Until I met Kevin.
Kevin wears pink shoelaces and likes jumping out of aeroplanes, but these are some of the less interesting facts about him. For me, the most interesting thing about Kevin is the way he's gone about learning Japanese. His goal is to move to Japan and teach English there, and so he's been diligently preparing for around 18 months by learning about the language and culture of Japan. This is in stark contrast to the approach I took when I moved to China to study English. A Pakistani newspaper vendor in Charing Cross station taught me how to say 'ni hao' (hello) and that was the only Chinese phrase I was equipped with when I moved there in April 2001. I could not have been less prepared. By contrast, Kevin is able to hold a decent conversation with any Japanese person he meets, and he hasn't even set foot in the country yet. What's really intriguing is how he's gone about this.
The general approach of anyone trying to learn another language is to buy a course - a set of face to face lessons with a class of fellow students; a book and audio CD; a multimedia course like Rosetta Stone; or perhaps just a textbook on its own. Kevin didn't really do any of that. Instead he jumped right in at the deep end and started having conversations with Japanese tutors and Japanese people as often as he was able.
He did this initially through a service called italki.com, a website which acts like an eBay for language tutors. You sign up, search for someone who speaks the language you want to learn and either pay them a small amount for a Skype lesson (if they are a professional tutor) or just arrange to talk for free over Skype (if they are just a conversation partner). Tutors are located all over the world, so you could learn Japanese from a Brazilian living in Poland, for example. Kevin has 3-4 regular tutors and conversation partners and schedules hour-long classes or chats with them at different times during the week. Since he started doing this, his conversational ability has increased incredibly quickly. In effect, he's mimicking the ideal situation for language learning - being thrown in at the deep end in the country where the language is spoken.
He has also joined a number of face to face conversational Japanese meetups, which he goes to in the evenings. There, the conversations cover all kinds of topics, making talking much more challenging. One of the problems of using a pre-designed course or textbook is that the conversations you practise there are highly structured and graded so that you aren't challenged too much. In real life, conversation flows from topic to topic, forcing you to search for new vocabulary and grammar structures all the time. Practising in this way means Kevin is far more challenged than the average language student, and can converse more fluently as a result (even if his grammar isn't perfect).
Kevin did go to a traditional Japanese teacher at first, but she was frustrated by his non-linear approach to learning the language, and the fact that he used slang and non-beginner grammar. Her strict methodological approach to teaching the language couldn't cope with his enthusiasm for absorbing Japanese any which way, and they quickly parted company.
As well as speaking Japanese regularly, Kevin uses digital support materials, such as Memrise, an app for helping you to memorise sets of vocabulary very quickly. I wouldn't normally recommend Memrise on its own, as it teaches words out of context, making them easy to forget. But if you are encountering new words every day in conversation or pieces of writing, an app like Memrise can reinforce this learning and help you to build a large vocabulary more quickly. This is especially useful once you have the most important grammar structures sorted, as it dramatically increased your conversational ability.
For the last nine months I've watched Kevin become more confident and more fluent in Japanese, to the point where it's become annoying. He often speaks Japanese to me, even though I can't understand a word he's saying!
His transformation into a Japanese speaker has been quite a profound education for me as well. It made me realise how much I still had to learn as both a learner and a teacher of language. For years I'd been following basically the same pattern, focusing on the course first and the conversation second. Kevin has helped to turn that structure on its head, and now the first thing I advise any language learner to do is to put the textbook away and get on italki. My own language capabilities have benefited as a result of Kevin's example. Yesterday I had satisfying conversations in three languages, and today I had my first Spanish class over Skype.
Today I also helped my step-daughter with her French homework - conjugating verbs. She was bored almost to tears by it, and says she 'hates' French. It makes me terribly sad that so many kids in the UK are being put off the magnificent experience of learning to communicate in another language. I honestly think there is nothing equivalent to the rush of having a successful conversation in another tongue. At least, as adults, we don't have to repeat the awful experiences of language learning at school. Get on italki, book a half-hour trial lesson (Spanish costs as little as £3 for 30 minutes) and then tell me I'm wrong.
3 comments:
So true! One may also try find some local social networks, like WeChat for Chinese, VK.com for Russian speaking, Twety for Spanish speaking,etc or just finding random friends on Facebook to try raugh conversation with the natives in real life situation without a help of a tutor, it worked great for me.
Great post! Thanks for alerting me to italki.
Kevin's approach is exciting because it mimics the experience of total immersion in the native culture, but allows you to stay at home!
As someone who learned two languages using the crude but effective tactic of moving to countries where those languages were spoken, then harnessing my frustration at being unable to communicate as a necessary lash, Kevin's approach seems to offer a kinder, gentler, half-way house.
Thanks Douglas, I've now moved to Japan and I'm still learning on italki. I had in mind that I'd lived and worked in France for three summers in a row and learned pretty much diddlysquat (to use the technical term) of French because I quickly learned that I could get away with the time honoured tradition of speaking English slower and louder, "CUP OF TEA PLEEEEEEAASE". Also, when living in another country, I'm always more interested in going out and doing stuff rather than sitting around learning a language. So learning a language outside of the country where it's spoken became something of a right of passage. I'd made a promise to myself that 'I won't move to Japan until I'm confident that I can speak the language enough to be sociable.'
Anyway, I'm pleased to report that having learned enough Japanese to be 'conversational', my first month in Japan has been fantastic. One night I even chatted away in Japanese for a couple of hours. It seems like I'm not doing as much sitting around learning, but plenty of moving around understanding the gist of conversations around me. I think that might be the hurdle that I'd never have overcome if I'd not learned so much before arriving.
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