Getting to Grammar: Comparing my method with Steve Kaufmann's method

Steve and I have been having a bit of an interesting back-and-forth on how to approach grammar. It started with my post entitled If you want accurate grammar quickly, Steve Kaufmann's method is not for you, and then moved over to the comments section of a tangentially related post on his blog.

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.

Steve's reply came over on his blog:

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.)

Steve replied:

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.

To which I replied:

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.)

And, finally, Steve replied to my questions:

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.

After Steve's last post, I decided to polish off a post explaining in some more detail my own grammar method, and there you'll find more details on the system I'm comparing to Steve's.

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.

Getting to Grammar: Learn grammar through an ad hoc spaced-repetition system

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.

Getting to Grammar: If you want accurate grammar quickly, Steve Kaufmann's method is not for you

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:

1. Spend lots of time getting input.
2. If you figure out the grammar rules, great. If not, don't worry about it.
3. 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:

1. Get the rule in your head.
2. 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.
3. 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.

5 Free English-Learning Tools to Help You Get Into Business School

The following is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer, whose name you may recognize from her guest post on Aspiring Polyglot earlier this week. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about accredited online colleges for OnlineColleges.net and guest blogs regularly on language-related topics.

Foreign students are always welcome in English-speaking business schools. Most programs love to accept diverse groups of applicants to simulate real-world scenarios in the classroom. To be considered for acceptance, however, you must be able to speak and write English relatively well. Fortunately, there are quite a few English-learning tools online that can help you brush up on your skills before you apply to your program of choice.

Five free tools that work particularly well for business school applicants, after the jump.

Read more... PhraseBase. Memorizing entire phrases is a good way for business school applicants to build vocabulary and gain an understanding of sentence structure and grammar at the same time. You can buy a phrasebook for this purpose or you can sign up for a free membership to PhraseBase. PhraseBase offers a free electronic phrasebook to its members. The phrasebook is customizable and can be accessed through a computer or mobile device.

VerbaLearn. In addition to learning new words and phrases, business school applicants should also regularly review the English words they already know. This can easily be done on VerbaLearn. VerbaLearn is a free web application that makes it easy for students to customize how and what they learn. The app offers many different tools for this purpose, including video flashcards, print flashcards, mp3 vocabulary lists, word usage reviews, fill-in-the-blank reviews, and crossword puzzles.

OWL. Getting a good score on the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) is a must—particularly for applicants who want to get accepted to a top business school program. To prepare for the GMAT, students should avoid getting bogged down with grammar study and instead focus on learning the most common grammar topics tested on the GMAT: verb usage, pronoun usage, and modifiers. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) is the perfect place to learn about all three of these things.

ETS. Although some business schools are willing to waive TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores for certain students, most do not. This makes scoring well on the test very important. One of the best places to prep for the TOEFL is the ETS site. ETS develops, administers and scores the TOEFL. Applicants who visit the ETS site can get information on the test and receive official practice tests, sample questions, and sample writing topics.

AddLang. When it comes to English language learning, there is no real substitution for practice. Before applying to a business school, applicants should make an effort to practice their English every chance they get. This isn't always possible at home, which is why it makes sense to join a social language network like AddLang. AddLang allows users to practice English with native speakers and communicate online through Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AOL Messenger.

Links:
15 Free Language Learning Podcasts [Aspiring Polyglot]
15 Free English Language Learning Sites [Al Jamiat]
15 Free Hi-Tech Language Learning Tools [English Virtual Community]
20 Free Online College and University Lectures [Debt-free Scholar]

Get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free

When you're learning how to write in a language, there's nothing quite like getting your writing corrected. And when you're getting it corrected, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected totally for free. And when you're getting it corrected totally for free, there's nothing quite like getting it corrected for free and quickly.

Sound like something you'd be interested in? A comparison of the websites on which you can do just that, after the jump.

