Good Advice¶

I’ve read more than I care to admit on the subject of language learning. I’ve experimented with every tip and trick I can find. Most of what I’ve tried has admittedly been bad advice, but there are bits of wisdom.

Here is the best advice I’ve found. This is all general advice, there’s also advice for introverts if you want something more specific and in-depth.

1. Study in a way that makes you want to study tomorrow¶

Discipline shares its root with “disciple” -- both refer to learning and training through consistent practice.

When you commit to the steady repetition in language learning -- daily drills, phrases, and conversations -- the hard work either becomes a drag, or something you want to return to tomorrow, because the practice (the discipline) becomes a source of joy.

This is why repeating the Rosary prayers in another language can become such an effective daily practice, building automaticity in a way that is spiritually enriching.

In my experience we will fail to learn, and inevitably quit, if we aren’t filled with that ineffible joy of learning. If you're not looking forward to practicing tomorrow, don’t quit the language, orient yourself to God through prayer.

As with any kind of discipline, we will be motivated only to the degree that we experience the spiritual fruits of our work. When the light of Christ fills your work, you will find ample fruit.

2. 活到老學到老¶

"Live till old, Learn till old".
Learning a language is not just a skill to learn. It is the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the language and the culture that lives in it.

At first the words feel foreign and the meanings remain distant, like meeting someone from another world. Little progress seems to happen. Yet with steady daily practice you reach the first true connection -- the day you can pray the Rosary fully in that language and sense it beginning to live inside you.

From that point you look back and see how far the relationship has already grown. You become more present, more at home. The only way forward is one faithful step at a time: repeating the prayers, listening to the words, entering the thoughts of the people who have prayed them for centuries.

The relationship does not suddenly become easy. You simply become more yourself within it.

The reason to pursue this is the relationship itself. Through the language you enter the thoughts, prayers, and way of life of a people. The Rosary offers a beautiful daily anchor for this bond: you pray with them, in their tongue, before the same mysteries that have shaped their faith for centuries. What began as study becomes friendship with a living tradition that will continue as long as you remain faithful.

3. Recognition and Recall¶

As you learn a new language, you’ll need to retrieve foreign words, phrases, and idioms from memory. Conventionally, there are two types of memory retrieval; recognition and recall. Recognition is a more shallow form of memory retrieval; you may recognize a foreign word, but you have no idea how to use it in a sentence. Recall is a deeper form of memory retrieval, where you both recognize a foreign word, and know how to use it in a sentence. Despite the conventional wisdom, there are deeper forms of memory retrieval, but recall is necessary as a first step.

To gain the ability to recall the meaning of a foreign word, you simply must practice recalling. This is known as the testing effect, and it’s why flashcards are effective.

Furthermore, if you space out your practice over periods of time, you’ll increase your ability to recall. This is known as the spacing effect, and it’s why spaced-repetition software has become so popular.

In practice, spaced-repetition software is great for preparing for a written test in a language class; but it will not help you communicate with a native speaker in your target language. Many teachers will unhelpfully say, “you just have to practice speaking and listening”, which completely undermines the point of spaced-repetition software and language learning in general. The entire point of language learning is to make things easier than the slow natural process of language acquisition. Spaced-repetition will help you gain the ability to recall, but you must go deeper.

When learning the Rosary prayers, spaced repetition helps with individual passages and responses. Yet to pray the full Rosary alongside others and enter their spiritual life, you need more than recognition of the words. The deepest level of memory retrieval is known as automaticity, and will be discussed next.

4. Automaticity and Disruption¶

Automaticity is the ability to effortlessly recall the meaning of a word or phrase. Disruption is the conscious interruption of that process.

Don’t think of a smelly fish.

Did you just think of a smelly fish? How much time did it take you to recall what the words “smelly” and “fish” mean? If you’re a native English speaker, then the recall was instant. It’s as if an unconscious process did the work for you (which is exactly what automaticity means).

Disruption requires that unconscious process to become conscious, which is non-trivial, hence you’ll probably think of a smelly fish even if you try not to.

To learn a language towards any reasonable definition of fluency, automaticity is required. In fact, your ability to converse depends on automaticity. Let’s consider words like “poisson”, “pescado”, “fisch” or 魚 (yú, it’s pronounced like the German ü, but with an upward intonation, like a quick question). You may have a passing familiarity with one or more of those words (like the cognate, “fisch”), but if it takes you a second or two to remember that they mean “fish”, then you haven’t achieved automaticity even if you’ve learned their meaning.

