Beyond Bounds Blog

Frustrating phases in language learning - How to focus your efforts

Jason Sharp — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:53:09 +0000

Language acquisition can be broken down into phases. There may be many ways to differientiate phases, but I find stages of frustration the most revealing. Each stage is frustrating in a different way based on patterns in language learning, and thus requires adjustment in focus. While the entire process will always have you continuously reading, listening, writing and speaking, one aspect should take preference over others at particular times. If you pay close attention to what is most frustrating during the process, you will be able to get a feeling of which stage you are in and your language learning will go more smoothly.

Perhaps other people have experienced language learning frustration in a different pattern, but the theme holds true - when you feel that something is frustrating, you should put your efforts into that area rather than avoiding it.

Here are the phases as I’ve experienced them.

Phase 0: Recognition

In this stage, the language looks like scribbles on paper. What are these scribbles?! Are those pictures? What does the “circle” mean?” In this phase you know nothing about the language and probably haven’t listened to it much. This phase will be the most exciting, and thus probably not the most overwhelming. When everything feels new, things usually are easy and your motivation is probably still high.

I call this phase 0 because language skills are not acquired at this stage, i.e. you are not able to use the language. You start to notice patterns to the scribbles and put sounds to those patterns. This stage gets you from complete ignorance to being able to start formulating expression in the language, but most importantly it helps you understand exactly what it is you are going to be learning.

The focus here is to learn how to draw the characters (letters, words etc) in proper stroke order, how to speak the sounds (and later words), and to learn the rules (grammar). After this stage, the rules of the game should be tightly understood and need only referencing later. This is the take off point. It should only take a few months to pass this stage, and it can be done in relative isolation, although you will need the help of a native speaker for pronunciation.

Phase 1: A gurgled garble of noise.

You can’t understand anything. The sentences, words, tones, and sounds all come out as a long stream of garbled mess. In this phase you can’t tell the difference between a name and an action when a native speaker slings it at you at full speed, and probably not even at half speed. Frustration really starts hitting you in this stage, as this is the stage where you feel like you just landed on Earth from outer space.

While obviously you still have everything left to learn, phase one is mostly about making sense of this mess of sounds and separating it out into words, phrases, and hopefully finally sentences. Your ability to listen and understand the language will be the biggest frustration during this period as without the ability to hear clearly what others are saying, learning will feel impossible.

After a year of basics in America I thought that I was ready to start talking to people - and I was right, but in the wrong way. I could talk to people, but when someone talked to me I couldn’t understand. My listening ability was far behind my vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. I literally couldn’t even catch when someone was telling me their name if they said it at a normal speed. Classes were taught solely in Chinese, and while the work wasn’t particularly hard, the fact that I couldn’t understand what the teacher said gave me a daily headache.

Solution:

Listen to anything you can, and often. Read out loud, listen to movies (as in pay particular attention to speech and try to match it with subtitles. The focus is on listening, not watching), listen to music and podcasts, and just listen in on people speaking the language. Divert as much focus and attention as you can to your ears - you won’t be able to continue forward in a balanced manner without them, and once you get over this hurdle, language learning will suddenly become so much more rewarding. Once you can easily make out the words that people are saying, then you will probably find yourself a new frustration below.

Phase 2: Me No Speak Able

Phase one was about the ears, and phase 2 is about the mouth. At this point your ears will have finally caught up to your other abilities, but now you will find out that the basics are no longer enough. You are now more comfortable in the basics of the language, but you will become very frustrated when trying to express any complicated ideas. Compound sentences will get you breaking your grammar and you won’t have the vocabulary to cover even a small portion of things you might want to say.

While vocabulary is always important, the most important part of phase 2 is getting acclimated to producing the language. This is where conversational fluency is achieved.

You do not need a lot of vocabulary to be fluent: I once met a Japanese girl that could speak her mind with probably only 50 words. Did I enjoy listening to her speak? No. Did I understand what she was trying to say at all times? Yes. She spoke quickly and a lot. Do I recommend you stopping at 50 words? No way; but you can achieve conversational fluency with a limited vocabulary. Don’t obsess over vocabulary. Pace yourself and learn new words daily, but don’t make memorization the focus.

