Step 3: Use good practice strategies

Step 3: Use good practice strategies

Now you know what you will practice, but how will you do it? Do you just find chunks to learn and repeat them until you know them? Not exactly. Nobody can just sit down and memorise thousands of chunks of language in a way that they can just show up in working memory as one. There will be a lot of repetition, for sure, but it must be targeted and deliberate. It must always be done with a purpose in mind.

General tips

Time: Focus and sprints

All your planning and attitude will be for nothing if you don’t put in the work. You MUST practice. That’s why this approach is called deliberate practice. You must put in the work. How much? How much is enough? How much is too much?

Language learning takes longer than getting ready for your first 3-mile run. But we can still learn from running. So, let’s break our learning into training sprints. And after each sprint, we should achieve something tangible. See some measurable improvement. Be able to do something that seemed impossible to do at the start.

There’s no perfect length of time for this, but let’s settle on 6 weeks. A month can be too short to see results and two months is too long to go without tangible results. You should plan to spend at least 20 hours of pure practice time during those six weeks. That’s less than an half an hour a day.

You can take some rest days but you should practice at least half an hour most days. That will give you 20 hours. You can practice in even smaller chunks 10 minutes at a time but you MUST have at least some 30-minute practice sessions. And some longer ones.

Talk, talk, talk

You will need to talk. You’re trying to learn to speak the language after all. And you can only do that by talking. Talk to yourself, talk to objects in your house, talk to your fellow students, find somebody to do a language exchange with. If you’re in the country, find people in the street to ask them directions to the same place, over and over. Order things in a lot of restaurants.

Always try to say something meaningful. Not deep, but meaningful. As you go about your daily life, keep an eye out for things you could say in the new language. Make a note and then practice saying them. Out loud. With the book closed. In different places. Sitting down and standing up. Singing out, whispering. Just sitting in a chair and repeating things is not enough.

Visualising

When you’re practicing you should also keep in mind that soon you will have to say something to someone. Often you have to practice on your own. But always imagine a situation where you’re actually saying this in real life. To a real person trying to get a real response. You don’t actually have to see them in your head. Just try to focus on the idea of saying it to someone in a real situation. You’ll be surprised how well that actually works.

Memorizing

Even though memorizing words is not language learning, it is necessary to build up the scaffolding you need to get there. So you will be doing a lot of that. Set aside at least 10 minutes every day when you’re memorising words. Make flashcards, use a flashcard app. And constantly quiz yourself. Your aim should be to learn at least 250 new words and phrases during your first learning sprint and then increase that by 50% with every other one.

The good news is that this is actually easy. Apps like Memrise, Quizlet or Anki have this down to a literal science. It’s called Spaced Repetition and it will help you memorise words properly.

Comprehensible input

To learn a language, you need lots and lots of input. You need to experience a lot of the language you’re learning in its natural environment. But you can’t just listen in the background, let the language wash over you. You must actually understand a little bit of what’s going on. But not everything. So, you’re after are situations where you know what’s going on but that are just a little over your head. It’s been called i+1.

So during your sessions with a native speaker always try to get to a place where you drive the conversation forward. Learn a lot of phrases that will trigger a response with more words. Things like aha, yes, that’s interesting, really?, I didn’t know that., What next?, Can you tell me more?

Not knowing what’s going on

When you’re new to a language, your most common state of mind is confusion. People say things, or you try to read some text, and you just have no idea what’s going on. Nobody likes the feeling of being lost. Completely out of control. But you must practice getting comfortable with this feeling.

If you always try to understand every single word, always want to be in control, you will never learn anything. You would get enough input. If you try to understand every word in a sentence, it will take up so much time, you won’t know what the conversation is about. Be on the lookout for that feeling of confusion and see if you can welcome it into yourself. Integrate it, it’s part of the process.

Getting feedback

If you want your practice to be effective, you must get feedback on how you’re doing. The sooner the better. That’s where your teacher is so helpful. They can notice issues, point you in better directions.

