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How to Learn a Language:

An Overview
Language learning is complex; it’s one of the reasons I love it so much.

You’re dealing with four separate, yet linked skills – reading, writing,

listening and speaking – which are in turn linked to thousands of

separate, yet linked facts – grammar rules, vocabulary words,

pronunciation rules, etc. Figuring out how to work on each of these

aspects individually and as a whole has been a hobby and passion of

mine for the last nine years. While a detailed discussion of each aspect

of this method is quite a bit of material (hence the forthcoming book!), this

should get you well on your way.

Start with Pronunciation


The greatest challenge in learning a foreign language is the challenge of

memory. With thousands of words and grammar rules to remember, you

need all the help you can get to retain what you learn. This is where an

early focus on pronunciation comes in: if you look into the science of

memory, you’ll discover that it’s much harder to remember words you

can’t pronounce well. And one of the reasons that foreign languages can

be tricky is that they’re full of hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-memorize


words. You can eliminate that challenge by training your ears from the

very beginning. You’ll also get a number of side-benefits: better listening

comprehension, better speech, faster vocabulary acquisition, and native

speakers who will continue to speak to you in their language instead of

switching to English.

So how do you do this? Learning accurate pronunciation takes two main

steps: first, you’ll need to train your ears to hear the new sounds of your

target language, and second, you’ll need to train your mouth to

pronounce them. For the first step, I’m in the process of Kickstarting a set

of apps that will do the work for you (and designing a free guide to

developing those apps yourself for any languages I’m not covering). For

the second step – training your mouth – I’ve released a series of videos

and flashcard decks to help teach you the International Phonetic Alphabet

(IPA). With its help, you can learn how pronunciation works in your mouth

(in English), and apply those ideas to your target language.

No Translations
The moment you cut English completely out of your language studies is

the moment you begin to think in your target language. You can do this

from the very first day. Starting with pictures and graduating to simple
definitions and fill-in-the-blank flash cards (see below), you can teach

yourself the vocabulary and grammar of a language without the added

mental step of translating back and forth from English, and actually build

fluency instead of translation ability.

Use Anki for Vocabulary and


Grammar
Anki is a free software program that relies on more than a century of

research proving that studying a concept in intervals (For example, only

on days 1, 4, 10, 20, 35, 60, etc.) is much more effective than studying all

at once. Anki automates these intervals, showing you facts at the optimal

times to push them deeper and deeper into your long-term memory in the

least amount of time possible. It’s a shortcut to memorization that gives

you total control of what ends up in your long-term memory, and it is so

efficient that the you will be able to memorize hundreds of flashcards a

week in 30-40 minutes a day.

Choose your Vocabulary


Efficiently
Computational linguistics has given us new tools to study languages, and

what we’ve found is that learning the first thousand most frequent words
in a language will enable you to read 70% of every text you’ll ever

encounter, but learning the next thousand will only give you 10% more

(and the next thousand, 4%). Use this to your advantage! Learn the first

one or two thousand most common words, and then customize to your

own needs. Why learn academic language if you just want to travel?

Why learn business language if you just want to read academic papers?

Choosing your vocabulary to suit your needs makes your study time

much more efficient. So what does this look like in a new language?

Stage 1: Learn the correct pronunciation of the


language.
This starts with training your ears to hear the sounds of your target

language, understanding English pronunciation (assuming you’re an

English native speaker), and then fine tuning your pronunciation with the

help of the IPA (or a good pronunciation book). You should know the

sounds of your target language, how they’re different from English, and all

that language’s pronunciation rules.

