Two seemingly unrelated things gave me the inspiration to write this post. First, I’ve needed to, for work, learn a bit about the actual inner workings of various wireless data standards — specifically, China’s 3G TD-SCDMA standard and W-CDMA. Before this, I had never thought about what it actually took to get data from a mobile device, whose location relative to various short-range base stations is constantly changing, and whose ambient electromagnetic environment is constantly in flux, to a server out on the internet somewhere. I’ve coded for both ends — the client software on the mobile and the server software out in the cloud — but I’ve never much considered all of the messiness that sits in-between them.

The second is that I’m reading William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea (Ribbonfarm, where I first saw the book mentioned, has a good review if you’re interested), which is a fascinating look at the chaos that is life on the modern seas. Though picking up a little digital gadget and seeing “Made in China” or some other foreign locale is so commonplace today as to not warrant mention, we seldom think about incredible messiness (and danger, and death) that stretches between a factory in the Pearl River Delta and a Best Buy showcase in Orlando.

In thinking about these two things, I started thinking about other instances where we focus on the clean beginnings and ends and totally ignore (or are simply ignorant to) the messy in-between the must be traversed. Since this is a language learning blog, I’m going to talk about an instance that relates to learning a foreign language.

The beginner – native gap

The two ends of the road to fluency in a foreign language are really easy to visualize. One is embodied by the foreign language student on the first day of his first class, an absolute noob that couldn’t say “where’s the bathroom” in a foreign language if her life depended on it. The other is the suave, sophisticated native speaker that can handle any linguistic demand placed upon her, from socializing in a formal setting to telling dirty jokes at the neighborhood card night. It’s the in-between that’s really hard to visualize, and this is a bad thing because for the majority of your studies that’s right where you’ll be.

This inability to visualize the path between beginner and native fluency is hard for most people to handle. It’s like driving across the country without a map. If you keep following the sun you know you’re headed in the right direction, but you’re never sure where you are, and you’re always worrying that a much faster, more direct route than the route you’re on is out there somewhere, if only you could find it.

The fact is, though, that there are no clean starting points, and no single path from end to end. “Beginners” go into a language with all of their previous linguistic knowledge (which may or may not be useful). Native speakers have an extremely wide range of abilities (for example, the oration skills of Dubya vs. Obama), too. There is no single method that will deliver you from beginner to native speaker in the shortest amount of time — as with anything, methods matter less than persistence.

It’s the inability to visualize one’s place on the path that’s really frustrating for a lot of learners, especially when progress begins to slow down near the end and seems to (but probably never really does) come to a complete stop. I don’t think it’s possible to say with any sort of accuracy that you’re at 73.6% of a native speaker’s abilities, but you can keep track of your own abilities, and watch them progress over time.

Method #1: SRS

One of the less talked about but (for me at least) very enjoyable aspects of SRS is that it brings up old material from time to time (with ever increasing intervals, of course). This is a terrific opportunity to see how much you’ve improved. I constantly have old cards with simple material come up, and each time they do they give me an intense feeling of satisfaction — “that used to be new and unfamiliar, but now I totally own it.” I mark it as known (or, every once in a while, I miss it, especially if it was something obscure when I added it in the first place), and it disappears into the deck for another several months or a year.

Method #2: Learning diary

This isn’t something that I personally do, but I know people that swear by it. Basically, you output in the language they’re learning — either in text, audio, or video — at regular intervals, and save the output. After a while, you’ll have a small library of content that you’ve created and that, so long as you’re studying, is continuing to evolve. I know in my own experience with Chinese that every time I think back to something I’ve done in the past I think, “oh, man, my Chinese sucked back then,” and having a diary like this would provide unassailable proof that you did indeed suck then, and that you suck a lot less now.

How do you keep track of what you’ve done and where you’re going? How do you maintain confidence and motivation while stuck in the messy gap between beginner and native speaker?

Related posts:

1. Little goals on the road to fluency
2. You’re doing it wrong
3. Feeling overwhelmed? Stop trying so damn hard!
4. New year, same great flavor; also, directions
5. My Cantonese tutor

Tagged as: beginners, fluency, languages, learning, methods, motivation, native speakers, srs