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“I know you’ll have an opinion about flashcards”

October 23, 2020 By Daniel Leave a Comment

Buondì.

Club-member Andrew emailed this:

One other language learning tool which I’m kind of undecided on is flash cards. I’ve not seen you mention them on your site, but I know you’ll have an opinion. Maybe a topic for a future newsletter? My thoughts are:

Helps get over a hump when you struggle with similar looking words; spesso, spasso, spessa, etc

Single words on their own don’t work, it needs to be a phrase with context.

Focus on tricky words, not every word you don’t know.

Beware of youtube videos that have you believe it’s the silver bullet.

Well, of course I have an opinion on flashcards, Andrew’s right. Though not a strong one either for or against.

I agree, Andrew, that flashcards (little pieces of paper or cardboard with the word you want to learn written on one side and maybe a translation on the other side – or a more technologically up-to-date version of this age old study technique) are no silver bullet.

The interesting part, though, is why not.

Learning vocabulary is, of course, an essential part of learning a foreign language, and there are different approaches to doing it.

When I was a beginner in Turkish, for example, I remember using flashcards to teach myself the numbers, the days of the week, food items, and other such useful beginner topics. The Turkish words were not similar to anything I’d seen before, so effort was required to recognise and memorise them, and there was the promise that they would be immediately useful.

Duolingo didn’t exist in those days (this was more than 30 years back), but if it had done I could have used their app, which presents words and grammar together not separately, and probably got just as far or further than with my elastic band-wrapped stack of snipped up pieces of card.

Ditto with taking a course, or doing ‘match the word and the picture’ exercises, or whatever. There are many ways to learn new words and, in part it, comes down to what you are comfortable with and what the options are. If I had no other way of learning words, so no app, no course, no textbook, then flashcards and the like would be fine.

Flashcards, I suppose, would also be good when it came to dealing with a MASS OF ESSENTIAL ITEMS that really must be dealt with before moving on to, say, reading or listening to actual texts. If you want to learn Japanese, you’re going to have to deal with the Japanese writing system, and so build that visual memory for kanji (the Chinese characters that represent words). Flashcards, why not?

BUT – and this is the important point – in any language there’s a lot of vocabulary. And so, once past the essentials that you’ll find in any beginners’ course, the issue is WHICH WORDS are worth spending your time on, rather than how you might learn them.

By definition, when using flashcards, you will have pre-selected words you want to focus on, or someone else will have done so for you. But once past the lowest levels, it’s far from obvious what your focus should be. Do you really need to memorise sets of ‘body’ or ‘food’ vocabulary, for example? Or would you, like me, find it more useful to be learning terms like ‘marketing’, ‘discount’, ‘turnover’, ‘profit’, and so on?

With my most recent and lowest-level language, which is Spanish, I’ve really not ‘studied’ at all (apart from a few months with Duolingo), but I have been reading it, listening to it, and taking weekly conversation lessons. You might wonder whether that’s not a case of putting the cart before the horse, but with a language that’s reasonably accessible in terms of its vocabulary and grammar (I know Italian and some French) it’s perfectly possible to get used to understanding it and communicating in it WITHOUT memorising sets of words beforehand.

By reading regular emails from El Pais about the American presidential election, for example, I’ve learnt a lot of words, got much more used to the grammar structures, and built my confidence dealing with Spanish texts. More to the point, the things I am reading and listening to contain the words and structures that are relevant to my interests. Sure, I might have trouble decoding a Spanish menu, because I haven’t bothered with the flashcard set of food words, but I can follow the conversation about how relevant the Hispanic/Latino vote in Florida is, and how both sides are attempting to win it.

Were I to have spent the same time as I spent reading election report emails in Spanish memorising word lists, I might, or might not, have learnt more items. But they almost certainly wouldn’t have been the things that are most-immediately relevant to me.

