What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23122
Contact:

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby rdearman » Wed Mar 08, 2023 3:31 pm

jackb wrote:Besides, if you think 15 minutes a day will get you really good at anything, you have a hard life ahead of you.

Depends on when you start. 15 minutes per day starting at age 10 until you are 90 would be, 7305 hours. I can learn a lot in 7305 hours of study.

Unfortunately most of us don't start then. :D
4 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Irena » Wed Mar 08, 2023 4:46 pm

Cavesa wrote:
Irena wrote:
Cavesa wrote:"Study for 3-5 hours a day" is my answer to a rather specific kind of question. It is for people, who NEED or really really want to learn fast. And then it is an excellent piece of of advice that doesn't get given enough. It is not for general public, it is for a certain minority (but still a bigger minority, than most people think), that doesn't hear this enough. No other bit of advice will help a person in need of fast progress as much.

That's something you promoted for the "vast majority" of immigrants and expats.


Yes, exactly! Because they NEED to learn the local language. That's exactly the kind of specific situation I am mentioning.

This varies greatly from person to person. For some people who move abroad, learning the local language is crucial for improving their economic and/or social position. For others, this is quite simply not the case. I know quite a few people for whom this was indeed not the case. Generally, these were people who moved somewhere, spent a number of years there, gained valuable professional experience, and then moved back to their home country or to some third country, never having learned the local language. You can moralize or get angry about it (and you can even make the case that governments should do something about it), but the fact remains that in the context of their actual lives, the benefits of learning the local language would have been lower than the opportunity cost of doing so.


Cavesa wrote:It is about priorities. I survived medschool (and learnt languages on top of that), it was not healthy lifestyle, but it was necessary to make such sacrifices. More than I should have perhaps. Living abroad with a good future and meaningful career is my reward for the hard work and sacrifices. That's the way it works.

You know, I might have taken that seriously back in my 20s. (Actually, it's not necessarily terrible advice for healthy people in their 20s.) However, not anymore. The older you get, and the more little health issues you accumulate (and no, it doesn't have to be anything crippling), the more likely this is to backfire spectacularly, in the form of illness that can set you back in all sorts of ways (assuming it doesn't kill you). It's even riskier if you're a foreigner because that can make accessing medical care tricky, even for perfectly routine problems that can be fixed with cheap generics that you nevertheless need a doctor's prescription for. Actually, this is precisely the issue I've had in the Czech Republic. I was disappointed to discover that learning Czech doesn't really help matters, given that this was precisely the sort of thing I assumed Czech would be helpful for. But no. I still don't have a GP (and not for lack of trying, and yes, I tried in Czech).
0 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3468
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8657
Contact:

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Cainntear » Wed Mar 08, 2023 5:55 pm

Irena wrote:
Cainntear wrote:There's a real issue with the deprofessionalisation of teaching staff, and it's largely been driven by the massive market for English teaching in the last couple of decades and the resulting drop in standards so that "gappers" can do it as a holiday job. It was entirely necessary to meet the explosion in demand. It has, however, depressed salaries to the point where there isn't a real future in the career, and as a result there is no incentive to pay people who are really good at the job, and they tend to not want to do the job.

Those are all good points, though my language studies haven't been affected to any significant extent by those issues. Still, I can believe there is an issue. That said, this:
Cavesa wrote:vast majority of teachers I've met should have been streetsweepers instead

is a profoundly unhelpful way to discuss the matter. It's rude and arrogant, nothing more.

There's always more.
People have reasons for believing things, and if you shout then down for expressing things, you'll never find out what their reasons are.
Cavesa has pretty deep seated issues with language teachers and I don't remember if I ever worked out what the root of that was (intracerebral haematoma can be a bit of a bother that way).

Regardless, taking negative statements as effectively proof of a personal failing isn't particularly helpful.