Read more... The first two sites below—Lang-8 and CorrectMyText—are focused primarily on textual corrections. The rest—Livemocha, Busuu, and LingQ—include textual corrections as one among many features.

One note before diving in... the comparisons below are only looking at what these websites do in terms of text corrections. All of these sites can of course do other things, but I'm leaving those features aside for now (although feel free to highlight your favorite features in the comments below).

Lang-8

• Overview. Lang-8, based in Tokyo, is a two-person project by Yangyang Xi, CEO, and Kazuki Matsumoto, CTO, that focuses letting language learners get their texts corrected.


• Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever text you feel like posting. Although many people do post journal-like entries, I typically post all sorts of things in there. In addition to texts to get corrected, this mainly consists of language-related questions. Just as people are happy to correct your text, they're also happy to answer questions about whatever confusing point of the language you've come across.


• Making corrections. Lang-8 first breaks the text down into sentences, separating them based on punctuation (this results in the occasional weird break-up when you have something like "12.1" in the sentence; Lang-8 interprets the decimal point in that number as the end of a sentence and breaks it up accordingly). Then correctors can edit sentence by sentence. The system flags uncorrected sentences so subsequent correctors can focus their efforts where most needed.
  
  Correctors edit each sentence in a little window. The one annoying thing about the editing process is that, if you want to add formatting to the text, you've gotta deal with tags tossed into the text in that little window, such as [BLUE][/BLUE] or [BOLD][/BOLD]. It can get pretty jumbled up.


• Speed of corrections. Although none of these sites are slow in getting corrections back to you, the corrections come extremely rapidly on Lang-8; I rarely wait an hour, but I think the most I've ever waited is something like a day. In fact, one day I put up a whole bunch of posts on Lang-8 and, by the time I was done adding all the posts, most of them had already been corrected.


• Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through formatting: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I make most use of Japanese, unsurprisingly, but I've also made use of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and French thus far. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.


• Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done. I'd like them to make it even easier to view edits, but it's decent as is.


• Bottom line. I find Lang-8 to be the best of the bunch, and I recommend it highly.

CorrectMyText.com

• Overview. CorrectMyText, based in Russia, is the project of Dmitry Lopatin. It's a new entry to the free online text-correction market; as far as I can tell, it was launched all of seven days ago. As such, it's still got a lot of squeaky wheels that need some grease, but the functionality you need to get text corrected is already there.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into CorrectMyText.com.


• Making corrections. CorrectMyText first breaks the text down into paragraphs, separating them based on line breaks. The corrector can then edit each paragraph's text direcly.


• Speed of corrections. Given how new CorrectMyText is, and thus the limited number of users it has compared to the other sites in this list, the corrections don't come quite as quickly. Nevertheless, if my limited experience is representative, you'll still get them within a day or two.


• Correction presentation. The corrector cannot apply any formatting. CorrectMyText.com will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in red and struck through. The after version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes.


• Languages. Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.


• Interface. This is still a bit rough. It's sometimes hard to figure out what you need to press to move on, and I found myself pressing the wrong thing more than once. It remains very basic, as you'd expect from a newly launched website.


• Bottom line. As a new entrant to the market, it still needs some work before it'll be a viable contender against Lang-8, but it's definitely a site to keep an eye on.

Livemocha

• Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through text corrections (see my complete review of Livemocha here).


• Content. The textual submissions on Livemocha are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe the locations of a set of people and objects". However, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about, and indeed that's what I've often done. In fact, Livemocha may soon be considering implementing freestyle writing. That'll be more than a nod to reality than an actual change, but I'd be happy to see the addition.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.


• Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu.


• Interface. As far as text correcting goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.


• Bottom line. Not a bad back-up to Lang-8 for text corrections, but as Lang-8 specializes in this feature and it's just another feature at Livemocha—and Livemocha's still not made for freestyle writing—I'm going to stick with the specialist Lang-8 and hope that Livemocha gives this feature some TLC.

