Fluent in 3 months

7 reasons why you should sing to learn languages

benny — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:52:38 +0000

Warning: This video contains a silly looking Irish guy singing a German song in bad karaoke-style. Protect your ears!

Singing is an amazing way to dramatically improve your language learning strategy. To prove to you that I’m serious about this, here is a video of me singing in German.

It’s a pop song called “Pflaster” from ich und ich that I like. (Here’s a vague translation of the lyrics). I’m not a good singer, but that doesn’t stop be from trying… Hopefully the Berlin scenery behind me distracts you from how bad my singing voice is!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPUEj4YOhms

Reasons to sing

Music and singing have made a huge difference in my language learning progress over the last seven years, as well as in getting along with the natives of the language. Here are a few reasons why:

Music connects across cultures and can break down barriers. When I have sung people songs they wouldn’t expect me to know and that they like, it has instantly broken the ice. In my first weeks in Berlin, even the start of the Sesame Street song in German helped me to make new friends! If I ever meet Madrileños I usually give them the theme song of Aquí no hay quien viva in an Irish twang. It always impresses them way more than perfect grammar ever will!
Getting to know the music is getting to know the culture and language and sometimes learning languages is like learning a musical instrument.
Learning the lyrics of a song helps you expand your vocabulary and teach you some slang/typical phrases.
Singing can actually help you reduce your foreign-sounding accent! One of the ways I managed to convince Brazilians that I was a Carioca back in December was due to taking intensive singing lessons instead of Portuguese lessons. My music teacher taught me more about sentence rhythm, pronunciation, tones and beat of Portuguese than a foreign language teacher ever would have been able to.
As described in the free chapter of the Language Hacking Guide (subscribe to the Language Hacking League on the right of the site to receive a copy), you can use music and singing to help you learn to speak simple basic essential phrases to get by in a language much quicker.
You can take music with you anywhere and learn and practise it on the move thanks to your MP3 player / mobile phone. While it’s pleasant to have music in the background, make sure to actually pay attention to the words if you want to learn something beyond just being able to hum the tune!
It’s fun! You can put your whole body into singing if you like and let your hair down a lot easier than you would in many speaking situations. You can really enjoy yourself by singing and it helps to improve your mood. Life would be way cooler if people sang more! Did you ever notice how happy everyone is in musicals?

So don’t be shy, and don’t worry if you don’t have a good singing voice (I don’t think Sony Records are going to be rushing to sign a contract with me based on the video above, but that isn’t the point is it?) and enjoy yourself!

If music has helped you to improve your language skills, share your story with us and let us know of even more reasons why people should sing to improve their language skills!

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Music and singing have made a huge difference in my language learning progress over the last seven years, as well as in getting along with the natives of the language. Here are a few reasons why:

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The ONE thing that will ultimately lead to success

benny — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:56:07 +0000

After years of investigating what separates successful language learners from unsuccessful ones, I believe I have found the one thing that those who ultimately succeed and speak the language fluently, all have in common.

It’s not the course materials they use, or their ability to travel, it’s not a particular aspect of their “method”, it’s not their wealth, and it isn’t even their natural born intelligence.

It’s PASSION.

Oh, but I’m passionate already! I “really really” want to speak the language! you may say – not good enough.

In fact, that’s way off what I’m talking about and even if you “really really” want it, you can still ultimately fail, as many have. The desire to speak a foreign language has to be so important to you that you would do anything to achieve it.

What are you willing to do to speak the language?

As part of the audio of the Language Hacking Guide, I had the chance to interview some successful language learners like Khatzumoto from AllJapaneseAllTheTime, Moses McCormick, Professor Arguelles and several others. Some of them may have extremely different approaches to learning a language compared to me, but each interview (each one about 45 minutes long) was nothing but agreement.

Rather than nitpick at our differences, I wanted to see what we all have in common despite our different backgrounds, end-goals and reasons to learn languages. If I had to summarise it briefly it’s simply that we would all do anything to reach our goals.

To show you what I mean, here is an excerpt of the interview with Moses McCormick. Definitely have a listen to see what he is willing to do to get some practise of his target languages: (click through to the website if you are reading this by RSS/e-mail).

Do you see what I mean? Moses was so passionate to get some practise of Hmong, that when people didn’t want to help him practise he did what was necessary to make it happen.

Would you have done the same in his situation? No? Then I’d say you aren’t passionate enough about your language.

I could party with other foreigners the entire time in my travels and that would give me a short-term “fix” of fun, but instead I decide to embrace making mistakes, avoid speaking English, and socialise almost exclusively with locals for the purposes of my language mission.

Sometimes it is very hard and stressful, without any of the glamour of travel you might think of – but I’m passionate about my goals, so I get results. In the short-term I make certain days much more difficult for myself, but in the long-term I reap the benefits of truly exploring local culture.

Would you be willing to do these things if you were abroad? If you “really want it” then the answer may still be no. Nearly all expats I meet who never learn the local language still “want to” learn it. Their problem is that they simply don’t care enough.

Stop comparing yourself to others – it’s your own journey

Maybe it’s easy for me because I travel? Or it’s easy for that some guy you know because he can afford private tutoring? No. These things don’t make a difference if you aren’t passionate. Any “perfect” method or situation is wasted on someone with no passion.

To continue from this, Khatzumoto gave an excellent metaphor of comparing language learning to the Olympics and how futile it is to just look at the end result of other people’s language learning and feel like you could never achieve that:

[The full version of both of these and more interviews are included in the Language Hacking Guide]

If you are truly passionate then you are willing to put in the work to reach that end-goal. Don’t look at me or Khatz, or Moses or your friend who learned a language and think we have some advantage you don’t. Each one of us had to go through our own struggles and have put more hours of work into it than you can appreciate.

Speaking a language (or running in the Olympics) is an amazing thing, but the steps needed to get there are something that anyone can do. The problem is only the truly passionate will put in the work to make it happen, so this is why it’s so “rare”. The true passion is what is really rare.

There have been days where sometimes the thought comes to me that maybe I’m not “good enough” to speak this language – maybe I’ll fail miserably and it isn’t even worth trying. These days happen to everyone – rather than letting that pessimistic view dominate my mission, I squash it whenever it appears and get back to work.

Can you become more passionate?

Your devotion to your language learning project is your choice. If you are too lazy and want to just learn a language while you sleep or do something else, then frankly you don’t care enough.

If you are willing to make the time to get some genuine focused work in every day, and to get over your fear of talking to strangers to give yourself opportunities to practise in person, or to do whatever is needed in your own situation to make sure you are constantly making progress, then you are passionate and you have paved the road for things to happen.

Stop telling yourself that you are too stupid, or that you are making too many mistakes. These “mantras” are what are holding you back! I’ve met many many people who tell me that they are “too stupid” to learn a language and I can tell immediately that they most certainly are not. This idea of them being too stupid is what is holding them back.

Make a new mantra of I will master this language no matter what and do what it takes for this to happen. Change your vague “want” into a desire that goes well beyond even I need to speak this language. Make it a priority in your life and it will happen.

…or just nod as you read this and think “that makes sense” and get back to a vague half-assed investment and wonder why you aren’t making progress at a useful rate. The choice is yours.

———————-

If you liked this post, please share it on Facebook and twitter.

Otherwise share your thoughts with us below – would you pretend to be a girl (if you’re a guy) to get a chance to practise the language? Would you put yourself in unfamiliar situations that force you to speak the language with no preparation?

Or would you just want to enrol in a course and think that by simply attending you are doing your “work” and fluency will happen magically by itself? Is passion really the “one thing” you need to be successful? Share your thoughts with us!
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Shocking truth about passive listening

benny — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:30:48 +0000

A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.

Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.

The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.

Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?

Not a hope in hell.

This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.

It’s barely better-than-nothing.

I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.

I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.

Results of thousands of wasted hours?

I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:

@hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
@yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
@permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.

I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.

Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.

Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.

My own disappointment with passive listening

This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.

After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.

The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.

Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)

The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.

I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!

Why is it so popular?

It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.

So why is passive hearing so popular?

In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.

Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)

After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.

It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.

The few benefits

Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.

However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.

Here are some benefits, with some warnings:

In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
@don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
@danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.

Be more active!

I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!

Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.

Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.

Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.

Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.

I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.

So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.

Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!

Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!
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Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

benny — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:19:20 +0000

It’s time for a new 3 month language mission!

Since I started the blog about a year ago, I’ve learned pretty good Czech in 2 months, convinced some Brazilians that I was a Carioca, got by in Thai, and just recently passed 4/5 of one the hardest formal examinations in German.

So now it’s time to take on one of the toughest challenges yet: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months!

Hungarian: a non-Indo-European language

Before the Chinese/Japanese etc. learners jump on me for lazily taking on another “European” language, there’s something you should be aware of…

Hungary may be situated in Europe, but its language has almost nothing in common with any of the many European languages surrounding it (apart from a distant relationship to Finnish/Estonian)!

Many even think of Hungarian as being among the hardest languages in the world. One way a speaker of other European languages could perhaps come to that conclusion is that it is not an Indo-European language.

This basically means that English/French etc. have more in common with Romanian, Polish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Sanskrit and Persian than they have in common with Hungarian. Not just the very occasional vocabulary outside of direct family branches, but also the sentence structure can be somewhat familiar in these languages. It doesn’t make your job a huge amount easier, but at least it gives you some sense of familiarity, and I found this when learning Czech.

Apart from rare loan words, Hungarian seems to show nothing in common with its neighbours! Luckily it uses the Latin script (but so do Swahili, Turkish and Vietnamese…), but unluckily it seems to pack enough grammar into its sentences to make your head spin. Forget German’s four grammatical cases, or Russian’s six – Hungarian nouns can have up to eighteen cases!

I’m certainly going to miss prepositions - in, at, to etc. since these seem to get merged into the word as a “postposition” as one of many ways that Hungarian can produce extremely long words such as “megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért“.

It’s a phonetic language, but it still has some things that will take some getting used to! ‘s’ is the ‘sh’ sound and ‘sz’ is the ‘s’ sound (the opposite of Polish), and the ‘g’ in the name of the language itself, magyar, is pronounced like a d!

Sound intimidating enough yet?

3-month mission: conversational Hungarian

I got all of the above information just from the Wikipedia article on Hungarian this afternoon for the sake of providing a summary. I am starting to learn the language from scratch as of today.

The only word in Hungarian I’ve learned so far is “Szia” (“hi”, pronounced see-ya apparently). So yes, this is absolutely from scratch with no similar or even distantly related language to act as my crutch.

My target is to reach conversational level in the language by mid-October. My mission is to take the intimidating message of the above paragraphs and to turn it around completely to find out what’s easy about Hungarian, to the point where I can effectively communicate in social situations with natives in the language, and of course, share my discoveries with you all!

I don’t want to sit any tests, spend hours watching TV shows or listening to the radio or reading, and I definitely don’t want to have my head in books studying grammar and vocabulary the entire time. I want to talk with Hungarians and attempt to have a social life almost exclusively through the Hungarian language.

I have no doubts that my usual tricks will come in very useful and that I will be able to communicate in some way quite quickly. However, I should specify exactly what I’m aiming for so there is no confusion! It won’t be fluency this time, but I do want to be able to converse.

Before I hop my flight out of Budapest on October 14th (just in time to fly south for the winter!) I want to be able to meet Hungarian natives I have never met before and have a casual conversation about a wide range of typical things people talk about at social events, with no preparation. I am allowing myself to make mistakes, as long as what I’m saying is totally understandable, and my focus will be on conversations I am involved in.

I’ll also aim to make a video or two in Hungarian before I leave so you can all hear what I sound like!

Trying out this “preparation” thing you all love so much

This target will be similar to the “pretty good” level I reached in Czech. The reason I’m aiming for about the same level (rather than fluency) is because I will actually have slightly over two months of proper immersion rather than three.

Rather than diving straight in, studying on the flight over, and speaking consistently from day one of the mission (which I know from experience works really well), I am going to give myself just over 2 weeks to prepare (while still in Berlin) and study some material (both from books and online). These two weeks may ultimately hurt my potential progress (especially since it won’t be full time – I’m still in recovery mode from the exam!), but now that I’ve had a chance to improve my study technique, I want to see if there is any benefit at all to this “preparation” thing you all seem to be raving so much about!

Two weeks not speaking the target language is already longer than I would usually go for, but it’s worth a try to see if it does indeed help to focus on absorbing as much as possible first.

This easing in period will be further extended, as I’ll spend my first week in Hungary in a town called Pécs just south of Budapest with some Esperanto speakers (at an event filled with fun young party-goers, called IJS). There will be some cultural adjustments to make in Hungary (etc. figuring out how to eat well in a country that doesn’t show much promise for vegetarians) and I’d rather be with friends and have some chances to communicate fully with the many Hungarians at the event (I’ve been told that Hungarians generally don’t speak much English or other languages), before I start full immersion a week into August.

That first week will also give me a chance to get to know some Hungarians who normally live in Budapest so that I can expand my social circle – of course they’ll all be convinced to speak just Hungarian with me after that first week!

Living in Budapest

The reason I choose particular destinations for my language missions, is less due to marking my territory among pompous linguists, and way more due to the actual destination and the people where I travel to. I consider myself much more of a nomad than a language learner and the social rewards of spending time almost exclusively with locals is mostly the reason why I am always so keen to make sure I can converse with them.

Budapest has long been on my list of places to visit, and there’s no way I could give a city with its reputation any less than a few months! I can’t wait to get to know it and discover what experiences await me – especially by discovering it through the people from the city itself. My “road less travelled” is not going to undiscovered villages, but simply being a “3-month tourist” without being a typical English-speaking one.

More than discovering Hungarian verb conjugations, I would like to discover Hungarian culture – and speaking to its locals is the best way to do this. That’s what the mission will ultimately be about!

So join me and see if I can reach a pretty-good conversational level of Hungarian in just three months!

If you have any advice or thoughts about this mission, feel free to share them in the comments below!
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C2 exam results and analysis

benny — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:55:58 +0000

After slightly more than two weeks since sitting my third CEFRL exam (German this time), I have just gotten the results of it today! I have to say, I am very pleased with the results and happy to share them with you all!

One unique thing about my language learning projects is complete transparency of the good and the bad aspects of how these missions pan out, so I will continue that in this post and share full details of my results, what I did right and what I did wrong. I know several readers are considering sitting a similar exam, so hopefully my recommendations will come in useful.

Overall result

There were five different aspects to the exam. Based on four of these aspects I “passed” the exam and have a C2 level in German in these parts, doing better in certain sections than I originally thought I would!

However, I did not pass one aspect: Listening comprehension. Because you must pass all of the five sections, the overall result is not a pass and I will not be awarded the C2 diploma.

If I needed this diploma for professional reasons or to study then this would be a huge disappointment, but my purpose for sitting this test was always to do my best and to aim ‘impossibly‘ high in the very tight deadline of three months. When you see the results I got in individual parts, you will understand why I am very proud of how I did. I have also learned a lot about improving my study approach and this will be crucial in future missions (when combined with the priority of social-based learning).

I’ll give the results of each section and elaborate more on it below. There are 5 different possible grades: sehr gut (very good), gut (good), befriedigend (satisfactory), ausgleichbar durch mindestens “gut”…. (pass pending gut or higher mark in certain other sections) and nicht bestanden (not passed). I will also mention what I remember as a comparison in my Spanish DELE from several years ago.

One difference with the Spanish C2, for example, is that the overall pass is way less complex than in German. There are also 5 sections, but (when I did it) you need 80% or more in each section to pass. There are no levels – just a pass or fail. I did pass that and can mention why I did better than the equivalent in German in certain cases.

