Learning a Language

Questions and model answers

1. How do you usually practice a language outside class?

   Mostly by accident, if I'm honest. I watch things — not language-learning videos, just normal shows with the subtitles on, and I've noticed I pick up more from a bad sitcom than from anything designed to teach me. The other thing is I text a friend in Seoul most days. It's low stakes, nobody's marking it, and I'll write something wrong and she'll write it back correctly without making a thing of it. What I've stopped doing is vocabulary lists. I did them for about six months and I could recognize the words but I couldn't produce any of them. I knew four hundred nouns and still couldn't order a coffee without rehearsing the whole sentence in my head first.

2. Would you rather study a language in a class or on your own?

   A class, and specifically for the part I'd never do on my own. Alone I'll happily read and listen for months, because both are comfortable — nobody hears you get it wrong. What I won't do is open my mouth. A class forces that maybe twenty times an hour, badly, in front of people, which is unpleasant and is the entire value. The reading I can do better alone, honestly, since a textbook explanation is slower than looking something up when I actually need it. So I'd want the class narrow: speaking, correction, and someone whose job it is to interrupt me. What I'd avoid is a class that spends forty minutes on grammar I could have read on the train.

3. Tell me about a time you had to use a language you weren't confident in.

   I got put on the phone with a supplier in Osaka because I was the only person in the office who'd studied any Japanese. I'd done two years of it, badly. The call was about a delivery date and I understood maybe a third of what he said. What saved me was giving up on understanding all of it and just repeating back what I thought I'd heard — so, the fifteenth? — and letting him correct me. He corrected me four times and we got there. I'd always assumed fluency was the point, and that was the first time I noticed you can be useful at about thirty percent. I still can't hold a conversation. I can absolutely confirm a date.

4. Do you think everyone should learn a second language?

   Should is doing a lot of work in that question. Everyone benefits, and I still wouldn't build a requirement on it. The benefit is real but it isn't mainly communicative, because most people will never need the language — it's that learning one shows you your own language is a set of choices rather than the shape of thought itself. A requirement, though, produces six years of compulsory study and adults who remember four phrases, which is what most national curriculums have already demonstrated. What I'd change instead is how it's assessed. If the test rewards translation, translation is what schools teach, and I've met a lot of people who can parse a sentence and can't order lunch.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.