Confessions of a language addict's Blog

The other day, I wrote about Imagin8 and comprehensible input. Specifically, I was looking at how having the vocabularies available on HackChinese.com meant you could start learning the words as you read the story, so that you had a way of simultaneously growing your vocabulary and having comprehensible input. Today, I’d like to say just a few words about the flashcard app where you can pick up the vocabulary for Imagin8 books.

One of the fusses of learning a new word list is it’s often littered with words you already know. And if you’re looking at wordlists to work your way through a set of related stories – even if all that binds them is they were written with HSK2 or HSK3 vocabulary, you’re going to keep getting the same words over and over for each story. In this, HackChinese.com is genius. While you can add lists to learn, they’re added to the databank of words you already know. If you’ve done all the characters in HSK1 and HSK2, when you add a new lists that includes some of those words, they won’t be added to your new learning. Sure, they’ll cycle in for periodic review, just like all the words in your databank. But that’s just it: with HackChinese.com, everything you add grows the vocabulary you’re maintaining, but nothing makes you duplicate your efforts unnecessarily. And this leads to the second wonderful point. When you go to the queue of lists you’re learning, it shows you how many words you know and how many are left for each list. But it’s constantly updated. This means that as you learn the vocabulary for one story, you can see the unknown vocabulary for later stories shrinking each time you learn a word that appears in multiple stories. As a result, the closer you get to knowing the 300 words you need for one intermediate story, the less work you have for later stories that assume at least an HSK4 vocabulary. And you can see the size of your task shrinking every time you work a little further into your current list.

I’m sure there must be other apps out there that work like this… it’s too ingenious an idea for everyone to have missed. But for the moment, HackChinese.com is what I’ve found, and if you’re learning Mandarin it’s marvelous to see the learning of lists turn into seriously growing your overall reading vocabulary. If keeping tracks of all those Chinese characters is a challenge, especially with those you know you’ve seen someplace else recently, give this a look. (P.S. They also have the wordlists, chapter by chapter, for Heisig’s Remembering the HanZi.)

Long time readers are aware of my ups and downs with Chinese Mandarin. At the moment, I’m working on a bit of an up again. Some time ago, I worked my way through Jeff Pepper’s 23 Cats and Mulan. They are readers with a restricted vocabulary, but are not so tedious as the typical beginner reader where dad is always a doctor, mom is always a teacher and life never ventures from the HSK1 or HSK2. Then, as usual, I let things lapse again for a while. But I still keep looking at the Journey to the West readers. And so I clicked on a link at Imagin8 to find out what this HackChinese thing they were recommending was all about. HackChinese is essentially yet another flashcard app for Chinese that uses SRS. The nice thing is they have vocabulary lists for all the Imagin8 books. The better thing is the app builds a cumulative vocabulary for you. This means that when you start a new book, it doesn’t drill you on the vocabulary you’ve already learned from other books, only the vocabulary from that book that is new to you. If you are looking for a way to target comprehensible input for Chinese through reading, this isn’t a bad way to go: 1) Add the vocabulary for a book to your list, 2) Work the list till you know 70% or so of the vocabulary, 3) Start reading and continue working through the list and 4) Reread the whole thing when you’re through both the book and the vocabulary list.

Note that HackChinese also does have a bunch of word lists including textbook vocabularies, the HSK lists and other things. And the great thing is whatever lists you add, you never start over with a word you’ve already learned from one of the other lists. That said, because it mainly tests knowing the pinyin and meaning for given Chinese characters, I’d recommend it for reading more than conversation.

Just in time for the holidays! (I kid, I kid). For just about one year during the pandemic, I found myself unemployed. When I wasn’t looking for work and doing tutoring or coaching sessions, I set myself to starting a grammar of Romagnolo for English speakers and revising my Romagnolo Starter Dictionary. The more I worked on the grammar, the clearer it became that my dictionary needed to be less in line with Italian pronunciation and more in line with representing the phonemic distinctions Romagnolo makes and Italian doesn’t. I settled on the spellings used in Masotti’s Vocabulario Romagnolo and added close to 1700 entries, with a view to capturing common vocabulary that I had left out of the previous dictionary because it would be easy for a French or Italian speaker to find in one of the conventional vocabularies. The new dictionary is far from comprehensive – 2700 words – but it will allow you to do short writings and come up with the types of sentences language learners tend to write for practice without necessarily needing another reference at hand. You can find the dictionary at Amazon:

Romagnolo Starter Dictionary (revised and expanded)

And, as before, I have placed a free copy of the PDF at Academia.edu:

Romagnolo Starter Dictionary (revised and expanded) (PDF)

Have a look!

There is a species of language learner who, on the chat boards, has come to be known as the YouTube polyglot. You’ve seen these people. They make videos of themselves saying a handful on phrases in 20 languages and encourage everyone to sign up for their course. But the truth of the matter is, language is hard. Really using a language requires that you know enough to fill up a life, or at least an afternoon, of talk time. Realistically, if you aren’t speaking a language every day, in a way that makes you think, every day, your fluency is going to shrink.