Busuu

• Overview. Busuu is a direct competitor of Livemocha, using a similar picture-based learning method, but it also connects you with lots of native speakers, including, again, through text corrections.


• Content. Just like Livemocha, the textual submissions are at least nominally supposed to be based on prompts connected to lessons, e.g., "Describe a real person in your life", but, again, there's nothing to stop you from writing about whatever you care to write about.


• Making corrections. Correctors simply get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text, mirroring Livemocha. It does have one convenient feature that Livemocha lacks: a button to automatically copy and paste the unedited text into the comment field.


• Speed of corrections. Although I don't have any numbers to back up my supposition, it seems to me that Busuu has less users than Livemocha, and accordingly will take a little longer. That said, corrections still come back within a day or so.


• Correction presentation. Like Lang-8 and Livemocha, it is up to individual correctors to make their changes apparent through the various formatting options that are available. Again, your results will vary, but most correctors do a good job of making it easy to see what they've changed.


• Languages. English, French, German, and Spanish. One of the largest differences with Livemocha is that Busuu covers fewer languages.


• Interface. Busuu's interface is probably the nicest of the bunch, and it's just fine for getting texts corrected.


• Bottom line. Given how similar it is to Livemocha, the bottom line for both is essentially the same; not a bad back-up to Lang-8, but until Busuu puts some more focus into textual corrections, I'll be sticking with Lang-8.

LingQ

• Overview. LingQ's focus is on audio and textual content (especially audio with the accompanying textual content), and, among other things, it has a feature that allows you to get your text submissions corrected. LingQ's text correction feature, however, is not free (it's not terribly expensive though, basically coming down to $0.033 per word, although the pricing is a bit more complex than that). I've broken the free-stuff-only rule and included it here because it has some very interesting features that the completely free ones do not yet match.


• Content. You can put any kind of textual content into LingQ.


• Making corrections. You highlight the text you want to correct, and click a button. Up pops a window with the text you selected, and you can then edit it. Thus far, that pretty much makes it like all the rest. But then you then get the option to select what kind of error it is—spelling, word order, verb form, etc.—and that data will be used when presenting corrections.


• Speed of corrections. Corrections are generally done by a learner's selected tutor, and you might have to wait a little bit before your tutor has a chance to correct your text. That said, tutors seem to reply relatively quickly. I'm a tutor on the site, and I typically try to do my corrections as soon as I'm notified they're there. My slowest response time thus far has been a single day.


• Correction presentation. Just like CorrectMyText, LingQ will automatically create side-by-side before-and-after versions of the text. The before version will show the edited text highlighted in yellow, the after version in green. The learner then has to compare correction by correction to see the changes. Alternatively, the same corrections are listed out below the side-by-side versions in a table that also lists correction-specific notes and the type of each correction.
  
  And then here's where LingQ lays down some awesome. Using the type of errors that the corrector marked down, you get an analysis of your mistakes.
  
  
  Just. Fricking. Awesome. Getting this level of analysis is far better than just seeing your mistakes, because it can help you focus your efforts on where to improve. Although Steve at LingQ is not a big fan of focusing on grammar, this lets you do just that. If you see that you're struggling in a particular place, you can do a read-through of the section in your grammar on that topic, or take other steps to figure out why you keep messing up. Great feature.


• Languages. Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.


• Interface. LingQ recently made some system-wide improvements to the site, which included some interface improvements. The site before was fine, and the improvements made it better. Overall, a very usable interface.


• Bottom line. They've built in some very clever features into LingQ's textual correction system, but I just can't justify the cost for text corrections when Lang-8 and all the above are available completely free of charge.

So do you know of any other places where we can get our foreign-language writing corrected? If so, drop a line in the comments!

Drinking-party English

Today there was a going away party for some departing summer associates at my firm. One of the Japanese attorneys sitting nearby commented that it's difficult to understand drinking-party English (飲み会英語 nomikai eigo). And I can see what he means.