I think this varies from country to country. In most European countries, you couldn't enroll in a university language course just like that. If you want to take university level Spanish, then you need to be a student at that university, studying Spanish for a degree. In the United States, this sort of thing is possible and wouldn't be a bad idea, except for one small problem: the price. Unless you can get it for free or at a sharply reduced price (this is sometimes possible for university employees, including non-academic staff), I just don't see how it's worth it.

I studied languages with the [url=open.ac.uk]Open University[/quote] in the UK. It tends to have a mixture of "real students" and "hobbyists". Their language courses were notable for being one of the few courses where the hobbyists outnumbered the real students (which I think was actually threatening the effectiveness of their language courses, really).
Irena wrote:Native speakers with minimal training are a poor choice for beginners, but if they have the right kind of personality, they can be highly valuable for advanced students who need speaking practice. For English in particular, there are quite a lot of students in that category, and if a school is going to hire some young American with little-to-no relevant training or experience, then those are the students that young American should be working with. If a school chooses to place that teacher in a classroom of 30 beginners, then that is the school's fault.

Yes. Or no. It's actually the market's fault, and blaming the school for following the market is about as futile as blaming your local pub-restaurant for serving burger and hotdogs based on market demand rather than local dishes.
As for what alternatives that American might have: it very much depends. I only know one person who did this sort of thing, and it was during a gap year between college and law school. Now she works as a lawyer. If she hadn't taken the gap year, she would simply have gone to law school right after college, and she would have started practicing law one year earlier.

This again deflects from the problem of market forces in action.

Gap year teaching is promoted as an easy option for anyone who wants to travel before working. And yes, I said "travel before working", because gappers typically do not view teaching as working, instead seeing teaching English as easy because they speak it, so it must be easy enough to teach.

Schools sell native speaker teachers to kids' parents because the market makes them a popular resource.

It's a systemic problem with the market, and trying to find one group of people who deserve the blame is a fool's errand.
4 x

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Irena » Wed Mar 08, 2023 6:06 pm

Cainntear wrote:There's always more.
People have reasons for believing things, and if you shout then down for expressing things, you'll never find out what their reasons are.
Cavesa has pretty deep seated issues with language teachers and I don't remember if I ever worked out what the root of that was (intracerebral haematoma can be a bit of a bother that way).

Regardless, taking negative statements as effectively proof of a personal failing isn't particularly helpful.

It's not a "negative" statement. It's an aggressively disparaging and rude statement. When people choose to express themselves in that manner, then no, it's not going to inspire me to find out where they're coming from. I am not a psychiatrist after all.
1 x

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 09, 2023 5:06 am

I have never learned very much in any language classroom. I have never learned very much from simple exposure.

I've never seen an excellent language teacher, although, to be fair, during my time in school, I was a very poor language student. Like most Americans, I really didn't understand what learning a language meant.

I worked as a teacher most of my life, and I always felt like a fraud whenever I wound up teaching English. I never felt that I was doing a good job. I actually was more confident teaching Samoan to beginner students.
I always felt that students would do better if I could just give them resources and support. But students expect to be led. I guess I was never satisfied with the guidance I gave. Maybe I needed a better textbook or program to work with.

I know that good language instruction is possible; my daughter is attending her third year of German at her high school, and her teacher is obviously brilliant. She loves her class. She is definitely learning German. The class is hard, and she works hard. Some of the grades she gets are a little harsh, but it just makes her more determined to do better next time. I admire a great teacher.

She is learning German. She has a friend from Germany that she Facetimes with a couple of times a week. During the English part of the discussion, they seem to be talking mostly about boys and rock climbing. My daughter is going to stay with this girl's family this summer. This is way beyond anything I learned in a classroom.

Maybe I just suck as a language teacher, or maybe I just expect too much.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

Gaoling97
Yellow Belt
Posts: 84
Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 3:48 am
Location: 中國
Languages: English (N), German (Advanced), Chinese (Intermediate)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18675
x 322

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Gaoling97 » Thu Mar 09, 2023 5:54 am

rdearman wrote:
jackb wrote:Besides, if you think 15 minutes a day will get you really good at anything, you have a hard life ahead of you.