The results are presented in marks per section (marks achieved / (slash) total possible marks), followed by a representing percentage and the actual grade.

Oral exam

Result: 60/80 (75%: ‘good’ grade)

Believe it or not, this was the one I was most nervous about.

I have been way less social in Berlin than usual, so I have not had the chance to focus on constantly improving my conversational level as I normally would. Despite this, even with way less conversational time, I have plenty of language hacks to improve spoken level under tight conditions. So not only did I pass, but I got the good grade!

This was even more of a challenge when I saw the theme I had to discuss (for 5 minutes before the theme I had prepared in advance): deforestation! I can’t even discuss this in English, so I’m glad I have lots of tricks up my sleeve (yes, the language hacks I wrote about work great in oral exams) that eventually got me into a nice flowing conversation and ultimately gave me a grade to be proud of.

Having said that, the grade I got in my Spanish oral was a much more impressive 96%. You may think that this was due to simply having put more time into immersion in Spanish (about a year before exam compared to three months in German), but I am sure that it is actually because I focused on speaking Spanish first and then worked on more academic study methods that make up the rest of the exam. I didn’t really focus on the DELE exam until the weeks before it, when I was already speaking Spanish confidently.

I still remember that Spanish oral exam and how I immediately abandoned the “usted” form, used lots of casual language, and even flirted with the madrileña examiner a little. While German requires you to use Sie in such a situation (Spanish from Spain is way more restrictive), I still “worked the room” to keep the atmosphere informal in the exam and I am sure this worked to my advantage.

I never say people shouldn’t study to speak a language well (for example, I always have grammar and vocabulary books to help me in each mission), but as you can tell by the theme in certain posts recently, study must be put in its place and the focus must be on what a language exists for: communication. I am absolutely convinced that I would have gotten a similar result to my Spanish exam (95% or more) in the German oral if I studied less during those three months and focused entirely on speaking, using the techniques that I know work well but full time instead of just occasionally.

From a purely oral perspective I will always recommend people make studying a minor focus of their time to improve their level, and spend more time conversing. The only reason I did indeed study so much in Berlin was because I was sitting an examination, with other aspects as outlined below. Study works for examinations, but it’s a mistake making it the priority for real life. This also applies to oral exams, which are as close to the real life use of languages as you can get.

In future I will (of course) not be studying so much, but I will also only aim for sitting another C2 (or similar) exam when I already speak the language fluently. I will not likely be doing this again any time soon though.

Written exercise

Result: 52/70 (74%: ‘good’ grade)

This nice result was a bit of a surprise as writing is usually not something I focus much on. However, I had some tricks up my sleeve (read: not cheating, it was just me, a pen and no “bathroom breaks”) that I will discuss at a later time.

Apart from my usual hacks for spoken production that can be somewhat transferred to written production, I’d simply recommend that people write as much as possible for similar themes as in the target exam and have a very critical native correct them.

I don’t remember exactly what I got in the Spanish DELE for this, but it would have been 80-90%. If you can speak confidently and correctly, then you simply transfer it to written format. This is easy in phonetic languages like Spanish and German. To me its logical that my oral and written results were pretty much the same. The only difference is that I removed casual empty-softeners (like, you know, isn’t it?) and conversational connectors, which would make speech sound more natural, but not work in written form.

The only aspect of this that was hard for me was the actual writing - I had a cramp in my wrist as I haven’t used a pen to do more than fill out forms, sign my name, or write a quick postcard since… well since the Spanish DELE exam in 2006! This to me is a dark-ages aspect of CEFRL exams and I wish they would just let me use a computer (obviously with spell-check and Internet etc. disabled), or at least give me a feather to dip in ink so I can do this backward “writing” thing with some style.

Grammar

Result: 43/70 (61%: ‘satisfactory’ grade)

I just barely got within the safe pass grade both in German and in Spanish. I still remember the Spanish result was precisely 80%. One tiny slip up and I would have failed the entire exam!

I don’t like to focus so much on grammar and the rules of a language: speaking ‘perfectly’ is definitely way less important than speaking confidently. People who focus on this perfection will never actually reach it since they still aren’t confident enough to speak. When you do speak, improvements come naturally: as I said I got 96% in the Spanish oral by simply applying what works for improving spoken level.

So, it’s no surprise that I didn’t ace this section. I don’t like this part as it presents the questions sometimes in a way I feel is quite artificial for how you would need to apply the rules in real life. However, they do indeed test your understanding of the technical aspects of the language. It’s not my place to tell the Goethe Institut or Instituto de Cervantes how to run their exams, but I would personally do it differently.

Another frustrating thing is that you have to study for the exam layout. The way I passed this was to simply look at pass papers, see what they asked and study as many possible iterations of the answers that could come up as my main non-vocabulary SRS based study. I definitely improved my actual grammar in doing this, but I still think it’s restrictive.

I actually initially thought that I may have failed the exam because of this section. Rather than language abilities, I think just recognising patterns and studying those patterns gave me a pass in this part and it doesn’t (in my opinion) particularly reflect much on my actual language skills.

Reading

Result: 25/50 (50%: would just be ‘pass’ grade due to ‘good’ in written)

This part was the only surprise for me, as I thought I had passed it safely, but I actually did quite poorly.

After a text with questions (that I believe I answered satisfactorily, but not perfectly), there was a part to check your level of vocabulary by giving synonyms to words in the text. Precise synonyms are required (there are only one or two right answers), so I think mine were too general and I may have gotten no points at all in this part because of that. There is no half-points system – you are either right or wrong.

What I would have done differently: more focus on vocabulary study, to be more precise. My answers were likely ‘correct’, but not good enough. Also, I would recommend answering more questions on texts and running answers through a native. It’s likely that I wasn’t phrasing the answers in a satisfactory way, or presumed I gave enough information but didn’t.

What I wouldn’t have done differently: Despite the title, reading a lot does not necessarily help. I read enough for the purposes of this exam and I wouldn’t have increased my focus on reading if I were to resit it. Even ‘passive’ exam sections like reading and listening (see below) are actually active in these exams in that they require you to prove your deep understanding. This is not required of people who normally listen to podcasts/radio or read a lot. See more on this below in the same tune, but for listening.

If you enjoy reading in a foreign language, then go for it. But this section in a C2 exam requires you to rephrase answers, extrapolate slightly, search through text for certain information and be able to produce vocabulary – not just recognise it. This is not the same as generally summarising a chapter of a book for example. You need to answer questions on texts for sample exams, not just read a lot.

Despite this, I did (just about) pass the reading section due to the higher marks elsewhere bringing me up. In the Spanish exam I got 80-90% in this, and that was likely simply due to more exposure to the language.

Listening comprehension

Result: 15/40 (37%: not a pass)

The listening part is what determined the overall result. This result wasn’t a surprise and I had said that this section may determine if I pass or fail. It’s actually comforting that I failed by several points, as I would have hated being a point away from the entire exam counting as a pass. Although I’m frustrated with this result, unlike in the grammar part, I think this was very fairly tested. I would not change this part of the exam if I was designing it myself and I deserved the result I was given.

There’s no use (other than for ego) being a cry baby and blaming the questions I was asked or saying this particular audio was too hard etc. I was tested fairly and I am not currently at the level required to pass this part of the test at C2 level.

My biggest mistake here was (as mentioned above), presuming that to prepare for the listening exam, I simply had to listen to a lot of German. Ever since I arrived, I have had the radio on almost constantly, mostly on news and discussion stations. I somewhat paid attention and definitely got the general gist most of the time, and all of the time in the last month.

This did not actually help me for my listening exam.

Other learners swear by passive listening all day long as a means of learning a language. I was already sceptical about it, but now I’m convinced that it’s not a practical use of time (at least for me). If you like listening to the foreign language, then listen away, but don’t think that you are actually learning much. Listening while washing the dishes or driving a car will give you important exposure, and this is important to get a ‘feel’ for the language to make it sound less strange. But it is not necessarily improving your actual level of the language; definitely not your ability to produce, and not even so much for your ability to understand.

Unless you are actively involved in the audio, you can only improve your level if you give it all of your attention, or if you have the ability to efficiently split your attention so that it is getting crucial focus. I cannot do this myself.

What I would do differently if I were to sit this again: be 100% focused on listening when preparing (not doing anything else at the same time) and try my best to get as many details as possible out of the audio, rather than just feeling good about myself that I got the ‘gist’ of it.

I definitely understood the text read to me, and could summarise it satisfactorily if requested, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to give very specific information that you only pick up if you are focused and making notes. I realised just a few days before the exam that I was very much unprepared for the aural part after doing an example exercise. My main mistake was presuming that this part of the exam would be easy because listening is easy.

It’s a pity because my ability to understand German is good, but in conversations (which is always my ultimate end-goal) you do not have to remember very specific details. For example, talking to a friend and knowing that they went to Spain for the summer is easy, but remembering exactly how many days they spent in each town and listing what they had for dinner each evening requires a level of focus I usually don’t give (even in English). In these exams you can listen to the audio twice, but efficient and fast note taking is crucial and something I would have to work on if I did a similar exam in future.

Despite this I got 85-90% in my Spanish exam – this was likely simply due to greater exposure. With greater exposure you would naturally improve your abilities to pass all parts of these exams, but the point of my experiment was to see which ones I could hack in three months.

Conclusion

With a different approach, and taking what I said here into consideration, I still think it’s possible in three months from my starting point (vague familiarity). However it has been a stressful and anti-social three months for me so I won’t be doing it this way in future and I’d recommend people give themselves more time because of that

The point of this experiment was never the end goal of definitely passing the exam. It was always to try my best, force myself to improve the academic side of my German in a short time and investigate and improve my study/learning approach. In all of these aspects the mission has been a success for me!

As well as this, I fully passed 3/5 of the exam (and could theoretically pass 1/5 from the balance points), 2 of these parts by a very safe margin. This is not something people would usually achieve in three months, so I will be very happy to refer back to this in future as another success.

What about the accent part of the mission? Well, since I was focused so much on the exam, my spoken German suffered and, despite speaking very well, I still definitely have an accent. I could actually eliminate the main foreign aspects of my accent in my last two weeks with some intensive work, but I have worked very hard recently and need a break – so I will not be pursuing the accent reduction part of the mission. In future I will aim for just one crazy 3-month objective at a time!

Either passing the C2 exam or passing off as a German is definitely possible, but trying both at the same time requires focusing on unrelated parts of the language and I’m glad that I focused mostly on just one in the end.

Having said that, my German level is now fluent, and I will officially add it to my list of fluent languages spoken! I have not added a language to my permanent list for a while (I just reached pretty good level of Czech, dabbled in Thai and otherwise have just been improving my other languages for a few years) so this is a great achievement and I will continue to improve my German over time.

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Although I will officially begin the next mission later this week, I will still be in Berlin for a few weeks, so I will continue to improve my German here and will be making an interesting video or two entirely in German too.

I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me in another exciting mission! Many more on the way of course

Let me know what you think of the final results of these exams in the comments below!
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Benny’s birthday request: 1982 clicks!

benny — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:23:58 +0000

At midnight tonight I will have successfully completed 28 laps of the entire solar system. That’s about 26,264 MILLION kilometres! Phew, it’s exhausting! But I’m ready for much more!

So, I will take this short off-topic break from saving the world from being doomed to a a boring monolingual fate, to asking for a birthday present from you!

If you’ve enjoyed any of my blog posts in the past, then this will be hugely appreciated as a thank you! Best part is: it’s completely free and will take you 20 seconds max. Although those of you willing to treat me to a non-alcoholic cocktail (or mocktail as I prefer to call them) for my weekend celebrations, can certainly do that too!

My birthday request: 1982 clicks

Don’t worry, you don’t have to personally click anything 1982 times – once will do But I’m hoping that the RSS subscribers, Language Hacking League e-mail subscribers, and everyone I am spending the day writing to personally, can combine their click-powers to give me a total of 1982 clicks (any guesses why I’m aiming for that number? )

The best part is that you can follow the progress for yourself! Check out the page I want to share with a video of me speaking in 8 languages. The page also talks about the Language Hacking Guide, but people have told me that it’s fun to share simply because the video is cool, even if they aren’t interested in the book. That page has the Facebook share link on the top-right and that is what I would like people to click this weekend!

I have augmented the page with the latest advanced web 7.0 technology: a cheesy guilt-filled message and a ridiculous giant arrow just so there is no confusion about where I want you to click! When you click “share”, a page opens up for you to put the link on your Facebook profile (you may have to log-in first). Write a wee message saying how crazy this Irish guy is, how bad my accent in French is, how cheesy my pathetic plea for attention is, or whatever you want to say, but share it! You can also click the arrow to select a nicer white image to display to represent the page.

All the link sharing will bring more interested and cool readers to my site, give me lots more interesting comments and e-mails, and perhaps make an extra sale or two to make sure that I have enough Orange Juice to power my language learning missions! The next one is going to be quite the challenge and I’ll officially introduce it next week!

That’s it! So if you have 20 seconds to spare for your favourite Irish polyglot, please click ‘share’ on the top-right of this page. For every click I receive, I guarantee that I will smile in appreciation, or you get your click back no-questions-asked. Multiple clicks mean multiple smiles so spread the message, and for bonus points (or if you don’t use Facebook) you can e-mail 3 of your friends learning languages and tell them to read this blog, and let me know about it so you get your well earned smile-credit!

My birthday request is to take over the (Facebook) world… for the weekend You know what to do to help make it possible!
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The stone of Rosetta & multilingual Language Hacking Guide 2.0

benny — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:57:34 +0000

NOTE: The Language Hacking Guide is now available to be read in its entirety in six languages (seven next week), translated by natives.

The stone of Rosetta

You might think that this post has something to do with expensive yellow boxes that you can buy at airports with language learning software. Nope.

The Rosetta stone is, in my opinion, one of the coolest contributions to languages of modern times, and I’ll refer to it as the stone of Rosetta so that there is no confusion. The people who wrote the software program are very clever for using that title, but I find it frustrating that the name is associated with them now for many people more than with the original “language hack”.

Before the Rosetta Stone was discovered and then deciphered, there had been no understanding of the ancient Egyptian language, which appears in pyramids and in other incredible sites, since shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire. For 14 centuries, even the Egyptians themselves were incapable of reading hieroglyphics.

The stone was discovered in 1799 and immediately seen as the key to understanding all the ancient writings of the Egyptians: it’s a tri-lingual translation of a decree for King Ptolemy V, created around 200 BCE, in hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script (closer to the spoken language at the time) and ancient Greek. Since scholars knew ancient Greek, it was a simple (well actually it took about 20 years and a lot of ingenuity) case of comparing the Greek to the hieroglyphics.

This one stone, and one translation opened up the doors to a world of Egyptian history and culture, turning their writings from mere random scribbles of images into a readable language. As a language buff, I was in awe of getting to see it in person at the London Museum, as this one translation did indeed change the world as we know it.

The “stone of Rosetta” method: reading equivalent translations

I am sure some clever linguists will educate me on the official terminology, but I like to think of the stone of Rosetta method as one of the oldest, and still quite an effective way to learn a foreign language.

You read a text in your mother tongue and then with the full idea of it in your head, you read the target language equivalent translation (obviously only a good quality translation). Rather than using a dictionary (which sometimes can give you translations in the wrong context, or generally be frustrating to use to look up words) you can refer back to the full translation in your own language to compare what you don’t understand.

Since you have already read the text and understood it entirely, your focus changes to allow you to get into the flow of the language much more and this can help your progress a lot.

For centuries many people got their first exposure to foreign languages by reading translations of the bible in that language, knowing the original off by heart.

