I previously wrote a post about what I look for in language learning materials, but I didn’t really go into a huge amount of detail about how to actually use the materials themselves. This article aims to explain my process for learning a language and what worked for me in order to achieve fluency in Mandarin. I use and have used the same techniques and methods for other languages as well, so this will in no way be limited to Chinese only.
Identify Your Reason to Learn
The first step to learning a language is to actually identify why you’re learning the language. Did you decide to pick up a language for a job or just for fun? Do you want to just go and travel or do you want to go in depth with the culture? Ultimately, why are you even bothering to spend the time and the effort to learn another language? You don’t have to have only one goal, but having a clear cut reason of why you have decided to learn and what you want to do with the language helps you skip studying without aim during the learning process.
Even if it is just on a whim, having a clear reason to be learning this language helps shape and direct your learning process. If you are learning on a whim and you have no end goal, then you will most likely just tread water. You may still progress, but not nearly as efficiently as if you were actively working towards a specific direction. Nail down exactly why you want to learn this language. It doesn’t have to be overly romantic either, and like we mentioned before, it doesn’t have to be for just one reason.
Find a Starting Point Towards Your Goal
The resources you pick if you decide to learn to go travel will be completely different than the resources you pick if you want to read ancient literature. Even though you may start with the same basic coursebook, you will find it more efficient to start with a coursebook more centered around your goals, though sometimes, there isn’t really much choice. A basic travel course in a language may be plenty good if all you want to do is visit the country, but it may be a complete waste of time towards the goal of reading ancient literature (assuming you don’t plan to also travel). Most goals aren’t this polarized, but it’s still something to keep in mind.
If you have absolutely no idea where to start with the learning process, that’s fine too. Try taking a course or starting with a popular coursebook and just see where it takes you and what works or doesn’t with it. If you haven’t shopped for language materials before, it can be hard to tell how the book is going to work for you or not. There are also plenty of books which start off extremely straightforward and fall apart pretty quickly in, but you can’t tell until you’re more familiar with the language. You can get ahead quicker at this phase if you know what to look for, but it really isn’t going to hurt too much unless you get something that is just plain bad. A good travel course which makes sense is going to be better than a coursebook which covers more but doesn’t make any sense to you.
What’s in a Coursebook?
Language coursebooks tend to be structured pretty similarly. A typical beginner’s textbook or coursebook is going to have an introduction to pronunciation, then waylay into a lesson composed of a dialogue or two with some basic greetings which will be followed up by a vocabulary section, a grammar section, a cultural section, and maybe some drills and exercises. The next few lessons will move on to different dialogues with a theme of sorts which may work in a reading section as well for more literary language. Ideally it will come with the dialogues and some other listening practice on CDs or via download.
Travel courses are similar, but may be a bit pared down by omitting more complicated grammar and more formal vocabulary for the sake of accessibility. If the language doesn’t use the Roman alphabet, they may omit the writing system except for signs and important bits as one off entries in a lesson. Do beware since some travel courses are just glorified phrasebooks, which although they have a use, aren’t the best first step. Travel courses are also often a good bit cheaper than traditional courses in most cases, so they can be a good first step if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and you don’t mind going back to the basics if you stick with it.
Getting Better Faster
Once you’ve gotten past the basic dialogues and gotten the most fundamental bits of grammar, that is when you want to diversify the learning process. We want to augment our coursebook (or even replace it) with specific resources targeting each of our linguistic sections. We have: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, the spoken language, the written language, and culture as the primary units with a few other items which are auxiliary, but potentially useful.
You may not necessarily split each off in the beginning either. A lot of how you augment is going to depend on your goals and your weaknesses. What are you struggling with and why? If you are struggling with grammar, you probably want to add a grammar resource in which makes more sense, or else simplifies the process by reducing the complexity of vocabulary and other elements. Coursebooks tend to be a bit holistic which helps for getting up to speed faster when you’re able to coast through the material and keep pace with the plan behind the coursebook, but this integrated approach hurts you if you are missing any of the elements. Many coursebooks look to try and use each and every word which is introduced even in lessons about that specific word which can make understanding a little trickier.
Identifying Your Weaknesses
One of the hardest things to do is to identify your own weaknesses. You need to be honest with yourself and accept that you may not be as good at certain things as others. For instance, I’m much better at learning to speak a language than to write it, and I’m better at grammar than I am at vocabulary. I had to learn to work around these weaknesses and augment them properly or else I would get left behind in the formal courses I took. Augment your weaknesses, but don’t let yourself be blinded by them.
No coursebook is ever going to be perfect, and each course is written with a specific use case in mind, so don’t be ashamed if it doesn’t work for you or make sense to you. You may not be the intended audience, but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily just throw the baby out with the bathwater. If a course is good at most things, but certain elements aren’t working, augment them rather than just throwing the course out. It will help you learn better to have a bit of uncertainty in the materials as long as the materials are not lacking or wrong.