But your teacher is not always there when you’re practicing. So learn to get feedback in other ways. Record yourself, exchange your recordings with others. You can also dictate into Google Docs to see how well it will understand your pronunciation.

And once you get the feedback, you must act on it. Look for ways in which you can focus your next practice session on correcting what you were doing wrong. But also be prepared that it will not always be easy to fix in one go. So don’t obsess. A good rule of thumb for language learning success is: Never make the same mistake more than about 20 or 30 times.

Making associations and finding patterns

As you’re learning, always be on the look out for patterns and associations. You may find that a bunch of words have something in common, some shape, sound or similar context. Use that as a way to expand your vocabulary or others ways of speaking. Memory is all about associations.

Many of these patterns are in described in textbooks or grammar books. Pay attention to them and learn as much as you can from them. But don’t wait to have someone tell you, look for your own. They don’t even have to be real patterns or accurate ones. Just something that will help you learn.

Measure your progress

You need to get lots of immediate feedback to make the most out of your practice. But you also need to measure progress over days and weeks. Again, the best way is to make a recording of yourself speaking. Compare it to a new one a week later, a month later, and so on.

Specific skills

Reading

A good way of getting a lot of input is reading. Even if you’re just trying to learn to speak, you can get a lot more input by reading. Reading is essential. Of course, at the beginning, you won’t find too many texts you can understand. Not the sorts of things you want to read. But that’s because you’re looking in the wrong places.

The world around you is filled with signs with words on them. They always say important things. And if you’re not in the right country, there’s the internet. Advertising is great. There are often very simple phrases in it such as Come to our store, Get ready for the discount, We have the best prices, etc.

Reading modes

There are different modes of reading. People mostly think of reading as if reading a story or magazine article. You sit down and read from beginning to end. But that can be very hard and discouraging in a new language until your vocabulary has grown.

1. Pre-reading activities: Interlinear glosses

Break reading into pre-reading and reading. One of your pre-reading activities would be simply to spend some time with the text and a dictionary looking up words you don’t know. Don’t try to read the text, just scan for unknown words. Then write the translation above them or below them in small letters.

2. Skimming and scanning: Reading for gist and details

While you need to do some extensive reading, that’s not actually how most people read most texts. Be it instructions or newspaper articles, most of the time people only skim them to get the gist or scan through them to get to an important detail.

Listening

You can’t speak without listening. No one can. Even if it may sometimes seem otherwise. But of all the language learning activities, listening is the hardest. You can’t easily skip around, pause, or look a little ahead to see what’s coming. You are not in control at all. But you have to do it.

Writing

You need to start writing as soon as possible. There are two kinds of writing. 1. Writing things down. You need that to take notes. 2. Writing to express ideas. You will do that less as a beginner but you should try. For example, keeping a simple diary.

How to practice vocabulary the right way with collocations

Language is mostly words. So you have to learn them. You have to learn a lot of them. You should aim to know 1000 words as soon as possible. Not all actively but at least have some notion they exist. And once you get to 2000, things become much easier.

Knowing words and speaking the language are not the same things. But you cannot speak without knowing them. And cramming them is the only known way to scale up fast. The good news is that the more words you know, the easier it will be to pick up new ones. Eventually, you’ll just suss them out of context. But first you need to jump start the process by cramming. Sorry.

You will have to do some flashcard work here. But you should very soon start using the words in context. Because in real life, words are never alone. But here’s some good news. Words often have preferred companions. Other words they appear next to more often than others. Because they appear in the same location, they are called collocations.

When and how should you use grammar: The monitor approach

“Do I need to learn grammar?” is a common question people ask. The answer is yes because grammar helps you monitor your performance. But you should only learn it for that purpose. As you go about building bigger and bigger chunks, you’ll find out that you want to learn some shortcuts for making sense of them. And rules of grammar are such shortcuts. They are what other people discovered to help them understand the way they speak. Use that, learn from it. But don’t make it your goal (unless you are interested in grammar which is its own reward but is not connected to language learning skills.).