If it worked well to decipher Ancient Egyptian, then I’m sure it can help us a little to improve our French, Spanish etc.

You don’t even have to read to apply this method – I used to watch way too much TV when I was younger and could almost recite the entire script of some episodes of The Simpsons, so it actually helped my Spanish comprehension a lot to watch the dubbed Los Simpson when I moved to Spain. I didn’t need subtitles; I already knew what they were saying and associated the Spanish words much quicker than getting distracted by reading subtitles.

This greatly improves learning speed because you are focused more on the flow, rather than on the meaning of every single word, since you already understand what you are reading.

Multilingual Language Hacking Guide

With this in mind, I have taken my Language Hacking Guide, which explains precisely how you can speak languages from the first week and improve towards fluency very quickly thanks to lots of confident practise, and had it fully translated. All 33,000+ words of it have been translated by natives to the languages listed below.

Since the techniques I discuss are equally valid for all languages, I wanted to still give people an edge on the actual language they are interested in learning. My hope is that they will attempt to read the guide in that language. In doing so, they will be applying the tips of immediate immersion (albeit just in reading form in this case) discussed in the guide. They can refer to the copy in their mother tongue to help them understand. I’ll be using the guide myself in future to learn languages as I have them translated to these languages.

These translations also allow non-native English speakers to read it in their mother tongue. All translators worked hard to make sure that my ideas and voice were maintained, as well as re-wording things so that they sounded more natural in that language.

The languages included in this update are:

French, translated by Christine Schmit, professional translator from Luxembourg. Title: Domptez les langues étrangères
Portuguese, translated by Leticia Dáquer, professional translator from Rio – I worked in a translator traineeship in the same company as her in Italy. Wouldn’t have had anyone else translate it to Portuguese but her! Title: Guia para hackear línguas
Spanish, translated by Alex Arroyo from Mexico. He has an engineering background like me, but is gaining a passion for languages. Ridiculously nice and clever guy! Title: El manual del superpolíglota
Italian, translated by Andrea Piu from Sardinia, another translator with a varied work background like myself. Title: Il manuale del superpoliglotta
German, translated by Bleicke Peterson from Germany. He was happy to help me promote my learning method over the academic approach. Title: Der Fremdsprachen-Hacker

Next weekend I’ll send an update with a Polish translation, and in 2 months I’ll send the Greek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Esperanto, Hebrew, Dutch and Russian translations. The price will go up when I add the next group of translations, but they will all be sent for free to anyone who gets a copy in the mean time.

I’m hoping to include many more translations in the update in 2 months, so if you are a native of any language not listed and are interested in translating (payment is based on sales that the translators themselves make), please contact me if you have time this summer.

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I’ll be starting my next mission (already announced on Facebook) next week! But first, I’ll get my German exam results on Monday and let you know how it went! It won’t make the slightest difference, but any pagan luck rituals of knocking on wood, throwing salt behind you or crossing fingers, will be appreciated for the sentiment!

On Friday I’ll make a special birthday request so look out for that post! (Thursday in the e-mail list)

Note to “enthusiastic” commenters: While I welcome pretty much all comments, if you plan on complaining that quality unique content costs money, and that I also need to keep my lights on, please save your breath as I will delete all pointlessly negative and irrelevant comments. Over 95% of the content I write on the blog and in the e-mail list is completely free, and sales from the Language Hacking Guide will help me devote even more time to providing more free content to inspire others to take on the language learning challenge.

Looking forward to hearing from you all! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch a football match with tens of thousands of Germans!
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How to download free native-spoken podcasts & MP3s in almost any language

benny — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:00:58 +0000

Every Monday I send out an e-mail to the Language Hacking League (you can sign up on the right of the site) with a language hack or interesting website, as well as more precise updates regarding my own language missions.

This particular tip got a great response from people last week, so I’ll share it on the blog too. It’s very easy, and yet overlooked by many people when looking for content in the target language.

iTunes – not just for people with iPods, but don’t search for the language name

iTunes is a free installation and you can sign up for a free account to download podcasts about a range of topics. I am definitely not an Apple fanboy, but iTunes is an excellent distribution means of finding free content to listen to. Since the download is simply an MP3 file, you do not need to have an Apple device to listen to them; any MP3 player will do. On my Windows (Virtual box) installation all podcasts are downloaded to the My Music/iTunes folder and I simply drag them onto my Nexus One’s SD card.

When in iTunes, go to iTunes store and you will see a podcasts option. Many people feel that the most logical thing to do is to search for the language name, say “Spanish”, and see what comes up. If you are an absolute beginner then perhaps you’ll find this content useful, but it’s all about learning Spanish (i.e. it’s not natural native material) and most likely packaged by non-natives. There may be some exceptions, but I generally don’t like listening to these as they speak way too slowly and basically and this won’t give you the pressure to improve as quickly. Natives do not speak like that.

My suggestion is quite different. Back in the iTunes store home page, scroll to the very bottom and you will see “My store” with your country’s name and a flag. Change this to your target language’s country. So if you were learning French, change it to France, Italy for Italian, Japan for Japanese etc.

The iTunes store interface is suddenly translated to your target language, so going any further is much easier if your level is intermediate or above. Click ” Top Podcasts” (handily enough, many languages don’t translate podcasts and may not even translate Top). This is on the left in my interface. Next you will see that country’s most popular podcasts and can browse and subscribe to what looks interesting. These will of course be natives discussing science, news, politics, or whatever you are into, and they will be speaking naturally.

When it has downloaded, transfer it to your MP3 player and enjoy!

International radio station podcasts

When on your computer, listening to live streaming radio from the country where your target language is spoken is very easy. Here is a list of European radio stations. For other countries just Google “[country name] streaming radio”. This is completely free of course. You don’t have to be in the country to listen to its radio!!

If you can’t be on your computer so much, then go to the website associated with the radio stations and see what podcasts they offer for download to listen to on your MP3 player while you wait or travel to work/school. You will very likely need to understand the target language to do this, although you can also copy the URL to Google Translate to help you navigate the entire website easier to see if there are podcasts. For example, Spain’s Radio Nacional has a podcasts download page here.

Almost all major radio stations provide podcasts for their most popular shows nowadays. This can give even more interesting content than the iTunes suggestion above, although these may occasionally be iTunes links rather than direct downloads, so it helps to have the program installed.

News websites are another great source. For German I’d recommend people check out DW’s Learning German site for daily news spoken in slow German, or the rest of the website (audio and video) for natural German. France24 has a great video podcast with international news.

LingQ library

I wrote a detailed review of the LingQ learning system, and one of the things that I appreciated (and that is free) is the Library of material to listen to. The system currently offers 11 languages (English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Korean) although the amount of content available varies greatly depending on the language.

Another advantage of this is that the transcript is also provided so you can read the text after/while listening to it, but you can skip that if you are more focused on just listening and download the audio to your MP3 player. You need to sign up for a free account first to be able to access LingQ.

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Of course, I would personally recommend listening to podcasts on your way to a meeting that involves actually speaking with people in the language, if possible. Passive exposure does have its benefits, but don’t forget what you are ultimately aiming for! (i.e. speaking! Although if you are actually aiming to be the world expert in listening to others have all the fun, then ignore this paragraph).

If you have any other sources to access many interesting podcasts recorded by natives in other languages, be sure to share them in the comments!
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Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes

benny — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:22:32 +0000

Now that I’ve sat three of these diploma examinations (French, Spanish and German), I feel like I can give a useful summary for those curious!

When I introduced my current mission, I only quickly mentioned some details about the exam and what it exists for. They do indeed serve much more of a purpose than just for crazy Irish guys to sit them for ambitious 3 month missions! In today’s post I’ll describe the A1-C2 certificate process in much more detail.

Why sit them?

These certificates can be very useful to have on your CV/résumé, and they generally have no expiry date.

Self-evaluation of your language level may not be taken seriously by employers who truly require language skills, such as in the tourism and translation industry. A lot of companies in Europe are familiar with the CEFRL grading system and may even require recognised certification in the languages you claim to speak well.

Certain levels of these certificates are also pre-requisites to study at universities full time in those countries. This is by far the most common reason for young people to sit these exams. Most of those I met at the French, Spanish and German exams needed the certificates to be able to start studying a Masters locally, or even to begin a 4 year degree programme if they are not nationals of the country in question.

One other reason however, which is why I have always sat them, is to have a target to aim for to force myself to improve my language skills quicker than if I was just vaguely aiming to “improve”.

This has advantages and disadvantages though. I generally don’t place much importance on my writing skills or ability to analyse and discuss printed text in a foreign language, and these are requirements for all exams. Nearly all advice I give on this blog is linked directly to my focus in learning languages: to speak fluently with natives. The oral aspect of the exam tests this quite well, but this can contribute only 20% to your chances of passing in many cases.

Having said that, for many people writing and reading are just as important as speaking so it’s good for them to have everything tested. I will personally not be sitting a test like this again for a while as I have little patience for studying for long periods of time due to how little that contributes to actual ability to converse.

I have some interesting ideas to make it easier to pass these tests (language exam hacking if you will, but definitely not cheating!) and I will find out in 2 weeks if the work I put in to this ridiculously tight 3 month challenge to C2 was enough to get an overall pass in German. Even if it wasn’t, the work I put in to improve all aspects of my German has worked for my purposes and I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made in the last months!

What organisations provide the certification?

The Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFRL) is a language level evaluation system, which is used as a standard in Europe. Some Universities may use it, but the exams that I discuss here are for examination members of the ALTE group (see bullet list below) and are implemented by several major European language institutions. When used by these institutions it is not just any old university with a lazy language course or “Micky Mouse” certification that you can buy online – in many cases it is administered by the organisations that govern official modern usage of the language itself and is the most recognised certification in the world for many languages.

Being the organisation that promotes the language worldwide also means that they take pride in the levels expected of speakers and passing the highest level is no easy task. However, since they are indeed promotional, they attempt to make the exam as human as possible, while keeping it academic and following a standard exam layout. If the Alliance Française say you speak French at the level you passed then few people can ever doubt it.

Certification of this kind exists for almost every official European language. The best part is that you can sit them in many countries (depending on the language), not just where the language is spoken. In many cases no travel is required - most major capital cities have branches of the first three institutes mentioned below, as well as many others. In some cases they may only allow you to sit the highest level exam in the country itself. I think this is a good idea, as you would very likely need full time exposure to realistically attempt to pass them. For lower levels, you can just sit them at home though!

To be more specific, here are some examples and links to more information about these certificates. Read these websites for information regarding fees, testing locations, test dates, requirements, example tests etc.

German: the Goethe Institut
French: the Alliance Française
Spanish: Instituto de Cervantes (click ‘English‘ on the left)
Irish: TEG
Italian: CELI (page only in Italian)
English: Cambridge exams
For all other language exams (Portuguese, Greek, Czech etc.), check out the ALTE list of members

How does it work?

The layout of exams are somewhat different to one another and some have particular requirements that others do not. For example, in the German exam I had to read two (small) novels in advance that I could choose to answer questions on in the written part of the test, and in the French exam you have to choose a specialisation subject in the DALF level exams. Neither of these were a requirement in my Spanish DELE however.

What they do have in common is the European standard grading system of A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, (A1 is the lowest, C2 is the highest) although what each of these actually means is debatable. Here (PDF link) is a vague self-assessment guideline of what these levels may mean. Some Universities may only require a B2 to attend their courses, which means that you can indeed communicate in the language, but still not very confidently. But a lot of universities do require a C1 or C2 to attend particular courses, which are very hard to pass.

The C2 level does not imply that you would be mistaken for a native – you can still make mistakes, have an accent, and stumble a little, but otherwise you must be able to confidently express yourself and understand in many normal situations, without the use of any dictionaries etc. I decided to aim for C2 in German and Spanish simply because it would force me to attempt to reach this level or very near it, as long as I take it seriously of course. My first attempt at a CEFRL test was the French B2 and I did not find it enough of a challenge to push me to improve my French quickly. Going for a more ‘realistic’ lower level may not be a problem for most people though, as the pressure of a looming C2 when you are far from ready can be quite stressful.

The basic components of the exams also tend to be quite similar: they usually have five sections: Oral (spoken), Aural (listening), Reading, Writing and Grammar. Grammar may be counted as within the “reading” section, but you will almost always find complex questions to test your technical understanding of the language.

If I needed these exams for the purposes of studying then I would have aimed for the minimum level required to be more sure of passing it. One other issue is that the higher levels are always more expensive. The price varies considerably – between €30 and almost €300 depending on the language and the level.

As suggested in the post title, one thing that sets these certificates apart from simply studying the language at university is that you do not need to attend classes. With this in mind, the couple of hundred Euro seems a lot cheaper than the thousands of Euro required for expensive courses or years at university. You still need to do a lot of preparation, and private lessons would not go astray if combined with studying past exams and books made specifically for that exam. The language institutes themselves will almost always provide courses tailor-made for the exams, but they tend to be quite expensive so I have never attended these.

Since you don’t need to attend any classes, you really can just sign up for the exam (a few weeks in advance), show up on the written test day and oral test day, and then get the certificate after the time it takes for correction. No messy bureaucracy involved!

My most recent C2 exam attempt

It turns out that the German ZOP (C2) exam requires just over two weeks for correction. So on July 12th I’ll get my results!

I had been learning Spanish for about a year (from scratch) when I sat and passed the DELE Superior (C2), so I might be pushing it too far this time to attempt to get a C2 in just 3 months. Of course, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t pass, but my main purpose for this exam was always to force myself to learn as much as possible in a short time, by seriously attempting to reach the minimum pass grade, and that aspect of the mission has been a great success!

I’m very pleased with the progress I made and the realistic attempt I gave in the exam, even if I miss the pass just by a few percent. Aiming so high and reaching what I did means that I am confident that I would definitely pass the C1 (one level below) if I were to sit it.

As far as the contents of the exam itself go, I am confident that I passed several parts (most likely written, reading and oral), but the aural part had some tricky questions that I may not have answered satisfactorily and the grammar part requires skills that I found frustrating (and frankly, unnatural) to have to work on (such as taking a pre-made sentence starting with a preposition + noun and reforming it to start with a conjunction + verb while keeping the meaning exactly the same – yes it is as much fun as it sounds…)

Despite certain questions, I did find the exam overall to be a very fair and challenging evaluation of level, just as other ones I have sat have been. Rather than be a big cry baby and blaming the exam, if I don’t pass it will simply be because I haven’t reached C2 level yet, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I still believe I may have a chance of passing (it’s quite hard to tell) so I will reserve any judgement until July 12th.

Sitting an exam that tests all aspects of a language has required me to stay indoors and study a lot, so I think I will focus just on my conversational fluency for the next while in German and other languages. Being forced to study so much has helped me refine and improve my study technique, and this will ultimately help me to help others learn languages, and give me an edge for short study bursts. However, I will definitely not be studying so intensively for quite a while, as that only takes away from time that I could be actually conversing in the language.

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I usually start speaking a new language from day one, but I’ll attempt to do some focused study for two weeks before I start speaking my next 3-month-mission language! Let’s see if these study techniques make a difference, or I if I stick to the belief that you should dive in immediately and stop waiting so much. For me 2 weeks is already a long time to be focused on a language and not be practising it!

But first, I need a break and a chance to appreciate Berlin! In the mornings I can get the Language Hacking Guide version 2.0 ready – next week the entire contents of the guide will be in seven languages in one download (free upgrade for all those that bought it already), translated laboriously by natives. Hopefully I’ll have the time to redesign a few things on the site too. But in the afternoons/evenings, I will be out and enjoying this amazing city!

