Step 2: Set the right goals

SMART Objectives

Everybody’s heard about SMART objectives. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based. SMART. When you’re deciding what you want to achieve in learning a language, you must be SMART. It is not enough to say, you want to learn a language, that’s not measurable. You can’t just say that you want to achieve the Intermediate level or pass the exam, that’s not relevant. Or that you want to be able to have a conversation or get about in as tourist. That’s not specific enough. You need to define your goals with much more attention to detail and with an eye on how you will be learning and measuring progress.

Your ultimate goal

You may have a vague idea about where you want to get but how do you specify it in a measurable way? Luckily, you’re not on your own. There’s not just one but two frameworks for evaluating where you are and where you may want to get. There is the CEFR (Common European Framework Reference for Languages) and there are the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages). They are very similar and do the same thing but you may find one resonates with you better than the other.

What these do is describe your goals in terms of your ability to do something useful with language in a specific context. For example, the level A2 of the CEFR describes what somebody is able to do with language.

Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment). Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters. Can describe in simple terms aspects of his/her background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.

This is just a global description, there are also more details that break it down into listening, speaking, reading and writing.

If you just want to get on with it, use the CEFR. It has six levels that are broadly described in the Global Scale. But you will want to use the self-assessment grid which is available in multiple languages.

You can find more details in the chapter Fine-tuning your aims. It describes the CEFR levels, what they mean in practice and what it takes to reach them.

Your intermediate goals

So now that you have your overall aim, you need to set some intermediate goals that you can measure progress with.

Write down a few conversations in English that you’d like to be able to have at the level you chose as your goal, in two weeks, in six weeks, in three months, six months and in a year. Find some texts or types of text you’d like to read, or videos you’d like to be able to watch and understand. Be very specific. Don’t worry, you don’t have to translate this immediately. Just have it as a goal.

Then evaluate your progress every week.

Immediate Objectives, Working Memory and the Fantastic Elastic Chunks

So now you have your final aim. And your intermediate goal. But how do you go about setting the immediate objectives? The things you will actually be practicing. First, let’s think about how you actually speak your first language.

Languages have lots of words and quite a few rules. But nobody could ever say anything if they tried to do it by selecting words and applying the rules to them. Even the simplest sentence like “How are you doing” has more rules than you can imagine. More rules than words, actually. Trying to compute the sentence from these would simply swamp your working memory. Yet, anybody can say it with ease. How is that possible?

There is a famous paper in cognitive psychology called “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two”. It looks at all the memory experiments and concludes that the most we can ever hold in our immediate or working memory at once is about 7 pieces of information. And research since then has suggested that it may be even less. As little as four. And nobody, not even the cleverest rocket scientists or chess grandmasters can do any better than anyone else.

But the main lesson of the Magical Number Seven paper was not that there is a limit to the number of things you can keep in your head at the same time. The main lesson, and that is much more important and kind of amazing, was that there is no practical limit to the size of those pieces. You can take little pieces of information and chunk them up into bigger ones and on and on. And no matter how many you chunked together, they still only count as one in your working memory. Yes, chunks are the official technical term. But some people also call them mental representations.

And that is exactly how we speak a language as native speakers. We do it with chunks. “How are you” is not three words and about twelve rules for your working memory. It is just one chunk. And it also turns out that people who are top performers in their field have been able to develop very large chunks or mental representations. They can see very complex situations as one thing or perform complicated actions almost as one. A concert pianist can look at a 12 bar section of dense notation and see it as one thing to play. A chess master can look at a chessboard and see the result in 12 moves not because they can calculate that fast but because they see it as one situation.

It is the same with language. The things you need to learn, the things you need to practice are chunks. Not words, not rules. Chunks. The words and rules are just a way of describing the chunks to make them easier to talk about. But when linguists analyze language they find that the chunks are even more important than the rules for how we speak.

What does that look like in practice? When you learn words, always learn them in context. Learn entire conversations to be as one in your mind. Learn phrases with gaps and how to fill them instead of complicated rules. For example, when you want to learn how to say “I have something”, don’t learn all the rules. Learn I have _____. and bunch of words that can go in that gap in the right form: a book, a cup of coffee, a bottle of soda. Note that you need to learn the whole bit, not just book but a book, not just coffee but a cup of coffee.

Then that whole combination will become one chunk that you can manipulate without thinking. The rules will help you formulate the chunks but you are not learning them to use them while speaking. But more about that later.

Long-Term Memory: The magical shopping bag and the Matthew Effect of Learning

There is something magical about your memory. The more you know, the more you can learn. It’s the exact opposite of a shopping bag. The more shopping you put in a bag, the less you can add. The space fills up until you can add no more. But your memory is exactly the opposite, the more you have there, the easier it is to add more.

There are many people who speak five or more languages. None of them has ever said, I can’t learn another one, I don’t have enough memory left. They may not have enough time or motivation, but they always have enough memory. And they’re more likely to learn another one because it’s that much easier to do.

It’s the Matthew Effect of learning. The Matthew Effect essentially means “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” or as it said in the Bible “To those who have, more will be given.” That’s a bad thing when it comes to poverty but a very good thing for learning. So as you’re learning more and more, it will be easier to learn more still.

What does it mean in practice? Sometimes, to learn how to say something, you have to learn something else, as well. For example, a mnemonic device is something you learn alongside the word you’re learning. Maybe something that rhymes with it. When you learn somebody’s name, you don’t just learn the word. You learn the face, the situation, what job they have. And the more you know about a person, the easier it is to remember their name.

It’s the same with language. Don’t be shy about learning more context for words than what you find in the dictionary. Find famous people who said the words, find five different sentences, songs, etc. The more you learn, the more you can learn.

Scaffolding: Necessary but not sufficient

Not everything you'll need to learn or practice will actually be used when you speak. Just like when you’re building a house or a bridge, you need to build a scaffolding as you go higher, you need to do the same with learning a language. Or anything. Sometimes, it feels like the scaffolding is as elaborate and takes as much time to build as the bridge itself. Yes, but without it, there would be no bridge.

You will have to spend quite a lot of time learning and practicing things that you will eventually have to take apart and throw away. For example, you will be learning vocabulary or grammatical rules to help you build up the chunks. But when you’re speaking or writing, reading or listening, you will not actually be using them. You will be using the chunks you built up.

But, and this is the most important part, you must remember, the scaffolding is not your goal. And it is so easy to confuse it for your goal. A lot of people measure their success by how many words they memorised or how well they can do on a grammar test. And then they find out that they can’t get a sentence out or read simple instructions. That’s because the scaffolding is not the bridge you can cross a river on with all your baggage. That’s not what we speak with, even if it's maybe what you can pass an exam with.

Remember, your goal is bigger, richer chunks. And if the scaffolding is not helping you build those, ditch it. Try something different.