The key to foreign language success

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Buondì.

The key to success with foreign languages is very simple, though chances are you won’t appreciate me telling you.

Yet this is the most important lesson I’ve drawn from over forty years of learning foreign languages, and more than thirty years of teaching English as a foreign language.

But first some context, so as to increase, ever so slightly, the chances of my number one language-learning tip being of some help.

Imagine you’re a professional interpreter, hard at work rendering live speech in a language you know extremely well into another language you know extremely well, to impressive effect.

Or you’re a historian, browsing through thousand-year old parchments, records of a foreign court, looking for evidence to support some thesis you hold dear.

Or, closer to home, you’re turning the pages of an Italian newspaper or book.

Or watching a trailer for an Italian TV series.

Or doing a conversation lesson with an Italian native speaker teacher.

There’s a spectrum of certainty involved here: of the probability that what you read, that what you hear, that what you can say, is known, and that you’re certain of what you know.

With the first two examples – the interpreter and the historian – we can expect that they know what they’re doing.

Whereas for the language student, for ourselves, that expectation is the opposite – we’re ‘studying’ (hate that word) precisely because our level of uncertainly is elevated.

That’s to say, we understand much less of what we hear and read than we’d like to, and can express ourselves only with some or much uncertainty.

We are all of us somewhere on the ‘uncertainty spectrum’, whether nearing total uncertainly (imagine an academic text in Chinese) or nearing total certainty (an academic text in your native tongue, on a subject you’re familiar with).

We might assume that a student beginning a new foreign language would be at 0% certainty while an experienced professional translator, interpreter or teacher of that language (and most educated native speakers) would be at the other end of the line, at 100% certainty.

And yet it’s not like that. Language is so complex that there are always going to be points of uncertainty.

The interpreter’s skill is to render speech – in real time – into an approximately equivalent flow of language that clients can follow and appreciate. Fleeting points of uncertainly must be dealt with as they arise, but such are the characteristics of human speech that doubts will likely be smoothed out later. It’s the overall understanding that will matter.

The historian will be familiar with the period, the actors, the topics, and will have a good idea of what she’s looking to find in the mass of dusty material. Her language skills matter, of course, but there are many parchments, they’re written in an archaic style, and may not anyway be faithful. Her real skills will involve recognising what might or might not be relevant, and focusing only on those things.

I’ve never ‘studied’ Portuguese or Norwegian, but they’re not dissimilar from languages I have some experience of (Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish), so I’d expect that – were I to browse a newspaper in those languages, or spend a few minutes listening to the radio or watching TV, I would not find myself at 0% certainty.

Some things would be familiar, some words the same or similar, some structures likely to mean the same as in other languages I know (auxiliary verbs with past participles are easy to recognise, articles too.)

In short, I may officially know nothing of the language, while in fact having some ability to extract meaning.

Following me so far?

How to move along the spectrum then, from near uncertainty, to near certainty, or to whichever intermediate point feels sufficient for your needs?

The common, indeed almost universal approach is to ‘study’ (hate that word) the components of the language, with the hope that at a certain point the individual pieces will magically come together to form an intelligible whole.

Like watching the shattered pieces of Humpty-Dumpty reassemble themselves into a talking egg character.

Most teaching and self-study works that way. Almost no one tells you that it’s nonsense. Livelihoods depend on it not being so, after all.

The problem with the reverse Humpty-Dumpty approach is that language is not an egg, not in the same way that an egg is an egg, with an integral shell and contents which have a particular biological function.

An egg might produce a chick or be a meal for someone, an automobile has the function of getting you from A to B, a website is a tool with an overall form and one or more purposes.

But language is massively complex and infinitely variable. No two speakers will have exactly the same linguistic resources, or interests to communicae.

Yesterday I rode in a truck with a friendly Italian neighbour who is helping us install air-conditioning in advance of the scorching summer heat.

We chatted. He’s a firefighter from the south of Italy. I’m a British language teacher. My Italian is very different from his, but we got on.