Depends on when you start. 15 minutes per day starting at age 10 until you are 90 would be, 7305 hours. I can learn a lot in 7305 hours of study.

Unfortunately most of us don't start then. :D


I feel like there is always some amount of "starting cost" associated with studying. Whenever I start a session, I spend first few minutes just switching my mind over to "study mode" so that I can focus, and it takes me some amount of time to really get into a flow state. So, even if you did start at 10, I don't think you can necessarily compare 7305 hours distributed over 15 minute increments with, well, a better way of doing that.

This is also why I always hate it whenever I hear people saying things like "15 minutes a day every day is better than 2 hours once a week!" Maybe 15 minutes is a good thing to start with to help you get into the habit, but in terms of actual effectiveness during that time, yeah, no, 2 hours once a week is absolutely better than 15 minutes a day, and it isn't even close.
1 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23122
Contact:

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby rdearman » Thu Mar 09, 2023 10:43 am

Gaoling97 wrote:This is also why I always hate it whenever I hear people saying things like "15 minutes a day every day is better than 2 hours once a week!" Maybe 15 minutes is a good thing to start with to help you get into the habit, but in terms of actual effectiveness during that time, yeah, no, 2 hours once a week is absolutely better than 15 minutes a day, and it isn't even close.

I wouldn't say 15 minutes is better than 2 hours, but I would say 15 minutes is better than nothing. :)
2 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:24 am

Gaoling97 wrote:I feel like there is always some amount of "starting cost" associated with studying. Whenever I start a session, I spend first few minutes just switching my mind over to "study mode" so that I can focus, and it takes me some amount of time to really get into a flow state. So, even if you did start at 10, I don't think you can necessarily compare 7305 hours distributed over 15 minute increments with, well, a better way of doing that.

This is also why I always hate it whenever I hear people saying things like "15 minutes a day every day is better than 2 hours once a week!" Maybe 15 minutes is a good thing to start with to help you get into the habit, but in terms of actual effectiveness during that time, yeah, no, 2 hours once a week is absolutely better than 15 minutes a day, and it isn't even close.


That's an excellent point. I've always had the same problem and seen it around. (A very good example: a friend of mine used to complain that reading doens't help. Like "why did you recommend me to start reading? I am trying a page a day, but I never manage to really get into the story, and I never remember what I read the day before")

Getting focused fast is a skill that not everyone has, at least not to the same extent. It is normal that most of us need a bit of time to focus. And I find it weird that the "15 minutes a day" is recommended especially to people with smaller studying experience, therefore most probably much less "fast focus on study" training.

Irena wrote:
Cavesa wrote:
Irena wrote:
Cavesa wrote:"Study for 3-5 hours a day" is my answer to a rather specific kind of question. It is for people, who NEED or really really want to learn fast. And then it is an excellent piece of of advice that doesn't get given enough. It is not for general public, it is for a certain minority (but still a bigger minority, than most people think), that doesn't hear this enough. No other bit of advice will help a person in need of fast progress as much.

That's something you promoted for the "vast majority" of immigrants and expats.


Yes, exactly! Because they NEED to learn the local language. That's exactly the kind of specific situation I am mentioning.

This varies greatly from person to person. For some people who move abroad, learning the local language is crucial for improving their economic and/or social position. For others, this is quite simply not the case. I know quite a few people for whom this was indeed not the case. Generally, these were people who moved somewhere, spent a number of years there, gained valuable professional experience, and then moved back to their home country or to some third country, never having learned the local language. You can moralize or get angry about it (and you can even make the case that governments should do something about it), but the fact remains that in the context of their actual lives, the benefits of learning the local language would have been lower than the opportunity cost of doing so.


But you are still missing the issue. The people who "didn't need" to learn the local language were not an asset to the local society, never were a part of it. They were just profiting from it, and morally failing, and they should have been deported. No clue how many times you need to be explained such a simple truth to actually understand. Completely detached parallel societies are a huge problem.