I’ll announce the next 3-month mission on the blog just after I get the results of the German exam – otherwise I’ll continue attempting to improve my German for the rest of my stay here. If you missed the announcement in the Language Hacking League, then don’t forget to ‘like’ FI3M’s Facebook page to see it announced there this weekend!

Since I have done practically no work at all in reducing my accent (this was not a requirement of the oral exam other than for the purposes of being easy to understand), it will be hard to achieve that aspect of my initial goals in just a few weeks, but I will certainly try! Nothing is impossible if you keep trying! Although in future, I think I’ll just have one ridiculously ambitious goal per 3-month mission

Have any of you sat CEFRL tests? What have your experiences been? Share them with us below!
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How to achieve the impossible

benny — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:28:24 +0000

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my first year of blogging about my 3 month language missions has probably been discovering that achieving the “impossible” is actually easy. It turns out that several people that I’ve come across or read about have achieved the impossible several times over each. Taking their lead, so have I! Today I’ll share how.

What is “impossible”?

Looking at this blog it’s easy to come across a few examples of impossible tasks. First, you see the title “Fluent in 3 months” – bah, that’s ridiculous! Impossible! Then you see the missions I aim for: fluency, no accent, super hard exams, getting by in a language in one weekend. Impossible!

I know these are “impossible” because lots of people are generous enough to remind me of it so regularly by downer comments here, or on forums or other blogs. I’ve seen the word impossible more in the last year (directed at me) than I had in my entire life beforehand.

And I love it. Makes it so much more fun when I prove them wrong!

You see, it’s all a simple misunderstanding in definition. These poor people don’t seem to have any idea what the word impossible really means. I like to be clear about my definitions (why I defined what fluency means so there would be no confusion), so I’ll refer to the good old Oxford dictionary once again. The definition is:

adjective 1 not able to occur, exist, or be done. 2 very difficult to deal with.

When you look at the core of the word, the first meaning is the most likely. It’s the opposite of possible and can not happen. That’s “not” under any circumstances, not “not” as in no honey, your arse does not look fat in that. But eternal pessimists seem to have decided that “very difficult” and impossible should become synonyms of one another.

This means we are talking about different things ultimately. I agree that ambitious tasks can be very challenging, but impossible?

There are some things that I can be pretty confident about being impossible. The monsters on the TV aren’t going to step outside of the screen and eat me. That’s impossible (a TV is a cathode ray tube, not a portal to another dimension). A talking snake is impossible (it doesn’t have the vocal chords for it, or the cerebral capacity for human communication). But in most cases, people use the word as a lazy exaggeration. Getting the ideal job you’ve been dreaming about, travelling, speaking another language in a short time, and many other things are not impossible.

When you look at it logically, my view of impossible is more realistic than theirs. Usually when we think of “realistic” we imagine down-to-earth. But I am being more true to the meaning of the word, so ultimately I am being more realistic. You are welcome to say that certain objectives are improbable or very hard, but unless you give me specific laws of physics that say I can’t do it, then get your definitions straight!

Impossible happens every day

One up side to all of this, is that as soon as someone throws down the gauntlet and uses that silly i word, it means that if you do achieve it, you have achieved the impossible! The real secret to achieving the impossible is trying, trying hard and often and ignoring discouragement from others with an unrealistic understanding of the limitations of the universe we live in.

There are so many examples. Let’s take travel: Want to backpack the world for years and support yourself from a blog? Impossible, yet Nomadic Matt does it. Want to visit every country in the world? Chris Guillebeau is doing it. Or maybe you want to work as a volunteer in several different countries and think it’ll never happen? Kirsty is doing it. What about travelling long-term as a family? Also possible. Or travelling with an infant when you are in debt? Adam Baker has done it. All “impossible” and yet all actually very possible when people really try to find a way to make it work rather than focusing on all the excuses.

That’s just travel. Think you’re too young or too old to achieve your dreams? Any reason you can think of that is holding you back, someone else has gotten around the same issue. And if nobody in the history of the world has done it yet, what’s stopping you from being the first?

Way more “impossible” hurdles have been overcome by people who want to live their dreams, for almost any situation you can think of. Helen Keller wrote 12 books, was a lecturer, met Mark Twain and every US president in her lifetime, and yet she was deaf and blind from the age of 18 months. Her story is so inspirational to me that I really don’t think anything is impossible if you put your mind to it. You might think that I’ve seen too many Disney movies when I say that, but I think the pessimists are the unrealistic ones.

Yes, sometimes people have advantages that you don’t have, but instead of complaining about how it’s easier for them, you can find your path to living your dreams.

Never use the ‘F’ word!

The main thing that will prevent you from achieving your dreams is focusing on and overusing the F word. No, I don’t mean fuck (seriously? Yawn…).

There is a word way more offensive and repugnant than that ever can be. In fact, I refuse to write it here. To f*** is the opposite of to succeed (or the noun f*$#)&* is the opposite of success) and people who focus on this will ultimately achieve it.

Since pessimists are so generous with their definitions of impossible, I’m going to do the opposite and define f*$#)&* right out of existence. I simply don’t believe in it. This very definition helps me and many others achieve the impossible. There is no such thing as a f*$#)&*! When you focus on how you are to achieve the task, and actually work on it rather than get lost in the reasons why you can’t, the idea of “impossible” itself becomes impossible.

For example, in just over a week I am going to be sitting one of hardest language exams for non-natives in the world. Quite a lot of people love to remind me how it’s impossible and how I’ll definitely f***.

I feel sad for them! They see the world of possibilities as binary. 0 or 1, right or wrong, black or white, f*** or don’t f***. I don’t. My glass is half full. Those following the blog long enough know that I rate my successes in scales. I’m either successful, very successful or extremely successful. I will aim for and work towards extremely successful for the entire duration of the mission, even if I “only” end up at very successful. This whole attitude helps me achieve more, way beyond simple redefinitions of words to get around not achieving enough.

For example, I wanted to pass myself off as a Brazilian for 2 minutes, and have it come naturally all the time. Aiming so high meant that I had to make lots of progress quickly. I didn’t exactly achieve what I had initially aimed for. Instead I was able to convince several Brazilians in social situations that I was a Carioca for up to 30 seconds, by reducing my accent to be subtle enough (albeit not zero) and working hard on the important 93% aspect of non-verbal communication too so that I would be convincing enough for those 30 seconds. Did I f***? No way! 30 seconds is a long time to be in a conversation and pass off as a local, even if I had to be very focused to do so. As far as I’m concerned that was an amazing achievement, even if it wasn’t the initial goal. That mission was a success! The same happened with my Czech mission. I wanted to speak fluently in 3 months, but instead I was speaking quite well after 2 months (when I had to stop).

These were not 100% successes, but were definitely not the exact opposite either.

There are only successes and partial successes

In my next week’s very very hard exam, I only see two possible outcomes, none of which start with an f.

I will either do really well in this exam (since I have been working very hard, studying despite disliking it so much, and have some interesting language exam hacks up my sleeve – not cheating mind you), have dramatically improved my German in an incredibly short time and gained a new appreciation for study techniques, as well as built up fantastic anticipation for the summer… or I will achieve all of that and the Goethe Institut will also reward me with a C2 Diploma.

The second option would be way cooler, and likely involve lots of me screaming it from Berlin rooftops to the world, but you can bet that I won’t consider these 3 months “wasted” if a German exam correcter happens to disagree with me. That can never take away the leaps of progress I’ve made in this short time.

The only way to achieve the impossible is to try “impossible” tasks. Here, I mean impossible as in the lazy pessimistic definition, i.e. “hard”. After this, I’ll take a few weeks to recuperate… and then I’m going to have an even harder 3-month objective, whether this mission is an 80% success, or a 100% success. The more I try, the more I will succeed.

Your turn

Up until I started travelling and meeting so many people with stories that would inspire me to aim higher, instead of something that I know I will definitely achieve (i.e. not impossible by anyone’s definition), I have to say that my life was not particularly interesting or fulfilling. The last 7 years have been filled with full and partial successes, because I keep trying. I learn from the partial successes and they ultimately lead to “impossible” tasks being achieved.

So, what’s stopping you from achieving the impossible? Cast away that silly word, and just make it happen. Work hard, work often and stay positive and you’ll surprise yourself by how much you can do.

And if you still think something is impossible, then please don’t interrupt the person actually doing it

Thoughts? Comments? Hit me in the box below!
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Non-verbal skills: essential but ignored aspects of foreign language communication

benny — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:17:42 +0000

Can you guess what I’m thinking from looking at my expression in the photo?

When I run into some study-focused learners and the discussion turns to languages, sometimes I honestly feel like we are talking about completely different things. A lot of them like talking about subjunctives, past participles, cases and word roots, conjugations, tone rules and so on. If you are a grammarian or academic then these things can lead to fascinating discussions if you are into that.

However, I find focusing entirely on such details to be unhelpful if you actually want to communicate with natives in your target language.

The way I see it, it’s like Chemistry professors discussing cooking. The Chemist could say NaHCO₃ + KHC₄H₄O₆ —-> KNaC₄H₄O₆ + H₂O + CO₂and see how great that is, but cooks usually just say that they added Baking soda to Cream of tartar. Chemical formulae are interesting and practical in so many ways (I’d hate to think where would we be today without amazing advances in chemistry!) but actually quite useless to cooks.

Grammar isn’t “useless” to language learners, but devoting nearly all of your energy to it is wasteful if your end-goal is anything but to pass an exam about grammar.

Someone who focuses on grammar will become a grammar expert, and someone who focuses on vocabulary will become a walking dictionary, but if they want to communicate with natives they need to turn their attention to other crucial aspects of communication!

Non verbal skills: Sometimes way more important than the verbal ones

One statistic you may have already heard about that I find useful to illustrate this point is from a UCLA study, suggesting that as much as 93% of communication may be from aspects unconnected to the words we use. This study focused on feelings and attitudes (obviously in other contexts, words convey ideas much better), but that’s a pretty powerful statistic. Only 7% from the actual words you use…

That figure is a little too precise, but in my experience it is quite accurate! I’ve run into a lot of language learners who, on paper, “speak” the language way better than I do. They have gotten As in their exams, they can explain the intricacies of the most complex grammar to you and they know obscure words of the foreign language. And yet they can’t converse with anyone in that language. If the goal is to be able to understand everything in a written text then they’ll likely do better than me, but in real life the cat almost always has their tongue.

What separates such theoretically better learners from actual speakers of the language, is the latter’s focus on communication. Making the mistakes and getting out there and speaking as soon as possible.

As well as that, there are ways they need to communicate that are never covered in grammar books, and at best will be occasional asides in more cultural based language learning courses: How we communicate between the words. As far as I’m concerned this is even more important than the content of the language. You can convey a lot of information in body language, facial expressions, volume and tone of the words you use, use of spacing and precisely what you do between the words, as well as your clothes, behaviour and even when knowing that you shouldn’t say or do something.

Cultural and social aspects are bigger aspects of communication than grammar and vocabulary ever could be.

Interesting example: Italian squillo

I went into great detail into how to become more active in conversations and how to genuinely interact with natives, despite lack of vocabulary etc., using such non-verbal techniques in the Guide. One or two specific suggestions have gotten quite a lot of great responses from people, so I might elaborate much more in later blog posts.

However, one different example I’d like to point out today is the squillo in Italy. This form of communication also exists between certain friends/family members elsewhere and to a certain extent in many other countries, but I’ve personally found its use in Italy to be much broader.

Squillo simply means a “ring” (on the telephone), but is more precisely thought of as a missed call. This missed call can have dozens of meanings, none of which are explained beforehand. In English speaking countries I have heard people say “I’ll give you a missed call when I’m arriving” etc., but its use in Italy and some other places goes way beyond this.

This took me by surprise as I would get so many missed calls (seeing who it was from caller ID) when living in Italy. At first, I thought it was a means of the other person not having to pay and thought it was rather rude of them to expect me to call back just so they could save money, but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t because I would actually “miss” the call, since I would have my mobile on me all the time. There would never be a pre-made agreement (like I’ll give a missed call when I am ready to leave etc.) and yet it’s meaning would always be clear from the context.

A squillo means I’m thinking of you, or Hey, how are you doing? or Sorry, I’m running late or I’m at your door, come down now! or Where the hell are you!? or many many other things. If you agreed to meet someone at 9pm and at 9:10 you get a squillo, it’s pretty clear that it means the third one. If you get a squillo from a girl you’re seeing it can mean the first one. The context is pretty clear. No SMS needs to be sent, no phonecall needs to be made (unless the context indicates they are low on credit, e.g. two squilli in succession), and most of the time you don’t even need to acknowledge it with a return squillo.

No words are written or spoken, and yet a full communicative message is exchanged.

Since the phone call never actually connects, it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s a very clever means of communication. In Spain I’ve heard them say “dame un toque” and in France they request a “bip”, but up to now Italy wins in broadness of applications of the squillo. Foreigners would go as far as to simply use the Italian word when speaking English/French etc. – it just doesn’t translate that well.

As a means of communication, I love it! No amount of grammar studies can get your head around its use – this is understanding the human context of your relationship to the caller and what you are planning that day.

Work much more on the 93% part of communication

You would find yourself more accepted in social circles abroad if you tried to focus more on how locals are acting, rather than only on what they are saying. How are they sitting? How fast do they walk? How loud do they talk? (um, sorry to my American readers, but seriously, you should turn down the volume switch a little when speaking certain languages!! )

In some of my language missions, I like to attempt to pass off as a local. It’s pointed out to me very frequently how “impossible” this is because you can never lose your accent. What they fail to realise is that the accent reduction is just a small part of what you need to do to achieve this. Someone with an absolutely perfect accent, intonation, grammar etc. will still be seen as a foreigner 2 seconds into a conversation because of their posture, clothing, tone of voice, lack of native body language, inability to pick up on important social queues etc.

My idea of really studying a language, is to observe and emulate people speaking it. This has ultimately led to me being confused for a local in many occasions, even though a few grammar and pronunciation mistakes might slip through that are seen as too subtle when compared to my more local body language.

This is why this blog talks so much about the social aspect of learning a language. It is essential! I’ll occasionally make some grammar or vocabulary references, but frankly the 93% aspect of communication is way more important. If I can’t express myself as a local would before I even open my mouth, then anything I do say is going to sound even stranger, whether I have lots of mistakes in my words or not.

If I was designing a Brazilian Portuguese course, I’d have a whole section about how much warmer and friendlier you have to be. When people ask me advice for speaking Italian I tell them about how the Italian shrug works, combined with “boh!” long before I talk about conjugations. If you plan on living in France, you should learn how to drink un café like the French do.

All of these are aspects of communication and interaction with locals. Why they aren’t on almost any language courses boggles the mind.

The solution? Stop bloody studying and interact with people in the language! Or if you watch a foreign language TV show or movie, pay attention to how they act as well as trying to understand what they are saying.

The best news is that the vast majority of this unspoken communication is actually international! There are always exceptions that need to be learned, but most of the time a grimace, point, touch on the shoulder or warm smile will get you much further in terms of communication than words ever can.

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People have already booked 18 language coaching sessions in just one week! Contact me to book today if you are interested too!

For those curious, I am studying (grumble) really hard these days to try my best to pass the German C2 exam. All this study is frankly getting in the way of trying to improve my spoken German! I have two weeks to try to see if I can hack the C2 exam a second time despite the tighter timeframe… whether I will or not, I look forward to getting out a lot more after the exam and speaking German, reducing my accent and adapting to German mannerisms as well as I can to attempt to convince them I’m one of them before I leave

Am I really that crazy to think that there is more to attempting immersion in a foreign culture than the 7% that most courses seem to be so obsessed with? Let me know in the comments!
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Just 2 weeks learning Esperanto can get you months ahead in your target language

benny — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:52:07 +0000

Whenever I meet new people and try to help them with their language learning missions, when they hear that I have already learned to speak a few languages and ask me to list them, the one that always gets their attention the most is Esperanto.

