How to learn a language part #2: Set up for success 1-3

Now that you have read part one and cancelled that class, you are ready to prepare for learning a new language. Follow the steps below before you start and you will be on the way

How you set up to do a task will often determine your success rate as much as the actual implementation. Before starting a business, you come up with a business plan. Before writing a book, you come up with an outline. Before becoming a vegan, you find vegetarian restaurants, clear our yourrefrigerator of meat and dairy and restock with vegetables and fruits, and print out recipes. Before learning a language, you gather resources and make a plan too.

I’ll take you step by step on what I’ve learned about language learning over the years. Assuming you have the right motivation, you are ready to get set up.

This is #1-3, as this turned out to be a much longer article than I anticipated I will have to separate the “Set up for Success” portion of “How to learn a language” into 2 parts.  This step is complicated and needs to be explained in full.

1) Deconstruct the Language: (Find a native speaker)

The very first thing you should do is take the language apart down to the building blocks. Learning the structure of a language is like learning a new formula in math – you can learn to understand and recognize it in a short period of time, but it takes longer and a lot of practice to learn to produce it on your own given just situational information.

Part 1: The phonetics (sounds) and alphabet (characters):

This part is pretty straight forward: Sit down with a native and write out all of the sounds, consonants and vowels, in the language with counterparts in your native tongue. Make three columns.

Native sound | Equivalent in English | Example word (native language)

There will be many sounds that don’t quite match, that’s ok. For words without equivalents in your native tongue, such as the “v” vowel in Chinese, put them at the bottom of your sheet in a new category. These words require descriptions and practice – they will stretch the learning process out a lot and require a lot of attention. Make sure that your native speaker is good at explaining mouth positions, or at least be prepared with explanations and diagrams online that show the lips and tongue during pronunciation.

Tonal languages require extra attention, because not only do you have to first the sounds, then you also have to learn to change the tone of your voice while you speak. I will talk about how to work on this in another article, but for now simply make a mark of it.

Part 2: The structure:

You can deconstruct the structure of a language by starting in English. Choose a group of simple sentences that reveal the most about the structure of a language. Tim Ferriss of The 4 Hour Work Week suggests the following sentences:

The apple is red. - Describing a noun and article “the”
It is John’s apple. – Possession of a noun
I give John the apple. – How to structure subjects, indirect objects, direct objects, and verbs in a sentence
We give him the apple. - indirect object, pronoun and conjugation
He gives it to John. - direct object, pronoun and conjugation
She gives it to him. - direct and indirect objects, pronouns

I must give it to her - Auxiliary verbs
I want to give it to him - Auxiliary verbs

I suggest also adding:

To Give: - infinitive
I gave it to John - Past tense
He will give it to John – Future tense
I am running - Present progressive

You MUST have a native speaker translate this in a way that he/she will naturally speak. The formal way is good to know as a note, but you want real usable fluency, not to sound like a book. In Chinese “She gives it to him” formally keeps the “it” but informally omits “it” every time. 她把它交给他 – is formal. 她给他 is informal. The first way is cumbersome, and although in this case it is necessary to learn for other reasons, the second way reveals a lot – in the Chinese language nouns are often omitted . This is why a Chinese native speaker learning English often says (as someone just said to me) “OK, will send you after lunch” – 好，午饭后给你. The formal way to say it would have been 好，我吃完午饭后把它交给你。 The difference is staggering. This is another good reason why school is not a good place to learn language.

Analyzing the above:
a) The structure of the language: Is it subject verb object (SVO) or subject object verb (SOV). Chinese and English are SVO, but Japanese and Korean are SOV. This IS enough grammar to be able to get around in a native country. You may not understand what others are saying, but your language is still usable. “I – to eat – food” and body language will get the point across.

b) Verb Conjugation vs Particles: By adding an infinitive version of the verb, you can see a verb’s starting point; this is important later for looking them up in the dictionary. Next, see if verbs are conjugated when the subject of the sentence changes, if particles (a separate word) are used instead, or if neither. Just knowing if the verb changes and knowing one example is enough for now – the rest is for later. How does the sentence change when “she/he” is placed instead of “I”?  In Chinese, there is no change. In Spanish and English there is a change in the verb.