Solution:

Talk, talk, talk. This is the only way to reach conversational fluency, and is your main focus. Talk about anything and don’t worry about using the correct words - just get comfortable with speaking. I don’t care if you use the same 10 words over and over again, the goal is to gain confidence and fluency in speech, not perfection.

Phase 3: I can’t employ the good word

Phase 3 is where vocabulary suddenly becomes a focal point. Your understanding is excellent and you are comfortable speaking, but sometimes those words that you use just aren’t the right ones. Even in everyday speech you stick to your basic vocabulary a little too often instead of trying to stretch and use more appropriate words: while I just used “appropriate” you would have chosen “better”.

This phase is as frustrating as it is seemingly endless. Being able to effectively use vocabulary takes a lot of exposure and a lot of practice. I’ve seen many a good man stuck in this phase, where every other description word is “good”, every verb “want” or “get” or “do”, and every noun is replaced by “that thing”. You’re able to describe things using very long sentences, but it would be easier to just use a more fitting word.

While the practice of using appropriate and effective vocabulary never ends, there will be a point where the majority of the words you use will be fitting, and you find that in most cases you use the same vocabulary that a native would. This phase is sort of nativizing yourself, but only on a basic level.

Solution:

The solution is not as straight forward as it may seem: simply studying vocabulary lists will not necessarily improve your ability to use vocabulary. You need to pay close attention to not only what other people are saying anymore, but how they are saying it. Understanding is no longer enough.

First: Read a lot of casual writing, especially blogs. Most bloggers will write the way they will speak most of the time, so you will get a better feel for how people express themselves. Just be aware that many bloggers make language mistakes in their writing. While you are reading, be conscious of ideas that you might also want to express, and see how you might have expressed it in a different way.

Second: Write, write, write, and have a native correct you. Simple, but effective.

Phase 4: As deep as a puddle, as colorful as the moon

There are always new words you need to learn, and once you’ve started expressing yourself in the appropriate manner, you’ll start to realize that your vocabulary goes as deep as a puddle. Your language skills are not colorful, and when others speak in a colorful way, you find it hard to follow. Those TV shows that you “understand” suddenly seem more confusing than before. How is that possible? Previously you were focused on understanding, but the laws of the universe plague us by showing that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.

I remember the first time that I watched “奋斗” , a popular Chinese TV show: I had my dictionary in hand and paused during scenes that I didn’t understand, but I would let a lot of vocabulary go by as long as it didn’t affect my understanding. Just weeks ago I was watching re-runs of it on TV and felt uneasy with my comprehension. It turns out that before I was just understanding the story, but now I’m trying to understand all of the language, including all minor details.

Phase 4 is frustrating because your vocabulary is too shallow. You can speak well, but so can a robot. I must admit that my Chinese is somewhere between Phase 4 and phase 4.5.

Solutions:

Conscious exposure. Note the word conscious. It’s important to be very focused during all of these phases, as focused learning is much more effective than otherwise.

The only real “solution” to this frustration is lots and lots of exposure. If you are only watching TV in this language once a month, then you will find your improvement slow, and probably 5 years from now you will still have trouble understanding all of the language used in the script. The same goes for reading.

This is where long vocabulary lists come in. Constantly take note of new words and try to use flash cards to memorize them, but even still rote memorization isn’t as important as constant daily exposure. Getting past this phase is no walk in the park; it will take a lot of time and a lot of effort. The more time you spend daily immersed in difficult to understand material, the better off you will be.

Phase 4.5: Professionalize

I label this phase 4.5 because it may come just after you begin feeling frustrated with advanced language usage. I am currently working to professionalize my Chinese, which means learning business and technical vocabulary, but from a literary perspective I still feel uneasy about my skills. There is no way that I could write a worthy piece of literature in Chinese, for example.

