How to systematize your language learning

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“I don’t need systems” is the war cry of many new language students: “I just learn spontaneously”. Especially today, where we have so-called “millennials” or, now, “Generation Z”, for which much of what I will talk to you about will sound very old-fashioned.

Let me set things straight from the beginning. I am an avid reader and collector of language textbooks and an student of all learning methods I can get hold of. What I am going to propose to you has definitively not been a standard in “good-old language school days”. On the contrary: most of what happens today in language classrooms is exactly the same as one hundred years ago: a teacher administrating and students regurgitating a textbook. Plus some “games” and technological gimmicks around the book.

Secondly, spontaneity needs order to appear. What do I mean? If you study the lives of highly creative people, who will discover that they carefully prepare for that “spontaneity” to happen. Most of them have routines they follow religiously and create special “spaces” in their life, where they have the best conditions to become spontaneous. It is not so that most successful writers wait until inspiration strikes them. Most of them have developed habits of writing whatsoever on a daily basis, and, with time, let great ideas surface in their daily writing routine spontaneously. It is the amateur in music or arts, that does nothing but waiting until he or she is “in the right mood”.

What would a system for language learning include?

·        Written goals. What am I going to achieve, specifically? What am I learning that language for? With what categories of people do I want to be able to converse freely and on what topics? How many new words do I want to learn per day, week, and month?

·        A road map, or a routine. How am I going to achieve that? What small steps can I take each and every day to come a bit closer to my goal? Learning new words, producing sentences, consuming content, learning new grammar rules, etc. What are the best techniques to do that?

·        My hard- and software: What resources do I need to achieve that? Dictionaries, textbooks, tables and lists, aps, courses.

·        An accountability partner: someone with whom I share my goals and whom I am accountable to.

·        Regular testing and collection of success indicators.

·        Monitoring mistakes and analyzing them. What systematic mistakes am I making, and why? What do I need to do to uproot them completely? What are my main problems and obstacles in learning that foreign language?

Once you have established your first system, you should

·        Assess all elements on a regular basis (e.g. once a month) whether they work, or not;

·        Improve specific elements;

·        Incorporate feedback and expert advice into your system.

While this may seem complicated, at first, it actually saves you lots of time and effort. You will be much less frustrated on the way, and, whenever you will feel a lack of motivation, you will have a process that carries you through those dark moments.

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

The GO Method

The GO Method applies quality management and psychological science to the study of foreign languages. It helps students establish individual and clear goals, build learning routines, overcome psychological obstacles, monitor progress and systematize the learning process.

It is the perfect approach for high performer students that need to speak as closely as possible to a native speaker. From lesson one, it focuses on building your own sentences bottom-up, and not memorizing phrases like a parrot.

Gerhard J. Ohrband

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Contact

Gerhard.j.ohrband@gmail.com

http://thegomethod.mozello.com/

https://gerhards-school.thinkific.com/

https://thegomethod.blogspot.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerhard-j%C3%B6rg-ohrband-22525147/

If you want to save time in learning a foreign language without a teacher, please check out my book “The GO Method” on Amazon. 

How to estimate how many words you already know

Have you every worried about not knowing enough words in the foreign language you are currently learning? Most probably, yes. Have you complained about that to your language teacher? Most probably, yes. Have you ever worried about not knowing enough words in your native language? Most probably, no. Do you know all words in the standard vocabulary of your native language? Most probably, no.

But, how many words do you actually know – in your native language and in a foreign one?

In this article, I will show you how to find answers to the above questions, and give you some tips on learning new words, too.

Always start with your native language in mind. Many language students completely forget how things work out, or not, in their own language. And then they have unrealistic expectations of what to expect from themselves while acquiring a new language.

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt uncomfortable speaking? During a job interview, presentation, sales conversation, family conflict, flirting, or, in a conversation with a specialist in an area you do know nothing about (with an accountant, legal expert, car mechanic)? If you want to admit it or not, the cause is most probably that you do not possess the necessary technical vocabulary to participate in the conversation as a competent speaker, or, you do not know what the most suitable word or phrase would be for the situation at hand.

If you want to gauge how many words you already know, the most thorough way would be to go through an entire dictionary, to mark all the words you know, to count them and to calculate the percentage of known words. Typically, dictionary companies disclose how many words their dictionaries contain. This is, of course, a very cumbersome task. Better, do the following:

·         You choose a limited number of pages in the dictionary, by chance (!);

·         You count the total number of word entries on each page;

·         You mark all words you know;

·         You divide known words by total words on the page, and multiply the result by 100%.

·         You calculate the mean percentage of known words for all tested pages;

·         You extrapolate how many words your mean percentage would translate for the whole dictionary.

Example:

You have chosen 4 pages (e.g. fictitious pages 6, 15, 67, 183) of a dictionary. For simplicity’s sakes, each page has 50 entries. You identify the following number of known words on the 4 pages:  23, 14, 25, 18. From this, you get the following percentages:

·         Page 6: 23/50 * 100%=46%;

·         Page 15: 14/50* 100%=28%;

·         Page 67: 25/50*100%=50%;

·         Page: 183: 18/50*100%=36%

Now, we calculate the mean:   46%+28%+50%+36% / 4 = 40%

The dictionary states it has 20 000 words. 

40% out of 20 000 is 8000.

Answer: your estimated vocabulary is 8000 words.

You can do this method of sampling pages for word lists, too. If you have a list 1000 of medical terms you need to learn, you can sample by chance chunks of 10 words. Then, you will do the same as with the dictionary pages. You calculate what percentage you know out of each 10-word chunk, calculate the mean, and extrapolate the result to the entire list.