One particular utterance that came directly from my own mouth demonstrates the point neatly. Some of my more-or-less inebriated non-Japanese colleagues were chugging ramen. Slurping vigorously would be a more accurate description, but we settled on "chugging" to describe the action. When a bowl of ramen was passed my way, I declined, saying, "I ain't chuggin' no noodles!"

The linguistic dissection, after the jump.

Read more... Oh how "wrong" is that sentence, let me count the ways. First there's the sort-of-not-quite-right use of the word "chugging", described above. Then I swallowed the "g" at the end of "chugging", so that's one step farther from linguistic purity. Then there's the contraction "am not" to "ain't", which grammatical sticklers the world over frown upon (and which doesn't seemed to be covered in many English classes in Japan). And I bring it all together with the dreaded double negative, an even bigger grammatical faux pas in English.

Rather than being ungrammatical, what we really have here is an example of something that's only grammatically correct in a given kind of language (more on that here); in this case, very informal language. That, together with the somewhat creative word usage (more on that here) make it pretty tough to parse out the meaning for many English learners, even though native speakers would have no trouble (and even though some of those English learners can breeze through contracts and legalese in English that some native speakers might have trouble with).

The attorney in particular that made the comment is actually bolstering his English by watching U.S. television shows, among other things, and with enough of that I expect he'll sooner or later be able to tackle drinking-party English with ease. Now if we can just figure out how to get all English learners in Japan to get the same kind of exposure, we'll be making real headway.

Getting to Grammar: Grammars are incomplete

Language Fixation makes the following observation:

What I feel with Chinese (and I think this applies to other languages too) is that there are two levels to [learning grammar]. There are sentences that are technically “grammatically correct” according to someone’s made-up grammar rules that seem to fit all situations, and then there are sentences that actual people say and that actual native speakers consider to be correct.

Language Fixation is touching on two things here. The first is word usage, which I already addressed here, and the second is informal grammar rules.

Native speakers often seem to use the language in ways that seem to break the grammar rules included in most grammars. These may break the rules found in the book, but are they really breaking the rules of grammar of the language as they exist in the wild? You can probably guess that my answer is going to be no.

Read more... Let me start with an example. One day my wife and I were talking about how she and other drivers sometimes don't bother to pass slow cars, and I said to her, "Bunch of wusses, you all." What a grammatical mess, right? There's no verb, the subject is at the end despite English being SVO, and the subject pronoun "you all" is, according to Wikipedia, used "primarily in the southern United States and African-American vernacular English", even though I am neither from the South nor African-American.

The fact of the matter is that, even in situations such as these, grammatical rules are being followed, even though they may be informal rules that the authors of grammars don't always see fit to include. In the case above, this is a standard kind of interjection, which takes a standard SVO declarative sentence, such as "You all are a bunch of wusses", and makes it into an interjection: "Idiots, these guys!" "Disgraceful, today's kids!" "Geniuses, those people." And so on. We could go into more detail about how that construction works, but suffice it to say that these are following grammatical rules, even if some sticklers might consider a sentence like that ungrammatical. ("You all" is more of a word usage issue, so I'll refer you back to my earlier post on that one.)

Let's turn to Chinese for another example in the same kind of SVO reordering. "Nàge mǐfàn, wǒ chī" 那个米饭，我吃. You cold translate it as "I'll eat that rice". This would sound perfectly normal when spoken in Chinese, but most grammar books would probably tell you to write it like this: "Wǒ chī nàge mǐfàn" 我吃那个米饭.

The thing about informal grammar is that it's still grammar, even if those who write grammars don't see fit to put it in their books. So I'd agree; barring that you find a grammar with this level of detail, you'll need to get this from context.

A grammar stickler, as the authors of grammars tend to be, might wave this sort of thing off, calling it grammatically incorrect. I'd say that's the totally wrong approach. Grammar is not a box that a language is to be crammed into; it's a series of observations about how the language is used in practice. It's not about how it should be, it's about how it is. Or, to phrase it another way, it's descriptive rather than prescriptive.