Insomma, learning by reading/listening/speaking has the huge advantage that it is targeted to your needs, compared to learning pre-selected lists of words. Suppose I was into, I don’t know, say cooking, then arguably, reading and following recipes would be a way to fast track the relevant words and structures into the part of my brain from which I expect to subsequently retrive them when I need them.

OK, you might argue, what about making flashcards of all the words you need to look up when creating Spanish food for your family, learning just those, and so having exactly the vocabulary you’ll want handy for next time?

Logical, but wrong.

Reading recipes, or election news, has the advantage of providing information about frequency. If I read or hear a word many times, sooner or later my brain will figure it out. It’s a slow process, and not terribly effective, but it’s natural and everyone can do it WITHOUT STUDYING.

Whereas if I only see/hear a word or structure once or twice, I might not understand it and I’m pretty sure not to remember it. Or at least, I won’t remember it to the extent that I could use it in conversation when I needed it.

But that’s fine.

Because according to the texts that I am exposed to, that I have chosen to read/listen to, that particular word, that specific structure, is not frequent. And items which are not frequent are unlikely to offer a very good return on the time invested to learn them, or to stay ‘learnt’ very long, given that they won’t be reinforced with regular exposure.

Learn by reading/listening/speaking and you will inevitably, without a shadow of doubt, eventually assimilate and be able to use whichever elements of the language that are most relevant to you, while ignoring the rest.

And it’s the ‘ignoring the rest’ part that allows someone like me to reach a degree of conversational fluency fairly quickly.

What I’m not doing is spending time on memorising words or studying grammar that I might only use at a future point, or never. What I’m instead doing is having fun decoding, then perhaps as some distant future point using in speech, the elements of the language which I actually need, in order to understand what I read and hear, and to express my thoughts.

A final point – by not studying Spanish, I find that I’ve developed a huge hole where the past tense should be. Were I to be bothered to fill that hole, I’d find a website or textbook that showed the past tense conjugations and perhaps make a few flashcards. Perhaps just ten or twenty of the most common verbs.

With a little effort I’d have significantly improved my Spanish using this old-fashioned and free technique.

Why not do that, then, you might be asking yourself?

Because I’m lazy, perhaps. Or maybe because I don’t learn languages that way any longer. It didn’t work out so well in the past, so I stopped.

These days, I’d rather be catching up on the pandemic situation in Madrid and Barcelona by listening to the lunchtime news on Spanish radio, or reading about last night’s presidential debate in a Spanish newspaper’s daily election email. And yes, it’s difficult at first. But it quickly gets easier.

Articles and news broadcasts are not perfect, but they motivate and interest me, and importantly, they contain FREQUENCY INFORMATION. Whatever I hear/read often, I learn effortlessly. Whatever is uncommon gets ignored.

Were someone to come up with a master-list of ‘all the words that Daniel needs to learn in order to read, listen to and say the things that Daniel is interested in‘, then surely it would be worth me devoting study time to. I’d make a MOUNTAIN OF FLASHCARDS, and work through them, and boy, would it be time well spent!

But given that such a list would be personal to each one of us, and so each would be different, no one has done so, not even, especially not, my teacher, who sadly lacks the ability to peer into my brain and poke around to see what’s missing.

My list would be heavy on language-learning, marketing and politics. Yours would be different. And both would no doubt mutate in time, as our interests and priorities changed.

Never mind that there are no master lists, though, because you know what? Our brains has an app for making one.

Just feed your app appropriate data (text and audio which is more or less intelligible, feedback from conversation partners on things you don’t know how to say, or say badly) and it will run happily in the background, not taking up too much of the mental energy you need to conserve in order to get through your day. You’ll forget it’s there, but all the while it’ll be working away to build for you, word by word, structure by structure, your very own master list for the language you’re learning!

Read, listen and converse for long enough, for enough hours/days/months/years, and you will end up with, I promise, a personalised database of the elements of the language that are most essential for your needs.

No Youtube ‘learn an Italian word a day’ video can do that for you.

A lunedì.