Did you know just reading the word yawn can cause people to yawn?

If you’re unsure of whether you’ve gained automaticity with a specific word in a target language, check to see if it produces unconscious reactions that are difficult to disrupt; like a “yawn” or a “smelly fish”.

Learning a language is all about gaining automaticity in the target language with a sufficient amount of words and phrases to understand others. It’s not sufficient to simply memorize the meaning of a word and the grammar rules. Even if you’ve learned thousands of words and every grammar rule, don’t be surprised if you only catch one or two words out of a spoken conversation.

Fortunately, automaticity is easy, no complicated studying required. Pavlov’s dogs figured it out. Unfortunately, automaticity in language requires repetition and sleep. It’s not just metaphorically like exercise, it is literally like exercise. Work out your brain, sleep well, and repeat. If this sounds like rote learning, that’s because it is. Sorry, but language learning requires rote learning.

This is why the Rosary is such a powerful practice: the steady repetition of the same prayers builds automaticity in the target language while deepening your relationship with its spiritual culture. You come to know the words of the Hail Mary or the Glory Be so well that they rise naturally, without effort.

This means that focusing on memorization methods (like mind maps or the method of Loci) can sometimes be bad advice. The goal isn’t a mind palace filled with the target language, it’s automaticity in the target language. You can effectively use techniques like spaced repetition, but you’ll need to do more than just memorize. Keep practicing (rote learning) over and over until the meaning can be recalled automatically.

In other words, you’ll understand people only to the degree that you’ve gained automaticity with the words they’re speaking.

5. Comfort Zones and Competence¶

Let me share one of the most common “secrets” of language learning bloggers and self-proclaimed “experts”. First, practice a specific conversation in your target language, and get really good at that specific conversation. Next, guide (or redirect) real conversations into the one you’ve rehearsed. I’ve seen this described as comfort zones, islands, pattern practice, and various other metaphors. There should be no “secret” here, it’s just a psychological comfort zone.

We can learn the “hello/thanks”, «hola/gracias», 「你好/謝謝」 of a language in a few minutes; that’s the first comfort zone. Build that into a conversation, and repeat that conversation -- a lot. This is a great way to gain automaticity, and it can be fun. After every interaction in your target language try to identify the limits of your comfort zone. The limit of a comfort zone is known as the psychological danger zone, and you’ll know it because you’ll likely freeze or panic. The psychological danger zone usually kills a conversation and everyone will be uncomfortable.

To put this another way: if you’re far outside of your comfort zone, don’t expect other people to be comfortable talking with you. Your comfort zone will put others at ease.

This kind of approach is extremely useful, but it can border on bad advice. A comfort zone can provide a false sense of fluency, and we can get stuck. We’ve all seen people stuck in their comfort zones. The goal of language learning is not a comfort zone. The goal is to read, write, and speak competently in the target language.

The best approach I can find is to carefully develop comfort zones that demonstrate competence and the ability to learn more (like asking questions). This includes rehearsed conversations that will allow you to navigate the psychological danger zone without becoming an uncomfortable frozen statue or switching to your native language.

For the Rosary, begin by making the core prayers your first comfort zone: the Sign of the Cross, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be. Master praying them fluently in the target language. Then expand to full decades and the mysteries. These become reliable islands of competence from which you can explore more of the language and the faith of the people who pray it.

6. Immersion: undivided attention while learning¶

Language learning can be exhausting, especially at first. Learning a foreign concept requires a high cognitive load. Once you learn the foreign concepts, the cognitive load disappears and you’ll be faced with the boredom of rote learning (whether flashcards, drills, or repeating the same conversations again and again).

In every case, this requires undivided attention. Don’t do anything else. Put the entirety of your being into the language while you learn. This is known as immersion. Even rote learning requires immersion. Seriously, don’t do anything else while you study.

If you try to do two things at once, you won’t go twice as slow. Divided attention is worth maybe 1/60 of undivided attention for the same time period. In other words, one hour of “multi-tasking” is worth one minute of immersion. Multi-tasking may actually be damaging because you’re ignoring the sound of the target language (conditioning yourself to “tune out” the language). As a rule of thumb, people who claim they can multi-task are generally too incompetent to take seriously.