And the "how it is" part includes both the rules that grammarians tend to include in grammars and the rules governing informal usages that are rarely included in grammars. Thus, in terms of rules, the gap between what a grammar teaches you and how native speakers actually speak is because of one simple thing; the grammars are incomplete.

So when people criticize grammars, saying that they don't tell you how native speakers actually speak, they have a point, and such grammar is surely better learnt through exposure; if authors aren't generally including it in grammars, then you'll likely have few other alternatives. That said, that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn what can be learned from grammars, even if you need exposure to cover these kinds of grammatical patterns. And, of course, if you can find a grammar that covers such rules for you, all the better.

So make use of grammars, but remember that you're almost undoubtedly going to find "ungrammatical" grammatical rules that were not covered in your (or, perhaps, any) grammar.

Getting to Grammar: Differentiate grammar and word usage

One argument made against actively trying to learn grammar is that, even if you get the grammar rules down pat, you still don't sound like a native speaker. Assuming you've really learned to correctly use the grammatical rules from your target language, then there are two possibilities as to why you don't sound like a native speaker. One is that something other than grammar is the problem. The second is that, assuming that everything in your grammar is correct, it is not complete. I'll come back to how your grammar is likely to be incomplete in a subsequent post, but for now let's focus on what else might be a problem.

Here's a problem described by Geoff of Confessions in the comments of an earlier post of mine on grammar:

After I found myself in a French-speaking environment, my latent knowledge was activated and my French took off. But before that, I had a nasty habit of creating sentences that fit the rules but that no native speaker would actually say.

And here's Language Fixation on a similar note:

[W]e can all surely think of examples we have heard where someone says something in our native language but it doesn’t seem quite right. Maybe it’s technically correct, but nobody really says it that way.

Quite commonly, there are many “grammatically correct” ways to express ideas, but only a few of them are the ones that native speakers actually use. This is really what it means to speak a language… you say what other people say, because you’re used to how it works.

I myself run into this problem all the time in. Take Japanese as an example. I'll say something, completely grammatically correct, only to be informed by my wife that that's not how a native speaker would phrase it. She then tells me how it should be and, little by little, through lots of these short exchanges, I get to sound more and more like a native speaker.

In all of these cases, we're talking about grammatically correct speech. If the speech is truly grammatically correct, why doesn't it sound like native speech? Leaving pronunciation issues aside, that leaves only one obvious culprit: word usage.

Read more...What do I mean by word usage? I mean saying it how a native speaker would say it. There are always going to be numerous ways to make yourself understood, but only a fraction of them will actually sound native. Just take a real basic example in English. A native speaker might say, "I'm going to wake up at 7AM tomorrow morning." A non-native speaker might say, "I'm going to arise at 7AM tomorrow morning." Both are grammatically correct. Both convey the same meaning. But the second sounds weird and the first does not. Why? Word usage.

Getting the right word usage down is best done through exposure, both via input and output. Input will let you know how native speakers do it, and output can help as well if someone tells you when you screw up. Just outputting based on what you've learned could, as Geoff describes, result in your own personal pidgin. And that's where the native speaker correcting you becomes extremely useful. You ask them, "Is that how a Japanese person would say it?", and they tell you what you need to do to fix it. A dictionary alone might get you as far as our non-native speaker in the example above, but exposure should be able to eventually take you closer to our native speaker.

Predictably, this is exactly what happened when Geoff got to France.

Picking the right word is, of course, not a grammatical issue at all. So the conclusion that grammar is best learned only through exposure because learning how to pick the right word is best learned only through exposure is a non sequitur.

Getting to Grammar: Somewhere over the rainbow, frequency grammars

I seem to have gotten myself mixed up in this big debate about learning grammar, so this post the first in an unnumbered series called "Getting to Grammar" where I lay out my strategy and respond to some of the other things banging around the language-learning blogosphere regarding grammar.