P.S.

Here’s a final reminder about this week’s new ‘book of the classic movie’ ‘easy reader’ ebook, which is on offer until Sunday night at just £5.99!

.pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
.mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
8 chapters to read and listen to
Comprehension questions to check your understanding
Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
Suitable for students at B1/B2 level and above
Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Buy L’avventura, just £5.99 this week! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Classic Italian movies ‘easy readers’ | Catalog

P.P.S.

Don’t forget to listen to Thursday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news!

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop

So much nonsense written about language-learning

October 21, 2020 By Daniel Leave a Comment

Buondì.

Thanks to club-member Zsuzsanna, who sent me a link to this reasonably interesting article about language-learning. The article is a comment piece about a ‘scientific’ paper, published in the journal ‘Cognition’, the abstract for which you can find here.

I haven’t read the full journal article, because to do so would require payment and I’m unwilling to part with hard-earned cash for such nonsense, but the guy that wrote the interesting article about the paper clearly has, and goes into some depth.

The part that riled me up from the extract is below (the bolding is mine):

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily.

Background info. for you: there’s an idea that there exists a ‘critical period’ for language-learning and that this is to be found in early childhood.

Miss it, perhaps because you’ve been locked in a darkened and soundproofed room for the first few years of your life, and you won’t learn to speak like mom and pop. Though if it was them that closed you in the cellar, you might not have a lot to say to them anyway. So no bad.

Mostly this type of research was originally done on how children aquired their first language (so pyschology not applied linguistics), but parallels have been drawn for second-language learning. Such as in the paper above, which reveals (drum roll) that actually, the ability of children to magically learn the grammar of their native language continues until almost-adulthood.

Well, duh, OF COURSE it does!

Whoever heard of pre-schoolers using the ‘third conditional’, for example? Structures like “If I hadn’t dirtied my diaper, I wouldn’t have a soggy butt” come much later in life, and may often only be mastered, in my completely unscientific opinion, in the context of formal education.

The interesting article guy does a good job of looking at the study itself and, basically, drawing the opposite conclusion from the data on which it is based – that older learners, so non-almost-adults, can continue to learn languages effectively (huray!), or at least, that they would be able to if they weren’t distracted by trivia like having to earn a living.

But from my quick perusal of what is actually quite a long interesting article, what he doesn’t do is take the researchers to task for their OBSESSION WITH GRAMMAR.

“Children learn language more easily than adults“, says the abstract, but since when did language = grammar?

Since never.

What about the vast, effectively infinite, set of words, expressions, idioms, colloquilisms, jargon and so on that a typical adult may need to call upon in order to use her native-tongue to full effect?

What about native-speaker-like pronunciation? And that ability we adults have (but children lack) to ‘decode’ the speech of others so as to read from their vowels or cadences their geographical origin, social class, or whatever ‘meta’ information their speech contains that is not conveyed by the words or grammar?

What about the ‘skills’ of reading, of writing, of listening, and even of expressing yourself clearly in speech?

Italian state schools (in which I have close to zero faith) use oral testing as the primary way of evaluating children’s progress. Grouchy adults regularly ‘interrogate’ their classes of stressed or terrified juveniles and award an entirely subjective and so impossible-to-challenge ‘voto’ (grade) to each child, which goes towards their final result for the year. And kids who fail a year in Italy risk having to repeat it. Which is dandy if you’re an adolescent male looking to meet pretty girls a year or two younger than yourself, but otherwise not proven to be an effective motivator.

Oral testing is hugely less efficient in terms of classroom time than quizzes or essays (everyone except the person currently being tormented is wasting the school day away on their smartphones.) But it’s much easier for the teacher, as it takes up time which would otherwise have to be spent actually teaching and, as a bonus, avoids the necessity of taking work home to grade or correct over the weekend.

The justification, though, is that ‘interrogations TEACH KIDS TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES, which they presumably would otherwise be unable to do, even in their own native tongue, despite their youthful superpower of learning grammar quicker than grandma can.

