Teachers
Everyone agrees that there are good physicians and bad
physicians. That difference can be vital – your health is at stake,
and sometimes your life. With languages, the stakes are
evidently more humble, but still considerable. Learning
languages is time-consuming, and we are reluctant to put our
precious time and motivation into the hands of bad teachers.
It is beyond the purpose of this short introduction to shed an
unfavourable light on deficient language teachers, but let me
nonetheless warn you about two types you might wish to avoid.
The first group comprises teachers who do not really know what
they are doing, as language teaching is one of the rare
professional activities where people are allowed to teach a
process which they haven’t experienced themselves. When a
surgeon teaches a colleague how to perform a cardiac bypass
operation, he has done this type of operation hundreds of times.
See one, do one, teach one – this rule is sacrosanct in most
disciplines, but not in language teaching. If you book a vacation
to attend English classes in private schools in London or French
classes in Paris or Spanish classes in Seville, the odds are
substantial that your teachers will have a perfect knowledge of
one, but only one language – their own – and will themselves
never have been through the rough process of mastering
another language. The risk of encountering such ‘monoglot’
teachers is particularly high in English-speaking countries.
Spontaneously, a series of questions come to mind: Do these
teachers know what it means to absorb 5,000 to 15,000 words?
Can they imagine how it feels to nail 20 to 50 new words into
your brain every day? Do they have the faintest idea of how
demanding it is to penetrate the dense thicket of high-speed
human speech? Do they simply presage the thrill of discovering a
new language? In summary, do they have an appropriate
comprehension of the complications and implications of
language learning? They probably don’t. So if your language
classes in Paris, London, Berlin, or Seville, are meant to be more
than meeting and mingling opportunities with people from all
over the world, make sure that your teachers are polyglots. You
wouldn’t want to take sex lessons from nuns and priests.
The second group of teachers you should avoid are those who
do their job because they didn’t get the job they wanted. Their
first choice was perhaps to be a musician, a philosopher, or a
writer. But life is unpredictable, dreams don’t always
materialise, and in order to make a living, some people accept
the role of a language teacher. After a short period of
frustration, most of these ‘against-their-will’ teachers will settle
into their new life and excel in their profession. However, a
minority do not, and will lack the essential skills for teaching a
language: energy and enthusiasm. While in other professionals,
for example real estate agent, woodcutter, or mortician, a lack of
enthusiasm may be irrelevant, in teaching it is not. Don’t be
content with anything less than passionate and wholehearted
teachers. You have decided to become fluent in another
language, you are ready to invest years, and your desire is to
achieve the most. Frustrated teachers are infectious individuals
who could contaminate what is one of your most valuable
resources: motivation. Protect it. In order to get a clearer picture of language teaching and,
consequently, of how to avoid bored and boring teachers, let’s
address a list of the services teachers should provide.
Traditionally, language teachers trained and checked six core
competences: vocabulary, understanding of speech, production
of speech, reading, writing, and grammar. As we have seen in the
Words chapter, vocabulary training is inherently a lonely job
because nobody except yourself can transfer thousands of words
into your brain. In what is the most important single task of
language learning, teachers can do nothing for you.
The second most important task is speech recognition. Until
relatively recently, language teachers were often the only
individuals at hand to produce human speech in another
language. That has changed radically. In modern times, human
speech is ubiquitous, at every corner of your life and in any
language you want. As a consequence, audio CDs, audio books,
internet news, and TV have supplanted teachers as prime speech
sources.
The impact of teachers on the third, fourth and fifth tasks –
speaking, reading, and writing – is equally limited. Writing
comes as a bonus of reading, reading as a bonus of word
learning, and as you will see in the Speaking chapter, correct
pronunciation comes as a bonus of hundreds of hours of
listening. Grammar is therefore the only domain where language
teachers will continue to play a certain role in the future.
Grammar – the climax of excruciatingly boring language
lessons, and a torture for teens? As an adult, please consider
grammar rehabilitation. Grammar consists of a fairly limited
number of rules that tell you how to modify words and how to
arrange them to form correct and beautiful sentences. More
importantly, a big chunk of grammar – verbs such as to talk, to
love, to play, etc. – can be outsourced to pure memory exercises,
which reduces the duration of pure grammar lessons even further. As these verbs are immensely important in some
languages, let’s dedicate a couple of pages to it.
Verbs usually denote action (learn, listen, read), occurrence
(forget, decompose), or a state of being (love, exist). To English
native-speakers, they do not seem impressive because, with the
exception of a small number of irregular verbs such as go-wentgone,
write-wrote-written, etc., the English verb system is
disarmingly simple. All we can press out of to want are two
variations, wants and wanted. Just put a few auxiliaries around
them – have, shall, and will – and you will have created all the
tenses and moods you need.
Other languages are more complicated. The Italian equivalent,
volere, needs 6 different forms... just for the present tense:
I want voglio
you want vuoi
he/she/it wants vuole
we want vogliamo
you want volete
they want vogliono
And this is only the beginning. Dig deeper into volere, and you
rapidly discover a whole nest of descendants: volevo, volevi,
voleva, volevamo, volevate, volevano, volli, volesti, volle, volemmo,
voleste, vollero, vorrรฒ, vorrai, vorra, vorremo, vorrete, vorranno, vorrei,
vorresti, vorrebbe, vorremmo, vorreste, vorrebbero, voglia, vogliano,
volessi, volesse, volessimo, voleste, volessero. Surprise: verbs are
icebergs, and what you see in dictionaries, for example ‘baciare –
to kiss’, ‘volere – to want’, ‘fare’ – to do’, ‘andare – to go’, are just
the tips. Fortunately, there are strict rules which govern verbs (a
discipline which grammarians call ‘conjugation’); and with the
exception of some irregular verbs, all variations of a verb can be easily deduced. Unfortunately, easily does not mean fast, and
lack of speed is disastrous for fluent understanding and fluent
speaking. The solution? The same repetitive training as in word
training: repeated exposure, and heavy nailing. With an
additional ‘word load’ of generally below 1,000, this will not
demand more than 50 hours of extra training. Search the
Internet for free software. Free verb training for German,
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French is available at
http://poliglottus.com/verbs.htm.
Now that you have outsourced the study of verb forms to
autonomous learning, grammar per se shrinks to a set of about 30
problems to settle. If you followed my prescriptions in the first
chapters – 1) Learn 20 or more new words per day; 2) Listen to
human speech for at least one hour per day – all I would ask you
at this point is to rapidly assemble the knowledge that is needed
to recognise the most frequent grammatical structures. Just
recognising grammar requires 10 times less training than
producing grammar. Even allowing for a few tricky rules, you
will be electrified to acquire these passive skills in a few weeks
and to discover that grammar is a fairly manageable thing. You
will be happy to learn:
how to use nouns (boy, girl), adjectives (tall, small, pretty),
verb tenses (I go, I went, I have gone, I shall go, etc.), and a
limited number of pronouns (I, you, he, she, me, him, her,
my, your, his; to name only a few);
the order in which to arrange the words in a sentence;
how to count and to ask questions;
how to localise things in time and space.
Important advice: Make sure that you receive grammar lessons
in your native language. Reject all ‘monoglot’ proposals such as
being taught Spanish grammar by a Spanish teacher who has
never learned another language. Don’t complicate your life. Your native language is by far the best tool for grasping and
understanding new concepts.
Let me narrate an episode that most clearly gives the tone of
future grammar teaching. The star of the tale is T. K., a friend
from medical school who is now a professor of immunology at a
German university. Many years ago, T. came to visit me in
Sardinia and prepare part of his final medical exams. After
studying surgery textbooks for five hours per day, he accepted
the challenge of adding another three hours of intensive Italian
lessons. As I had just developed a small piece of software on the
mythical Commodore 64 (see the subsequent Internet release at
www.Poliglottus.com), I was happy to test it on a complaisant
guinea pig. As T. had learned both French and Latin at school,
the prescription for the 3-week course went as follows:
1,300 words + 10 tenses for 16 verbs + a 10 hour grammar
overview on two subsequent days. The grammar lessons were
focused on simple recognition of the most relevant grammatical
structures. As expected, T. produced only rudimentary Italian
sentences at the end of his learning vacation; however, he was
now able to decipher a newspaper. The experiment nicely
showed the feasibility of a fast introduction to grammar, and
also opened the perspective of reading newspapers or
magazines, which is clearly more enjoyable and motivating than
reading language manuals.
Now that grammar teaching will slowly shift away from snailpace
speed to repetitive rounds of ultra-fast overviews, let us try
and redefine the part that teachers can play in your language
project. In today’s environment, the best role for a language
teacher is probably that of a coach. Depending on your previous
exposure to your native and subsequent languages, your coach
will prepare an individual time schedule for your project;
recommend books, podcasts, audio books, and broadcasts;
provide the first round of grammar; advise you on how to
manage your daily word quota; teach you how to check that new words have arrived in your long-term memory; and demonstrate
common pronunciation pitfalls. For the first few weeks, you
should plan daily encounters or two or three lessons per week.
Thereafter, reduce to weekly encounters. Finally, after the third
or fourth month, one or two meetings per month will be
sufficient. During the entire course, check the motivating power
of your coach. If you have the feeling that he doesn’t motivate
you or, worse, makes you feel like a donkey, fire him.
Finding good coaches can be more difficult than finding good
doctors, because the reputation of teachers is less transparent:
doctors operate occluded heart vessels in hours and treat
syphilis within weeks. Hence, successes and failures are rapidly
visible, which is not the case for language teachers. But doctors
and teachers have a common trait: overmedication. Many
doctors will prescribe antihypertensives, statins, or antibiotics –
to name just a few – even in situations where reduction of
weight, diet change, or bed rest, would be equally appropriate.
Most doctors neglect prevention. Instead of insisting on banning
tobacco, soft drinks, or heavily salted prepared meals, they again
prescribe drugs. The reason is simple: as a doctor, you earn more
money prescribing drugs than advocating a healthy lifestyle. In
terms of the workload:income ratio, the best patients are
asymptomatic and relatively healthy patients with a chronic
condition (diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension) who need to
renew their prescription every month for the rest of their life.
Do you see the parallel with language teachers? In any case,
reject ‘overteaching’.
Let us summarise:
1. Avoid bored and boring teachers.
2. Insist on an initial quick grammar overview. Grammar is not
a black hole. The number of problems you need to resolve is
finite. Opt for the coach model and limit the number of lessons.
First month: 10-20 lessons; second and third month: 4
lessons; fourth month and later: 1 to 2 lessons.
4. Make sure that your coach explains the grammar in your
native language.
After leaving behind the complex topic of language teachers, you
will cautiously approach your next step: producing intelligible
sounds in your new language. Learning, listening, reading –
hundreds of hours, thousands of words. If you followed my
advice to study in silence, time has passed. Now the day has
come where you want to express yourself. Speaking is
fundamental to humans. Do it.
TheWordBrain2015
Everyone agrees that there are good physicians and bad
physicians. That difference can be vital – your health is at stake,
and sometimes your life. With languages, the stakes are
evidently more humble, but still considerable. Learning
languages is time-consuming, and we are reluctant to put our
precious time and motivation into the hands of bad teachers.
It is beyond the purpose of this short introduction to shed an
unfavourable light on deficient language teachers, but let me
nonetheless warn you about two types you might wish to avoid.
The first group comprises teachers who do not really know what
they are doing, as language teaching is one of the rare
professional activities where people are allowed to teach a
process which they haven’t experienced themselves. When a
surgeon teaches a colleague how to perform a cardiac bypass
operation, he has done this type of operation hundreds of times.
See one, do one, teach one – this rule is sacrosanct in most
disciplines, but not in language teaching. If you book a vacation
to attend English classes in private schools in London or French
classes in Paris or Spanish classes in Seville, the odds are
substantial that your teachers will have a perfect knowledge of
one, but only one language – their own – and will themselves
never have been through the rough process of mastering
another language. The risk of encountering such ‘monoglot’
teachers is particularly high in English-speaking countries.
Spontaneously, a series of questions come to mind: Do these
teachers know what it means to absorb 5,000 to 15,000 words?
Can they imagine how it feels to nail 20 to 50 new words into
your brain every day? Do they have the faintest idea of how
demanding it is to penetrate the dense thicket of high-speed
human speech? Do they simply presage the thrill of discovering a
new language? In summary, do they have an appropriate
comprehension of the complications and implications of
language learning? They probably don’t. So if your language
classes in Paris, London, Berlin, or Seville, are meant to be more
than meeting and mingling opportunities with people from all
over the world, make sure that your teachers are polyglots. You
wouldn’t want to take sex lessons from nuns and priests.
The second group of teachers you should avoid are those who
do their job because they didn’t get the job they wanted. Their
first choice was perhaps to be a musician, a philosopher, or a
writer. But life is unpredictable, dreams don’t always
materialise, and in order to make a living, some people accept
the role of a language teacher. After a short period of
frustration, most of these ‘against-their-will’ teachers will settle
into their new life and excel in their profession. However, a
minority do not, and will lack the essential skills for teaching a
language: energy and enthusiasm. While in other professionals,
for example real estate agent, woodcutter, or mortician, a lack of
enthusiasm may be irrelevant, in teaching it is not. Don’t be
content with anything less than passionate and wholehearted
teachers. You have decided to become fluent in another
language, you are ready to invest years, and your desire is to
achieve the most. Frustrated teachers are infectious individuals
who could contaminate what is one of your most valuable
resources: motivation. Protect it. In order to get a clearer picture of language teaching and,
consequently, of how to avoid bored and boring teachers, let’s
address a list of the services teachers should provide.
Traditionally, language teachers trained and checked six core
competences: vocabulary, understanding of speech, production
of speech, reading, writing, and grammar. As we have seen in the
Words chapter, vocabulary training is inherently a lonely job
because nobody except yourself can transfer thousands of words
into your brain. In what is the most important single task of
language learning, teachers can do nothing for you.
The second most important task is speech recognition. Until
relatively recently, language teachers were often the only
individuals at hand to produce human speech in another
language. That has changed radically. In modern times, human
speech is ubiquitous, at every corner of your life and in any
language you want. As a consequence, audio CDs, audio books,
internet news, and TV have supplanted teachers as prime speech
sources.
The impact of teachers on the third, fourth and fifth tasks –
speaking, reading, and writing – is equally limited. Writing
comes as a bonus of reading, reading as a bonus of word
learning, and as you will see in the Speaking chapter, correct
pronunciation comes as a bonus of hundreds of hours of
listening. Grammar is therefore the only domain where language
teachers will continue to play a certain role in the future.
Grammar – the climax of excruciatingly boring language
lessons, and a torture for teens? As an adult, please consider
grammar rehabilitation. Grammar consists of a fairly limited
number of rules that tell you how to modify words and how to
arrange them to form correct and beautiful sentences. More
importantly, a big chunk of grammar – verbs such as to talk, to
love, to play, etc. – can be outsourced to pure memory exercises,
which reduces the duration of pure grammar lessons even further. As these verbs are immensely important in some
languages, let’s dedicate a couple of pages to it.
Verbs usually denote action (learn, listen, read), occurrence
(forget, decompose), or a state of being (love, exist). To English
native-speakers, they do not seem impressive because, with the
exception of a small number of irregular verbs such as go-wentgone,
write-wrote-written, etc., the English verb system is
disarmingly simple. All we can press out of to want are two
variations, wants and wanted. Just put a few auxiliaries around
them – have, shall, and will – and you will have created all the
tenses and moods you need.
Other languages are more complicated. The Italian equivalent,
volere, needs 6 different forms... just for the present tense:
I want voglio
you want vuoi
he/she/it wants vuole
we want vogliamo
you want volete
they want vogliono
And this is only the beginning. Dig deeper into volere, and you
rapidly discover a whole nest of descendants: volevo, volevi,
voleva, volevamo, volevate, volevano, volli, volesti, volle, volemmo,
voleste, vollero, vorrรฒ, vorrai, vorra, vorremo, vorrete, vorranno, vorrei,
vorresti, vorrebbe, vorremmo, vorreste, vorrebbero, voglia, vogliano,
volessi, volesse, volessimo, voleste, volessero. Surprise: verbs are
icebergs, and what you see in dictionaries, for example ‘baciare –
to kiss’, ‘volere – to want’, ‘fare’ – to do’, ‘andare – to go’, are just
the tips. Fortunately, there are strict rules which govern verbs (a
discipline which grammarians call ‘conjugation’); and with the
exception of some irregular verbs, all variations of a verb can be easily deduced. Unfortunately, easily does not mean fast, and
lack of speed is disastrous for fluent understanding and fluent
speaking. The solution? The same repetitive training as in word
training: repeated exposure, and heavy nailing. With an
additional ‘word load’ of generally below 1,000, this will not
demand more than 50 hours of extra training. Search the
Internet for free software. Free verb training for German,
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French is available at
http://poliglottus.com/verbs.htm.
Now that you have outsourced the study of verb forms to
autonomous learning, grammar per se shrinks to a set of about 30
problems to settle. If you followed my prescriptions in the first
chapters – 1) Learn 20 or more new words per day; 2) Listen to
human speech for at least one hour per day – all I would ask you
at this point is to rapidly assemble the knowledge that is needed
to recognise the most frequent grammatical structures. Just
recognising grammar requires 10 times less training than
producing grammar. Even allowing for a few tricky rules, you
will be electrified to acquire these passive skills in a few weeks
and to discover that grammar is a fairly manageable thing. You
will be happy to learn:
how to use nouns (boy, girl), adjectives (tall, small, pretty),
verb tenses (I go, I went, I have gone, I shall go, etc.), and a
limited number of pronouns (I, you, he, she, me, him, her,
my, your, his; to name only a few);
the order in which to arrange the words in a sentence;
how to count and to ask questions;
how to localise things in time and space.
Important advice: Make sure that you receive grammar lessons
in your native language. Reject all ‘monoglot’ proposals such as
being taught Spanish grammar by a Spanish teacher who has
never learned another language. Don’t complicate your life. Your native language is by far the best tool for grasping and
understanding new concepts.
Let me narrate an episode that most clearly gives the tone of
future grammar teaching. The star of the tale is T. K., a friend
from medical school who is now a professor of immunology at a
German university. Many years ago, T. came to visit me in
Sardinia and prepare part of his final medical exams. After
studying surgery textbooks for five hours per day, he accepted
the challenge of adding another three hours of intensive Italian
lessons. As I had just developed a small piece of software on the
mythical Commodore 64 (see the subsequent Internet release at
www.Poliglottus.com), I was happy to test it on a complaisant
guinea pig. As T. had learned both French and Latin at school,
the prescription for the 3-week course went as follows:
1,300 words + 10 tenses for 16 verbs + a 10 hour grammar
overview on two subsequent days. The grammar lessons were
focused on simple recognition of the most relevant grammatical
structures. As expected, T. produced only rudimentary Italian
sentences at the end of his learning vacation; however, he was
now able to decipher a newspaper. The experiment nicely
showed the feasibility of a fast introduction to grammar, and
also opened the perspective of reading newspapers or
magazines, which is clearly more enjoyable and motivating than
reading language manuals.
Now that grammar teaching will slowly shift away from snailpace
speed to repetitive rounds of ultra-fast overviews, let us try
and redefine the part that teachers can play in your language
project. In today’s environment, the best role for a language
teacher is probably that of a coach. Depending on your previous
exposure to your native and subsequent languages, your coach
will prepare an individual time schedule for your project;
recommend books, podcasts, audio books, and broadcasts;
provide the first round of grammar; advise you on how to
manage your daily word quota; teach you how to check that new words have arrived in your long-term memory; and demonstrate
common pronunciation pitfalls. For the first few weeks, you
should plan daily encounters or two or three lessons per week.
Thereafter, reduce to weekly encounters. Finally, after the third
or fourth month, one or two meetings per month will be
sufficient. During the entire course, check the motivating power
of your coach. If you have the feeling that he doesn’t motivate
you or, worse, makes you feel like a donkey, fire him.
Finding good coaches can be more difficult than finding good
doctors, because the reputation of teachers is less transparent:
doctors operate occluded heart vessels in hours and treat
syphilis within weeks. Hence, successes and failures are rapidly
visible, which is not the case for language teachers. But doctors
and teachers have a common trait: overmedication. Many
doctors will prescribe antihypertensives, statins, or antibiotics –
to name just a few – even in situations where reduction of
weight, diet change, or bed rest, would be equally appropriate.
Most doctors neglect prevention. Instead of insisting on banning
tobacco, soft drinks, or heavily salted prepared meals, they again
prescribe drugs. The reason is simple: as a doctor, you earn more
money prescribing drugs than advocating a healthy lifestyle. In
terms of the workload:income ratio, the best patients are
asymptomatic and relatively healthy patients with a chronic
condition (diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension) who need to
renew their prescription every month for the rest of their life.
Do you see the parallel with language teachers? In any case,
reject ‘overteaching’.
Let us summarise:
1. Avoid bored and boring teachers.
2. Insist on an initial quick grammar overview. Grammar is not
a black hole. The number of problems you need to resolve is
finite. Opt for the coach model and limit the number of lessons.
First month: 10-20 lessons; second and third month: 4
lessons; fourth month and later: 1 to 2 lessons.
4. Make sure that your coach explains the grammar in your
native language.
After leaving behind the complex topic of language teachers, you
will cautiously approach your next step: producing intelligible
sounds in your new language. Learning, listening, reading –
hundreds of hours, thousands of words. If you followed my
advice to study in silence, time has passed. Now the day has
come where you want to express yourself. Speaking is
fundamental to humans. Do it.
TheWordBrain2015
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