Fortunately, immersion is easy and fun. For example, watch a movie in the target language and try to catch as many words as you can. Actively listen, don’t passively listen.

The Rosary itself is one of the simplest and most consistent forms of immersion available. Praying the prayers in the target language for fifteen or twenty minutes requires your full attention on the words, the mysteries, and their meaning. It is active, repetitive, and spiritually rich -- all at once.

7. Immersion: essential complexity vs. accidental complexity¶

Imagine you’re reading a book in Spanish, and you encounter an unfamiliar word. The word appears again on the same page and there’s no context to let you know what it means. You flip through a pocket dictionary, but no luck. You open a full-sized dictionary and finally you find the entry. Maybe the definition is vague so you look somewhere else. Now imagine you’re reading on a Kindle and you just touched the word. Instantly, a Spanish definition appears, along with an English translation.

I love physical books, but an e-reader with custom dictionaries greatly simplifies learning. This is also an example of two different types of complexity: essential complexity and accidental complexity.

Essential complexity is the complexity of the language you’re trying to learn. For example, conjugating verbs in Spanish, or pronouncing tones in Chinese, or writing traditional Chinese characters. In the example above (reading a book in Spanish), the essential complexity is learning the definition of the unknown word. This is where proper immersive learning happens.

Accidental complexity is the complexity of the tools and techniques you’re using in order to learn the language. This includes fumbling through dictionaries, and even browsing through Netflix for a movie (in your target language) that you actually want to watch. It’s all the other stuff, and it can make our lives unnecessarily difficult. Accidental complexity might feel useful, and is often times necessary, but it doesn’t count towards immersive learning.

This is a concept from the world of software engineering, but I find it applies universally, and is particularly useful for language learning. Basically, minimize the accidental complexity and maximize the essential complexity. Immersion requires undivided attention into the essential complexity, and not into the accidental complexity.

In other words, if you’re futzing with Anki settings, you’re not immersed in your target language.

When praying the Rosary, the essential complexity is the language of the prayers themselves and the mysteries they proclaim. The accidental complexity is everything that pulls you away from simply praying: looking up every unknown word mid-decade, adjusting audio settings, or switching between multiple apps. The more you reduce the distractions, the deeper the relationship grows through the prayer.

8. It takes time (in hours)¶

I find this is a sensitive topic amongst language bloggers. Part of the reason is because there’s lots of bad advice and click-bait that promises fast and easy language learning. In my experience language learning can be easy, but fast?

Let’s break down the following claim:

“I studied Spanish for 4 years in high school, but I still can’t speak Spanish.”

How many hours of immersion did this person put in? Removing the accidental complexity, how much undivided attention was given to the essential complexity of Spanish? Did they immerse themself for an hour a day, every single day? Or did they sit in class and get 10 minutes of immersion on average? Maybe they got an hour’s worth of proper immersion per school week. And with only 36 weeks in a school year, maybe they only got 200 hours worth of immersive learning in those 4 years. This is pretty common. The better question becomes: is 200 hours of immersion sufficient to speak Spanish well?

The time it takes to learn a language is a well-researched topic. The best research I’ve found is from the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI). They even ranked their language programs by language difficulty. These are proven estimates on how long it takes an FSI student to learn a given language to the proficiency of a diplomat. One thing I like about the FSI is that they measure time in hours. They measure course hours, but I find it useful to think of this as hours of immersion.

For example, let’s think of Spanish as needing 600 hours of immersion in order to speak and read well, and Chinese requiring 2200 hours. If you spend 10 hours per day properly immersed in learning Spanish, you’ll be as fluent as a diplomat in two months. If you spend ten minutes per day, then it will take you 10 years.

Likewise, for a non-cognate language like Chinese, 10 hours per day would result in diplomat-level fluency in 8 months. If you spend ten minutes per day learning Chinese, then it will take you 36 years. 10 hours of immersion per day may be impossible for most people, but 10 minutes is trivial to anyone.

While individuals may learn at different rates, the biggest factor (and the one you can do something about) is the amount of time you spend on proper immersion (that is, undivided attention into the essential complexity of the language). Remember, this is a lifelong relationship. Praying the Rosary each day in the target language steadily builds that relationship one mystery at a time. If you’re aiming for the level of a diplomat in your understanding and speech, it might take months or it might take years -- it’s up to you.

For language learning, like most things in life, you get what you put in.

For more advice, I’d recommend Speak like a Diplomat, or read about bad advice.