I’m reading Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. I’ve already read Outliers and The Talent Code, and this third book is a good complement to those, as it looks more specifically at what exactly deliberate, deep practice is and how to do it in your own life. Stephen Dubner gives us a good rundown of the tenets of deliberate practice:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

Deliberate practice is critical to language learning (and every other learnable skill, if the authors of the above three books and a increasingly large number of scientists are to believed). Unfortunately, most of the practice (or study) that many learners (myself unfortunately included more often than I’d like) do is the equivalent of playing a pick-up game when what we should be doing is working on specific deficiencies.

Learning like Benjamin Franklin

A very interesting part of Talent is Overrated talks about the way that Benjamin Franklin became one of the world’s great writers of prose.

As a teenager, Franklin seemed to think he wrote well enough, but then one day his father found an exchange of letters between Ben and a friend, John Collins, arguing a point back and forth. (The argument was whether women should be educated, Collins contending they were naturally unable to learn as much as men, Franklin taking the other side.) Ben’s father first told his son what was good about his letters; they were better than Collins’s in spelling and punctuation. Then he told him and showed him specifically how they were inferior: “in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances,” as Franklin recalled. We must note in passing that when it comes to giving people evaluations — offering praise first, then supporting criticism with examples — old Josiah Franklin could be a model for us all.

Ben responded to his father’s observations in several ways. First, he found examples of prose clearly superior to anything he could produce, a bound volume of the Spectator, the great English periodical written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Any of us might have done something similar. But Franklin then embarked on a remarkable program that few of use would ever have though of.

What Franklin did was identify three weakness — expressiveness, vocabulary, and organization — and created three different ways to attack those weaknesses.

1. Expressiveness: Franklin would take an essay and make notes on the meaning of each of the sentences. He’d then wait a few days until he’d forgotten the original, and try to rewrite it using his own words. He’d then compare the results with the original and see where he’d faltered.
2. Vocabulary: One of the things he found was that his vocabulary was weak. Realizing that poetry requires a large vocabulary to express ideas in accordance with meter, rhyme, etc., he rewrote essays in verse, and then later take the verse and write it again as prose, again comparing with the original.
3. Organization: Franklin would make the notes as in #1, but make each note on a separate slip of paper and mix them up, then several days later try to put the essay back together in the proper order and write it himself, finally again comparing with the original.

What’s interesting is that he didn’t just sit down and start writing essays as practice.

Deliberate practice makes perfect

I noted in my post about how I study that “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.” I think this relates strongly to the above.

When I speak to other people in Chinese, I don’t push myself to the edge of my limits and hunt for weakness. I play it safe and use words and constructions that I know because I want to sound good in public. When I write in Chinese, I’m intent on either communicating my idea as quickly as possible (for instance, in IM chats), or know that I’ll get someone to edit it for me before it goes live anyway (blog posts, important documents, etc.). In all of these examples I’m focused on outcome, rather than technique.

When I talk to myself, however, I push like mad, probing and finding holes in my vocabulary and faults in my grammar. When I do my SRS repetitions, I’m looking for places where I fail, and then adding material to help cover those holes.

Apply ol’ Ben’s method to foreign languages

After reading about Ben Franklin’s study methods, I started thinking about how to improve my Chinese writing along the same course. Here’s what I plan on doing:

1. Find short, professionally-written prose (magazine articles, mostly).
2. Translate that prose into English.
3. Let the translation sit for a week or two.
4. Translate it back into Chinese, and compare with the original.

This will not only keep my translation skills fresh (I was a full-time Chinese-English translator for a few years and a serious freelancer for a few more years after that, but I’ve not been translating much since the end of last year) but also, perhaps, improve my Chinese expressive abilities and vocabulary.

I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Related posts:

1. How I study foreign languages
2. Jack Kerouac on managing your study time
3. SRS == failure practice
4. Interview with Kelly McGuire
5. Fumbling in English

Tagged as: benjamin franklin, languages, learning, outliers, reading, speaking, talent is overrated, the talent code