I venture that most of you that have reached phase 4 are probably looking to use your language skills in your career. It can be very frustrating at the beginning, such as learning to use correct tone and politeness in your speech, translate, interpret and so on. All of these require different skills and will stress your language further than you ever before.

Solutions:

You can start by paying attention to the language used in business scenarios on TV shows or read a professional magazine, but ultimately the best way to professionalize your language is to get a job that requires it. With a dictionary you should be fine if you’ve already made it this far. With fluent intermediate language skills many companies will be willing to take you on, as they understand that it will only take a short time to make the professional leap.

Phase 5: ?

I don’t know exactly what frustrations lie ahead, but I can imagine that if I want to take my language ability further than it currently is, I will have to change strategies again. I assume that if I do continue to the next level, it would be composition, and most likely journalist like articles, native sounding blogging, and music lyrics.

Many of you might be wondering how long each of these phases should take, but that is really hard to say. The time depends on too many factors, but what I can say is that each new phase takes a lot longer than the phase before it. Phase 0 may take as little as 3 weeks, but phase 1 will probably take 3 months, and phase 2 could take another 6 months to a year. I am not the most dedicated language learner, and did not do even close to everything that I could have done, and after about 2 years I was somewhere within phase 3, but not very far. I’ve been in China for 2 years since that point, and I am on phase 4.5 (as in phase 4 and phase 4.5 are not complete).

Phases are just for focus:

This article is just a piece of how to learn a language, so considering it alone will not mean much. This article hopefully helps you better understand your own frustrations and lets you know that these difficulties are normal. The more difficult and frustrating something seems, the more important it is to focus on it.

I’m curious to know if others who have become fluent in a second language have also experienced these same frustrations and in this order. To me, these frustrations seem to come at logical times, and create a very smooth flow to the process. I never planned to take my Chinese this deep, but the lessons I am learning now in these later stages of the learning process will surely be useful for learning future languages.

11 Reasons to Ride a Bike

Jason Sharp — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:51:43 +0000

In the recent two months I have been experimenting with healthy living, and I found that having a bike makes healthy living a whole lot easier. What is more surprising though is that by riding my bike daily to get places, I see many parts of life in a completely different light. Originally I thought that buying a bike was simply buying another means of transportation, but little did I expect that I would experience a new way of living.

Below are 11 advantages of riding a bike that I have noticed in the past few weeks.

1) Get to know the city like you never did before. When you ride a bike, you get a real feel for the size of the city that your in. In a car or on the subway there is only a time measurement, but by bike you can feel the size not only by time but by space because you are peddling. Of course if you walked everywhere you would get a similar feeling; however walking is too slow to be practical. Previously, Beijing felt like an impossibly huge city. Now, I feel it getting smaller and smaller the more I ride. Within 2 weeks of biking, I got to know every bridge and nearly every street on the north side of the city. I’m working on the east side now.

2) Save money. A bike might go for between $50 and $100, but you save money everyday on other things. In Beijing, it is common to take taxis or the subway everywhere. The subway is 2RMB each way, which makes 4 RMB per day. You’ll earn the price of your bike back in around half a year. Any 10-15 RMB taxi (close distances) will be easy to reach by bike. I used to take these 2-3x a week, coming in at around 100 RMB a week. Within 2 months I will have made my money back on my purchase. This all on top of gas savings and parking savings for if you drive often. After that, lifetime savings are yours to keep!

3) Get exercise. Obviously any movement is exercise. Riding a bike takes a lot more movement than pressing the gas peddle.

4) Relax. This one may seem a little counter intuitive to most people, as driving in an air-conditioned car with your choice of music seems relaxing, but it isn’t. Riding a bike slows life down and gets you outside in nature (or closer at least) with the wind blowing and the sun shining (I assume you won’t ride on rainy days). On top of that, exercise itself is stress relieving. I’ve found myself a lot more relaxed in the past few weeks.

5) Slow life down. Get out of the rush of the day and slow yourself down. Biking isn’t so slow that you can’t run errands, but it’s slow enough that you have time to think and feel rather than worry. Small changes in life tend to have cascading effects, so by slowing down one part of your life you may find that the stress in other parts of your life just aren’t worth it. Going from point A to point B doesn’t have to be a rush. Take your time.

