Why output trumps input in language learning

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 output input. I am sure there are many more.

• We need to start speaking understand before we can speak well.
• I would rather communicate with people early understand well and stumble when I speak than communicate with people later and stumble less the reverse.
• If we can never 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 speak understand, and the more words we can use actively have, even passively, the more interesting our interaction with the language and the more words we can acquire.
• If we can actively use understand 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 active acquisition of passive vocabulary through output input, is like putting the pieces of the jig-saw together. Gradually the picture of what we're trying to express becomes clearer.
• Output Input is easy to arrange. We can speak listen and write read anywhere and anytime.

See here for some ways that the internet makes output possible from anywhere, which of course includes Steve's own LingQ.

• Output Input is interesting, if we choose content that is meaningful to us.
• If we develop the habit of producing output input learning, we become independent.
• Being able to produce output Input learning makes it easy to practice review our languages, and maintain them.
• Through producing output input learning, especially on topics we like writing and speaking about with authentic content, we learn not only the language, but many more things.
• At any time in our output producing input learning activities, we can decide to listen speak or read write, to practice what we can produce have learned.
• Of course we need to speak read a lot in order to speak well, but. Our progress in speaking will be smoother if we invest time in output input, 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 speakers listeners and writers readers, our output input 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 speakers read a full length book in that language. Getting there is a powerful moment of achievement, an Everest.

I could go on....

A single workflow to make use of online language-learning tools

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.

Then get that writing corrected. There are a number of ways to do this, but Lang-8 is my standing favorite, and italki recently implemented this feature. Again, if the corrections include things you need to look up, add them to your SRS system.

Once you've got the corrected text, record yourself speaking it and get that recording corrected by native speakers. I use Cinch and Lang-8 to accomplish this.

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 your brain on languages.

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.

Output is input.

iTalki is taking on Lang-8 by letting you get your foreign-language writing corrected for free

iTalki just announced that they've added features that make iTalki into yet another place where you can get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free.

From their post:

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.

Links:
Feature: Write in your Notebook and get corrections [official italki blog]
Get your foreign-language writing corrected online for free [Street-Smart Language Learning]

75-year-old Iranian guy crowdsourcing a Farsi-English translation in Geneva airport

Here's an interesting anecdote about a 75-year-old Iranian guy crowsourcing a Farsi-English translation in the Geneva airport. Sounds like he's doing a pretty good job of getting it done that way, but perhaps someone should tell him about how to get his foreign-language writing corrected online for free.

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!