Stage 2: Vocab and grammar acquisition, no English


allowed
Start with my basic word list – a list of extremely frequent words that are

easy to visualize. Put those in an Anki deck and learn them. Once you
have some words to play with, start putting them together. You can use

Google translate and a grammar book to start making sentences (but

make sure that what you put into your Anki deck has no English!), then

get everything you write yourself double-checked at lang-8.com. Turning

them into fill-in-the-blank flashcards builds the initial grammar and

connecting words. As your vocabulary and grammar grow, move to

monolingual dictionaries and writing your own definitions for more

abstract words (again everything you write should be double-checked

at lang-8.com). This builds on itself; the more vocabulary and grammar

you get, the more vocabulary and grammar concepts you can describe in

the target language. Once you’ve absorbed most of the material in a

basic grammar book, move on to a frequency list and learn the top 1000-

2000 words in your language, along with any specific vocabulary you

need for your particular interests.

Stage 3: Listening, writing and reading work


Once you have a decent vocabulary and familiarity with grammar, start

writing essays and journal entries, watching TV shows and reading

books. Put every writing correction (from a tutor or lang-8.com) into your

Anki deck, which will continue to build your vocabulary and grammar.
Stage 4: Speech
At the point where you can write ‘fluently’, find a place to immerse in the

language and speak all the time (literally! No English allowed or else you

won’t learn the skill you’re trying to learn, which is adapting to holes in

your grammar or vocabulary by going around them rapidly and

automatically without having to think about it). I prefer Middlebury

College, but a few weeks in the target country will work as well if you’re

very vigorous with sticking to the target language and not switching to

English. If you’re extremely strict with yourself, your brain adapts pretty

quickly and learns how to combine everything you learned in stages 1-3

together into fluent speech. You’ll find more detailed discussions of the

four key aspects at the links to the left and language specific resources in

the Languages section.

How to learn Japanese or


Chinese: A revised plan
Japanese has been my pet project for nearly 2 years. Those of you who

have been following the blog closely have seen me update my model

flashcard decks, add new plugins, make new video walkthroughs, update
my model decks again, and so on. Over the course of trial-and-erroring

my way through the language, I now have a clear-cut plan for future

learners of Japanese and Chinese. In this post, I’m going to lay that out

for you, so you don’t need to try and piece it together through nearly 2

years of blog posts:

Step 1: Learn
Pronunciation

This is the same step 1 as in

basically any other language. Get a pronunciation trainer and play around

with it for a few weeks. If you’re learning Chinese, you’re going to spend a

lot of time learning to hear tones. If you’re learning Japanese, you’re

going to get to play around with these cute mnemonics for each letter. If

you feel like you have extra time and want to do something with that time,
feel free to do steps 2 and 3 while you’re working on the pronunciation

trainer’s flashcards.

Step 2: Download and


Install a Model Deck
Download one of these model Anki decks and double-click it to install (for

help, go here).

 Japanese

 Simplified Characters, Mandarin (Used in Mainland China)

 Traditional Characters, Mandarin (Used in Taiwan, Hong Kong,

Macau and by most overseas Chinese)

 Traditional Characters, Cantonese

The decks have a few sample flashcards, but you can just suspend them

once you have the model deck installed so they’re not in the way.

(Browse -> Gabe’s Japanese/Traditional Chinese/Cantonese/etc Deck ->

Select all -> “Suspend”)


Step 3: Learn Your First
Radicals
The hardest part of Chinese/Japanese is the work involved in memorizing

the characters (things like 芸). If you want to have a shot at actually

remembering them, you’re going to want to memorize their constituent

parts (艹 + 二 + 厶 = 芸). Those constituent parts are called ‘radicals,’

and every character is composed of some combination of 1 or more

radicals. At this stage, you’re going to give yourself a head start, by

memorizing ~50 of the most commonly used radicals.

You already have pre-made flashcards for those radicals in the model

deck you installed in Step 2, but you need to spend some time

customizing those flashcards so that they actually work for you. When

you’re ready for this step, follow the instructions here (they start at “How

to make this deck your own”). Ignore the part about downloading a deck,

since you already did that in step 2.