At a certain point though, he asked me whether my wife (Stefi, who runs our Italian school) was British too, which amazed me somewhat, as he spent half an hour talking to her just the other day, she being in charge of the air-conditioning project.

How could he not know that she’s ITALIAN? My best guess is that, as a southern Italian who’s spent his adult life working in the north, he’s just used to interacting with a wide variety of people, many of whom speak differently in one way or another. He doesn’t notice much how they speak, or care. He puts out fires, or prevents them.

Italians (and non-Italians who live in Italy) call the firefighters when they forget their keys, he was telling me. Locksmiths charge a lot to break into your home, while he and his colleages do it as a public service. They don’t rescue many cats from trees, though, which must be an English thing.

Back to the point. Language is infinitely complicated. Trying to ‘study’ it all is therefore pointless.

Think about that and – assuming that you’re learning a language with a view to actually using it, rather than just for the joy you gain from the process – you’ll realise that there’s absolutely no point in studying all the many things you’ll never need, even if it were possible.

Insomma, what you can reasonably hope for is to acquire the elements of Italian, or whatever language you’re learning, that are useful and reasonably frequent. The small, infrequent pieces of the shell will be hard to remember, anyway, so why bother?

So what you might end up with is a reasonably egg-shaped Humpty-Dumpty, but with lots of holes. You might only be able to see ten or twenty perecent of him, the rest being thin air, but that will be enough to folllow his adventures.

I started this by writing “The key to success with foreign languages is very simple, but chances are you won’t appreciate me telling you.”

The key to success with foreign languages is becoming – as my firefighter acquaintance and I both are – experienced at guessing what’s going on.

The interpreter, the historian, and anyone who’s ‘studied’ more than one foreign language are all going to be relying – to a greater or lesser extent – on their ability to fill in the gaps between the visible pieces of Humpty-Dumpty.

Try this for yourself – find a website in a language you have never ‘studied’ and see how much you can make out.

Don’t use a dictionary, just guess. When you get bored, look at some other website in the same language.

Do this for ten minutes, or for as long as you can tolerate the unertainty.

If you’re doing this right, then what you’re doing is focusing on the CONTENT. You’re guessing at what you read or hear, and making hypotheses – that word must be X, this link could be Y…

The key to foreign language success is guessing. You have to get better at guessing. You really have to!

And when you’re more skilled at guessing what you read and hear, you’ll also be skilled at learning from what you read and hear.

Any time you’re using a dictionary, you’re not guessing, of course. So you’re not getting better at guessing, therefore not working towards the point at which you’ll be able to learn the useful frequent parts of the language you’re learning – by guessing.

To get better at guessing at the meanings of words, phrases and grammar structures in the contexts in which you find them, you need to read and listen regularly, of course.

Which is what people object to. I’ll read and listen AFTER I’ve learnt the language, they tell me. First I have to study the grammar and learn lots of words!

But which grammar? Which words?

Sure, with a really foreign, foreign language you could totally benefit from the reverse Humpty-Dumpty. Up to a point.

But with a language that’s similar to one you know, and for an unfamiliar language once you’re no longer a beginner, there’s no substitute for getting stuck in to reading and listening texts, whether ‘graded’ (prepared specifically for your level) or ‘authentic’ (a website, a newspaper, a radio broadcast).

Until you do, you won’t be acquiring reading/listening skills (guessing being the most important one) and so won’t be approaching the point at which you can learn the language just by using it.

Guessing at the parts you don’t know means tolerating uncertainly, which takes practice at first, but is worth it.

Get better at guessing at the parts you don’t know and you’ll be a more competent reader/listener/speaker, and so able to tackle ever more complex material.

And the more you read/listen/speak, the more you learn.

The uncertainty never goes away, by the way. But it will cease to bother you, when you’re used to it.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

And here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, which is excellent guessing practice in its own right…

The regular text + audio bulletins are a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, as well as being fun and motivating!

Take a look at their website to get started on improving your Italian immediately!

And/or get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, subscribe (they really are FREE) by entering your email address on this page and clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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