How go the Resolutions?

The Cunning Linguist had a nice post on what to do now that January's end draws near if the resolutions aren't in such good shape. Be sure to have a look for some good ideas and some good resources for taking your learning in a new direction.

Here are my resolutions and how they're going (in italics):

1) French: I devoted considerable years to it, my colleagues speak it and so I will be working to maintain and rebuild it through reading, music and conversation. Due to ear problems, I haven't listened to as much music as I'd like, but certainly spoken with colleagues plenty, as well as using French resources to study Breton.

2) Spanish: A lot of colleagues speak it and so I use it a lot. I'd like to speak it correctly. I've been using the Assimil Español sans peine, and taking a gander at Sci-fi in Spanish translation.

3) Italian: Long term, I would like to better enjoy Calvino and Eco. Short term, I'd like to converse more easily. I've been using Assimil Le Nouvel italien sans peine and listening to Italian music in the car.

4) Mandarin: I'd like to be able to go to the Chinese shops in the area and manage more than the formalities in Mandarin. I've fussed around with a few online sites, but haven't done enough.

5) Breton: This one, I know, is impractical. But I truly loved my time in Bretagne and would like to get in touch with its mythical past. I'm not, by the way, shooting for fluency, just an acquaintance with the language. This has been the focal point of my enthusiasm. I've memorized a bit of Breton verse, reviewed what I'd covered in Assimil Breton sans peine and started working through Colloquial Breton. I've also leafed through a children's dictionary and introductory grammar published by Ouest-France.

6) My language goals are tied to progress and enjoyment in the language, not particular methods or courses. On the one hand, failing to finish a book won't count as failure. On the other hand, completing a program without actually improving my skills won't count as success. For those languages that I have worked on, my focus has been on having fun and finding out new things more than sticking to the methods within particular books. This has my French, Italian and Spanish coming out a little smoother, if not markedly better, and has led to a better understanding of Breton.


All told, I think the resolutions are on a better track this year than last, not because I've made great strides, but because I've made more realistic resolutions. Now we'll see what February brings.

Resolutions, new processes, etc

Following on my resolutions post, here's a look at what a few other people are doing:

Edwin (Tower of Confusion) is trying out some new processes for in-context learning.

Kelly (DragonFruit), the Aspiring Polyglot, is making more use of Mandarin, but steering clear of overly ambitious resolutions.

The Cunning Linguist is going to get a better handle on what she's learned before and make sure to do more listening.

And ChineseQuest is making process resolutions instead of outcome resolutions, which makes a lot of sense since good habits are what make resolutions happen and bad habits unreformed are what gets in their way.

[Update: After a long hiatus, PolyglotToBe is back, with plans to learn 2000 words of French, German, Japanese and Italian, along with references to memory systems for doing so.]

But the Paleoglot seems a bit perplexed by others' interest in calendrical cycles.

Also, a note for language learners that a lot of you probably already thought of: Wikipedia is available in literally hundreds of languages! Scroll to the bottom, look for your language and try out a few keywords of interest. I've been getting a little bit of a feel for Breton working through the entries on Roue Arzhur (King Arthur), An Daol Grenn (The Round Table), Kaledvoulc'h (Excalibur) and Jafrez Menoe (Geoffrey of Monmouth).

A New Year, New Resolutions

This year's resolutions...

Too often, the setting of goals and the selection of New Year's Resolutions are undertaken with the aim of being a different person or living a different life. That's very nice, but there needs to be a connection between point A and point B. To put it another way, if the point of life is in the journey, not the destination, then personal, professional and educational development need to focus not only on where you want to be, but how you're going to get there.

For a long-term goal to be met, a series of short-term goals must be met that build toward it. The problem with the New Year's Resolution is that we tend to make the long term goal with a whole year before us and don't create the short term goals that will a) help us succeed and b) give us those little successes that motivate us toward the larger goal. So, for the first six months of the year, you postpone since there's plenty of time and for the last six months you let resolutions drop because you ran out of time. That's definitely what happened to me last year: I had some success with the languages I was actively engaged with anyway and let drop the others.

The other killer with the long-term goal is that it has to make sense in terms of who you are and what you want to do with your life. Ideally, a resolution or long term goal should be able to be rephrased thus: If I succeed in doing X, it will allow me to do Y. (And without the formulation being tautological: "If I learn German, I will be able to speak German" is no good. "If I learn Mandarin, I can transfer to our company's Beijing office and get a promotion" is better.)

By having resolutions that are a) "chunkable" - divisible into short term goals and b) in line with larger goals or life improvements, your odds at success are better.

This year's resolutions are oriented toward better communication with colleagues, greater enjoyment of literature, better use of resources in the community and, well, one not so practical goal:

1) French: I devoted considerable years to it, my colleagues speak it and so I will be working to maintain and rebuild it through reading, music and conversation.

2) Spanish: A lot of colleagues speak it and so I use it a lot. I'd like to speak it correctly.

3) Italian: Long term, I would like to better enjoy Calvino and Eco. Short term, I'd like to converse more easily.