Most people have never even heard of it, but occasionally they say that they thought it was dead and that maybe I learned it as an alternative to Klingon or Na’vi just for the hell of it, since “nobody actually speaks it”.

Well, today I am going to make a suggestion that I included as one of many other language hacks in the Language Hacking Guide, and it has nothing to do with saving the world, or peace and love between all races with a universal language. I don’t learn Esperanto to aim for a better world some day – to me it has very practical uses right now to me and to many learners.

Even if it had no speakers, it would still be very useful

In fact, let’s pretend that nobody actually speaks Esperanto.

In this hypothetical universe, there is just material online to learn it and one guy on Skype in Yemen who is willing to chat to you in it. Even in this situation, I still say that if you aren’t speaking your target language yet (Spanish, Japanese, Russian or whatever it may be), then devoting two weeks to Esperanto can get you months ahead in that language.

If you already speak several languages then this particular language hack will be lost on you, but for those of you still behind the “barrier” of actually conversing, this may be just what the doctor ordered!

One big criticism I have for many traditional learning systems is the obsession with studying (a.k.a. input if you like thinking of humans as the same as robots) because they see a language as nothing more than pure information and totally ignore the social aspect of it. You need to get over the barrier of feeling embarrassed, and simply not used to a foreign language. This is the strangest part of learning any language.

“Skip” the hardest first foreign language bit

Why should you learn Esperanto? Because it’s easy.

I don’t actually like using the word “hard” with languages – I think it’s counterproductive to randomly assign negativity, which will do absolutely nothing to actually help you learn a language. But anyway, if you are curious (I do get asked this a lit) the “hardest” language I ever learned and ever will learn was… Spanish. Yep – no matter what language you suggest in the world, Spanish will always have been the hardest one for me.

Not because of the subjunctive, or tables of conjugations or any of the other things that pessimists drool over when they get ready to compile a list of reasons to discourage people. It’s because it was the first foreign language that I ever tried to speak. It doesn’t matter about the grammar and vocabulary so much when you just are not used to any foreign language coming out of your mouth. This barrier is a tough nut to crack and extra work of needing to worry about conjugations, cases, word genders etc. are generally going to add to this pressure.

The reason I’m suggesting Esperanto for 2 weeks is because it is very easy (no word genders, no conjugation, perfectly phonetic, no random rule exceptions, easy consistent vocabulary). If you are truly devoted and have a lot less to randomly whine about, then in just a couple of weeks you can focus entirely on communication with way less study. You will recognise thousands of words already since most of the vocabulary is based on European languages like French, but there is some English in there too! For example, Yes is pronounced exactly the same (spelled as “jes”).

If you are fully devoted for two weeks, and in the second week do genuinely try to speak it in a chatroom or on Skype, you will be forced to use what you have learned, but you won’t have to think too hard to do it. If you are dedicated enough (and use some hacks to make sure you are speaking quicker) you could do this in a very short time. You will get over this speaking barrier and be communicating in a foreign language! You would need more than 2 weeks to speak fluently, but you can indeed speak it and get by in this time.

And then something amazing happens – that target language, the one you really want to speak (for moving to France, trying to rediscover your Chinese roots etc.) suddenly becomes your second foreign language! You already “speak” one, so you have gained this confidence that seemed so unobtainable before, and now you will have that extra edge where you actually want it.

The polyglot edge

It won’t surprise you to hear that the more languages you learn, the easier it is to learn the next one. If both me and a monoglot decide to take on language x at the same time, I’ll very likely learn it quicker than he will. This isn’t because I’m smarter, or because of mysterious reconfigurations within my brain. It’s because of techniques, familiarity and confidence. As far as I’m concerned these 3 aspects are the only things that separate me from people still speaking just one language as far as taking on a new language is concerned.

There are plenty of techniques, and familiarity plays a big part too, but the confidence to actually speak will hold you back if you don’t have it, even if you know a language inside out. If you can use Esperanto to hack your way towards this confidence quicker, then you will have it for your “second” foreign language; the priority language you definitely want to speak. You will know that you can communicate in a foreign language. You’ll have the polyglot edge.

This isn’t just my opinion. Several studies have shown that learning Esperanto first will give you that edge. For example, students learned Esperanto for six months and then French for a year and a half. Another control group studied just French for two years – so they had several months more studies in that language. And yet the first group that got “side-tracked” to learn Esperanto had significantly better command of French.

They needed to do it over the long term since this would have been done using the academic approach. As a language hacker, you would only need two weeks (maybe more if you can’t be very committed).

This post isn’t to convince the world that we all need a universal language. The point is that learning a language that is easy will get you miles ahead. Your actual target language will likely have some tricky things to learn that you will have to master if you are to speak it confidently. But simple confidence in itself won’t come to you unless you start speaking a language. It’s a vicious circle.

One way I get out of this circle myself is to speak as often as possible as early as possible. But it’s easy for me to say this because I have done it already before. Once you do it once, every time after that becomes so much easier.

So why not make the “first” time you do it all about communication with almost no technical grammar etc. to worry about so you can get over this barrier once and for all?

Oh yeah, the language itself is cool

Esperanto fits the bill because it was designed to be easy and material to learn it is very easy to come across. As well as this there are a lot of speakers who will be happy to help you, both online and in lots of places in person.

As I said at the start, even if there was just one guy to talk to and the material available to study, it would still work for the purposes described here. What is actually true is that there are millions of Esperanto speakers all over the world. I’ve met up with them many times and had lots of fun (click the last link to see me trying out my pathetic skills as an actor in the language).

I’m not looking for an ideal utopian society when I go to these week-long events where everything (karaokes, dinner menus, games, tours…) is in Esperanto. I go to find people I get along with really well, since there are a surprisingly large number of other polyglots, travellers, vegetarians, Linux users, non-drinkers and many open-minded people there.

There are lots of large events all around the world, or you can just find some speakers in your city to practise with, although you can already do a lot online. The Internet has plenty of Esperanto content; the Esperanto Wikipedia has more than 130,000 entries (more than Arabic). You can find an active forum and a fantastic free learning resource (with a great language learning course, a dictionary, a chat room etc.) on Lernu.net (the entire website is available in several languages).

The language sounds pleasant to listen to and has lots of easy to recognise words similar to English, French/Spanish/Italian and German. In fact, the content (not just the confidence) of Esperanto will help you in learning a lot of European languages! When I tried to learn German in school, the Accusative seemed very complicated. Even the name sounds like you are blaming someone. The accusative exists in Esperanto (it’s one of the very few bits of grammar, there only so you can have any word order you like), but its use is a lot clearer. Getting used to it there meant that it wasn’t so weird to add an -n in German either.

When I tried to learn Czech, the writing system of having “hats” on a letter like s and c didn’t seem strange at all, since Esperanto does this to make the language phonetic (s = s but ŝ = sh for example).

Even if you are learning a non-European language, the confidence you would gain in being able to communicate would bring you miles ahead. As I said, this lack of confidence in speaking a language is one of the main reasons people simply don’t.

If you can start communicating basically in one language for the investment of just a few weeks, then you wouldn’t have to wait the months you would have to otherwise with your target language. I think Esperanto is worth checking out beyond that, but even if all you are interested in is reaching spoken confidence in your actual target language – this small investment could make a big difference.

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So what do you think? If you have not been able to speak your target language yet, do you think that this injection of confidence of becoming multilingual in a short time will make a difference? Would you care to continue with Esperanto after that to make sure you were communicating much better? Think Esperanto sounds interesting enough to check out?

Let me know in the comments!
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FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam

benny — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:15:54 +0000

♬ Cumpleaños feliz ♫ Joyeux anniversaire ♪ Happy birthday dear fluentin3months ♬ Tanti auguri a te! ♪

On June 1st 2009 I wrote the first post on this blog, and my fluent in 3 months projects had begun! It has been an incredible first year! The blog has received (to date) almost 2,500 comments and 500,000 page views, and has just won 1st place in the Top Language Learning blogs and 2nd place out of all Top 100 Language blogs 2010!!

In the last year on this blog I have documented how I was able to speak pretty good Czech in just two months (video here), pass of as a Carioca, get by in Thai, and of course am working on the German mission right now. And of course, along the way I have constantly reminded all of you that you can easily do it too! It has been one of the best years of my life thanks to all the support from readers to make sure I kept up the missions! Thank you

And the effects have gone way beyond the Internet. I met some fantastic other bloggers in Thailand who gave me great advice, met up with a couple of readers in person and have even been recognised in the street dozens of times by people I’ve never met! It helps that every single post so far includes a photo of me in it I also seem to have a reputation ahead of me. I’ve lost count of the times someone in a party would talk to me for a few minutes and suddenly say “… hold on, are you that crazy 3-months guy?!?”

The blog has also made a big practical difference to my finances, all in the last two weeks. Unfortunately, everything I’ve earned for the last 15 months has gone directly to paying off my Visa card, which I had to use as an ATM card ever since my old laptop melted in 42ºC heat in India and left me workless for several weeks and needing to replace it with an equally powerful laptop. I had spent a lot on an iPhone just before this happened, which probably contributed to me disliking it so much…

However, since releasing the Language Hacking Guide, I may not have sold enough to retire yet, but I have (as of a couple of hours before writing this) cleared my debt! After paying rent, at the time of writing I now have €34 to my name and I’m damn happy about it Having a non-negative balance feels quite nice indeed! The best part is that I have received waves of positive feedback about the Language Hacking Guide – so people have genuinely been loving it and saying it was well worth what they paid for it! Sales have been slow after the first week, but hopefully as the site grows, more people will check it out.

To think, all it took to solve this problem and to be exposed to so many amazing people was a few mouse clicks and typing some words!

What’s in store for year two?

In one month, my 3-months will be up for the German mission – those of you in the Language Hacking League (sign up for free on the right of the site) will get e-mailed next Monday to hear where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing in July. I can say that for at least the next year I will continue the pattern of 2-3 month language missions that I have had since the site began. It’s fun!

People always ask me how I choose my next language – they suggest that the cases of this language or the tones of that language will be a great challenge for me. Well, as much as I love a challenge, grammar and other technical details of a language are not the reason I travel. I travel to get to know more people, enjoy a local culture, and feel comfortable in my day-to-day life. For me a cool city is way more important than a cool language. Although I definitely want to expand into some more interesting languages!

In fact, I’d love to get into Russian and Japanese, but there is one problem with both of these! No, it’s not Russian’s cases or Japanese’s kanji. That’s nothing – there’s something that scares me way more than that! It’s the fact that I love living in major active cities, so I would really much prefer to have those 3 missions in Moscow and Tokyo. Only problem is… they also happen to be the world’s top 2 most expensive capital cities! I’m not rich, and arrange my travels around that. Berlin for example is one of the cheapest capital cities in Europe, so coming here for 3 months was an easy choice, especially after hearing from so many people how great it is.

So, my side-mission for the rest of this year will be to try to earn more than I normally would as a translator. I don’t need to retire to a paradise island, feed a smoking/drinking habit, buy a car, or invest in lots of junk (since 40kg is already plenty to be travelling with). But if I want to be more flexible in my travels than sticking to cheap cities, I’ll have to start earning a bit more.

The good news for those of you who are just here to read & comment is that it means I am planning to be much more active! Once I have done the German exam, I’ll start working on aspects of this site like perhaps adding a forum to help connect language hackers, hopefully posting more regularly than once or twice a week, and I’ll definitely be writing guest posts on other blogs (about many things, not just languages!) and trying to get more interested readers to come here.

My priority will always be to continue to write interesting content to share my language learning adventures and my language hacks, both on the blog and the separate hacks in the e-mail list. I’ll keep all this advice nice and free! And hopefully 0.1% or so of people visiting will want a little bit more and will read the guide

Consultation

After the initial successful first week, sales of the guide continue to go well, but still not quite enough to live off. I’m going to take the risk and try to be a full time language hacker. I think I can contribute in other ways on my short time on this rock than locking myself up for weeks translating French train-door specifications to English…

Since I have been enjoying injecting some enthusiasm and language hacks into people I randomly meet in social events (one reason I was so slow to start a blog is because I am better at explaining myself verbally than in writing), I am going to go to the next level and try to help people on a one-on-one basis remotely. I was a language teacher for most of the last 7 years and you can see in the videos that I am certainly not shy to try to encourage people, so I am confident that I can really help people by Skype / telephone calls.

If you think you might be interested, or know someone who might, then check out my “Hire me” page for more details. Just as I am starting up, I’ll half the normal rate I am aiming for just until next Friday 10th. If you need to speak a language asap, but are not so confident and need formulate a plan of action, then let me know if you’d like private consultation and we’ll see if I can help

4 weeks until the dreaded C2 exam!

OK, now back to the current mission! I signed up for the C2 exam last week and am working really hard to make sure passing is a real possibility. Now that I am familiar with the exam layout I can tell you that it’s hard!! Much harder than I had expected! Despite that, and despite my slower progress due to being almost totally focused on writing the Guide for 6 weeks straight, I still have a chance!

The easy part will be the oral exam. I would have passed this anyway if it was spontaneous, as the Spanish and French ones I did were. Speaking confidently is my forte and the core of the Guide I wrote! But it gets even easier – you are actually allowed to prepare a speech in advance and then discuss the same topic. I will prepare a talk about “Unconventional language learning strategies” and my examiners will of course be German teachers in their day-jobs. They may have examined many people before, but they won’t know what hit them when I get there!

But there is one big problem I wasn’t aware of until signing up. They don’t let you sit the oral exam unless you pass the written one! This has been a big blow to my plans, as I mostly wanted to know my result in the spoken part, even if I didn’t overall pass the exam. Despite paying a tzar’s ransom to sign up for the exam I can’t even sit all parts of it unless I pass others. Bloody annoying!

So the pressure really is on to do as well as possible in the other parts. You don’t have to pass all of them. I need to get a result of at least 60% in the written essay to be allowed into the oral one. This is going to be very hard at the standards required, but I’m going to write as much as possible over the next weeks and get corrections. I won’t ace this, but I am going to try really hard to achieve that 60-65% window required.

After this I need 60% in at least two out of the following three parts to pass overall: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and the “expressiveness” part. The listening part will be hard, but I think I have a good chance of at least getting the 60% in that, the reading part is harder than you would think because of the complicated questions they ask, even though the texts are actually very manageable, but I’m practising a lot so I also have a chance there. And the “expressiveness” part is a frustrating collection of very technical grammatical questions that the examiners can expect a bold lecture from me about how pointless it is if I make it into the Oral exam! I’ll try my best but it’s not likely I’ll pass that part.

Even so I can still theoretically get the overall diploma with a “satisfactory” grade! However, falling below that extremely difficult to reach 60% grade in any of the four aspects I’m aiming to pass will render the entire result as a fail. And not getting that minimum in the written will mean that I won’t even get to sit the only part (Oral) that I was actually looking forward to!

Sound daunting enough? I seem to be willingly putting myself through this ridiculous exam procedure despite the fact that it’s June and I should be in sunny parks chatting up blond Berliners. At least the very unexpected dull weather Europe is experiencing these weeks means it’s not that bad being stuck indoors studying. Sitting an exam like this is the only reason I’m studying so much, because otherwise it can’t help as much as being much more social would with a goal of speaking better.