You are extremely mistaken, if you think "context of their actual lives" is the only important thing that matters. The expats profited from the years in the foreign country, their lives are better for it. They should have given back, they should have been part of the society. And that's impossible without a language.

If the costs (of all kinds) of learning the language were lower than the benefits of speaking it, they simply should have stayed at home.


Cavesa wrote:It is about priorities. I survived medschool (and learnt languages on top of that), it was not healthy lifestyle, but it was necessary to make such sacrifices. More than I should have perhaps. Living abroad with a good future and meaningful career is my reward for the hard work and sacrifices. That's the way it works.

You know, I might have taken that seriously back in my 20s. (Actually, it's not necessarily terrible advice for healthy people in their 20s.) However, not anymore. The older you get, and the more little health issues you accumulate (and no, it doesn't have to be anything crippling), the more likely this is to backfire spectacularly, in the form of illness that can set you back in all sorts of ways (assuming it doesn't kill you). It's even riskier if you're a foreigner because that can make accessing medical care tricky, even for perfectly routine problems that can be fixed with cheap generics that you nevertheless need a doctor's prescription for. Actually, this is precisely the issue I've had in the Czech Republic. I was disappointed to discover that learning Czech doesn't really help matters, given that this was precisely the sort of thing I assumed Czech would be helpful for. But no. I still don't have a GP (and not for lack of trying, and yes, I tried in Czech).


Why do you assume people in their 20's are necessarily healthy? That is extremely narrow minded. Especially in today's world, where most people with "accumulated little health issues" (as you say) in their 40's and 50's are not having them because of age, but just because of their poor life style choices, while many of health issues of the younger people are not self-caused. So, it is not an excuse. Again, it is all about motivation. Language learning is not coal mining, it fortunately doesn't require you to be in very strong health. I even knew a tetraplegic person, who learnt Korean and got a degree in it.

Again, you are making the wrong arguments and derailing the thread.

Either you can move abroad and face the challenges, including learning the language, or you cannot move abroad and there is no shame in that. The only problem is allowing people not willing to learn the language to stay in countries, that they cannot really function in.

Medical care is indeed tricky to get. Do you know why you struggle so much to get a GP? Because you chose a wrong country to migrate to, one in a huge healthcare crisis. It has been in such a crisis for at least 15 years, and will be for at least 20 more, because the less wise half of the population doesn't let the polititians make some huge changes. There are many good reasons, why most real migrants (not expats, those have different reasoning) use the Czech Republic as just a place to pass through, on their path to a country with fewer problems. Some of them are similar to my reasons for moving out. Healthcare quality and accessibility (including corruption) is on the list.

I know a part of your negative emotions against me have little to do with what I say, but with some sort of jealousy. You made some poor choices (as you've just illustrated) and succeeded to get only what I've left behind. Please, stop it already, you are just being unpleasant and spoiling and derailing various discussions.

Irena wrote:
Cainntear wrote:There's always more.
People have reasons for believing things, and if you shout then down for expressing things, you'll never find out what their reasons are.
Cavesa has pretty deep seated issues with language teachers and I don't remember if I ever worked out what the root of that was (intracerebral haematoma can be a bit of a bother that way).

Regardless, taking negative statements as effectively proof of a personal failing isn't particularly helpful.

It's not a "negative" statement. It's an aggressively disparaging and rude statement. When people choose to express themselves in that manner, then no, it's not going to inspire me to find out where they're coming from. I am not a psychiatrist after all.


Irena, please reread the forum rules, there is something about respect.

Just because you disagree with something, you cannot use such expressions. You are out of arguments, you just repeat your nonsense and probably even know on some level that you are wrong. That's why you opt for personal attacks instead. Please, just stop it.