Depending on the area of expertise you want to be conversational in a foreign language, there are lots of word lists or technical dictionaries available. There, you can estimate the number of words you know by categories:

·         Overall dictionary

·         Technical language in field A

·         Technical language in field B

·         Proverbs

·         Swear words (why not?)

·         Irregular verbs

·         Prepositions

·         Etc.

Of course, all this is an estimation. If you want to improve its precision, you will need to increase the number of samples: e.g. test 10 instead of 4 pages.

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

The GO Method

The GO Method applies quality management and psychological science to the study of foreign languages. It helps students establish individual and clear goals, build learning routines, overcome psychological obstacles, monitor progress and systematize the learning process.

It is the perfect approach for high performer students that need to speak as closely as possible to a native speaker. From lesson one, it focuses on building your own sentences bottom-up, and not memorizing phrases like a parrot.

Gerhard J. Ohrband

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

I am making no more progress

This is a frequent feeling, and a direct (or indirect) complaint of many language learners. How to address this issue?

First, we need to ackowledge that learning a foreign language, as well as it was learning our native language, is a long-term process. It is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no real short-term wins. The feeling of making no more progress, in practice, has the effect of students or dropping out or giving up completely, or significantly reducing their effort.

Therefore, it is important to analyze all the main implications carefully. We need to start by assessing whether our feeling is correct, or not. Not all our feelings and emotions are grounded in reality, or are accurate representations of reality. If you find this outrageous, please do some introspection, or ask a psychologist that treats depressive patients.

So, why should our feelings about our language learning process be automatically more objective than our other ones?!

To assess the veracity of this feeling is a difficult task. How should we measure it?

Most language students have one or more of the following problems:

1.      They have no concrete and quantifiable objectives for their language learning process, on paper: how many words do they want to learn each month, and in what areas? „I want to speak language XYZ well” does NOT count as a SMART goal.

2.      They do not have a set of indicators for measuring their progress: percentage of mistakes in written texts or conversations, number of e-mails written, mean lenghts of produced sentences, etc.

3.      They do not monitor those indicators on a regular basis: every week, month.

4.      They do not keep an archive of texts and spoken words with time signatures.

Without that, all appraisal of one’s own performance will be highly subjective and unreliable. To assess your performance you need

·        To have a clear and objective standard against which to compare yourself;

·        to compare yourself against the same (!) standard repeatedly.

If you want to approach this reasonably, you will need to address the four points above and fix them. If you do not want to do this, you need to ask yourself: why do I have this resistance against objective monitoring of my performance? Is it possible that I like to beat myself up and to self-sabotage my learning? Am I looking for an excuse to give up the language altogether? And if yes, why?

Right now, whenever feeling frustrated, find an answer to the following questions:

·        Has some other negative event occured in my life, which may have „primed” me for negativism?

·        May it be that I had previously an intense growth period, and that, now, comparatively, I am improving only slower?

·        Can it be that I have raised my standards and expectations?

·        Do I have a sustainable home routine for training that language, and do I stick to it?

·        Am I using the wrong learning techniques?

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

The GO Method

The GO Method applies quality management and psychological science to the study of foreign languages. It helps students establish individual and clear goals, build learning routines, overcome psychological obstacles, monitor progress and systematize the learning process.

It is the perfect approach for high performer students that need to speak as closely as possible to a native speaker. From lesson one, it focuses on building your own sentences bottom-up, and not memorizing phrases like a parrot.

Gerhard J. Ohrband

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

How to choose a good language teacher 1

This article may seem very biased, as I myself work as a language teacher. On the other hand, as a polyglot and enthusiastic language learner, I have been and am also a consumer of language instruction. Personally, I am extremely time-conscious. I have so many other things to do apart from language learning, that I am intolerant towards wasting time in unproductive classrooms. That is why I hated or dropped out of most language courses I attended back in Germany.

The choice of your language teacher can leave an imprint on the rest of your life. If your personal life and career depend on your level in a foreign language, you should not leave this decision to chance. If you are planning to migrate or to work in a foreign language, most of your success (salaries, integration, personal life) will depend on how you speak the respective language.

Unfortunately, many students make their choice based on suboptimal critera:

·        What is the most easily accessible option?

·        What is the cheapest option?

·        What is the option I “like” most (and not, what option is most productive)?

Remember, if you plan to learn German just to order beer at the Oktoberfest or to pick up women (or men), almost any way of instruction will do. If, however, you need to speak as closely to a native speaker as possible, you should realize that you are not only paying the price for the actual course, but also for the lost opportunities.

Let us do some calculations:

You enroll at a local language course that costs 150$ per level. Level duration: 3 months. In the ideal case, if the school delivers what it promised, it may take you 2 years (and eight levels) to reach an advanced level, enough for getting a job in that country. Now, you could think that you spent only 150$ * 8 = 1200$ for two years, right?

Now consider what you would earn at an entry job in that country in your profession. Imagine it would be 2000$. Therefore, each month not knowing the language costs you 2000$. A 2-year waiting time costs you 48000$. So, the total cost for two years would be 1200$ + 48000$ = 49200$.

What if, with another teacher/technique, you could obtain the same results in 12 months? Then the total price would drop by 24000$ . Now imagine that you had to pay 1200$ for just one year. Then you would still save 22800$ compared to the first option.

Now consider the risk that you choose the first option, but you do not reach the desired fluency? Then you would incur a monthly opportunity cost of 2000$ for each extra month of delay.

Having the right perspective, let us go through criteria for a good teacher:

1.      What percentage of lesson time am I actually actively producing speech? Is the teacher him- or herself consuming most of the lesson time?

To be continued

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.