent over 250 hours on my Indonsian one alone. I’ve listened to audiobooks in French and Spanish, and in about 6 months I’ll be doing the same in Italian. I really haven’t come across a set of methods that rival this for listening, speaking, and reading development.

But I’d like to repeat what I said earlier, one of the major reasons why these methods are effective for me is because I don’t mind doing them. The thought of doing them doesn’t destroy my motivation, and so, those of you who are new to language learning should be searching for the same thing. Hopefully, if you find it, you’ll happily put in the 1000s of hours needed to call yourself ‘fluent’.