Cainntear wrote:
Irena wrote:Native speakers with minimal training are a poor choice for beginners, but if they have the right kind of personality, they can be highly valuable for advanced students who need speaking practice. For English in particular, there are quite a lot of students in that category, and if a school is going to hire some young American with little-to-no relevant training or experience, then those are the students that young American should be working with. If a school chooses to place that teacher in a classroom of 30 beginners, then that is the school's fault.

Yes. Or no. It's actually the market's fault, and blaming the school for following the market is about as futile as blaming your local pub-restaurant for serving burger and hotdogs based on market demand rather than local dishes.


This is an extremely good analogy. And back in the original thread topic: this is the problem in the market. The whole business with low quality "teachers" is so profitable thanks to some huge myths, advice people keep giving each other without any criticism: 1.get a teacher 2.natives are the best.

The current market rewards schools for "faults" because people pay a school with foreign names by the smiling "teacher" faces in advertisements, they are not asking about real results or methods before paying.

Another thing: I've always found it weird, how young the teachers usually are (especially on those advertisements). In most areas of life, our society associates age with experience and quality. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it is wrong and too much. But it is simply something rotten in the system, if so many schools built their business purely on very young native teachers. Therefore the market stimulates them to provide trash quality.

As for what alternatives that American might have: it very much depends. I only know one person who did this sort of thing, and it was during a gap year between college and law school. Now she works as a lawyer. If she hadn't taken the gap year, she would simply have gone to law school right after college, and she would have started practicing law one year earlier.

This again deflects from the problem of market forces in action.

Gap year teaching is promoted as an easy option for anyone who wants to travel before working. And yes, I said "travel before working", because gappers typically do not view teaching as working, instead seeing teaching English as easy because they speak it, so it must be easy enough to teach.

Schools sell native speaker teachers to kids' parents because the market makes them a popular resource.

It's a systemic problem with the market, and trying to find one group of people who deserve the blame is a fool's errand.


Exactly, thanks for saying that. When I asked a few such teachers about their experience, they started blabbering about their travelling experience.
1 x

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Irena » Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:34 am

Cavesa wrote:But you are still missing the issue. The people who "didn't need" to learn the local language were not an asset to the local society, never were a part of it. They were just profiting from it, and morally failing, and they should have been deported. No clue how many times you need to be explained such a simple truth to actually understand. Completely detached parallel societies are a huge problem.

Actually, that's just your opinion. They got a job in those countries, they got the visas, and they provided their labor while there. One of the best language teachers I've ever had spent a couple of years living in my country and teaching there. Then she left. She didn't learn Serbian, but she says she improved her English while there. And I say good for her! Her students were lucky to have her. (She taught me over Skype when she had already left, but that's not the point.)

But your argument isn't really with me. If you feel so strongly about this, then why don't you take it up with your elected representatives and make your feelings known? If enough of your compatriots feel the same way, then changes can be made. And if not? Well, it's a democracy, isn't it?
2 x

Irena
Green Belt
Posts: 392
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:42 am
Languages: Serbian (N), English (C2), French (C1), Russian (C1), Czech (C1), dabbled in a couple of others, dreaming of many others
x 861

Re: What advice do you give to people IRL when language learning comes up?

Postby Irena » Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:07 pm

jackb wrote:When time commitment comes up, I say 15 minutes everyday in the beginning. It won't get you to where you want to be, but then again, neither will my advice. It's just a place to start. I feel like the people asking for advice are really asking 'Is it doable'. An (honest) answer of 1-2 hours a day is telling them 'no'. You'll know if you like something when you do it for 15 minutes a day and that you'll need to invest more time.

I see what you mean, but I think it's better to be honest. What is the minimum amount of time you need to put in in order to learn faster than you forget (which is what you need to able to do in order to make any progress at all)? I'm not sure, but I don't think 15 min per day is going to cut it. It's probably something like 30 min per day, six days a week. It may be more than that. But if you're putting in less, then you're probably wasting your time and would be better off spending that time sleeping or exercising. If a prospective language learner thinks that 30 min per day is out of the question, then that person would probably be better off not bothering with languages at all.
1 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests