It's pretty rare for a language-learning tool to annoy me enough that I feel the need to write a post about it. But Grammarly has managed to do just that.
I saw Grammarly recently advertised on some language-learning site I was on. It's supposed to automatically check English-language text for grammar and other various mistakes. I thought it sounded interesting, so I clicked through the ad. On their home page, I see this big welcoming button telling me to "Get Started Now!", and noting in little tiny letters below that no registration is required.
"No registration required? Great!", I thought, and clicked on the button.
Watch me get annoyed by, receive an email from, and then write an email back to Grammarly, after the jump.
Read more...On the next page, you're asked to "Copy and paste your text here, then press 'Start Review'". So I put some purposefully mutilated English text to see what would happen. Grammarly appears to run its correction algorithm on your text, and then they give you this little gem:
So "no registration required" but I've got to "sign up now" to see the corrections? This was probably the point at which I should have cut and run, but curiousity led me on. I gave them a name, an email and a password, thinking that'd be enough. But, oh no, once they got that, here's what I was faced with...
OK, now maybe they were going to say that "registering" isn't the same as "signing up", but I'm pretty sure that "creating an account" is definitely "registering". I'd been duped into providing an email address, and I wasn't going to get to see how good their corrections were without paying up.
Now that was of course the point at which I ditched out. They had an email of mine, but I didn't see an easy way to delete it from the system so I just left, hoping they would leave me alone.
But no. Not content to leave bad enough alone, I got this email earlier today:
Hi Street-Smart Language Learning,
I'd like to follow up with you on your interest in Grammarly writing support tool. You recently tried to sign up for an account on www.grammarly.com, but never completed it.
Maybe the requirement of an upfront payment was a problem for you, in which case I'd like to offer you a 7-day Money Back Guarantee on your subscription. If you are not completely satisfied with Grammarly, just contact me within 7-day period and I will refund your full subscription amount. I am confident you'll enjoy Grammarly's breakthrough grammar and plagiarism checking functionality, and would like you to enjoy complete peace of mind in the registration process.
Grammarly is the world-leading writing support solution. Serving over 500,000 users at hundreds of leading colleges and universities worldwide, Grammarly is now available for individual licensing. With such groundbreaking features as 150+ grammar checks, plagiarism detection, vocabulary enhancement and contextual spell check, Grammarly is the ultimate solution for all your writing needs.
I'm also happy to help with any other enquiries you might have regarding Grammarly features, support questions and the like.
Looking forward to hearing from you, Greg Carpets
_____________________________ Greg Carpets Individual Account Support Grammarly 1(888)318-6146 *****@grammarly.com http://www.grammarly.com
I thought I'd write back to Greg with a little constructive criticism, so I sent him this email:
Hi Greg,
I did indeed previously have some interest in the Grammarly writing support tool. I write a blog called Street-Smart Language Learning, and I thought that your service might be useful for some of my English-learning readers.
However, I never intended to sign up for an account on www.grammarly.com. Your home page contains a big orange button stating that I can "Get started now!" with "No registration required", which I believe most reasonable visitors would take to mean "Get started using Grammarly now!" without actually needing to register. So when Grammarly subsequently asked me to "Sign up now" before showing the results of my correction, I foolishly provided my email only to be told that I needed to create a paid account before being able to see my corrections. Apparently, Grammarly's understanding of "Get started now!" with "No registration required" means "Get started after you register and pay up".
The requirement of an upfront payment would not be a problem for me—if you were upfront about it. Indeed, there is no obvious information about any required payment on your website until after I've (1) clicked on the misleading "Get started now!" button, (2) entered some text to get corrected, (3) clicked on the "Sign up now" link, and (4) entered my sign-up information. Only then am I granted the privilege of being told that I'll need to shell out money to even see the small piece of text I submitted for corrections just to see how well your system works.
So it is safe to say that I am not satisfied with Grammarly at all without needing any 7-day period to review it further, which is a shame because my impression is that your actual product is pretty decent.
Moreover, it's my understanding that Applied Linguistics LLC is a California limited liability company, which means that Applied Linguistics LLC is subject to the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act that regulates commercial email. Now, I'm no expert on the CAN-SPAM Act, but based on this page on the FTC's website, I think emails like the one below need to provide a "clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future". Since you have not so provided, let me just make it clear; I do not want to receive any email from you in the future and hereby opt out from all such mailings. Furthermore, please delete all of my information from your database immediately.
As I noted in my message to Greg, this is really a pity because what they're doing does look pretty cool (can you imagine if Lang-8 had an automatic grammar checker that took care of most things before native speakers even needed to get involved?), and it might even be worth some money to English learners. That said, I can't put a good word in for them until they start treating their potential customers with more honesty.
The back-and-forth actually led me to think that we're a bit closer in our approaches than my earlier post suggested, so I thought I'd pull together all of the relevant comments into one place and then offer some further comparisons of our methods, making use of a few rough graphs. The fun begins, after the jump.
Read more...There's quite a chunk of text that Steve and I generated in the comments, so if you want to skip all that and get right to the (much briefer) comparison of our methods, click here. Otherwise, let's dive into the discussion.
First, you might want to take a look at the post that started it all.
I read your post and I am sorry but it makes no sense to me. I find that I cannot get the grammar rules into my head without first getting the exposure. … Input and vocabulary over grammar rules, anytime, at least in my experience.
Feeling like I hadn't quite explained myself well enough, I replied:
First I should probably be clearer about what it means to "get it in your head". I don't mean that you need to have it mastered, or that you need to have it memorized. I completely agree that that will most easily happen after lots of exposure. But anyone who picks up a grammar and reads that "estar" becomes "estoy" when "yo" is the subject already has it in their head to some degree, and that's the minimum you'd need to do to get it in your head. As I'm sure you're not saying that you can't get that in your head, I presume we're talking about different things.
The language in which I'm closest to the degree of accuracy that I seek is Japanese. … I would presume that your argument here would be that the input I'm getting is leading to my improved grammar, and I won't disagree that that's contributing, but whenever I come across something that doesn't fit into my understanding of how Japanese grammar works (extremely polite forms that I'm not accustomed to using come to mind), I dig until I understand how the rule works. That makes it much easier to understand it a second time. If I didn't get it the first time and didn't look it up, the second exposure would just be another puzzle.
And I'm definitely not saying that grammar is the only thing you focus on. When I've employed my approach, it typically takes me two or three weeks before I'm hardly spending any time on grammar at all. So you say "input and vocabulary over grammar rules", and I say "spend a few weeks getting the grammar into your head, then exposure and vocabulary over grammar rules".
… I think another point where you and I differ is that I think you should systematically try to fix your grammar, whereas my understanding of your approach is to just get it as it comes to you via input, filling in the gaps when you feel like it. (Correct me if that's wrong.)
I constantly refer to grammar books, a little at the beginning and thereafter quite often reading the same rule or looking at the same table. I do not try to nail anything down. Eventually it all sticks. I have always said so. It is just that my point of emphasis is input.
I am actually quite accurate in my use of language, and constantly try to get more accurate. Expanding vocabulary is one of the best ways of achieving greater accuracy.
I'm beginning to wonder if our positions on grammar are closer than I originally thought. Let me ask you a few questions:
1. When you start a language, how and to what extent do you review the grammar? 2. When you encounter grammar you don't understand, how and to what extent do you systematically try to figure it out? Every time? Sometimes? 3. What do you do when whatever you do in 2 is taking a very long time to stick in your head? (German cases are an instance of this for me; I needed (and, thanks to not using German frequently, now again need) to take steps beyond just getting exposed to them and reviewing my grammars to get them down.)
1) I have never started a language with LingQ. I have usually bought a little starter book Teach Yourself, or Colloquial and followed it, and then moved on to other content. I tend to skim the explanations and devour the little dialogues. I then refer back to the book from time to time. I do not try to understand or remember the explanations. In future, if the language is Dutch, or Czech or a language related to one I already know, I think I will just dive in, and only refer to grammar explanations later. If it is Turkish, I may still start with the starter book and CD and do LingQ in parallel.
2) Rarely look things up. It is usually when I am writing or speaking that I will look up a declension table of something. On the other hand, I will from time to time review a short grammar book, to see if things make more sense. I do not retain much, but I think it helps to make me more attentive.
3) When I was studying German on my own, I spent a fair amount of time trying to get the declension tables into my head. I was unsuccessful and now rely on having heard it so often and hope for the best. The same with Russian. I do save phrases in LingQ which feature the cases that cause trouble. I have tagged words and phrases for their case endings and reviewed them as a batch. I try to be attentive to these. I occasionally review the tables but find that the benefits are very short term. Mostly I try to notice them while listening and reading and hope for the best when I speak.
First, here's how time is spent on grammar under my method, as explained here:
And this is my understanding of how it's spent under Steve's method:
So Steve spends a little time at the beginning with some introductory materials. He then refers back to grammar as necessary, with exposure to the language (in particular, reading and listening) being his main source of exposure to grammar rules. He also engages in a similar refinement effort. However, because that is his main source of solidifying the rules outside of exposure, the amount of grammar time spent on that declines more slowly that it does under my method. Under both methods, it will eventually go down to next to nothing, but it will take longer under Steve's method to get to that point.
Accordingly, here's a rough comparison of the grammar understanding generated by the two methods (assuming that the average native speaker's knowledge of grammar is 100%):
Under both methods, an initial review of materials will quickly establish some basic understanding, but from there the level of understanding diverges.
Under my method, you get a large initial jump by outlining your grammar. This will cause a lot of it to stick. Not all of it, of course, but because you are actively processing the information, it is a much stronger form of exposure than the passive grammar reviews that Steve primarily relies on.
From there, both methods rely on a refinement process. Steve frequently consults grammars while I use my own refinement process only as necessary. Both processes result in a gradual approaching of a native speaker's grammar level, but because of the boost the outlining gave under my method, my method will get you there more quickly. Steve's method will of course get you there too, but it will just take more time.
In the post that started this whole discussion, I wrote that Steve's method won't lead you to the same level of accuracy in your grammar. However, given enough time and enough checking with grammar books, as Steve does, I think Steve's method can take you to at least an equal level of accuracy. The issue, again, is that I think this will take more time.
Thus, I think Steve's method will work if you've got both the time and the commitment to continuously get regular exposure to a language over a very long period of time. Many language learners can't or don't do that, so I would be wary about recommending Steve's approach to grammar. My approach on the other hand, will lead to a greater understanding more quickly, and can be put to good use when time is limited. After this comparison, I’m left with one question that I’d love to have answered: how much more time would Steve’s method take to reach accuracy parity with my method? Although I think the time difference is significant, I don’t have a good basis on which to make any guesstimates.
As a final note, and one that I’ve mentioned before when comparing my approach to Steve’s, I think our varying approaches very much reflect our varying goals in language learning. Steve main focus is to enjoy content in the language, while my aim is more centered on being able to use my languages at work, which means I need to try to get more accurate more quickly for output purposes than a nearly all-input method would allow.
Extracted from the current manuscript of the book, to the right you'll find the meat of how my preferred method for learning grammar works, in convenient flow chart format.
As with learning any piece of knowledge, you'll learn a grammar rule best through spaced repetitions. As such, through much trial and much (much, much, much...) error, I've found that combining a wide variety of repetitions works best. Although the repetitions do not have any systematic spacing based on a forgetting curve as spaced-repetition systems are supposed to, there should be enough repetitions here to get the rules in your head.
Let's take a walk through that flow chart, after the jump.
Read more...First, let's look at the big picture. The first three steps get you started in developing an understanding of the grammar. These steps are front-loaded in the process and can typically be taken care of in a few weeks (if you're going to the language zone, they are also good things to do before you get there). The next two steps move onto exposure, which is by far where you'll be spending most of your time. Finally, the last four steps allow you to refine your grammar to cover things that haven't already clicked, but you only need to proceed to those steps as necessary. The flowchart then always turns you back to exposure.
The above graph is an approximation of how you'll be spending your "grammar time". So what exactly do I mean by "grammar time"?
No, not quite.
It's the time you spend getting repetitions of grammar. When you're just getting started, most of those repetitions—and thus your grammar time—will come from you reading and working through the grammar, with some exposure to the same from the other things you're doing in the language. From there on, most of your reps will come from exposure, and you'll also spend a gradually decreasing amount of time refining your grammar, until finally you're spending virtually no time at all focusing solely on grammar.
That's the big picture. Now let's run through each of the steps.
Reading through your grammar is just what it sounds like. Get the grammar in front of you and read through it. This should be a relatively quick read-through; don't get hung up if you don't get something right away. Try and get an idea of the rule and move on. You shouldn't spend more than, say, 5-10 hours doing this (and you can probably get away with doing even less). This read-through will give you your first repetition—a relatively weak reading rep—of all the grammar rules.
Then we get to outlining. What exactly do I mean by outlining? Taking the grammar you see in front of you (another reading rep of the grammar rules), trying to make sense of it (an analysis rep, which will cause the rules to more readily stick in your head than mere reading reps), and then outputting it into a Word document or the like (a writing rep) in a way that makes sense to you (be sure to include plenty of tables, charts, etc.). The document you produce should be a raw and bare explanation of the rules, using example sentences and the like only when absolutely necessary.
The outlining step will typically take some time, but you should be able to get through it in several weeks (if you're studying the language full time, make that 2, maybe 3, weeks, assuming of course that you're doing other stuff as well; if you dive into an outline non-stop, I'll bet you can kill it off in less than a week, although I've always preferred mixing things up a bit more than that). If it's taking you a lot longer than that, you should reduce the level of detail you're putting into the outline. For anything that you ponder for, say, 10 minutes, and still don't get, mark it as a question in the outline and come back to it after you've covered everything else.
If you still don't get it after your second pass at it, it's time to ask a native speaker or a language-leanring forum. I often throw tricky questions to native speakers on Lang-8, and it's also common practice on italki. Some good forums include How to Learn Any Language and WordReference. These won't be able to do everything in every language, but there are of course plenty more forums to be had through a few simple searches. And feel free to ask any native speakers that might be nearby, as well. Once you get an answer from any of these sources, update your outline accordingly.
That takes us through getting started, and now it's on to exposure. This just means reading, listening, writing, and speaking the language. (Here's a little process for doing all four of those things using free, online tools.) This will get you exposure to the grammar in use, both passively (reading, listening) and actively (writing, speaking). While this requires little explanation, it will be by far the place where you get most of your grammar reps, with the goal of it ultimately being pretty much the only place where you get grammar reps.
Finally, we come to refining your grammar knowledge. If there's something you see or hear and don't understand, or if there's something you keep screwing up in writing or speaking, it either means that the grammar rule is new to you or that you've forgotten it. In either case, the refinement process will help you get the additional reps you need to burn the rule into your brain.
The first step is to simply review the problematic grammar in your outline (a reading rep). If you've already got the correct rule in there, review and get back to getting exposure. This will typically be the solution when you've merely forgotten the rule and just need a refresher.
On the other hand, if the rule was never in your outline, or you didn't really get it right the first time, then it's time to edit the outline. Add or fix the rule, as necessary, and get back to exposure.
If you don't get the rule, or think you've got it but still seem to be getting it wrong, it's probably time to turn to others for help. Just like above, native speakers and forum participants should be able to answer your questions.
As an absolute last resort, you can actually memorize problematic grammar. This means making grammar items in your spaced-repetition system. This should generally be unnecessary, but if you've found that you keep going through the refinement cycle without really getting the rule, this can help you finally nail it down.
And that's it. At the end of all this, the process should lead you to getting just about all of your grammar reps from exposure, with a very occasional dive into the refinement process.
OK, so I don't really think that output trumps input, but I thought I'd lead off with a contrarian title vis-à-vis Steve Kaufmann's post entitled Why input trumps output in language learning. Some amount of input necessarily needs to come before you can produce any output, but saying one trumps the other is like saying reading blogs trumps writing blogs; sure, you can learn a lot by reading blogs, but you'll only be getting your message out there once you start writing one. (And, incidentally, in either case, you'll be getting exposure to a language.)
The reason I went with a contrarian title was because, when I read Steve's post, I thought that most of his arguments for input learning could easily be changed to serve as arguments for getting into output sooner rather than later. Below I've edited Steve's post to show how easily those arguments can be turned in the other direction. I've tried to edit as little as possible. Some of the changes work better than others, and some even work surprisingly well, but they all go to my main point here, which is that early output is a good thing.
Read more...I've used red to mark text I deleted from Steve's post, while blue marks the text I added:
Some arguments in favor of outputinput. I am sure there are many more.
We need to start speakingunderstand before we can speak well.
I would rather communicate with people earlyunderstand well and stumble when I speak than communicate with people later and stumble lessthe reverse.
If we cannever pratice producing intelligible phrases and do not understand the answers, our conversations will not last long.
Passive vocabulary is powerful, necessary, and always much larger than our active vocabulary of the words we like to use, so we need to start working on active vocabulary early and frequently.
The more we can write and speakunderstand, and the more words we can use activelyhave, even passively, the more interesting our interaction with the language and the more words we can acquire.
If we can actively useunderstand most of the words in a text or conversation, it is easier to pick up the words and phrases we do not yet know than if we merely understood everything passively.
The ability to use activeacquisition of passive vocabulary through outputinput, is like putting the pieces of the jig-saw together. Gradually the picture of what we're trying to express becomes clearer.
OutputInput is easy to arrange. We can speaklisten and writeread anywhere and anytime.
See here for some ways that the internet makes output possible from anywhere, which of course includes Steve's own LingQ.
OutputInput is interesting, if we choose content that is meaningful to us.
If we develop the habit of producing outputinput learning, we become independent.
Being able to produce outputInput learning makes it easy to practicereview our languages, and maintain them.
Through producing outputinput learning, especially on topics we like writing and speaking aboutwith authentic content, we learn not only the language, but many more things.
At any time in our output producinginput learning activities, we can decide to listenspeak or readwrite, to practice what we can producehave learned.
Of course we need to speakread a lot in order to speak well, but. Our progress in speaking will be smoother if we invest time in outputinput, and continue doing so.
Our interaction with any language, including our own, is mostly as listeners and readers, so we need to make extra efforts to practice producing output.
If we are good speakerslisteners and writersreaders, our outputinput skills will have a sound base.
One of my goals in any language learning project is to have little difficulty in conveying complex ideas to native speakersread a full length book in that language. Getting there is a powerful moment of achievement, an Everest.
According to this Italian parody of a 60s/70s English-language pop song (via Fluent Every Year), it might just sound like gibberish...
I was about ready to write the English subtitles for that video, but who needs to add English subtitles to English-mimicking gibberish when you can add it to a completely foreign language?
One of the points of contention in the ongoing back-and-forth between Steve Kaufmann and Benny the Irish Polyglot is whether Benny can truly pull off fluency in three months. Specifically, Benny is in Berlin studying German right now and will deem himself fluent if he can pass a really hard German test and if he can fool native speakers for 30 seconds that he is a Berliner.
Sounding like a native and amassing enough vocab to pass a difficult exam is impossible IMHO. Senseless hype.
I can confidently state that this is not impossible; I myself did with Portuguese exactly what Benny is trying to do with German. (And that's not even getting into wunderkinds like Daniel Tammet.) That said, I'm doubtful that Benny can pull this off in Berlin because there are some very important differences between his situation in Germany and mine in Brazil that will make it a harder task for him to accomplish than it was for me.
Read more...The tourist visa I got to go to Brazil was for exactly 90 days, and I stayed for the entire 90 days. I had never formally studied any Portuguese before arriving in Brazil, and in fact the only thing close to studying I had done at that point was reading some parts of a Portuguese grammar book more than a year before arriving in Brazil. And that book was for the Portuguese of Portugal, so it had a number of things that were useless for me in Brazil.
On the other hand, my Spanish was pretty good. I had studied Spanish throughout middle school and high school, and had previously spent a month in Mexico studying it more. Spanish is of course not Portuguese, but they are so close that the benefit of knowing one when studying the other shouldn't be downplayed; knowing Spanish was without a doubt a massive help in learning Portuguese.
On top of that, I had a great learning environment. I was living with a large Brazilian host family and there was almost always someone around to talk with. I also had a Brazilian girlfriend with whom I was constantly speaking. I didn't need to do anything but study Portuguese, so except for the occasional emails in other languages to my friends abroad (which was further limited by the hassle of a dial-up connection I had to use), it was all Portuguese all the time for me.
In terms of what I was doing to learn Portuguese, the first two weeks or so I focused on getting an understanding of the grammar. Then I moved onto exposure: music, comics (Spawn, in particular), books (a history of the Roman Empire was one I spent a lot of time on, but there were a number of others as well), television (which was always on when I was doing anything else), etc.
Naturally, I spent a lot of time getting the vocab down. I still have my digital Portuguese flashcards as they were when I left Brazil. The flashcards contained some 4,000 vocabulary words and phrases. Add to those a few thousand words that never made it to flashcards (because they were so much like English or Spanish that there was no need to do anything to memorize them, or that I just managed to pick up elsewhere) or that got deleted from the set once I knew them, and I'd estimate that I had at least 6,000 to 7,000 words in my head to some degree when I left Brazil.
Using Benny' standard for fluency—fooling native speakers for at least 30 seconds that you are a native speaker yourself and passing a really hard test—I seemed to have been fluent in Portuguese after my three months there.
When I was leaving Brazil, I managed to fool the lady at the airport check-in that I was Brazilian. I can't recall if it was precisely 30 seconds, but I'd venture that it was. I remember that I had said a few things to her, including something about having already weighed my bags and that they shouldn't be overweight, before giving her my passport. Once I gave it to her, she said, "You're not Brazilian?" When I told her I was there studying Portuguese, she was shocked to find out I had only been there for three months. I'm guessing somewhere in the course of our conversation I eventually said something non-Brazilian sounding, but, based on her reaction to my passport, I do think I had her fooled at the beginning.
Regarding the test, I came back from Brazil and took my university's Portuguese placement exam. I got placed out of all the language-learning classes and straight into the literature classes (i.e., the ones where you might be sitting next to a native Brazilian). I think that my experience shows that three months can prepare you quite well for difficult tests.
However, I'm doubtful that Benny will be able to pull it off. If you compare my situation in Brazil to Benny's situation in Germany, there are a number of things that gave me a big advantage. First, my Spanish abilities made Portuguese so (so, so, so) much easier. Benny doesn't have anything comparable with respect to German. Second, the only thing I was doing was learning or using Portuguese, whereas Benny is working (presumably not in German) and blogging in English, and that is likely eating up a big chunk of his time. Third, my guess is that the test that Benny wants to take is a heckuva lot harder than the test I took, so I'm not so sure that he'll be able to pass it as easily as I was able to pass the one I took.
Indeed, the only advantage that Benny has over me is that he's studied some German previously, but, based on what Benny himself as said, that recollection is faint at best, although it will nevertheless provide some familiarity.
So while I'd love to see Benny do exactly what he's going for, if I were a gambling man, I'd definitely be betting against him pulling it off.
There are so many language-learning resources out there on the web, it's kind of tough to figure out how to make use of them all. In looking at how I'm using these tools myself, I put together the following little process to incorporate many of the language-learning tools I've been using into a single workflow:
Oh, and this workflow is completely free.
Let's walk through this, after the jump.
Read more...Start with reading and/or (but preferably and) listening to something in the target language. LingQ is all about content with both text and audio, so that's a good place to start looking, but you're hardly limited to LingQ; any recordings you can find with transcripts, unabridged audio books (including children's books), etc., will do the trick.
To the extent there's anything you don't understand in the text or audio, look it up and add it to your spaced-repetition system. Anki is my current SRS of choice, but some other popular choices are Smart.fm and Mnemosyne.
Then write something about what you read or listened to in the target language. Try to make use of whatever you needed to look up and add to your SRS, and to the extent that you need to look up anything else, add that to your SRS as well.
You've now written and read that writing. Now it's time for some plain old talking. Making use of everything you've learned thus far, record yourself saying something about the running theme and get that corrected in the same way you got the recording of your text corrected. Once again, if the corrections give you any thing that needs to go into your SRS, add it.
At this point, you should have everything you need to get in your SRS. Now go over to RhinoSpike and get native speakers to record the pronunciation of each of those words. Take those audio recordings and add them to your SRS system. From there, you just need to review your newly added items as part of your regular SRS review.
You've also got two things that you've recorded yourself: your corrected text and some plain old talking. Go to RhinoSpike again and get a recording of both from native speakers. Once you've got those recordings, add them to a playlist on iTunes and listen regularly. I'd recommend just throwing all of these recordings into a random-order playlist and listening to them in the background while doing other things. This will provide a review of all of the above.
This entire workflow can be tailored to your level. At the most basic level, you can even use children books; my kids have plenty of books that come with audio CDs in all three of their languages. But you don't necessarily need to dumb the text down; you can also just keep it short. For example, if you're just starting a language but want to read a news article, you could limit yourself to just the first paragraph. This will likely take a while, but it won't be insurmountable.
If you've got a way to make this workflow, I'd love to hear it!
This is the best our graphics department could do.
The great language-learning blogosphere battle of the day has been Steve "The Inputter" Kaufmann v. Benny "The Haxor". The latest salvo in this battle comes from Steve:
In my view, there are three divergent approaches to language learning, divergent in terms of their emphasis or principal focus. This is true whether we learn in the classroom, online or on the street. One approach focuses on input, another on output, and a third on what I would call shortcuts and some people call language-hacking techniques. These techniques include grammar study, studying vocab lists and phrase books, heavy use of flash cards, "deconstructing the language", memory techniques, and so forth.
I don't think Steve's division has it right at all. As I noted in my last post, output is input. In other words, it's all just exposure. From there, the only thing you need to think about is what kind of exposure you need to get in order to burn the language into your brain as efficiently as possible.
And efficiency leads me to one of my main points of disagreement with Steve: grammar.
Read more...In a nutshell, here's my understanding of Steve's approach to grammar:
Spend lots of time getting input.
If you figure out the grammar rules, great. If not, don't worry about it.
When you feel like it, try to fill in those gaps in your knowledge by looking up the rules.
Steve's German is good enough to listen to and read fairly tough materials, and yet he still get criticized for screwing up the cases. That tells me that his method is not working as far as his ability to produce correct grammar. (Of course, I'm assuming those criticisms are correct, as I've never heard or read his German myself. If that's not right, I'm sure I'll be hearing about it in the comments soon enough.)
This is a close adult approximation of the inductive "learn like a child" method. Children get years of exposure to a language and still make lots of grammar mistakes, until years of schooling finally iron out the wrinkles. Without extra efforts beyond mere exposure, they end up being able to understand just about everything, even while they may still be speaking incorrectly. Steve's results seem to match that pattern.
And, after all, is it really surprising that a method that focuses on input results in you having a good understanding of input without being able to produce accurate output?
I think a different approach can get you much better results. Here's the rough outline of how I approach grammar:
Get the rule in your head.
Get exposure to the rule in use. Because the rule's in your head, you're seeing the rule in action rather than trying to puzzle out what the rule is.
If you forget the rule, or if you're exposed to something that doesn't fit into your understanding of the rule, go over the rule again.
During the bulk of my German studies, I actually followed a method that was much closer to Steve's, and it resulted in German being one of the weaker languages that I can actually communicate in with some degree of proficiency. (So, yes, I screw up the cases, and probably much worse than Steve.) I'd love to find the time to attack it again, using the approach that I laid out above.
As a final note, I'd also say that I think Steve's and my divergent approaches to grammar may stem in part from our divergent goals in language learning. Steve's goal seems to be enjoying literature and whatever else he feels like enjoying in the language. For me, that's a means to an end while my actual goal is being able to prepare business documents, contracts, etc. I need to obtain a higher degree of accuracy in a shorter amount of time that Steve's method will allow, while Steve can quickly reach his own goal of jumping into content he enjoys without worrying about whether he's producing correct grammar.
The image you see here is a visualization (which is obviously not comprehensive) of how a given piece of information in a language might get lodged into your brain. The piece of information could be anything: a vocabulary word, a grammar rule, pronunciation, a character, etc.
Every one of those lines emanating from the piece of information connects with one kind of exposure. The more exposures you get, the more connections your brain draws to that piece of information. The more repetitions of a given kind of exposure, the stronger that exposure becomes (imagine the lines getting thicker with each exposure). The stronger and more plentiful your exposures are, the more likely you are to remember the piece of information.
Exposure to a language can be largely divided into reading, listening, writing, and speaking. It doesn't matter if an exposure is via reading/listening (i.e., input from an external source) or writing/speaking (i.e, output to an external target). These traditional ideas of "output" and "input" are both input as far as your brain is concerned.
Have you ever wanted to write something and get help correcting it? Now you can write a short post in your Notebook, and get other italki members to correct and comment on it.
They kind of make it sound like they're doing something completely new, huh?
Their system is fairly straight-forward, where the text is copied to a comment window below and you can format it to show your corrections. Their correction interface isn't quite as good as Lang-8's, but I certainly can't complain about having yet another place to get my writing corrected for free.
Read more...Update: After putting up this post, I got an email from Kevin Chen, one of the founders of italki, who shed some light on the development of this feature:
You're right that the corrections feature is nothing very "new" --- honestly, it was on our to-do list as early as when Livemocha came out way back in 2007. For a while we watched people use our answers and group sections to get corrections. However, the real answer is that we just got carried away with other priorities (our marketplace). At this point, the corrections feature is anything but "new", and every language learning social network has this feature, including Livemocha, Busuu and of course, Lang-8 (which I think is great). That being said, it is a really useful service for our users, and we think it deserved its own heading at italki.
The only thing I'd note is that I disagree that Livemocha and Busuu really have this feature. As I've noted before, on both of those, you can get text edited, but the text you're submitting is supposed to be the assignments of the courses on those sites, with prompts like "Describe six objects...", etc. Before italki entered the ring, Lang-8's only true competition in the free, write-whatever-you-want text correction area was CorrectMyText, which hasn't gained quite the traction of Lang-8.
Another contender in the field is Cramberry. What's kept me from making more use of Cramberry is that you can only study 30 cards per day in the free version of their web app. That said, they're doing a promotion right now that will get U.S. residents their iPad apps for free, and the first 50 people to download the iPad app can also get their iPhone app for free. And I'm guessing that those apps, which currently cost $2.99 (iPad) and $4.99 (iPhone), don't have the any study count limitations, even when you're getting them for free.
Get your free apps, after the jump.
Read more...From an email that went out to Cramberry's mailing list earlier today:
To celebrate the launch of our new Cramberry app for iPad, we're giving away free copies of Cramberry for iPhone and iPad. Here's how it works: Send us an email (contact@cramberry.net) telling us how you use Cramberry, and we'll send you a coupon code for a free copy of Cramberry for iPad. Once you've downloaded the iPad app, send us your iTunes receipt, and we'll send you another coupon code for Cramberry for iPhone. You must download the iPad app to receive the iPhone app. You can download the app from iTunes on your computer; you don't need an iPad to participate in this offer.
Note: this offer is only available to U.S. residents. Sorry!
After I sent them the required email, stating that "I use Cramberry for language learning, of course!", they wrote back to me with further details, including this one that they should have probably had in the first email:
Only the first 50 people to download the iPad app will receive free copies of the iPhone app, so act quickly!
So while the iPad app appears to be available for all, the iPhone app only goes to the first 50 to get in line.
If you're not already signed up for Cramberry, you probably should sign up and give it a whirl before contacting them. With a little luck, I'll be checking out a free copy of their iPhone app shortly (don't have an iPad, nor any plans to get one, so checking that out will have to wait, despite the fact the download is already sitting in iTunes).
This post was updated a few hours after the original post to reflect that only the first 50 downloaders of the iPad app can get the iPhone app for free, which was only revealed by Cramberry in the email in which they sent the promo code for the iPad app.
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