While it’s not realistic for most people to maintain fluency in eight or ten languages, there are two bits of good news: 1) You don’t need to! If life doesn’t force you to use a language often enough to maintain it, why would you spend a lot of brain power doing so? 2) When you’ve built neural connections learning a language, they don’t just go away overnight. For a long time, what you’ve learned of a language will lurk in the shadows of your memory, waiting to be brought back to light.

My core languages have always been French, Spanish and Italian with a side of German. Lately, I’ve been reading through Margarita Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, Magic Key to German, and Invitation to Italian, reading three or four pages a night. There’s nothing to learn, but it keeps the languages floating around in my mind and my German articles really need work. But recently, I got a request to tutor Ecclesiastical Latin. I did a year of Latin way back in high school and used it intermittently in grad school. But it had been quite some time since I’d worked through Scanlon and Scanlon’s Latin Grammar: Grammar Vocabularies, and Exercises in Preparation for the Reading of the Missal and Breviary. No matter, I dusted in off, read through the first two chapters and scanned a copy of the Ordinary of the Mass. It comes back quickly. But… you have to find a familiar path. Working with the same text book, I immediately recognized the exercises. And reading through the Mass goes nicely with listening to a setting of the Mass like Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli – audio with visual.

The point here is that if you’ve lost a language, that doesn’t mean it’s gone. Relearning will come far more quickly than the first learning, and if there are passages that are familiar to you, either from literature or from the exercise books, your brain will latch onto them, even if you no longer have full understanding. So rather than being a YouTube polyglot who knows 20 phrases in 20 languages, why not learn languages when you need them or when, for whatever reason, they will bring you joy? Not only will your experience of them live with you forever, but when life brings them back to you after a time away, you will find they are not so lost as you might have thought.

Side note: I tutor English speakers for beginning French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, and I provide coaching for non-native speakers of English who need to polish their communication style as they move up the corporate ladder. You can set up a free consultation at career-communication.com.

Agnieska Murdoch has the hot take for language learning this week: Don’t learn with an app. She makes a lot of valid points, but concludes by noting that apps are good for some things after all. Which is the very unfortunate thing about apps: They’re good for getting started, but should not be confused with full-fledged language learning programs.

For quite some time, I used DuoLingo for Mandarin. And I learned to recognize a lot of characters when I’ve never been very good at that. The problem, though, is the gamification element. While the gamification element may get you started and keep you going for a little while, after a while your motivation for signing in is the game, not the learning. I eventually quit DuoLingo because I found myself doing an extra five or ten minutes on Saturdays to stay in whatever group I was in at the time. And what I discovered is that because I’d been using it long enough, following the queues from the way the game worked allowed me to get through lessons without actually paying much attention to the actual content. If you don’t know anything about a language, DuoLingo is a great place to start, but once you’ve finished the first level, you should probably move on to something else. Because after level one, being good at DuoLingo’s gamification elements is probably as important as language learning for “advancement.”

I’m going to be really controversial here, and take a shot at another app. Lots of people roll their eyes at DuoLingo, but what about Anki? I’ve used Anki, and I’ve found the same thing as with DuoLingo: If you use it to bang some basics into your head, that’s fine. But if you’re doing 100 cards a day in Anki, that’s a lot of time that could be spent listening to or reading content and forcing yourself to deal with comprehensible input. Really, learning a language has a lot to do with dealing with things you weren’t expecting or don’t actually know yet. Learning and using a language is not about knowing the answers. It’s about having enough exposure that you can navigate situations where your knowledge is imperfect and use the feedback you get on the fly to build your knowledge without getting yourself into (too much) trouble.

One app that I do think is particularly useful for beginners is Memrise. I’ve fussed with their Mandarin program off and on, and here’s it’s one advantage: While they drill the same phrases a lot, they have lots of different people with lots of different accents saying them. So in that regard, at least, you have to deal with a lot of ambiguity and work out things that can be a challenge. Still, I would never suggest learning Mandarin with Memrise alone.

So, rule of thumb: If you’re learning a new language, by all means, use an app to get started. But once you’ve learned one or two hundred words and can make it through Hello, Goodbye and Sorry, I didn’t understand, it’s time to start using new resources.

Meina at TogetherWeLearnMore has an interesting article about her experiences with “receptive bilingualism,” that place where you can understand a lot but you can’t speak. In her case, she shares her journey with Arabic, as well as a lot of outside information on the difference between understanding and forming original thoughts in terms of the workings of our brains. Is it possible to know a language without speaking it?

A little while ago, I wrote about intercomprehension and the EuRom5 program. Reading Meina’s piece, it feels like intercomprehension is effectively receptive bilingualism using languages that are close enough together that you have a headstart on vocabulary and, to a lesser extent, grammar. This goes with my own experience with Spanish. I majored in French (and later got a Masters in it), but my senior year of college I took one year of Spanish. A few years later when I needed to show I could read other languages for my graduate studies, I took a test that said I was halfway through university level third year Spanish. Obviously for speaking I was nowhere near there. But between French vocabulary and a basic knowledge of core Spanish structures I could follow a lot.

These days, the language learning fads are DuoLingo and Anki. But I still really like Assimil. And it occurs to me that what Assimil does in the first wave is to develop a sort of receptive bilingualism so that on the second wave you’ll have the background to pick up the language. Food for thought for those who argue as to whether it’s better to speak from day one or get a little language into your brain before you start speaking.