Step 4: Get Your
Information Sources
Prepared
We need to get you ready to learn words, ideally in the context of a

sentence. To do that, you’re going to need these ingredients :

1. Words to learn

2. Stroke order diagrams for the characters in those words

3. A way to break the characters down into their constituent parts

4. Example sentences for those words that are simple and clearly

understandable (optional at first but get to these ASAP)

5. Recordings of either the example sentences or the individual words

6. Images of the words or the stories in the sentences

So go through this list, item by item, and figure out ahead of time where

you’re going to find each piece of information. I’ll give you my

suggestions, but feel free to add more in the comments!

Japanese Information Sources:


1. Words to Learn: Start with the 625 List
2. Stroke Order Diagrams: I use this Anki plugin because it’s automatic.

If I wasn’t using that, I’d use Jisho.org, which is a part of the

Japanese Multisearch.

3. A way to break the characters down into their constituent parts: I

use Kanjidamage.com. It doesn’t work well with Multisearch (you

need to re-paste your word, one character at a time into their search

box, but it’s a good enough resource that I do that anyways)

4. Example Sentences for Words: I highly, highly encourage you to get

these from a tutor on iTalki.com. One hour (for $5-8) spent taking

words from the word list and coming up with sentences together will

give you enough content to learn for a full week, if not more. If not

this, then there are some example sentences at Jisho.org.

5. Recordings of the words/example sentences: I record my Skype

calls, write down the time that my tutor says each example sentence,

and go back into that audio file and make mp3s for each sentence.

This is a lot of work, and we’re in the process of creating a web app

to make this process simpler. If it seems like too much work, you can

grab recordings of whatever individual word you’re learning off

of Forvo.com, which is a part of the Japanese Multisearch.

6. Images of the words or the stories in the sentences: Google Images

isn’t as good in Japanese as it is in English. I tend to search in


Japanese first (as a part of the Multisearch) just to see what comes

up, but 80% of the time, I get my images by searching in English. I

don’t find this super problematic as long as I’m working with

sentences, rather than individual words, since the context of

each sentence tends to give me a lot of extra information that I might

lose if I was learning the words alone with exclusively English-

sourced pictures.

Link to the most up-to-date Japanese Multisearch. Right-Click (control-

click for Macs) and select ‘Download Linked File’

Chinese
(Mandarin/Cantonese) Information
Sources:
1. Words to Learn: Start with the 625 List
2. Stroke Order Diagrams: This

Anki plugin is designed for Japanese, but the developer has added

more Chinese support, so you may find that it ultimately saves you

time to use it anyways. because it’s automatic. If I wasn’t using that,

I’d use MDBG.net, which unfortunately doesn’t work well with our

current Chinese multisearch, so you currently have to re-paste your

word into their search engine. But they do offer animated gifs of the

stroke orders (see diagram on the right)


3. A way to break the characters down into

their constituent parts: MDBG.net, once again, is a really nice

resource for this.

4. Example Sentences for Words: I highly, highly encourage you to get

these from a tutor on iTalki.com. One hour (for $5-8) spent taking

words from the word list and coming up with sentences together will

give you enough content to learn for a full week, if not more. If not

this, then there are some example sentences

at LINEdict.com (Mandarin) or at Cantonese.sheik.co.uk

(Cantonese).

5. Recordings of the words/example sentences: I record my Skype

calls, write down the time that my tutor says each example sentence,

and go back into that audio file and make mp3s for each sentence.

This is a lot of work, and we’re in the process of creating a web app
to make this process simpler. If it seems like too much work, you can

grab recordings of whatever individual word you’re learning off

of Forvo.com, which is a part of the Chinese Multisearch [but this is

going to be way more limited in Cantonese than Mandarin. I feel like

for Cantonese, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not

getting recordings from a tutor]

6. Images of the words or the stories in the sentences: Google Images

isn’t as good in Chinese as it is in English. I tend to search in

Chinese first (as a part of the Multisearch) just to see what comes

up, but 80% of the time, I get my images by searching in English. I

don’t find this super problematic as long as I’m working with

sentences, rather than individual words, since the context

of each sentence tends to give me a lot of extra information that I

might lose if I was learning the words alone with exclusively English-

sourced pictures.