My spoken level has been improving (as you can see by watching my two most recent videos), but way less than I would prefer. Attempting to reduce my accent is hard as I’m not speaking regularly enough, but I am still not giving up on that just yet!

So, we have one month left! You will of course get details of how the exam went… they give me the final results about 10 days after sitting the exam (but they will correct just the written part on the same day to tell me if I’m not invited to the Oral exam – how nice of them!)

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There you have it! So, what do you think about FI3M’s first year? How would you like to see the site develop over the next 12 months? Do you think having Skype calls is an interesting way for me to get to Tokyo? Based on my description – will you forgive me if I don’t pass the C2 exam, or do you think I have a good chance?

Share all your thoughts in the comments! Any off-topic negativity will be banished to the netherworld of Disqus’ deleted comments limbo!

Thanks again for all of your support over the last 12 months
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[video] Travel hack: How to pack over 40kg of luggage with you on no-frills airlines

benny — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:04:48 +0000

Check out this video that explains everything in this post, with airport footage from an actual trip I made with 40kg:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IScYc9altnU

Ah, no-frills airlines. How we both love and hate you at the same time!

Since quite a lot of us are on a budget nowadays, we try to find ways to pay less as often as possible, and low cost carriers (like Ryanair, Easyjet etc. in Europe) are a great way to do this if you are travelling. They remove all unnecessary luxuries and simply get you to your destination. If you travel just with hand luggage and buy your ticket at the right time, they are by far the cheapest way to travel, and seats can be gotten for just a couple of Euro sometimes.

However, there are those of us that simply can’t travel only with the 10kg hand luggage limit. I don’t have a base anywhere in the world, so I travel with my entire “house” once every 3 or so months. I think I am doing pretty well to have everything important I own in the world weighing only 40kg. When I go on non-low-cost carriers (across oceans for example), it usually means I only have to put a few kilograms in my pockets. But in Europe, flying with them is almost always way too expensive.

So, over the years I’ve learned some travel hacks to allow me to bring way more than the limit with me without paying overweight luggage fees. Best part is -- I’m technically not breaking a single rule!

Every rule has a loophole!

The rule with Ryanair for example is 10kg hand luggage and 15kg check-in. As it is, you pay for check-in separately so that will immediately bump up the price of your ticket. So if you are travelling with 20kg or so, you can actually use the hacks discussed here while travelling just with hand luggage and avoid all extra charges. On the trip shown in the above video, I did pay extra to bring check-in luggage (€15 on Ryanair) as well as other random Ryanair extras like credit-card fees etc., but I didn’t pay anything else after that.

So how did I do it? As explained in the video, I stuck to their rules precisely: 10kg hand luggage and 15kg check-in. The remaining 15kg did not go into these bags so I did not break any rules. If it didn’t go in the bags, where’s the only place you can put it? On your person.

You see it all the time; people squeeze that extra little bit into their pockets, or overweight passengers are generally not charged extra. This is a loophole that I take advantage of and put all excess items on me. I made a video about it 2 years ago that got quite a lot of views on Youtube, and if you have combat trousers and lots of pockets, you’d be surprised how much you can squeeze in! But it doesn’t explain my main hack that helps me bring way more with me: my jacket.

The ridiculously large jacket-pocket hack

Even if I’m travelling in August in 42ºC weather, I will put on this jacket. It’s an ugly old unfashionable jacket, but I bring it everywhere with me. It wasn’t particularly special when I got it, but by partially destroying it I have made it suddenly very useful: If you have a double-layered jacket, then tear a pocket open and simply stuff all your things inside! This way your entire jacket suddenly becomes one pick pocket that you can keep filling up! The only limit is the space that can fit in there (quite a lot usually) and the strength of the jacket to support it.

This jacket simply counts as weight on your person so you can be pretty flexible with how much you can stuff in!

It isn’t uncomfortable because you only wear it when passing through checks. It only takes a second to take it off when passing through security and they simply don’t care when they see stuff in it in the x-ray. As long as you have no liquids or weapons they’ll let you pass. Around the terminal, I just put the jacket into a strong plastic bag. With Rynair you have to get checked when getting on the flight too, so I just put the jacket on again for that couple of minutes and then take it off and stuff it overhead with my check-in bag.

Even if it’s really hot and uncomfortable, you only actually wear it for a couple of minutes. For most of the journey to/from airport and on the flight, the jacket is actually in a separate bag.

I also included everyone’s favourite hack from the first video in this new one. How to bring a large towel (or similar). In this case you have to ask yourself what would superman do? I wear my towel as a cape and put my jacket over it so people simply don’t see it. You would be surprised how much you can fit on you when you think about it!

One other useful hack is to bring an empty bottle, since you can’t bring water through security. They always let you pass with an empty bottle (no liquids), and you can fill it up at fountains inside the terminal. This saves heaps of money that you would otherwise spend on buying airport water.

Don’t forget to be nice!

I think the main reason that this has worked for me dozens of times without me being taken aside and asked to pay extra is because I am always nice to workers at the airport. There might be some small-print somewhere that says I can’t do this, but it’s never applied because (no matter how exhausted or annoyed with travel I might be) I always smile and try to go the extra mile to make those working at the airport feel like I appreciate what they are doing.

This time in Paris was the only time that they ever commented on my jacket at security. The security guard just thought it was strange, but didn’t imply that I couldn’t do it. To get attention away from the jacket, when she actually said (in French) “You have a LOT in your jacket pocket! And your laptop is huge!” I immediately jumped on the laptop comment and told her more about it and that for the same price as an Apple laptop I got a much more powerful PC laptop, but installed Ubuntu instead of Windows on it to avoid crashes and viruses. “What’s Ubuntu?” I was asked -- I actually spent the next 5 minutes talking to the security guard (as she was checking other passengers) giving my Linux pitch and she requested that I write down the address for her to download Ubuntu! The jacket issue was forgotten entirely.

I always try to get to the check-in early and change my customer-is-always-right attitude to relate to airport staff as much as I can, and they always give me some leeway, even if I am over the actual check-in luggage limit by a several kilograms. A bit of Irish charm has gotten me quite far! With no-frills airlines, flexibility on check-in limits is way less likely so the actual hacks mentioned here do make a big difference

I always try to chat to those at the airport like this. They are human too, and if you think outside of the system and focus on the human-aspect (something I said a lot in my language hacking guide) then they’ll appreciate it and make an exception “just for you”.

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Has anyone else tried these travel hacks? Do you have other ones that I didn’t mention here or in the video? Make sure to leave a comment to share it with us And share this post & video with your friends on facebook if any of them are travelling this summer!
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Embracing embarrassing mistakes

benny — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:59:06 +0000

“I made a new video – I look cool in it! Want to come up and check it out?”

Sounds like an innocent enough thing to say, right?

While talking to a German friend of mine (a girl, but seriously just a friend and one I’ve had for many years), I wanted to say this pretty simple phrase. Through very unwise use of the word “geil” (normally cool/awesome) and “kommen/bei mir” (normally come & my place), what I actually somehow said was that I was horny and I wanted her to come inside me. And that’s come with sexual intonations.

That has been my biggest D’oh! moment in the last few weeks, but it definitely wasn’t the first time. For example, when learning Spanish, I managed to tell the first Mexican I ever spoke to in Spanish that I like to shag/screw the bus every day. What can I say, it’s a weird fetish I have (apparently).

I’ve told people I’m a girl hundreds of times due to gender agreement hiccups, and in France I complimented a bunch of people I had just met as having a nice arse (merci beau-cu(l)). At least I never got pregnant in Spain, unlike some of my unfortunate male friends.

These kinds of mistakes are the horror stories you will have heard many times before about learning a language, and I’ve made way more than I could possibly think of examples to illustrate. And I’ve done them in person with natives. I always seem to unintentionally find a language’s hidden sexual innuendos and produce them quite innocently and cheerily and usually in the most cringe-worthy of situations.

What do you do if it happens?

So what happened after the said linguistic crimes? Was I added to the local police database as a bus sex offender? Did hundreds of people gather round, point their finger, and guffaw simultaneously at my stupidity? Did the shame of it all hit me so hard that I cried myself to sleep and packed my bags the next day to never try to speak the language again?

No. Nothing happened. My mistakes were pointed out to me, it was understood what I meant to say and the conversation went on. No parade or ceremony to commemorate how ridiculous I sounded. Sometimes we would both laugh it off for a few seconds. It’s not a big deal.

This is something that I wish people still too afraid to get out there and speak, and still hiding behind their books, would realise. If you make enough mistakes in a test then you fail. But people are not keeping count of the quantity and severity of your mistakes to fail you. You will make embarrassing mistakes in a conversation… and yet somehow life will go on. You make a mental note and try not to say it again – simple as that.

There seems to be this huge fear of failure from people only familiar with a language in an examination context. I’ve made enough mistakes in all my languages to probably fail every test in the world hundreds of times over. And yet I speak them fluently. The path to fluency must include a lot of mistakes. The only way to make no mistakes is to say nothing and you will never learn anything that way.

The way I see it, the more mistakes you make the more you are speaking and this is a good thing. You will be interacting with people and getting closer to speaking better as you are made aware of these mistakes. If your goal is to speak perfectly with 0 mistakes you will be very disappointed. This will never happen. Even natives make mistakes. Just accept it as a natural part of the path to speaking any language well.

The best attitude to take is to just accept that it’s going to happen and go with the flow. Embrace the mistakes!

The only embarrassing thing is your reaction, not the words

After that conversation with my German friend, both of us had a great laugh. I think it was very funny!

Looking at it that way meant that she could laugh too, and laugh with me. If you pause and get all red-faced and bring attention to yourself then this will make other people feel way more uncomfortable than the spoken mistake ever would.

I could have also reacted by stopping dead in my tracks, apologising for several minutes, reassuring her that I see her as an important friend I respect, beg for her forgiveness and then tone down my conversation to be “safe” for the rest of the evening, likely creating unnecessary tension. That would have created the embarrassing situation. Not a minor amusing blunder of words.

Embarrassment is always caused by reactions, not the content of the mistakes. Some people react differently, but you can control their reaction from your own reaction.

Even if you don’t make the very embarrassing mistakes I suggested here, and are making grammar mistakes for example, your confidence as you speak will make these grammar mistakes seem less intense. Someone extremely aware of how wrong they are speaking will make everyone else equally aware of this.

I get complimented all the time (with just one exception) when I take on any language about how well I’m speaking, even in the early stages. This isn’t because of an amazing ability to assimilate grammar and use precisely the right words. It’s because I’ve just become numb to making mistakes after making so many of them. I don’t care enough any more to become embarrassed. When the mistake is pointed out, I’ll make a mental note to not make it again and I’ll have learned. But I won’t make a big deal out of it and will continue speaking confidently as before.

So stop worrying and make mistakes! You can decide what happens when a mistake is pointed out. You can feel inadequate when your mishap is pointed out and shy away, or you can thank the other person so that you encourage them to help you again in future. A warm smile on your face will solve most embarrassing situations. An awkward reaction will create them.

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If you’ve made some embarrassing mistakes in your languages, feel free to share your story! Let’s laugh together and encourage others to get out of their shell and make similar mistakes! That is the best way to learn
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Why studying will never help you speak a language

benny — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:31:25 +0000

This post has been a long time coming.

Teachers and linguists are going to hate me for this, but it has to be said:

You can never speak a language by just studying it, no matter how much you study

Yes, you read that right. Studying is the wrong thing to do if you want to speak a language. I’m totally serious.

Last night I ran into some English speakers and heard the same thing I’ve heard thousands of times about other languages: they have been studying German for years and don’t speak it yet, even though they now live in Berlin.

Every day, I get dozens of e-mails from aspiring language hackers sharing their tales of woe with me; they’ve spent a small fortune on workbooks, CD audio courses etc. and have spent probably thousands of hours locked up in their rooms studying tables of rules and vocabulary lists. And they still can’t say anything.

Most people think the reason that this happens is because the material/teacher isn’t good enough. Or perhaps the language really is impossible and it’s the “hardest one in the world”.

I get asked all the time what my study method is, and precisely what books I buy. If our study materials were better then surely we’d finally speak!?

No.

There is only one thing study is good for

The purpose of this post isn’t to tell the world to stop studying. However, you have to realise that studying a language has a very specific purpose and if you are not aware of this then you may end up stuck in the vicious circle of never speaking: Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better.

Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.

If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go.

But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!

But I’m almost ready!

When you study, you acquire vocabulary, you improve your grammar and you do exercises. Logically enough, your level improves. With time, your potential increases and you can understand more and you can theoretically join in on a wider scope of conversations. “One day”, when you’re ready, you can finally start speaking confidently. Not today though – maybe you just need to study a little bit more.

Theoretically & Maybe.

Based on my experience and accounts from thousands of learners I’ve met who need their language in the real world (not tests), “theoretically and maybe” translate to never. The academic system seems to have drilled into us that studying is the way to speak a language. Studying helps you improve (and to pass a test you do indeed need to know your grammar/vocab better… because that’s what the test is usually about) but it is an artificial means of acquiring or improving the language. Some artificial ways are quite useful, but they are still artificial.

When you look at a language the same way you look at geography or history or other subjects in school that can be tested, then you simply don’t know what a language actually is.

Stop looking at conversations with human beings as a test that you have to pass (so, every time you make a mistake you get a big red X and if you make a certain amount of them, then you fail). It doesn’t work like that!!

A language is a means of communication. It’s not a table of grammar rules in some dusty old book, or a piece of paper that you have to spread ink across in the right way for your teacher to be happy. German isn’t a rough sounding collection of Datives and Accusatives, it’s families sharing what they did that day. Czech isn’t a frustrating collection of consonant clusters, it’s young couples flirting with one another and someone buying his morning bread.

These are not things that you can put under a microscope. They are people living their lives and sharing experiences with one another. That is what a language is for. When you are locked away in your room you are avoiding this contact and that’s why so many people never speak. They still think about everything they don’t know and see the world that speaks their target language as one big test that they are doomed to fail.

How do you learn to speak then?

So, if studying isn’t how you learn to speak a language, then what is? I’ll tell you, and it’s going to blow your mind.

Are you ready?

Are you sitting down? Brace yourself!

You have to speak it! Yes, I know – it sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it! To speak a language you have to actually speak it.

It will be hard at first – you won’t know how to say things, it will be embarrassing, you’ll hesitate a lot and feel frustrated that you can’t say things precisely the way you want to. This will happen even if you study for decades. Until you actually use the language in its natural context (or at least in a course that gets you to speak to people) you will always have this barrier to get through. You simply have to break through it. If you practise often enough and enthusiastically enough you will get to the other side quite quickly. You can do this in person if there are natives or other learners close by, or over the Internet with millions of natives.

However, you can’t study to get this confidence. Confidence isn’t hidden somewhere on page 182, it’s getting into an actual conversation and proving to yourself (Obama style) yes you can.

Too many people study to gain confidence – this is an oblique way of going about it. You have to simply get used to speaking the language. Know how it feels to have the words come out of you rather than in an artificial test in which you have several minutes to think about things.

Last night with the English speakers I had the almost magic ability to turn them into German speakers with nothing more than a 5 minute pep-talk to boost their confidence and give them some language hacks. I didn’t teach them any actual German or tell them to study in a particular way. They had the potential to speak the entire time, no matter what their level was.

You haven’t learned enough to say anything yet? Hogwash! In many European languages you have thousands of words before you even start. In all languages you can study for a couple of hours (rather than years) to get basic phrases and then use them. Use what you know and go from there. Then you will see what you do need to work on (usually it will be something very specific and relevant to your situation rather than “chapters 1 to 7″), and then very specific study will help you improve how you are speaking so you will be able to express yourself a little better. But you already have the ability to say something right now.