Remember, nobody speaks by looking up words in their mind and applying grammatical rules to them. It’s impossible because of the limitations of working memory. People may occasionally pause and think about a rule that can be applied if they get stuck. But that is very rarely otherwise everybody would be permanently tongue-tied.

Think of grammar as a recipe. You’ve probably had the experience of trying to cook something from a recipe for the first time. The recipe says the preparation time is 15 minutes but you take more than twice as long and the food isn’t very good. That’s because everything in the recipe is new and you are going very slowly. You have to think about every little step. Plus you’re checking the recipe after almost every step, because the few times you don’t, you did it wrong. Chefs don’t cook like that. They already have all the moves baked into their body and they just move very quickly.

Improving your pronunciation

If this all learning is about chunking, pronunciation is even more so. It is the chunks other chunks are made from. Pronunciation even has its own grammar with lots of rules. But you should only learn very few of them to help you get unstuck.

There are three key things you need to know about pronunciation:

1. Sounds are never pronounced in isolation so you shouldn’t practice them like that for too long.
2. Sounds are pronounced differently in different contexts.
3. You’re not just pronouncing the sounds, you’re pronouncing syllables, phrases and sentences. They have their own pronunciation. These are called stress and intonation. And they are even more important than the individual sounds.

Slow down, speed up, shake it all about: The benefits of feeling silly

So far, we’ve been talking about practicing as if it’s just a matter of repetition. But that’s not nearly as effective as varying what you do. Whether you’re learning words, dialog structures, intonation patterns, or grammar constructions, you must never just repeat them. You should repeat them in lots of different ways, places or contexts. Here are some ideas:

• Say what you’re saying at different speeds. Very slowly, very fast.
• Use different emotions. Speak happily, angrily, sadly.
• Whisper and shout.
• Sit down, stand up, lie down when repeating words or phrases.
• Speak into a mirror
• Have conversations with inanimate objects
• Sing and chant

Tools

There are lots of tools you can use to make this process easier and also more effective. But remember, like any tool, they will only be useful if you learn to use them. You cannot just click a link or install an app. You have to investigate how it works, how people use it, and develop some fluency with the tool. And that’s a mini learning project on its own. But it is well worth it.

Commitment: Don’t cheat yourself

If you go on Good Reads Quotes and search for self-deception, you will find 177 quotes from people across history that all essentially boil down to the same thing: Nobody is as easy to deceive as yourself.

Displacement activities

Doing activities like making flashcards, getting your books ready, choosing the right exercises for practice. Those are all necessary but they don’t contribute to learning. It may feel like you are doing something useful and you are but just not learning. It’s the same as putting on your running gear and deciding on a course does not make you any fast or healthier. It does not count against the running time.

Confusing recognition for recall

This is a common problem for students. You’re looking at something in your book or on your memorisation app and it looks like you know it so well, as if you could never forget it. And then someone asks you, and you draw a complete blank.

Confusing studying for learning

Another common way is to confuse doing the sort of thing that students do for learning. You’re reading a book or to class and it feels like that’s enough for learning. And you feel like you’re doing all you can and the rest is the responsibility of the book or the teacher.

Working with others: Virtual study space

Working with others is necessary for language learning. You need conversation partners and you need someone to give you feedback. But you can also use others to help you keep to you practice routine. You can simply check in with others when you’re about to start studying. Give each other progress reports. But a really good way is to set up a virtual study space.

Get started: Plan, execute and find enjoyment

So, now comes the hard part. You have to get started. You must make a plan. Schedule all your practice sessions in your diary or planner. You must not leave this for your free time. Make sure it is on your schedule alongside all other duties.

Find people to help you. Look for native speakers who can give you feedback. Agree with your teacher about the support they can offer. Agree with your classmates.

Then get started. Don’t skip, don’t cheat yourself. Find time to talk with others about your frustrations and get some tips about how to overcome them.

And above all work very hard to find enjoyment in the process. Even if some of it is kind of gruelling, the results are worth it. But even you can even find joy in the process. See if you can catch that language learner’s high.