Link to the most up-to-date Mandarin Multisearch. Right-Click (control-

click for Macs) and select ‘Download Linked File’

Link to the most up-to-date Cantonese Multisearch. Right-Click (control-

click for Macs) and select ‘Download Linked File’


Step 5: Start Learning
Words in Anki
The card model I use for Japanese/Chinese is enormous. It’s going to

take you some time to get used to it, and creating your first cards is going

to be sloooowww. So be prepared for that. It gets faster. The nice thing

about that card model is that for a typical word, you might generate 10

flashcards worth of content to study, so all of that time spent preparing

those flashcards tends to pay you back.

To learn how to use the flashcard model, read this article about “Kanji

Signatures” and watch the video inside of it. Although I’m talking about

Japanese, all of the concepts apply in the same way to Chinese. To

quickly summarize the concept of Kanji Signatures, basically it’s the idea

of adding a flashcard that asks you about the first two radicals in any

given character, so if you’re trying to learn 芸, then that flashcard is

asking you to JUST remember 艹 + 二. This ends up being super helpful

when it comes to building a good memory for that character, since you’re

training yourself to start the character correctly, which usually lets you

finish it more easily.


Since I wrote that article, I found that there’s one more thing that you can

(and should) do when learning characters. Make more mnemonics. All the

time. Any time you see a new radical, make a new mnemonic for it. Any

time you see two old radicals used together, make a new mnemonic for it

(厶 = cow. 二 = nickel, 二 + 厶 = decapitated cow). The bottom of the

flashcard model has two fields for making new mnemonics. Plan to use

them very, very often. I had something like 500-1000 mnemonics I was

using in Japanese. They were never particularly hard to remember and

they always helped when remembering new characters. Really, the

hardest part of my daily flashcard reviews were always the older

characters that I didn’t do this with. If I did Japanese over again, I’d go

back and make way more mnemonics.

Step 6: Keep Going


If you’re learning these words in sentences…and especially if you’re

learning them in sentences that you’re developing with a tutor, then you’ll

find that after you finish the 625 list, you can actually have conversations

in your target language. You’ll be missing a lot of vocab, but still, you’ll be

at a pretty solid intermediate level. You’ll also find that you don’t need to

learn new characters/stroke orders/radicals all that often. To keep going,


move to learning the top 1000 words in a frequency dictionary. Use the

Routledge ones (Japanese, Mandarin, not available in Cantonese) if you

can. Keep making sentences with a tutor that involve every one of the

words you don’t yet know in those top 1000.

Step 7: The Language


Game
Once you complete those (this will take 1-3 years – these languages

are incredibly data heavy due to the characters), you’re going to be at a

high intermediate level and in a pretty solid position to play with whatever

you want to play with, as per Chapter 6 in the book. You should be in

decent shape to watch movies/tv, listen to audiobooks, etc. You’ll still

have a lot to learn, but your foundation is going to be rock solid and taking

in new information is going to be way, way easier. Good luck, and I’ll see

you on the other side. For my own studies, I’ve had to put Japanese on

hold (I’m 30% the way through Step 6) while I spend 6 months on

Spanish so I can talk to my in-laws at my wedding, then I’m going back to

Japanese to finish the job. So you have some time to start catching up to

me, and then we can finish together


How to Learn a Foreign Language - by Paul Pimsleur
ISBN: 1442369027, READ: 2014-06-05, RATING: 7/10
(See my list of 200+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Short, punchy, incredibly insightful and useful book about learning another
language, especially for a first-timer. I've read a few books on the subject
now, but this is the only one that spoke directly to my issues. Especially
loved his points on the importance of sounds over words. Hint: a language
that is written but not spoken is called a dead language.

my notes
Sounds, although invisible, have a substance and a character of their own.

