I’ve spent the last several weeks talking about various parts of language learning, and I wanted to tie them all together and talk about how I normally study. Like the disclaimer in this post, I want to emphasize that this is just what works for me, and your mileage may well vary, perhaps significantly.
A three-legged stool
My study is divided roughly into three parts — active reading, passive reading, and passive listening. Though the latter two consume the majority of my language study time, the former is probably the most critical.
Active reading
Active reading is what I call reading with the express purpose of gaining new vocabulary and increased understanding of grammatical structures. This is reading that I do not necessarily for fun (though I still do it with interesting material), but for the purpose of being able to learn how to talk about the subject in question.
Here’s the general workflow:
- Pick a topic. Sometimes I’ll go to Wikipedia and look up a topic that I’m interested in, and then switch languages using the language list on the lower left to a language I’m studying and read about it in that language. Other times I’ll go to newspapers and just read about current events. Depending on your interests, other online periodicals and newspapers will probably fit the bill. I strongly recommend using electronic media, as it makes the following steps a lot less painful.
- Read with an eye for the unknown. When I talked about how to read in a foreign language previously, I was primarily talking about passive reading, which I’ll get to in a minute. For active reading, though, I do the opposite — I specifically hunt down things I don’t know and look them up. Any sentence that contains a word that I don’t know, or a structure that I’m not familiar with or would like to use more myself, gets carried into the next step.
- Move material into Anki. All of those funky, unfamiliar words find their way onto new cards in Anki. Generally I just copy the sentence as the question part of the card, and then definitions for words that I don’t know as the answer. If it’s a particularly interesting word I’ll look up other examples of it per the steps I outlined here.
- Rinse and repeat.
I aim for 50-60 new sentences per day. As I mentioned here, my current new material setting for Anki is 50 cards per day, and I find this to be a comfortable if slightly challenging pace. Collecting 60 sentences generally takes me about an hour per day, though I find that once I start I tend to keep going for longer than an hour.
Passive reading
Passive reading is the “pleasure reading” that I do. I’ve already talked about how I read. The majority of this reading I do while on the move — my commutes are never bookless, and I read a number of foreign language newspapers and blogs via my iPhone while traveling. While I’m not actively trying to retain material while passively reading, I know it is reinforcing things that I’ve already learned.
Passive listening
I’ve talked previously about how I have built a foreign language listening environment and how I maintain it using iTunes. Passive listening also includes TV and movies. Again, I don’t try to learn anything specific (though if I hear a word over and over that I don’t know I might look it up), but rather just try to get used to the sounds of the language, and improve my ability to distinguish sounds.
What about actual communication?!
Maybe you’ve noticed that I haven’t included “talking to people” as part of my studying. In a way, I find that talking (or writing) isn’t something that helps me improve, but rather is something that I can do because I’ve improved. Though talking certainly helps my mouth become accustomed to making the right sounds, but in terms of improving my language skills it is, at best, as good as passive listening. Not that I in any way discourage communication — that is, of course, the entire point of learning a foreign language — but I wouldn’t personally expect it in itself to do very much for my ability to communicate in that language.
Related posts:
- You’re doing it wrong
- How to read in a foreign language
- Jack Kerouac on managing your study time
- Organizing foreign language listening material with iTunes
- Interview with Steve Kaufmann
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Bocatas,
I do everything you do except for Anki and passive listening.
I don’t do Anki (or flashcards at all for that matter) because the languages I study are roman alphabet and usually cognate languages, so I find re-reading (x2 or 3) to be sufficient (after the look-it-up stage, of course). Short stories and fables are my genre of choice.
I put a lot more focus than you do on communication, and way less on passive listening. Actually I think my passive listening skills arise from, communication especially when it comes to slang and expressions; if I don’t hear them (and use them) first in the wild, I usually don’t have a prayer to get them in passive listening.
Great post!
JP, thanks for the comment!
I’ve been thinking a bit about why it is that I don’t think of communication as “study” but rather something I can do because I’ve studied. It seems, thinking about my studying to date, that I “use” communication to figure out where the holes are, and then go back and fill those holes in using the above (active reading, mostly). It could just be what suits my personality, though it might also be worth experimenting and seeing if I can more effectively use communication to learn new things, rather than just using it to discover holes.
((((Not that I in any way discourage communication — that is, of course, the entire point of learning a foreign language — but I wouldn’t personally expect it in itself to do very much for my ability to communicate in that language.)))
What wonderful logic…. communication doesn’t do much for the ability to communicate.
I wonder how it is that children can learn their first language without using a SRS and watching television and movies. It’s ridiculous that they would learn to communicate by communicating.
Of course you can learn by purely communicating (although I would suggest that a child does far, far, far more passive and active listening than he or she does speaking– by several orders of magnitude). And no, you don’t need SRS to learn to read and write (a decade of school — perhaps two to really become a decent writer — would work; though the majority of students graduate from college not being able to write at anywhere near a “college level”).
Children put in an incredible amount of time and effort into learning to communicate. You could do the exact same thing, and I’m confident it would work (and faster, because babies are figuring out the world at the same time they’re learning to communicate, and you’ve presumably already worked all that stuff out). But who has that sort of time? I certainly don’t.
Yes, perhaps it is a time issue for some people.
But for the amount of time one puts into SRS and watching movies and what not, one could try to make a friend in your target language and just try talking to him in your target language. There is something special about the act of communicating one’s thoughts and feelings that the impersonal use of computers and film doesn’t really capture.
I venture that it is the act of communicating thoughts and feelings that makes a child become a near-native speaker in two years (ages 4-5). After all spending one’s time on passive listening, reading, or writing doesn’t really influence one’s ability to use new input if there is not already a firm basis for how meaning is expressed in the language. Just look at the Taiwanese college students studying Shakespeare but afraid to chit-chat in English with foreign students. Which do you think represents true communicating?