There are a LOT of ways you can speak a language in the first weeks even if you didn’t study it much yet. So many ways that I had to write 30,000 words to describe them.

So what do you think? Picking on the academic system is such an easy target because it does such a miserable job in so many places and wastes the time of millions of people when it comes to language conversing ability. There are exceptions, and there are great courses to take, but that is usually because they have students converse in as natural a way as possible. Once the focus changes from studying to actually using the language to communicate with people then the road to speaking well, and doing it quickly, is opened up.

Don’t have this attitude of Leave me alone! Can’t you see I’m learning your language?

A language is a social tool and being locked up in your room studying it is, frankly, antisocial. You can’t avoid studying to improve your language skills, but if you want to speak then stop studying and just speak already!!

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Of course, I wrote in depth about how I learn to speak languages with as little study as possible in the Language Hacking Guide. If you are a blogger check out information about becoming an affiliate.

I’m sure you can all understand how passionate I am to get this message out there – speaking a language does not have to be a chore! When I hear so many people complain about grammar I feel like they are looking at their language wrong and focusing on the wrong things. Stop complaining about it and just start speaking! You’ll make mistakes, but you will get over the barrier and start on the path to fluency

Looking forward to your comments! Feel free to call me crazy (as always…), but offensive or irrelevant comments will be eaten up by the Smoke Monster from Lost.
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The Language Hacking Guide is ready!

benny — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:13:58 +0000

After seven years of working hard to improve my language learning strategy, almost a year of blogging about my learning approach, and six weeks of full-time writing and research for it… the Language Hacking Guide is ready for download!

Click here to see a funny 8-language video I made to talk about it, and to read all about what you can find inside the 40MB download!

If you’d like to browse through the first few pages of the e-book part (to see the table of contents and get a feel for it), join the Language Hacking League e-mail list on the right of my site and you’ll get it free in your first e-mail. (You can unsubscribe immediately if you don’t want any more e-mails with language hacking tips after that) If you are already in the list you should have received it this morning .

Only the first ones to download the guide will get a bonus for the next day or two! To see what that is, check out the description!

My hopes with this guide are to share the core of what has helped me to achieve the faster progress that I have in languages. The guide is separated into six parts: Mentality, Plan of Action, Communicating from Day One, Speaking with natives, Learning resources and Particular language issues. It is a mixture of positive attitude and particular techniques with examples and worksheets to help you try to do the same. There are also several interviews with some amazing language learners that some of you will certainly know!

This is only version 1.0 – there will be updates with full translations, and more sections added. I will even likely include updates in the next week, as people are already giving me their interesting suggestions (e.g. not just one PDF file for reading on a screen, but also a printable version and an ePub format version). These updates will be free.

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When I started this blog, I had no idea I would be heading in this direction! But I have literally gotten hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to go into more detail into my method and to present it in an easier to read format than a blog with random articles. So the Guide is my attempt to do so. In seeing the popularity of the site, if I can actually earn a little money from the traffic (up until today I received €80 in donations over the year – nice, but not enough to help me pay off debts ) then I would have more free time to be able to write much more articles here

Everyone won’t buy the guide and that’s OK – the small amount of people that do will be helping me out, so that I can keep writing these posts to help people who need free tips! Any of my “secrets” currently in the guide will be shared in the blog in one form or another, but over a very long time and in a somewhat random way. I have a huge amount of ideas for posts that I want to write!

Hopefully, the support from the Guide will give me more free time to be able to write here more regularly . I usually write only twice a week (recently only once), and I’d like to do it more

So check out the description and video and let me know what you think of it!
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Spaced repetition: Never forget vocabulary ever again

benny — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:16:06 +0000

On Monday (17th) I’ll be releasing the Language Hacking Guide [Edit: it's available for download now!] with a detailed account of the unconventional methods I use to keep my progress and positivity up when starting to learn a strange new language, speak it my first week, and the techniques I use to reach fluency quickly and get along with native speakers while doing so (either travelling or from home), all of which can be applied by anyone. The guide includes over 30,000 words and hours of fascinating audio interviews with some of the Internet’s best known language learners, as well as worksheets, transcripts, tons of free resources, e-mail updates and more!

But it will be growing and getting updated. I’ve learned a lot in the last 7 years of trying to rapidly pick up new languages, but what has always helped more than anything has been openness to new techniques.

In today’s post I want to share with you a technique I started using just a few weeks ago that has totally transformed my vocabulary learning approach!

SRS: Spaced Repetition System

SRS is a presentation method that gives you the information before you would forget it and makes sure that it stays constantly fresh in your mind. So, you might see a word a few minutes after the first time, then a few days later, then a few weeks later etc. always at the time you need to see it most to make sure it is constantly fresh in your mind.

It’s a more complex version of the flashcard system where you have a word on one side of a card and its translation on the other. You look at the word, test yourself to see if you know it and turn over the card to see the translation. You couldn’t get more low-tech than that even if you tried, but SRS uses 21st century technology to make this possible while considering the time dimension.

So how would a guy like me who hates studying indoors, definitely dislikes flashcards and already has a pretty good learning strategy, be interested in software for improving recall of vocabulary?

Finding the time to study

Like many people, I’m a busy guy! I’m trying to work, write a book, dramatically improve my level of a language, have a social life and grocery shop/clean/sleep/eat/write blogs & e-mails/exercise etc. every day. But there are ways to make time – get it back from the time spent waiting.

Note: the next paragraphs are taken from the Language Hacking Guide

You wait for the bus/metro/train to arrive, you wait in it while going to work/school or home, you wait in the supermarket queue/line, you wait in a traffic jam in your car, you wait when ordering coffee in the morning, you wait for your water to boil if you prepare it yourself, you wait for your friend to arrive, you wait at the doctor’s/dentist’s, you even wait for a minute or two in lifts, elevators, at traffic lights, when waiting for something to load on your computer, for someone to answer the door after you knock etc.

In most of these situations you may be alone – so if you can’t talk to someone, what do you do? Stare into space? Read advertisements around you? Twiddle your thumbs? Press the pedestrian cross or lift button again in frustration that nothing has happened yet? These little segments of our day fly by unutilised and actually add up to a huge amount of time wasted. You can’t avoid these situations – they are natural parts of your day.

For most people, these little segments are annoyances – why is the other person so late? Why does there have to be so many people ahead of me in the supermarket? Why did my computer have to crash to be rebooted now of all times? Waiting in frustration is simply what we end up doing – considering how much time per day we spend doing this, this is an unneeded source of stress!

I actually don’t mind when these occasions arise! Seriously – if someone is arriving a little late, or if I just missed the bus and the next one won’t come for 15 minutes, or the Internet goes down and I can’t work – rather than cursing at my “bad luck”, and adding stress to my life by being angry during this time, I think to myself – great! Another chance to study some vocabulary!!

Improving on the old-school method

For several years, in these situations I would take out my phrasebook, or pocket vocabulary book for these moments, open it up to a random page and learn whatever I saw. Sometimes I’d see a word I never did before and sometimes I’d see something I needed to review and had already long forgotten and need to relearn rather than just remind myself. It did the job but to be honest, in retrospect it was inefficient and sloppy. (Although, if you learn by listening, these moments are good times to take out your MP3 player and press play!)

Randomly or even systematically going through vocabulary in order like this means that you might not review the hardest words when you need to, or you’ll keep seeing the easy words too often, or you’ll forget words because you didn’t review them for a very long time.

SRS answers all of these issues by letting you decide when you should see a word again based on certain criteria (usually, how hard you felt it was). So the easy words are pushed way off into the future, the hard ones keep constantly reappearing until you are finally happy with them, and the middle-difficulty ones will reappear just when you need them most, to refresh your memory.

Deciding when to study a word again when you see it in a printed list is too hard, but that’s where technology comes in!

Anki

Anki is an application developed by Damien Elmes for reviewing things you need to learn, using SRS. Not just vocabulary, but city/country capitals, medical terminology, a script for a play etc. Anything you need to apply to memory really!

It’s a completely free download (or low-bandwidth website) and works on Windows, Mac, Linux and even on mobile phones!

On the surface, the program does more or less what you would expect from a flashcard – it shows you a word with no translation (the word can be either in your native language or in the target language) and you can decide if you know what it means. Then press “Answer” and it will show it to you.

If you thought it was super easy, press the button on the right (which includes a distant time factor, depending on how you reacted to the word in previous attempts), if you had absolutely no idea press the button on the left (it will reappear very soon), and otherwise press one of the other buttons. I like having 4 levels to decide how “easy” I thought it was, and I use each one accordingly.

If it sounds drastically simple, that’s because it is! The most important part of the interface is actually pretty much just that (as you can see on the iPhone screenshot I took; similar on other systems) – the impressive part of all of this is actually the algorithm working in the background to decide precisely when to show you the words.

You don’t really have to think about that aspect though, since the system covers it for you. All you have to do is think about the word and then grade it on difficulty (hardest one if you’ve never seen it before).

Using the program

There are broadly two ways to use this application and they depend mostly on the resources available to you. Everyone can use it for free on their computer, and you can simply decide to devote 30 minutes a day to using it and make sure to set aside that time every day.

A huge amount of people have been recommending this program to me since I started this site, but I dismissed it as “not for me” without really trying it, because of how I dislike flashcards and generally don’t like sitting down to study. If you have that focus, you will get a lot of use out of this program!

Based on the time-wasting description above, you can guess where I do my studying! On the go! You can see in the post’s main picture that I even swipe it out for 2 minute waits before crossing the road!

I happen to have an iPhone (invested in it just before my laptop broke and replacing it meant I suddenly couldn’t afford to have bought an expensive Apple device, and still can’t, but that’s a sob story for another day) which is jailbroken, but if you have an Android device or Nintendo DS you can also use Anki offline (no Internet access required). If you have any other portable device that can access the basic webpages (modern mobile phone, Palm device, Sony PSP etc.) either by wifi or 3G/Edge (mobile phone network), then you can use the Anki system that way too (on a very low bandwidth website).

The way I did this was as follows: Install Anki on your computer, then download “decks” of prepared vocabulary sets to study in the language you are working on (on the Decks screen click Download – there are lots already waiting for free download!). You can also prepare the vocabulary yourself based on words you want to study, as explained in this video. If you don’t have the right mobile device, then stick to this computer interface and use it to study the words whenever you have time. Its use is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some videos of how it works.

If you can make it more portable, next thing to do is to create an account on Ankionline and then to synchronise your computer’s Anki with the online version (File –> Sync). Then install Anki on your mobile device and synchronise with the same account (you only have to necessarily do this once, then just use your mobile device and ignore the computer version until you need more material to study). If you don’t have the particular devices that allow for offline access, but can access the Internet on your mobile device, just go directly to the Ankionline page and use its low-bandwidth interface to learn from.

The set-up takes a few minutes but then you just have to open the program and use it whenever you can! All the little minutes add up very quickly. Since I haven’t found some websites too helpful for learning vocabulary, I’ve done most of my “studying” over the last weeks in Berlin’s U-Bahn, on buses and in cafés/supermarkets etc. without ever carrying any books with me!

SRS must be used with other learning strategies

Despite how obviously enthusiastically I’m sharing this system with you, it is important to be aware of the fact that it is just one way to acquire new vocabulary. The best way by far is to hear and apply it in context with native speakers. Even if you “knew” all the vocabulary in the world you still wouldn’t be able to actually apply it in actual conversations if you didn’t work on other skills important to language learning (which I discuss a lot in the Guide).

Since you are usually hearing words in isolation (although it’s possible to include example sentences), it means you have no context and this is quite an artificial way to learn words, as simple translations of something from your mother tongue, rather than understanding how to use the word itself. You can’t learn any language just by learning translations. Someone using too much SRS would not necessarily be any further along compared to someone using other strategies.

On top of this, just looking at the word is not enough and SRS can turn into nothing more than a fancy version of rote learning by pure repetition if you don’t think harder while using it. If you are exposed enough times you will be forced to remember it, but what I prefer is to try to make an image association of the word and/or to think of an example to use it in and say that to myself, so that I use it in its right context. This way I’m much more likely to remember it next time.

SRS by itself is far from perfect, but if you use it while thinking independently too, its potential is much greater. I’m sure lots of you know the feeling that you have learned a word, and you are sure of it, but you just can’t say it. This may simply be because it’s been too long since you reviewed that word, and using SRS a few minutes a day will make sure that all words you use in the system will never be neglected if you use it right.

Another thing to take into account for learning words efficiently and avoiding forgetting them is to avoiding learning the vocabulary only one way: foreign language to native language, focusing on recognition rather than production. This focus means a lot of people understand languages but are at a loss when the time comes to speak them. In this case, it’s important that you see words appear in SRS for translation to the foreign language too.

When used on a computer, you can acquire single-word vocabulary very quickly (it works easily with the keyboard 1,2,3,4 & space keys for quicker navigation than with the mouse) if you set aside 30 minutes a day to review words. And in its mobile form you can take advantage of time that you would otherwise waste, to improve your vocabulary!

—————-

I interviewed the Anki developer Damien as part of the audio for the Language Hacking Guide, to understand SRS better, and he is going to continue to develop different versions of this open-source software for people to enjoy. Give it a try!

If you have experience with Anki or other applications that apply SRS let us know! Has it helped, or do you prefer other systems for vocabulary? People also use it for learning scripts such as Kanji, and you can add audio and pictures if you feel that would help!

Wish me luck for Monday! I’ll have an extra bonus for the first people to get a copy of the Guide. I’ve been working for about 6 weeks full time total to produce this and share it with the world! You can see that I haven’t been posting regularly to the blog because of that, so hopefully that will change soon! I’m looking forward to releasing it into the wild
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Busuu & LiveMocha: review of pros and cons

benny — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:41:49 +0000

Over the last weeks, I have been attempting to learn German through various different interfaces. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me at all.

This post shares a little of my experience using both Busuu and LiveMocha. The reason I’m reviewing them together is that I find both their advantages and their disadvantages to be very broadly similar, even if the actual systems are very different and present different types of interfaces. I’ll start with how I think these can be useful and then say where I feel they fall short.

Note that this article is just my opinion to explain why I wouldn’t generally recommend these popular sites. If you have gotten use out of the parts I personally criticise, then great! You can also find a much more detailed review of LiveMocha that mentions other points I would agree on as positive and negative on the street-smart language learning blog.

Both site courses offered work by mainly using the flashcard system of showing you an image of the item or scene, and playing the sound of the word or sentence at the same time.

Free online courses

Now, I’m going to get into a little rant about the “courses” offered on these sites below, but at the end of the day they are free. No matter what setbacks they may have, you can’t really complain too much when it has a 0 price tag associated with it. The reason I will is simply because too many people might think these sites are better than what they are. To be totally honest, I’m surprised at how much Livemocha in particular was recommended to me after using it myself.

Although there are certain paid aspects of the courses, I simply cannot personally recommend these paid versions with a straight face because of how little the free versions managed to inspire me. But the free versions can be very useful when you are starting off.

The main reason I didn’t appreciate the courses offered on either site is because I was hoping to learn a language beyond the basics, since I’m already at more or less intermediate with my German. This means that I can’t really fairly review how useful these sites would be for absolute beginners but I can see how they would be a fun and useful tool to start off.

Either one can be a useful tool to become familiar with the sound of the language and to acquire some basic vocabulary, while also enjoying yourself thanks to the helpful images. If you are starting off, and want to use one, I’d recommend using Busuu for the first week that you sign up (after the first trial week you lose certain useful features unless you upgrade to a premium account) specifically if you are learning English, Spanish, German, French, Italian or (Brazilian) Portuguese. For any other language, use Livemocha.