Accept as your objective to learn the sounds rather than their written
representation. When there is a conflict, when a word does not look the way
it sounds, it is the sound you must believe in and cling to.

This man ended up with a list of words on the back of an envelope. The
Greek was in his pocket, but not in his mind; he had a sword that would not
draw. Like many people, this important executive lacked faith in the spoken
word. He trusted only what he could see written down.

Many people, even many teachers, fall prey to the fallacy that the written
form of a language is the language itself.

Know before starting exactly what you want to accomplish and why.

Language has three distinct components: pronunciation, grammar, and


vocabulary.

No known language is composed of fewer sounds than Hawaiian, which has


fifteen, or more than certain languages of the Caucasus, which have up to
sixty.

Learning grammar becomes easier after having mastered the first two
languages.

All languages have devices for conveying whether an action is presently


going on (she is dancing) or is finished (she danced); for relating people and
things to each other (Jack’s wife; our car); for replacing a noun (the woman)
by a pronoun (she).

Ingrid Bergman, who knew five languages, was asked which she preferred,
she replied: “English for acting, Italian for romance, French for diplomacy,
German for philosophy, and Swedish for secrecy, because so few people
know it.”

Richard Burton said, “Simple grammar and vocabulary: marked out the
forms and words that I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by
heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare
moments during the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an hour
at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After learning some three
hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy
workbook (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined
every word that I wished to recollect. Then chose some other book whose
subject most interested me. The neck of the language was now broken, and
progress was rapid. Whenever I conversed with anybody in a language that I
was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words inaudibly after them,
and so to learn the trick of pronunciation.”

It is fair to ask, at the end of a language lesson, be it the first or the fiftieth,
“What did I learn today that would help me if I left immediately for the foreign
country?”

One way to judge a teacher is to calculate the ratio of teacher-talk to


student-talk. With a good teacher, it will be heavily in favor of student-talk.

No more than five minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English - just
enough to get a tough grammar point across.

Grammar is best learned by using it, not by talking about it.

There is not a single point of grammar in an elementary course that cannot


be explained in four minutes or less.

The music of a language, its intonation, strikes you even when you cannot
comprehend a single word. It can also be the first thing you learn.

Absorb the new accent by listening to someone speak the language and
imitating the sounds he makes.

Imitate the way the foreign person speaks English. A foreign accent is
merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another.

If you will trust your ear, you are almost certain to speak with a good accent.

The teacher’s function is to set day-to-day goals, encouraging his students


to concentrate, not on the distant objective of total fluency, but on taking one
more step.

Break the language down into manageable tasks.

Think Sounds, Not Letters: Probably the biggest impediment to good


pronunciation is picturing how a word is written while saying it. These
English sounds rise automatically to our lips instead of the foreign ones, and
we must spend part of our energy in combatting this tendency.

Never Look at the Letter R: In English, r is pronounced differently from other


languages. Our tongues curl up more than for a Spanish or Italian r, and in
quite the opposite direction from a French or German r. Looking at the
written word while saying it makes the tongue instinctively take the English r
position and thereby makes learning the foreign sound more difficult.

The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly
planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use
your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.

Work with a Model: Check your pronunciation often until good speech habits
are firmly established.

Practice sounds in a specific setting. The French r, reputedly a very difficult


sound, is easier to pronounce in the word Paris than in rouge, and needs to
be practiced in both.

Think in Sound-Clusters. J’en ai un (“I’ve got one”). You might say each
word authentically and yet be unable to glide them together with a native-like
accent. One must practice the glide as well as the sounds.

Practice Whole Phrases, Not Words: In real life, a string of words like “I don’t
know” or “Not on your life” is said as though it were a single word. If you stop
to take a breath in the middle of a foreign phrase that should be said in a
single burst, you are not saying it correctly.

For mastering a really difficult foreign sound. I keep careful track of when my
friends thought I was closer and when they thought I was further away from
the correct pronunciation.

Listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality.
Good pronunciation begins not in the mouth but in the ear.

