The highly literate mute
When I was in graduate school, a friend of mine earned some extra cash as an English tutor for students from Southeast Asia. As he was sizing up his students’ knowledge of English, he noticed something funny.
Their reading and listening comprehension was exquisite: on these fronts they were at a near-native level of English and had no problems with their lectures or readings from class. But when it came to forming sentences of their own, either in writing or aloud, they made bizarre mistakes. If you listened carefully to the words they used, you could see what they were trying to say, but they made word choice selections that no fluent speaker of English would ever make.
He couldn’t imagine what chain of events would lead these students to have this specific, weird sort of linguistic competence. On a lark one day he decided to quiz one of his students using the dictionary: my friend would select a random word and ask his student what it meant. He was unable to find a word that the student didn’t recognize. But while the student could grasp the meaning of every word, he generally had no sense for its usage.
It was is if his students had just sat down with an English dictionary and memorized it.
My friend and I agreed that, while we were happy to be in grad school and everything, if you had told us several years before that we’d have to memorize a dictionary to get there, we probably would have done something else. And I continued to feel that way until about a year ago, when I began learning the Italian language by memorizing a dictionary.
SuperMemo
Last year I read a neat article in Wired called “Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm,” which describes the obsessive, ingenious work of a Polish scholar in the development of a piece of software called SuperMemo.
The Wired article is worth reading and goes into a lot of detail about how SuperMemo works, but here’s the basic gist. SuperMemo operates like an electronic flash card deck — for example, it’ll give me an Italian word and my task is to remember the English equivalent. Once it shows me the answer I’ll rate my ability to remember the card on a scale of 0-5, 5 meaning that I recognize the word immediately and 0 meaning that I don’t recognize it at all. SuperMemo uses that number to schedule when it will show me the flash card again in the future. If I knew that card well, it may schedule the card weeks or even months into the future, and if I didn’t know it, SuperMemo might schedule the card again for review tomorrow.
The upshot is that for any given day SuperMemo is trying to show you only material that it thinks you’re about to forget, so you don’t spend a lot of time reviewing material you already know well, and the time you actually spend learning is allotted very efficiently.
After I read the article, I bought the software and have been loading my brain with thousands and thousands of Italian words ever since. This style of learning is passive and rote, and so it’s about as un-Head Firsty as you can imagine. But it’s also really easy once you get the hang of it, and it’s a good complement to more active approaches to learning. On average I spend about ten minutes a day going over new words and expressions.
[Oh, and a quick caveat about SuperMemo. In addition to being (arguably) the most incredible software learning platform of all time, it's also a strong contender for having the most poorly designed software interface of all time. So I'm not recommending SuperMemo. But I can say that, for people who can fight through the frustrations of dealing with the software, it works as advertised. And BTW a free, open source implementation of the SuperMemo algorithm is this program, which looks solid but which I haven't tested myself.]
That’s not how you’re supposed to learn a language!
I think there’s a good chance that my friend’s students learned English the way I learned Italian, using SuperMemo or some similar software. I usually have no problem understanding spoken Italian, and I am pretty solid reading Italian newspapers. But if you’d like me to speak to you in Italian, make yourself comfortable, because it takes me four or five seconds between each word as I try to sort out the genders and conjugations and all that assorted stuff. I’ve simply never practiced speaking Italian.
Now one might say that this is a train wreck approach to learning a language. The only way to really become fluent in another language is to immerse oneself in an environment of native speakers for a long period of time.
I’d totally agree. It’s just that, in my case, long-term linguistic immersion in Italy is an opportunity that hasn’t presented itself. If I were kicking it in Rome right now, you wouldn’t find me tap-tap-tapping away with computer flash cards. But as an alternative to linguistic ignorance, or as a way of preparing for future opportunities, starting off a language with SuperMemo and the newspaper is a great idea.
My friend’s students improved their speaking and writing abilities dramatically once they were immersed in an English-speaking university. They may never have made it there had they not memorized the dictionary. And, once there, they certainly benefited from having preloaded the language into their minds.
Last night I had my first actual Italian class, where I hope to be able to learn to use the language and not simply to understand it. I enrolled in an intermediate class, since I’m already familiar with the first few thousand Italian words one learns. My first impression is that, while my vocabulary is larger than my classmates’ vocabularies, their ability to vocalize sentences is way ahead of mine. I’m sure we’ll all be on the same page in a few months, but my experience up until now has made me a believer in technologically enhanced rote memorization.
Michael, you’ve just described exactly my experience / grasp of Spanish.
We have a house in spain and I once had a partner who was fluent, and have spent a lot of time reading, listening to being around Spanish. My spanish-to-english vocab is pretty solid. I can understand almost everything said to me even our little town with its funny accent.
But when I open my mouth to reply… yikes!
Usage is exactly my problem. I visited a hardware store and asked for “paint for wood” because I needed some varnish. The shopkeeper literally fell about laughing. Apparently what I’d actually said was “I’d like some paint for the forest”.