c) Tense: Here we are looking for the same things we look for with subject change, except that now it’s time. Is tense expressed by changing the verb or by adding particles? In Chinese there is no change in the verb, but instead particles are used (了，过，会，要,在，正，呢). In Spanish, the verb changes, while English uses auxiliary (helping) words. (I will run / correré / 我要(会)跑).

d) Pronoun and indirect object placement: See how the sentence structure changes when you add an indirect object and/or replace nouns with pronouns. This is a headache in English and Spanish, so I sympathize for learners of these languages; while you can say “I give John the apple” and “I give the apple to John” you can only say “I give it to John” not “I give John it”. In Spanish the “lo/la/se” etc should be taken a close look at (**Need a native speaker**).

e) Auxiliary verbs: Must, want, and should are auxiliary verbs (helping verbs) that add extra meaning to the original verb. In Korean and Japanese, the auxiliary changes are added on to the end of the word (주고싶어 -Korean for “I want to give”), while English and Chinese add a word in front “want” and “要”.

f) Articles: “The” vs “A” in English tells you if a specific noun(s) is being referenced, or a generic noun(s). Articles are important to look at to see if there is change for masculine vs feminine words (la playa, el mundo in Spanish), or for plural vs singular (los hermanos, el hermano ). Chinese doesn’t use the article “the,” so most Chinese native speakers that learn English omit this word, as there is no exact equivalent, although they get the meaning using other means, such as by using “其”.

g) Other: The above should uncover anything in a language that is completely new. In Chinese, adjectives are not connected to subjects by a verb, but rather by another word altogether. This should be obvious when you compare “the apple is red” to “it IS john’s apple” as two different words will be used for “is.” Make sure to ask lots of questions.

Different languages use different ways of expressing things, so there will always be a concept that is completely unfamiliar to you. By analyzing the structure of the language through the above sentences (or any others you can think of, just try to limit the number), you can find these out early and have a full awareness of the task at hand. By starting out with a full view of the material, you can fit new information into your system instead of randomly grabbing at it.

After finishing this quick analysis, you should be able to grab a dictionary and any page of (insert language) and start to read it. It will be slow as every word will be new to you, but once you have finished going through the dictionary you will be able to understand what you are looking at. I suggest to look up a blog online in (insert language), print it out, then go through sentences identifying parts of speach, grammar points, and trying to summarize the meaning.  You’ll be surprised by how quickly you can start diving into material. 

2) Make a cheat sheet:

Put everything that you’ve found onto one piece of paper that you can carry around with you. This won’t completely replace the need to study grammar, as there is more difficult grammar that will be learned later down the road, but it will be enough to get you into conversations. When you shrink all of the information down onto one sheet of paper, you are forced to cut out all of the useless information and focus on the basics. As my soccer coaches always told me – those with the best grasp of the basics have fewer problems with the complicated stuff.

3) Get a list of the most common 100 words

Get the most spoken and written words and learn them first. Then get the top 300. This will be your main study list. The most common 100 words in a language make up over 1/3 of all words used. This means that if you memorize these 100 words, you can understand 33% or more of that language. The top 300 words will give you a 66% comprehension level.  Did your teacher ever tell you that?

According to the principle of 80/20, 80% comprehension will come from 20% of the words. To get to 80% comprehension you only need 700 words – the rest follows the laws of diminishing returns. You only gain a 1% increase in fluency for every 100 words past 1000, and it gets even worse at the top. I’m around 98% fluency in Chinese. While I’m happy to be at this level of fluency, most people could have stopped 1600 words ago, which equals 80% fluency in 2.25 additional languages. No wonder I don’t feel like my Chinese ability is increasing, even though I’ve now been living in China for a total of over 2 years; I need to learn 700 more characters to get a 1% more increase in fluency. Now those 4 years of Spanish look even more wasteful…

Check out the most common words in Chinese: http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000en.html.

That’s enough for now.  Finish the above first, then go on to 4-7.

Related posts:

1. How to learn a language in under 2 years Part #1: Get out of school
2. Should I learn a new language: Part one: Motivation
3. Should I learn a new language: Part two: Interest + Courage
4. When to stop learning a language (or start again)

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