Invite a Friend to Make Fun of You: When you have trouble hearing the
difference, ask an acquaintance to imitate your pronunciation followed by the
right one. Don’t try saying it yourself prematurely; you risk becoming
discouraged easily at this point. Keep listening until you feel the difference
penetrating you.

One class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by
listening to recordings. Students who worked with recordings acquired
grammatical habits with unexpected ease.

The ear may find simple what the mind calls complicated.

Students who had spent only sixty minutes practicing in the lab did slightly
better than those who had spent more than a week on it in class. The reason
for their advantage is simple. They had heard and said a large number of
correct French sentences, and their ears had become so attuned that only a
correct sentence “sounded right” to them.

The best arrangement of material for learning, is:


(1) pose a challenge
(2) let the students try to respond
(3) provide the correct response

Novelty rather than repetition should become the primary law of learning.”

More than 50 percent of the grammar exercises in an elementary language


course deal with just two features of grammar: pronouns and verbs.

Virtually any question one can ask will bring about the use of a pronoun or
two in the answer.

Q: Hasn’t Mrs. Dexter lost a lot of weight lately?


A: Yes, she has.

Q: Didn’t your father lend his gold watch to the man next door?
A: Yes, he did lend it to him.

Make up cues that will force you to use pronouns in the answer.

Forget the old classroom bugaboo about answering in “complete sentences”


and give natural answers instead.

Verbs are the only words in most languages that can assume many forms. In
French, for example, a noun can have only two forms (singular and plural),
and an adjective only four (masculine singular and plural, feminine singular
and plural). But a verb...! I once counted the different written forms a French
verb can take and was amazed to find over 130!

A dozen or so common verbs (be, do, go, etc.) account for a very high
percentage of all verb occurrences. These few are almost all “irregular,” for,
being on people’s tongues more often, they have evolved and changed form
faster:

to be
to have
to be able
to come
to go
to know
to take
to want
to say or tell
to do or make
to see
to give

Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are
studying expresses these concepts.

Learn the Hardest Thing First: it appears to fly directly in the face of reason.
Yet it has helped me more than almost any other. Learn the hardest thing
first and the rest will then seem easy.

The sentence with several pronouns (“She gave it to him”) is as easy to


learn as a sentence with only one pronoun. A sentence with two adverbs
(“The horse ran exceptionally fast”)

Attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is
most receptive.

The emotion surrounding a word helps impress it on our memories. During


her stay in the hospital, she found herself learning vocabulary with an ease
born of desperation. No need to say them over and over; their emotional
impact made them stick in her mind after a single hearing. Inject a note of
urgency into your attitude as you learn vocabulary.

Some things should be learned in random order. Because that is how we


encounter them in life.

It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word. If
you wish to learn a grammatical expression - let’s say jusqu’à (until) - put it
down on a flash card in a sentence like Il est resté jusqu’au matin (He stayed
until morning). The more striking or entertaining your sentence is, the better
you are apt to recall it.

You do not want to pair up French words with English words lest you be able
to recall la nuit only when thinking “night.” Rather, you want la nuit to occur
to you when you are “thinking in French,” without having to go through
English to remember it. For la nuit, you might make three cards, reading:
English Side French Side I never go out at night. Je ne sors jamais la nuit.
Good night. Bonne nuit. I slept badly last night. J’ai mal dormi cette nuit.
Once you can deliver the French sentence in response to these three
different stimuli, you “know” la nuit in a much richer sense than if you could
say it only in response to the English word “night.”

One of the quickest and surest ways to pick up foreign vocabulary is through
reading.

An acquaintance was studying Tagalog in preparation for a trip to the


Philippines. I advised him to play the role of a Filipino to the hilt during his
lesson by using Filipino gestures and expressions as well as words.

Letting yourself play the role will improve your performance.

When a strange reaction follows something you have said, always track
down the reason. Never let a chance go by to correct a wrong habit.

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