Sorry, but it’s all nonsense.

I teach kids of all ages, from pre-schoolers to the final years of high school, and it’s not apparent, I assure you, that ‘Children learn language more easily than adults’. The opposite, in fact.

I have mostly taught adults, and I learn languages myself, despite being more than three decades past the age at which the paper’s authors claim ‘grammar-learning ability’ ‘declines steadily’.

So I can confidently assert, ladies and gentlemen, that it is 100% NOT TRUE that, given equal exposure to language-learning opportunities (so for example, a measured number of hours of contact each week), kids of any age would make faster progress than adults. I’d bet on the opposite being the case.

Guys! You were measuring the wrong thing (‘grammar’ does not equal ‘language’). But in any case, if you want to understand adults’ abilities at second langauge-learning, why focus on children and they way they learn their mother tongues?

Perhaps you’re missing some other cruical factor besides age. Like, um, MOTIVATION (adults have it, kids tend not to), TIME AVAILABLE (the opposite), or EXPERIENCE (learning a first foreign language is hard, subsequent languages are easier)? Perhaps, if you looked, you’d discover something that would consign the whole ‘critical period’ concept to the trash can?

Grades in Italian schools go from 1 to 10, did you know? Not A, B, C, D, E, like when I was a lad. But as with everything in Italy, you have to know the unwritten rules that actually govern people’s behaviour.

For example, the law says you mustn’t drink alcohol and drive, though everyone knows that a couple of glasses of wine with your Sunday lunch is going to be just fine. Ditto, that you should not, in any circumstances, pass a red stop light! Unless, of course, you’re pretty much sure there’s nothing coming the other way, and there are obviously no cops around.

So, “nobody gets 10, dad” means that the achievable maximum in an ‘interrogazione’ is 9, or more likely 8. Which in turn means that 7 is good, and 6 is acceptable (‘soddisfacente’), though what that actually means is bad, just scraping by.

5 is a fail (‘insoddisfacente’). 4 or 3 are so bad that you’re in for a thrashing when you get home. And only ‘crazy’ teachers would give a 2 or a 1.

So the actual scoring system for oral and written tests in Italian schools, as applied by most teachers, is a five point scale from 5 to 9, with one common failing grade and four gradations of passing, from ‘just about OK’ to ‘wish I had a class composed entirely of angels like you’.

Not to be mean then (unwritten rules need to be followed, otherwise one seems like a foreigner), I’ll award the abstract a 5.

And admonish club members to believe precisely the opposite of its conclusions – that older is wiser, as any fool can see.

A mercoledì.

P.S.

Don’t forget this week’s new ‘book of the classic movie’ ‘easy reader’ ebook, which is on offer until Sunday night at just £5.99!

A group of friends – including Anna, her best friend Claudia, and Anna’s well-off architect boyfriend, Sandro – are holidaying on a luxury yacht. While they are moored at a tiny, uninhabited island, one of the party mysteriously disappears. A search is begun, but the weather begins to worsen…

If you’d like to find out what happens next, the details (including the link to the free sample chapter) are below.

.pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
.mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
8 chapters to read and listen to
Comprehension questions to check your understanding
Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
Suitable for students at B1/B2 level and above
Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Here are the links if you want to buy a copy, or just look at the free sample chapter:

Buy L’avventura, just £5.99 this week! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Classic Italian movies ‘easy readers’ | Catalog

N.B. We have various payment options in our online shop, one of which is Paypal, which used to be our only payment system but is now supplemented by Amazon Pay (currently working 100% of the time, so useful if you have an Amazon account) and ‘Credit card/Stripe’ (which also works fine.) The Paypal route, on the other hand, appears NOT to work much of the time – we think it’s their new, EU-imposed, security protocols which are confusing people, though it’s hard to be sure. If you’re a Paypal fan, then persist. But if not, do try one of the other payment options, which work much better, for now at least!