Geoff of Confessions makes a valid criticism of the state of modern grammars:

When I was in grad school, we talked about the spiral syllabus. Imagine a spiral staircase going up multiple floors: You keep coming back to the same points, but at a higher level each time. Unfortunately, conventional grammars don't do this. They typically are divided into, e.g., phonology, morphology, and syntax, with morphology broken down into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, etc. The treatments can get pretty exhaustive and the learner has to figure out how deep to dive in.

How to mediate the problem, and the as-far-as-I-know non-existant solution of a frequency grammar, after the jump.

Read more...This problem can be mediated by carefully selecting your initial grammar. It should be good enough to give you a complete overview of the target language's grammar, but not so in-depth that you get bogged down in exceptions to exceptions to exceptions that you're only likely to encounter once in every five years of intense target language use. Once you've gotten what you can get out of your initial grammar, you can move up to a more in-depth one, and ultimately you can cap it off with a grammar aimed at native speakers. This, in a sense, makes three passes around the spiral, which combined with exposure should give you quite a solid understanding.

But, three doesn't make for much of a spiral and, as is, it hardly makes for an efficient process. You're likely to have already covered much of what is in any subsequent grammars you look at, and there'll be no easy way to determine where that more difficult rule is hiding; you'll have to pick through the stuff you know to find the stuff you don't. By the point you get to looking at these kinds of grammars, that review is probably not the best way to spend your time.

Moreover, the cut off point for grammars are typically determined somewhat arbitrarily, by how an editor or author feels or guesses. I've never heard of a grammar's cut off point for what is covered being backed by statistics of what rules, constructions, etc., are actually used.

Mediation of a problem is all well and good, but what really dances in my language-learning dreams are frequency grammars, or grammars that introduce rules based on how likely you are to encounter them. In your first pass around the grammar spiral, you'd cover rules that represent, say, 50% of the rules you'd typically encounter. This'll take you through much of the language, just as frequency lists do, but you'd still have quite a ways to go.

Once you're at 50%, you'd click a button (these would need to be electronic, of course) and then the grammar would suddenly cover, say, 70% of the rules you'd typically encounter. The additional 20% would show up in a different color so when you go through the grammar again, you'd know exactly what has been added since your last passthrough. And you'd keep going in increments up until 100%, with the highest percentiles representing the most obscure rules of grammar out there.

If anyone knows of anything even remotely close to this in any language, I'd love to hear about it.

Related: Don't ignore grammar, learn without grammar, or use it only for decoding

Don't ignore grammar, learn without grammar, or use it only for decoding

Ramses of Spanish Only, Geoff of Confessions of a Language Addict, and Josh of Language Geek have recently written about what Ramses calls the "anti-grammar" position (here, here, and here, respectively). The basic premise of the position is that you don't actively study grammar but instead learn it by induction through exposure to the language.

Let's clarify one thing here; both the pro- and anti-grammar camps share the same goal: learning the grammar. It's the how that is in question. The most extreme pro-grammar position would have you start with a grammar and not do anything else until you have the grammar down. The most extreme anti-grammar position would have you parachute right into the middle of the language zone with no background and have you learn it all by observing the language in use.

Neither approach optimizes efficacy. Many high school kids in the U.S. have studied 3, 4, or even 5 years of a language, but just try talking to them and you'll realize that the hidebound grammar-centric approach most of those schools are using is a complete failure. On the other hand, learning completely by induction requires huge amounts of time and leaves gaps for things that are less commonly encountered, especially when time is limited, as it is for most language learners.

Ramses did make a good point:

It’s just a pity to see that many people in the pro-grammar and anti-grammar camp just focus on LEARN grammar or DON’T LEARN grammar, and don’t come up with alternatives.

Let me see what I can do about that. My alternative, after the jump.