6) Freedom of Movement. Walking is too slow and a car is too cumbersome. A bike offers you a healthy balance in the middle, where you get speed and mobility. Going half a mile to four miles no longer becomes a hassle. Also, in a car you are limited to places that have parking spots. A bike has no such limit. By foot you can’t go on the freeway - a bike can. A car can’t go through the park - a bike can. It feels liberating owning a bike. And hey, if youwant to stop and walk, you can park anywhere and just start walking. You could also ride to the subway, park, then go from there.

7) Environmentally friendly. It’s man-powered. Save the planet a little bit of exhaust. Hey, it might just be enough to save us all.

Expand your concept of “my neighborhood”. Before I started biking often, down the street was a 15 minute walk, and thus quite a hassle. Going to a restaurant 15 minutes down the street, and then walking 15 minutes back was something that I did on a rare occasion, even though the choices of food down there are good. Why would I when there is a lot of decent food just downstairs? With a bike, what I consider close-by and easy to get to now has expanded even beyond down the street. It’s expanded a few miles out, as even what before would be a taxi ride now is an easy bike ride. Suddenly there is a movie theater in my neighborhood

9) It’s Fun. Biking is really enjoyable, especially going downhill. You can bike through the park, with your friends, or even cross country. Biking is not just a means of transportation.

10) Become a part of your surroundings rather than just watching through a window. Driving a car with the air-conditioning on, windows rolled up, and music blazing makes the outside world seem surreal. You become wrapped up in your own little world, just passing through. There is no interaction besides the occasional honk. On a bike the surroundings are very real, and you can even interact with it. Just the other day at a stop light I turned and talked to an old man on the bike next to me. Try being a part of the world for a week and notice the different in your stress levels and happiness.

11) Stop the sedentary lifestyle. While a bike does have a chair, biking is not a sedentary activity. Going from bed to dining room chair to couch to car seat to work chair and back is a recipe for disaster. Throw in a little movement in your day. If you work too far away to bike, then bike to the store for small purchases, or bike to restaurants, or to the cinema. The more you move the more willing you will be to move and the further away from a sedentary dull life you will get.

This post is not about getting rid of cars, buses, or subways. I still have to use a gas or electric powered vehicle to get across the city sometimes, as they are faster than a bike. Rather, I’m advocating for people to not soley rely on these forms of transportation. By riding a bike your life will change immensely, as you can see from the 11 points that I wrote above, and there are many more.

My Bike

For those of you out there studying abroad in China, especially in Beijing, then getting a bike is a no-brainer. Chinese cities are extremely bike-friendly: I can travel from one side of the city to the other by bike in about the same time I could by car.

For those who already ride: What are some other advantages that you see for riding a bike? How about disadvantages?

Yunnan XiShuangBanNa (云南 - 西双版纳）

Jason Sharp — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:08:51 +0000

I took a week-long trip to Yunnan, spending 5 days in Xishuangbanna and the remaining 2 in Kunming, the capital.

XiShuangBanNa (Jin Hong - capital city)

This is China’s mini Thailand. XiShuangBanNa is a self-governed area, populated by a majority of the minority group Dai, as opposed to Han which composes most of the Chinese population. You get a distinct feeling that you have left China when you land at the XiShuangBanNa airport, which really is just a building with a runway behind it. The city Jin Hong, the capital, feels as though there are buildings in the forest, rather than trees in the city. There are paved roads and modern structures, but there is so much green in the city that it makes you feel closer to nature. When I landed I could taste the fresh air. There is a river flowing into Myanmar running right through the city - if anyone is considering a river trip through Southeast Asia - and there are mountains on every side.

The pace if life in XiShuangBanNa is really slow. Most people there only work 4-5 hours a day, split into morning and afternoon chunks with a huge break in the middle for lunch. Spring weather is the norm throughout the year, so I guess it makes sense that people work less as they would prefer to be outside enjoying nature in the beautiful weather, rather than inside at a desk. The city and population is quite small in Jin Hong, with about 350,000 people, which makes it the perfect size for walking the city or biking rather than driving. There are few buses and cars, although taxis are abundant and really cheap.