4) Mandarin: I'd like to be able to go to the Chinese shops in the area and manage more than the formalities in Mandarin.

5) Breton: This one, I know, is impractical. But I truly loved my time in Bretagne and would like to get in touch with its mythical past. I'm not, by the way, shooting for fluency, just an acquaintance with the language.

6) My language goals are tied to progress and enjoyment in the language, not particular methods or courses. On the one hand, failing to finish a book won't count as failure. On the other hand, completing a program without actually improving my skills won't count as success.

I'll have more to say on the specifics of my language plans, to start, in the near future.

Looking to the New Year...

Last year started with promising thoughts on New Year's resolutions, followed by monthly updates... for a while... that dwindled. Which seems to be the nature of things for a lot of people. Looking back on how last year's resolutions worked out, the answer is a resounding so-so. It is astonishing, in retrospect, to realize that with 8,500 hours to play with (nearly 6,000 of them being waking hours), I never got around to listening to 16 hours of Michel Thomas CDs. Still, all was not lost. My Spanish and Italian are much improved. My French is not so shaky as it was. While my Mandarin is still pitiful, it is not so weak as it was. And along the way, I've taken detours into other languages, and language learning methods, and have maintained a love for language that still leaves me heading first for the foreign language aisle whenever I enter a bookstore. That's something, too.

A fundamental problem confronts language learners which is not unlike Douglas Adams' declaration that he liked having written novels. Language learners like having picked up or acquired new languages. They like the thrill of starting new languages, with the rush of learning and the sense of something new. The day-in, day-out slogging through learning when you're past the point where your knowledge doubles every three days but not yet at the point that where you can go chat someone up is harder. It's a time to take stock.

If we had infinite time and resources, we could learn all the languages we wanted. And some of us, at least, would want to learn all of them. But we don't. Choices have to be made. Sometimes, the prudent choice is to say, "time to move on."

* * *

Marc Allen has a new book out, The Greatest Secret of All. The first part, "Discovering the Secret of Manifesting," is pretty stock stuff. It will seem quite familiar to Allen's previous readers, but won't catch readers of The Secret and such too much by surprise. The second part, though, is almost a take-down of the run-of-the-mill self-help book. Allen is too genteel and too relaxed to do anything like that, of course, but he still raises the crucial question that too many self-helpers don't: Why?

Allen's process for manifesting - Dream (the big idea), Imagine (put some flesh on the idea), Believe (conceive of the idea as something you can and will do) and Create (break down the idea into steps and, for God's sake, follow them) is a bit more prudent than what you find with the worst of the self-help literature. You don't just write down your idea fifty times a day and hope for the best. Faith is only of value if it leads to action, and Allen's process is designed to bridge the gap between the wish and the fact.

What makes Allen's latest worth the read, however, is his reminder that there has to be some reason why your goals are worth undertaking, and that this must harmonize with who you are and who you want to be. Scott Adams, a big proponent of manifestation, captured this nicely in a Dilbert cartoon: Dogbert had just learned about the "write down your idea and it will become reality" bit, and decided to try it. He had written "Dilbert is a garden slug" fifteen times. Dilbert doubted it would work, but Dogbert advised that he should still stay away from salt (which causes slugs to shrivel).

Mindless manifestation seems to pop up all over the place, and not just among new age mystics. It's not just that some befuddled new agers dream of lives of ease but lack the emotional depth to do something worthwhile with their time. Academics decimate forest to publish books that no one will ever read. Manufactures hire marketers to convince us to buy crap we don't need. Then builders get us to buy bigger houses to keep it in... And, sad but true, language learners undertake to learn languages that they have no reason to learn.

* * *

Looking back on my successes and failures with language learning last year, one common thread emerges: If I had some external motivation to stick with the language, I did. If not, I didn't. Most of the people in my office speak French; I kept up my French. Some of our teachers pretty much only speak Spanish; I maintained my Spanish in spite of myself. We had a couple Italian teachers around, and a handful of Italian artists are in my regular play list; I stayed with Italian. We have a couple Chinese teachers around and a small Chinese community in the area; while my Chinese is still lousy, it's better. As for Uzbek, I have to stop to remember how to say "my name is..." But when Uzbek music comes up in my play list, I catch all the "my love"s, "my heart"s, "my life"s and "my soul"s that are sprinkled so liberally through their romantic ballads - the language I actually encountered stayed with me. While I'm about to take another look at Turkish (Elisabeth Smith's new "One-Day Turkish"), the truth is I have no purpose for knowing Turkish, and will probably only learn rudiments. German and Arabic are also languages that I really feel like I ought to know, but because they're the kinds of languages polyglots know. But in truth, I'll probably get further with Breton because of my emotional attachment to Bretagne.

So, here is something to consider for the new year and for language resolutions:

1) Try to pick out languages and language goals that will fit in with and improve your life, not conflict with it.

2) If it is your dream to learn a language, imagine, realistically, how the language will be a part of your life, believe in your ability to learn and create and implement realistic, step-by-step plans to do so.

How about those resolutions?