Read more...As mentioned above, the goal of both camps is actually how, not whether, to learn grammar. And we learn grammar rules with good reason; memorizing a short rule—say, how -ar verbs are conjugated in the present tense in Spanish—is a heckuva lot easier than memorizing individually all of permutations of all of the -ar verbs separately. This of course even applies to irregular grammatical rules, such as irregular Spanish verbs, many of whose forms are actually regular and whose irregularities even follow some patterns (such as an irregular -g- in some first-person singular irregular verbs, stem-changing verbs, etc.).

What's more, grammatical rules tend to follow patterns. and, as I recently noted in relation to music and language learning, "The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns". Rick Aurtus has a nice summary of how patterns help:

Your mind tends to organize the impressions it receives, and to reduce them to simple formulas wherever possible. This saves it, and you, a lot of trouble, because the knowledge that something fits into a certain pattern gives you a head-start in trying to remember it. ...

How does this tendency toward pattern act upon your ability to remember? Well, for one thing, rhyming lines of poetry are more easily memorized than are sentences of prose. Words are easier to memorize than nonsense syllables. Sentences are easier to memorize than groups of unrelated words. Try naming all the letters of the alphabet, stating them at random without relying on the order in which you've learned them!

Furthermore, you'll find that it's easier to remember things in groups than singly, and less difficult to memorize lists when they are placed in alphabetical order, or in size place, or chronologically, or in any established pattern that will lend itself to your list.

This can, of course, easily be applied to languages.

The inductive method to learning grammar, however, is not the way to go. There are two reasons for this. First, the inductive method is inefficient in its use of time and effort. Second, you're likely to be left with gaps in your understanding for things that don't appear often, especially if you're time is limited, as most language learners' time is.

The inductive method is often billed as "learning like a child". What could be more simple, more effortless, than learning like a child? The problem with this is that you need to read the fine print. Think about how children learned their native language. They spent years and years in an immersion environment, and on top of that spent years and years in classes that aimed to refine their understanding of their native language. If you've got time for that kind of exposure, you can probably learn like a child, but chances are that kind of time is not available to you.

Limited exposure due to time restrictions exacerbates another problem with learning by induction; the risk that you'll miss out on less common (but necessary) rules or that you'll think you've gotten how a rule works when in fact your understanding of it is flawed. You might argue that if the rule isn't that common, why bother? I'd counter with if a native speaker knows it, so should you.

So, finally, as an alternative, I propose something of a compromise position that's somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Get the grammar rules in front of you. Read them. Organize them into a way that makes sense for you, whether in your head or otherwise. Understand them. This allows you to know what's out there and what to expect. Those declensions in Russian or those verbs in Spanish won't seem quite so mysterious, even if you forget what a particular ending means. What's more, you'll have a complete picture of any given rule, so you won't need to wonder if there are any gaps in your understanding or blatant misunderstandings that you picked up by trying to guess how the rules work.

Once you've got the rules in your head, even if only lightly so, jump into exposure. By seeing the rules in action rather than starting from a rule and going through abstract and inane drills, you'll learn how native speakers use the rules in practice and end up sounding more natural than grammar-centric learning would leave you. This beats learning like a child because you don't need to fumble around for the rules, but you do get the same exposure. Repeated exposure will then help cement the rules. If a rule gets fuzzy, go back to the rule and review it, and then go right back to the exposure. Then all you need to do going forward is to repeat this process. This will result in an ad-hoc spaced-repetition system that will eventually result in you knowing the grammar rules, and with a lot less time spent than using an inductive method.

To give an example of this approach, I'll actually turn to Josh of Language Geek. Although Josh's post would seem at first glance to put him squarely in the anti-grammar camp, he's actually practicing exactly what I'm preaching:

I’m finding that I grasp grammar more fully after learning the grammar points via the Penguin course, and then seeing the grammar in use repeatedly in the Assimil course.

Bingo.