Livemocha: The main advantage of Livemocha here is its wide selection of languages; an impressive 35! However, this list is not the misleading drop-down list you will see on the home page. Since you use the system to contact natives, you can do that for a larger range of languages (as in Busuu), but the actual courses are not offered in all of them – based on the standard template nature of how the system works (which is a point I criticise), I’m confident that the number will increase further though.

You can’t learn Irish through their courses for example, but you can select it as a language you are learning if you would like to try to practise with someone (whether you’d actually find them or not is another issue). The list is already impressive and interestingly enough; you can even learn Esperanto as one of the 35 languages through it for example. Unless you are learning a minority language you can be pretty confident that you’ll find a course for it.

In Livemocha, to get the best out of the system without paying, you have to contribute by providing corrections of text/audio in your native language given by others. You might need to do this for quite a bit before earning enough points to open up a new aspect of your courses etc.

Busuu: Although the list of languages is limited to only the 6 that I listed above, I find Busuu’s course itself to be better than the Livemocha one.

Firstly, vocabulary usually comes with the definite article, which in the languages listed is crucial for getting used to the noun gender. Livemocha does not do this except for inconsistent user submitted comments on the side. Although you don’t want to be bombarded with too much information when starting off, it’s important to get used to this idea of associating some article/gender with a noun even if you don’t necessarily remember it the first time.

Next, Busuu has integrated an excellent keyboard control system, so you can go through the course and replay the sounds without using your mouse. I personally prefer to do this – you can do it with the mouse instead too if you prefer.

Busuu also gives you the individual word you need to learn, followed by an example in context (with audio for your first week). Livemocha gives either a single word or a full sentence, not both.

For the first week, Busuu gives you free access to normally-paid content, such as audio in dialogues and in the sentence examples for the flashcards. After that first week you can still read these even if you can’t hear the audio. You also have access to the grammar course in the first week – I liked the way grammar points were presented in Busuu more than in LiveMocha.

Busuu also lets you go through a review of your lesson for free immediately, which Livemocha doesn’t in certain cases. With LM you either have to pay, or earn points. Luckily you can earn the points quick enough in LM, so this is just a minor annoyance. I found some serious disadvantages in the test/review in both that I mention below, and this makes the paid aspect of Busuu’s grammar course (after the first week) way less useful.

Help from natives

I don’t find the courses useful, but both of these systems offer fantastic opportunities to communicate with and get feedback from others. There are written exercises included within the courses for both of them and you will get corrections about text relevant to a specific topic. More independent learners would be better to use Lang 8, but it’s good to be encouraged to write something specific to a topic you need to practise, and you can always go off topic if you like. The feedback is hardly professional level, and it’s quite inconsistent, but it will be helpful in the early stages.

The best thing would be to get to know other users and to come to a mutual agreement about helping one another, preferably outside of the system, and with a user that you find to be particularly helpful. The fact that you can find such people eager to help you within the system is a huge plus.

On Livemocha you can also submit audio samples that you read, to have your pronunciation efficiency level rated, although the number of stars given to you depends as much on the other person’s personality as your actual level, so this becomes quite useless other than for encouragement unless the right people respond.

One criticism I have for LiveMocha is that it does not make these corrections available only to natives. I’ve set my level of Spanish and French, for example, to fluent and I was given more text to correct in French and Spanish than I was English (which of course is set to native). This means it’s important to be aware that your text may not actually be checked by natives. Then again, the level expected for these checks is so low that this may not be an issue, since any corrections advanced speakers can provide would be just as good as from a native for the basics.

The system requests that you be clear in your review, but because you would want to earn more points quickly you are encouraged to give a quick (perhaps sloppy) review to get to the next one faster. I earned the same points for a detailed response as I did for just saying “good work”. My own text in German was corrected very slowly – it took several days until I got a response, this was despite contributing by providing my own corrections, so it felt very unbalanced. This suggests that certain languages, although technically in the system, are still too infrequently represented to be able to provide consistent help. Once again, you are better just finding a native and collaborating outside of the system.

In Busuu I got a response much quicker. Once again, Busuu’s focus on particular languages works to its advantage if you are focused on one of these languages. It also depends hugely on the availability of actual speakers. I submitted a text in Spanish to test it out and got dozens of responses within a few minutes! It would make more sense that there are more Spanish speakers than German speakers in the system of course.

In both systems, the biggest advantage by far and main reason I’d ultimately recommend either system is the conversation practise. Both systems provide interfaces for typing and speaking live with a native for free. Each one of these deserves attention within itself, so I’ll come back to both sites, as well as several other sites that focus specifically on this aspect, and compare all of them specifically for finding conversation partners. Although from trying to use both a little, I find Busuu’s way easier and more flexible and LiveMocha has very few options for finding natives of the language I would like so easily.

Then again, Busuu’s chatting system couldn’t recognise letters with accents over them (ü, é etc.) typed from my keyboard unless I copied and pasted from its own keyboard window. A disappointing aspect to a language-based system to say the least! This made it unenjoyable to use its interface for chatting, but it worked well for a spoken conversation. I didn’t like LiveMocha’s interface much either, so I would prefer to simply give the other person my MSN/Skype etc.

I was told in advance that the advantage of both systems was definitely this “community”, although I would never call either of them a community. You can find single natives to speak with, and get corrections, but there are no forums, public chatrooms, Livemocha makes it difficult to find people flexibly (at least Busuu has a search tool), and there are no dynamic profiles with walls etc. that quite a lot of other social networking sites have. I didn’t feel any community aspect of either site when using them.

The “courses”: nothing more than lazy translations of the same material

The reason I would find it very hard to ever recommend the courses offered at either site, for more than just a quick glance to get familiar with a language when starting, is because the entire material offered is nothing more than a lazy translation of exactly the same content. Even grammar points are precisely the same material!! This is a ridiculous simplification of how languages should be treated. A positive attitude and certain learning methods can indeed be pretty universally useful for all languages, but once you are dealing with the actual content you have to tailor it to learners of that particular language!

Both sites translate precisely the same material to every language as if they had the best sentences and vocabulary in the world that magically work to perfectly teach any language. This appears to be copying the format used by Rosetta Stone. LiveMocha even has “vastly superior to Rosetta Stone…” in a testimonial on its main page. Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but Rosetta Stone is not that great either. Comparing yourself to and emulating expensive rubbish just makes you free rubbish.

Feel free to correct me if you’ve somehow reached fluency just by flicking through flashcards (and please share your wizardry with me), but these are not courses. They can help a bit, and they are fun to use, and make you feel like you are making lots of progress, but I can’t imagine anyone having more than basic phrases after completing either site’s entire course material.

I’m discovering flashcards’ usefulness in other systems, but basing an entire learning system around them is a mistake in my view.

Busuu‘s system happens to me more aesthetically pleasing to me, so I was starting to like it a bit until I finished one module and got to the review. Wow. I am genuinely impressed with how useless its review was – in years of learning languages I have never come across such a worthless testing system! Questions would be totally irrelevant to the purpose of the module and test memory for useless information such as people’s names… who weren’t even mentioned in the dialogue (just indicated off the side). In the multiple choice tests, it would also ignore the point of what it was supposed to teach me and I could very easily cheat by using a basic word I recognised as in the image/selection, or by process of elimination, and prove in no way that I had properly learned anything from the lesson.

Livemocha‘s lesson reviews on the other hand, are tedious repetitions and, of course, based on translations not designed for that language. If I get a particular aspect of a lesson right a few times in a row, I would hope for the system to dynamically accept me as knowing it, but I’d still be tested on it again and again. It was barely passable as useful for German, and other users have told me that it’s a downright waste of time for other languages where that format really doesn’t help. I was scratching my head to understand how it could possibly be useful to me learning German to hear the phrases being pronounced to me in English (when they are already written anyway).

The system ignoring crucial grammar points is apparent when you see comments on particular flashcards from people pleading with those behind Livemocha to do an overhaul.

Important aspects of how the language works are not explained in any useful way other than going straight to examples. If you want to avoid explanations entirely, you are better at least exposing yourself to languages as they are naturally used, but there is no natural language to be found anywhere on either site (other than chats with natives, or in Busuu a page with a few Youtube videos). They are all single sentences or simplified dialogues made in a recording studio based on translated text from the standard template.

One part of the tests that I did like in both systems was the sentence construction where you click on certain words until you have a sentence. It was nice, but still quite pointless in terms of practicality of using the language, and sometimes it was very hard to imagine what sentence you would construct from a bunch of random words – this is not something you naturally do when speaking a language. As I said – the systems are enjoyable to use, and I appreciate this effort to make the learning process more fun. But these are still games and not necessarily helping you make any appreciable progress. I still think people will learn very slowly and make only a tiny improvement to their level when using these courses. These systems give the illusion of progress and I feel like a lot of people will be quite disappointed when the time comes to actually use the languages they would have invested a lot of time into learning.

Overall Busuu was the better of the two. Apart from the nicer and easier to use interface, the themed lessons with icon representations let you choose what you want to learn, whereas LiveMocha just labels non-grammar lessons as “vocabulary 1, 2 etc.”

Conclusions? After learning the basics only use the system to chat!

Both systems claim to teach you up to intermediate, but I would not call the level you would reach after using these courses as anything vaguely resembling intermediate, no matter how flexible the use of the word was.

In either system it was nice to have so many words spoken to me and associated with the image, so I do believe they can be useful for people starting to learn a language. But anything beyond that and you should really use the systems for nothing more than finding conversation partners. If you find someone patient enough to help you, you could learn quite a lot with their help. As I said before, I’ll come back to both websites to compare them to other systems specifically for this.

Sorry for not having too many positive things to say, but I had been referred to these sites so many times and perhaps had too high expectations of them so I’m quite frustratingly disappointed with how little use I can imagine someone getting out of them.

—————

I will continue my search to try to find free or cheap online useful learning materials, but for the moment if you want a free language course to study, separate to actually speaking/listening etc., I think the best thing you can do is go to your local library!

Hopefully this post will be useful to people curious to hear what I thought about the systems. Sorry to be so frank in most of this page, but I am ultimately looking at how a system can help you speak, and I think that the poor-man’s Rosetta Stone (or even the rich man’s one) is not the way to do it!! I’ll continue to share other resources that do help here on the blog and in the Language Hacking Guide. I am hoping to make it available on May 17th!

Let me know what you thought of this review in the comments! Make sure to stay on topic or your comment will be banished to oblivion! Feel free to point out any aspects that I missed, or share your tales of woe in using either system with us!
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First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat

benny — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:32:45 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCylqlYNRTg

It’s been a month since I arrived in Berlin, so it’s about time for a mission update! To make it more interesting, I’ve decided to include this multilingual video tour of my flat.

I also made (just English) videos to show my home in Prague and Rio, since I host Couchsurfers most of the time and I’d like them to see where they’ll be sleeping before they come.

However, this is the first time I’ve tried to make a single video with multiple languages, i.e. the whole video is one unedited (other than adding graphics like flags & subtitles) take. I really prefer to use my languages to talk to people rather than my camera, since it feels very artificial. On top of that it’s hard to switch between languages so quickly, so I made a few mistakes, but otherwise you can hear me speak the languages I have good command over, one after the other, and I even included German so you can hear how I’m more-or-less speaking it after a month!

First month

The reason that video is relevant to my first month in Berlin is because that flat is basically where I’ve spent most of my time since I got here! I prefer to spend more time outside, but before the summer weather got here I wanted to make sure I did as much of my indoor stuff as possible, to get it out of the way.

After the first week, I was translating double-time again and this gave me very little time to do anything else. So I decided to block translation work for the rest of the month, and most of my day has been devoted to writing the language hacking guide so that I can describe in great detail the process involved that helps me learn languages quickly.

I’ve made great progress in writing a huge amount already, and interviewing some amazing people to include audio in the guide. I’m hoping to release it mid-May!! (For more info on that, join the language hacking league by entering your e-mail on the right).

Progress in German

The first week was the most crucial, since I had already gotten into the rhythm of not speaking English. I made enough progress to be able to even spend several hours a day speaking just in German, using my usual tricks! Since that week, my level has definitely improved, but a lot less in its spoken aspect than what I usually prefer, simply because I’m not being social enough.

This month I’ve been implementing the ‘input experiment’ -- a title I got to like less and less, since I find this concept of input vs output to be silly for language learning and totally ignores important inherent human aspects. I’m not a robot thank you very much!!

Anyway, this new approach has gone reasonably well as I discover which non-social systems work (at least for me) for learning languages. Certain ones are useful for reading and listening comprehension, and other ones (like SRS, which I’ll explain soon) have revolutionised how I previously learned vocabulary.

I’ll continue to share my thoughts on what I have found useful, and elaborate on them more over the coming weeks. These methods can help people with no access to other learners or natives in their town, although if you live in a major city and are learning a major language you have a lot less excuses for not being able to practise with people.

Chances of success?

I’m way off being able to reduce my accent to be non-foreign, but I’m told that without knowing it in advance, most people have not guessed that I’m a native-English speaker based on how I speak German. This is mostly because I worked hard in other languages to get rid of my English accent. This is less likely in in a video like the above one, because of the very artificial nature of switching from other languages so quickly and basically talking to myself. I speak better than that in conversations.

I still have an accent in all of my languages, but not having the English ‘r’ and other things have been hugely helpful in making sure conversations don’t slip into English. Even if my level is quite low, the lack of a very strong accent actually makes it seem like I’m speaking better than another foreigner who would actually have way more command over the language than I have, but with a very noticeable accent. This has been a big help to make sure that conversations don’t slip into English.

I still haven’t reached fluency (as I define it), but I’m confident that I’ll do this in May so my last weeks can be focused on reducing my accent and better emulating Germans. Remember, completely eliminating my accent isn’t quite what I’m aiming for -- I want people to think that I’m German for about 30 seconds into our first conversation. This means that I can make some minor mistakes, as long as they are subtle enough not to raise any alarm bells!

In most casual conversations, people wouldn’t notice minor mistakes. Some readers seem to be confused about what I was aiming for. I never aim for perfection and I think it would be ridiculous to ever try. But what I’m aiming for is still realistic (depending on how devoted I am) and should be thought about in a social context. To me, speaking a language isn’t about how much I know, but how well I can communicate. There is a big difference that I’ll go into in more detail another time.

With regards the C2 exam -- I decided to get a private lesson from a Goethe Institut instructor (very familiar with the exam) and asked her what she thought my chances are. She said that it is perhaps possible, despite my current level, if I keep up the rate of progress that I have so far. However, based on her evaluation of my writing I will have to work really hard for that important aspect of it to be passable. She reminded me how ridiculously hard the exam is to make sure I was aware of the very likely chance of me not passing.

The fact that she didn’t laugh / roll her eyes at my suggestion of doing the C2 exam is definitely encouraging! I now only have two months left before I plan to sit it!

Life in Berlin

Hopefully in the next update I can tell you more about life in Berlin itself. I have only been out to socialise a couple of times a week and I can say that so far I’ve found Berliners to be very friendly, and I quite like the city!

It’s one of the quietest major cities I’ve ever lived in. I have been in certain central areas that definitely don’t seem shady, and sometimes I don’t even see other people/cars for a few minutes. Usually capitals are chaotic and filled with traffic jams etc., but I find it quite peaceful here!

I think this will change soon because summer is upon us -- warm weather came quicker than I was expecting, so I imagine the city will explode into life soon! I look forward to getting out to enjoy it!!

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So I hope you enjoyed the video and this update! As always, I look forward to your comments
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