XiShuangBanNa has become a tourist trap for the most part. The government has set up camp at all surrounding attractions, collecting entrance fees, transportation fees, and charging a ridiculous amount for water and fruit. Then there are “Dai performances” constantly going on that can go for up to 180 RMB (about $25) - talk about a waste of money. I never paid for this but I saw one anyway that was included in the fare for another park; it felt really inauthentic. It was a joke hiking up the mountains, as every 100 meters you are bombarded by locals with cameras and computer setups to print out your souvenir picture on the spot. It was interesting to see the way that the tourism industry has evolved in the area, and the weather and nature were great, but it felt a little surreal that locals in “traditional dress” have electricity, computers, printers, and Nikon D60’s 30 miles from the city and 5 miles up the mountain. What really gets me is not that the whole idea of having this set up in the mountains misses the whole point of going there in the first place, but that there is actually demand for this kind of thing. I believe in economics; if there is no demand, there is no supply. Tourists really don’t care about nature, they just want to see what there is to be seen and go home (in general of course).

While I originally was hoping for a lot of nature hikes and wildlife, I ended up happier about the place than had I got what I was expecting. After my first trip to a tourist trap, I decided to avoid anything anyone told me about places to go, and just hung out in the city. I went to some local cafes, hang out spots, bars, clubs, and restaurants and something really big hit me - I no longer felt stress, pressure, or sense of hurry. While in the big city (Beijing) there is so much going on constantly, so it is easy to feel that a rush to do things. Jin Hong calmed me down, and that feeling lasted over a week since I got back, although it’s starting to wear off now.

Recommended things to do in XiShuangBanNa:

1) Hang out in Jin Hong.
2) Raft on the river

Perhaps other people had different experiences hiking around the area, but for my week-long trip, this is what I can recommend.

Some Good BBQ

People love to ride motorbikes in the South

Me getting ready to get on the river

Yes, that’s a Bear Pissing

Ostrich riding - pretty cool. PS - my hair isn’t grey, the blue faded. Now it’s shaved.

A New Way of Looking at Fitness

Jason Sharp — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:12:49 +0000

In the past fitness to me was easily measured - does my body look good, and can I run x miles at y speed? Getting into shape was just as simple: work out every other day - as I talked about in this post - and run the days between. But as I have been adventuring into the world of language learning, I realized that many of the same findings apply to fitness.

When you compartmentalize things in your life, they become work - unnatural and uncomfortable. They become chunks of time cut out of your day that must be completed, or else you will feel some kind of regret, shame, or just a sense of failure. This gives us pressure, and at the same time is far too unnatural.

If those things were a part of your life, rather than separate from whatever you call your life, it would be easier to continue. Fitness is often seen as a necessary evil - something difficult that takes will power and lots of self-discipline. This mindset is usually perpetuated by those who have no use for fitness, other than the superficial desire to look good in society’s eyes. These are those who live sedentary life-styles - rarely getting up other than to go to the bathroom. For these folks, being healthy is unnatural and quite awkward. Just getting up to go to the gym sucks up their will power, so gym sessions often only last a short while.

In a previous post I talked about motivations for language learning. Fitness is similar: if you want to really enjoy good lasting fitness, you have to have the proper motivations. “I want to be sexy / in good shape / healthy” are not good motivators. That is like saying “I want to be president someday” to motivate yourself to do your homework in high school. If your life speed is set at “sedentary” then unless your self-discipline is absolutely amazing (and most people aren’t very disciplined), then your motivations will always be short-lived. One day someone will call you fat and you’ll be motivated for 2 weeks to get a gym membership and work out, but you will soon fall back into your average everyday slump.

