Can You Take a Break? / Making the most of your iPod
Josh the Language Geek is, as he puts it, "returning from a hiatus." This happens to language learners, both in and out of schools, all the time. Life intrudes on those great plans you made to study an hour and twenty minutes a day so that you'd finish this book in one month, that one in two months and hopefully be practically fluent by Christmas... So how'd things come out for Josh?
This weekend, I went through old CDs, continuing to update my iPod. I stumbled upon Michel Thomas' Advanced Italian course. While I've listened a bit to the iPod programs I got and to music, I haven't really hit Italian hard in a long time. But listening to the first lesson of the advanced program, the language came back in just a few minutes and by the end I wasn't even hitting the pause button for my answers, just speaking them in tandem with the students on the program.
Moral of the story: If you want to learn and maintain a language, it is a lifetime committment. But it's not one that has to be mapped out hour by hour, day by day or even week by week. It's more a matter of making the initial push needed to get a basic framework into your head and coming back to it often enough to maintain that framework. So don't be afraid to take up a language because you'll never learn or you'll forget or whatever other excuse comes to mind. To rework a phrase from Josh, the language will be a lot more forgiving if you don't study every day than you will. So get started, keep at it, and if you have to let it drop for a while, make sure to think of the break as a hiatus from which you'll return and you'll do fine.
***
Incidentally, I mentioned loading up the iPod. For the language learner, especially the aspiring polyglot, this is a must. The iPod, to my mind, is the new deck of flashcards. Only you can carry around tens of thousands of cards and flip through whatever deck you want whenever you want. One word on that: The real beauty of the iPod is not that you can work through all your Pimsleur lessons or all your Michel Thomas lessons or whatever. The real beauty is that by making playlists of music in the language, playlists of the word entries from the different iPod flashcard programs, and having your long form programs, you can grab a few minutes with what you feel like doing at the moment and have time for the at the moment. In short, the iPod (or similar MP3 player with playlists) makes language learning something you can do conveniently and on the fly so that your all-important comprehensible input is always available. Very cool.
[Update: If you really want to organize your listening, check out this from John Biesnecker.]
Thankfully, languages are much more forgiving than people are. Shelve them for a week or four, and they’ll wait around for you. Furthermore, while I do regret having been away from my languages for so many weeks, the break is proving to have been helpful, as I’ve been able to see that what I’ve learned so far won’t disappear if I miss a few weeks. For a long while, I was quite in the mindset that if I missed a day or two, what I’d learned would drain out of my head like water out of a sink.Fortunately, it doesn't work quite like that. Language is a structure you build up in your head, and while you do have to maintain it, it's more like a building that becomes a bit dilapidated if you don't maintain it. As long as you patch it up now and again before the main framework rots, you're okay.
This weekend, I went through old CDs, continuing to update my iPod. I stumbled upon Michel Thomas' Advanced Italian course. While I've listened a bit to the iPod programs I got and to music, I haven't really hit Italian hard in a long time. But listening to the first lesson of the advanced program, the language came back in just a few minutes and by the end I wasn't even hitting the pause button for my answers, just speaking them in tandem with the students on the program.
Moral of the story: If you want to learn and maintain a language, it is a lifetime committment. But it's not one that has to be mapped out hour by hour, day by day or even week by week. It's more a matter of making the initial push needed to get a basic framework into your head and coming back to it often enough to maintain that framework. So don't be afraid to take up a language because you'll never learn or you'll forget or whatever other excuse comes to mind. To rework a phrase from Josh, the language will be a lot more forgiving if you don't study every day than you will. So get started, keep at it, and if you have to let it drop for a while, make sure to think of the break as a hiatus from which you'll return and you'll do fine.
***
Incidentally, I mentioned loading up the iPod. For the language learner, especially the aspiring polyglot, this is a must. The iPod, to my mind, is the new deck of flashcards. Only you can carry around tens of thousands of cards and flip through whatever deck you want whenever you want. One word on that: The real beauty of the iPod is not that you can work through all your Pimsleur lessons or all your Michel Thomas lessons or whatever. The real beauty is that by making playlists of music in the language, playlists of the word entries from the different iPod flashcard programs, and having your long form programs, you can grab a few minutes with what you feel like doing at the moment and have time for the at the moment. In short, the iPod (or similar MP3 player with playlists) makes language learning something you can do conveniently and on the fly so that your all-important comprehensible input is always available. Very cool.
[Update: If you really want to organize your listening, check out this from John Biesnecker.]
1 Comments:
I totally agree. The iPod is totally this century's flashcard deck, and the iPhone (with its app) is even more so.
I wrote a post recently about the system that I use to maintain a steady stream of foreign language content, and the effect is exactly as you described -- even when you don't actively study a language for a while, the simple acts of passively listening helps keep everything fresh and ready for reactivation.
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