We're coming up on the end of the first month for 2007, and resolutions are useless without accountability. In fact, they're of limited efficaciousness with accountability!

Here's the list, with updates in italics.

Spanish:
Low-level conversational: Able to tell stories, use past, present and future and have basic conversations without those awkward "I know this but I have to remember" pauses.

-Regular reading from self-teaching manuals to get structured examples of the language in use.
January 29: Learn in Your Car 1-1st 7 lessons; Lonely Planet grammar section; Mastering Spanish - 1st four chapters
-Regular reading of stories and poetry in Spanish.
January 29: First 50 pages of El Poder de Ahora.
-Read Borges' Ficciones in the original.
January 29: Section I of "El Inmortal"
-Learn 4 songs in Spanish.
January 29: Most of lyrics for Pausini's "Escucha atento" - can't learn song lyrics

Italian:
Really low-level conversational: Able to handle basic conversations in the present tense.

-Michel Thomas Beginning and Advanced Italian courses
January 29: not yet
-Regular reading from self-teaching manuals to get structured examples of the language in use.
January 29: Opening chapter of Berlitz' Shortcut to Italian
-Read Pinocchio in the original.
January 29: First five pages
-Learn 4 songs in Italian.
January 29: Come se non fosse...

January 29: All items below - not yet, at least not really
German:
Regain at least basic functionality.
-Michel Thomas Beginning and Advanced German Courses

French:
-Re-read Les Misérables.
-Finish my translation of "Melancholia" from the Contemplations.

Turkish (a curiosity language):
Slightly greater familiarity
-Finish Pimsleur Turkish Basic Conversation (16 lessons).
-Read Le Petit prince in the Turkish translation.

Uzbek (a curiosity language):
Slightly greater familiarity
-Learn at least 3 songs in Uzbek.

I know I'm not setting the best example for the full-bore polyglot, but my Spanish is picking up considerably without destroying my Italian. And my French is as fine as it has been in the last couple years, thanks to other reading plus everyday conversation. Part of setting resolutions for a year is you can put off till later. It's just a question of remembering that you can't put things off a whole year! But I've actually been surprised by how much I've been doing with Spanish.

Next update on resolutions in one month, with an update on Spanish and a review of Learn in Your Car in the next day or so.

New Year's Resolutions

The Aspiring Polyglot posted her New Year's Resolutions, which got me thinking that I should look at the goals I set for myself last year and how I'd done. To choose a generous phrasing, I could have done better. In 2006, I fussed with a number of languages and learned alot. In my work - at a language school - I have been able to do a lot in terms of helping potential and struggling students get a sense of what's up with their languages because of the breadth of languages I've looked at. Depth is another story, and one thing I've concluded is that, to be honest, while there are some languages I really want to be able to use, there are a lot that I'd just like to fuss with to satisfy my curiosity, without any real purpose in mind. For these languages, I'm going to try to stay away from serious goal setting.

Giving myself a little credit where it is due, my Spanish is much improved, my Italian is more solid and I have renewed my French. Additionally, I completed the beginning program for Mandarin at my language school and have the certificate in my office to prove it. Finally, though I'm light years from being able to use either of them, I've learned a great deal about Turkish and Uzbek and how they fit together. The year wasn't a wash, but I did come way short of my oversized goals.

My biggest goal for 2007 is to stick to a limited number of goals for a limited number of languages so that I can enjoy my fussing with other languages without eroding my skills in my core languages or spending too much time or money on "curiosity" languages. My more precise goals follow:

Spanish:
Low-level conversational: Able to tell stories, use past, present and future and have basic conversations without those awkward "I know this but I have to remember" pauses.
-Regular reading from self-teaching manuals to get structured examples of the language in use.
Update: Starting with Hippocrene's Mastering Spanish by Robert Clark.
-Regular reading of stories and poetry in Spanish.
-Read Borges' Ficciones in the original.
-Learn 4 songs in Spanish.

Italian:
Really low-level conversational: Able to handle basic conversations in the present tense.
-Michel Thomas Beginning and Advanced Italian courses
-Regular reading from self-teaching manuals to get structured examples of the language in use.
Update: Starting with Assimil's L'italien sans peine.
-Read Pinocchio in the original.
-Learn 4 songs in Italian.

German:
Regain at least basic functionality.
-Michel Thomas Beginning and Advanced German Courses

French:
-Re-read Les Misérables.
-Finish my translation of "Melancholia" from the Contemplations.

Turkish (a curiosity language):
Slightly greater familiarity
-Finish Pimsleur Turkish Basic Conversation (16 lessons).
-Read Le Petit prince in the Turkish translation.

Uzbek (a curiosity language):
Slightly greater familiarity
-Learn at least 3 songs in Uzbek.

This pared down list still has six languages, but with real expectations for only three - French, Italian and Spanish. There are a million other things I'd like to do, of course, and I will do many of them. But this is my checklist for 2007. Should I be able to cross off every item, I'll set second stage goals. In the meantime, I'll be starting the new year with the hope of building on the enthusiasm that comes when you can say, "I accomplished X."