I have gone through many life pace phase changes over the last 5 years. In high school I was always on the move. If anyone wanted to do anything, I would almost always immediately say yes, especially if it meant getting out of the house. Soccer, basketball, swimming, going to the park, eating at some restaurant, going to a friends house - anything. At the same time, I was a computer game addict and spent all home time sitting on a computer. Guess what - I was in amazing shape, and going to the gym was just another reason to get out of the house. There was a balance to my life.

Last year I started my first job after college graduation. In the beginning I was still my very outgoing self, but eventually I sunk into the daily grind and life slowed down. In the beginning I was always pushing people to come eat lunch with me or play video games during breaks, but toward the end I would order in and watch a movie. In the beginning, going to the gym was something to look forward to everyday just to get out of the office, but at the end I stopped going altogether and just looked forward to going back home and relaxing. As the major part of my day was sedentary, it made it even harder for other parts of my day to be high energy.

Now, it is definitely my fault that I stopped doing lunch video gaming and eating out and going to the gym after work; it is mostly due to the unhappiness I felt at my job. The point is that when activity is not a part of your life, doing any activity will be a lot harder than when it is a normal everyday occurrence. The laws of physics apply to everything: an object in motion stays in motion. If you don’t move all day, moving in the afternoon to get to the gym will be extra difficult. If you do not need extra energy, your motivations will not be there to go get it.

Fitness must be a part of and necessary for the way you live your life. Recently I have gone from simply working out in the mornings and sitting around all day to working out in the morning then getting out 1-2x a day, everything suddenly has become easier and more sustainable. I play games at the local internet cafe and work at a cafe instead of home.

How can you make this change?

This does not mean that you should cut down your study time, nor do you have to quit your job like I did. Instead try to get off your feet at every opportunity. Say yes to more invites. Get used to getting out, even if it’s the weekday. Invite your friends to study together at the library instead of studying individually at home. Walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Walk around outside on your work breaks. Every little jolt in activity put into your day, makes fitness that much easier to reach and sustain. You’ll soon notice that going to the gym no longer takes so much will power, but instead becomes another excuse to get out of the house and live a fuller life.

Don’t make health a part of your daily grind. Make health a natural state of being.

City of Life and Death - Nanjing! Nanjing! (Film)

Jason Sharp — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:32:54 +0000

Nanjing! Nanjing! - City of life and death - was not an emotional roller coaster as most films like this tend to be. There was no happiness. There was no point that I felt like jumping for joy. If you know anything about the Japanese “rape of Nanking,” then you know that it was one of the most horrific massacres in recorded history.

Yet, the film didn’t seem to dig deep enough in our emotions - perhaps due to the lack of happiness or hope or even character development (the characters are sort of just there, there is very little change in their character). There seems to be a slight amount of hope in the opening scene, but that quickly fades and the movie continues on a very gray path as the Japanese quickly come in and demolish everything.

The implications of Nanjing! Nanjing! are extremely important. Previous Japan-China war films were very one sided - showing only the Japanese brutality and Chinese determination and nationalism. This film’s main character is actually a Japanese soldier with a conscious. He is appalled by the horrors that his fellow soldiers are inflicting upon the Chinese and even upon their own (the comfort women included Japanese).

A Japanese main character with a conscious to me seems like a director trying to make a change. There has been very little reconciliation between Japan and China since the war, and Nanjing! Nanjing! is the largest step that I have seen so far. To me this film says “Hey Japan, we understand that not all Japanese are evil. There were a lot of bad things that were done, sure, but it’s not impossible to reconcile as long as you show remorse.”

Wouldn’t it be amazing if a Japanese director then made a film in response to this gesture?

One thing that bothered me a little bit about the film is how watered down it feels. I imagine that what really happened in Nanjing is a lot more horrific than anything that is shown in this film. The rapes, the grotesque and perverted murders are all semi-covered up and watered down. There are scenes with bodies and deaths, but none of it makes you turn your head.

My only guess as to why the director chose to take this path was that the underlying point of the film is not to show what everyone already knows - that the rape of Nanking would make any fan of “Saw” cringe - but rather to send that other message: we will not forget, but we can move on.

2 Thumbs up from me. Go see it!

Has anyone else out there seen the movie? What do you think? Did you like it?