Augmenting Your Language Materials
Once you feel that the course or coursebook is starting to get a little stale, if you feel it just isn’t serving your needs, or even if you just want to move faster, you can and should start adding in extra materials. I like to focus on what I’m missing that helps me get to my goals. If you want to read better, you probably don’t need to augment spoken materials at first. Use your weaknesses and your goals to move on to other materials.
Pronunciation
If pronunciation is your weakness, you can augment it with either an actual pronunciation course if available, or else something like a spoken language course. There are also usually good, free resources online for many languages, but your mileage may vary depending on the language and depending on your needs. I like to use something like an audio course combined with Audacity (or any other recording program) to work on my pronunciation. This method is cheap and efficient as long as you can hear the differences in the language and yours. Paying a tutor who is a native speaker may be necessary if you can’t hear what is off for this method. Sometimes just picking a different course series which is more lacking on the rest, but which has an extended pronunciation section can be worth it.
As you advance, you can focus on other methods to improve your pronunciation, such as a language exchange or similar where you can work on the other bits of the language, as well as whatever you specifically want for pronunciation. Keep in mind though, not everyone makes a good teacher in these situations. Another trick is to use voice recognition software like Siri or Google Assistant which can be useful as well for certain things. This does breakdown with certain languages however and may not be the most efficient earlier on.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a huge part of any language, but vocabulary can be broken down in many ways. There are many categories such as: informal spoken, formal spoken, informal written, formal written, literary, etc. for most languages. Some vocabulary books will be tailored to one or several of these categories, some may be split up by level, some may even just be random. To add complexity, some are then sorted by topic, some alphabetically, and some by level. This is further compounded with the fact not all vocabulary books include usage, so a book may have a lot of vocabulary, but no context for the usage aside from that of the translation. Look at several and see what works for you. This is something which a phrasebook can help with in some situations as well.
With some luck, you can find decent Anki cards (we’ll come back to Anki itself later) or a free resource, but these tend to be a bit more limited than other resources in my experience. Having something a little more structured can help a lot unless you want to spend a lot of time curating your own materials. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to find free resources which can help as long as you are aware that they may not be the best and may not be as efficient as they could be.
Grammar
Grammar is the Yin to vocabulary’s Yang. Both are entwined but still separate in terms of learning. Grammar books tend to use reduced vocabularies or at least fixed vocabularies compared to coursebooks, which makes it easier to focus on the task at hand. The order and focus is what differs largely. If you like your course, try to find a grammar book more in line with what you’re doing. If the course is a little muddled or something you plan to move away from, find a grammar book that speaks to you but may not necessarily follow any particular order.
If you are familiar with grammar terms, it can help to get a more academic grammar book, but if grammar terms beyond “noun” and “verb” are a mystery, it might be worth going with something a bit simpler, or which explains the terms as it goes. A grammar book with a good index is a must, more so early on. Ideally, look for something with exercises as well (and an answer key) to really drill the points home.
You can also look for free resources or older, public domain grammars, but these may have errors or may not be as good as a newer resource. Like with the vocabulary resources, if you’re willing to pick through the free stuff, it can be great, but you do have to invest time hunting for it and finding something worth using. For a lot of situations, I tend to just skip the free resources because the time investment is higher than the cost of a decent book.
Phrasebooks
I’ve mentioned phrasebooks a few times in both good and bad contexts, but they are great as long as you are aware of and accept the limitations. One of the quickest ways to get better at certain patterns is to use a phrasebook. It combines vocabulary with grammar, and can help serve as a type of drill if you get the right kind of phrasebook. Most phrasebooks are organized into categories and situations which can be combined with most coursebooks for an even more potent combination. The grammar in these is typically as simple as possible and the explanations limited at best, but they are excellent tools for preparing for travel or to just round out some extra language proficiency. Don’t expect them to replace more formal instruction, but they are great from travel to formal language usage when used correctly.
Spoken Language
I know the past couple sections I have ripped on free resources, but that is not my intention at all. For spoken materials at a higher level, free resources are probably going to be your best friend for learning a language. There are so many shows and just general bits of media all over the internet free and legal which use the spoken language in any target language. At an earlier level, this may be a bit too much, but as you advance, the free stuff tends to overtake the paid courses and paid resources. You can usually also find some basic courses for free from various countries where the language is spoken as a cultural outreach for many, many languages.
At the lower level, you can use travel courses or specific spoken or oral courses to really get up to speed. Some free courses are excellent, but it depends on the language. The beginner-intermediate to intermediate level are where a lot of the free materials dry up before picking back up at the upper intermediate to advanced levels. I like to combine other, more authentic, structured courses with my main course at this point, or find specific spoken courses to augment my listening and spoken drills. Some people suggest children’s shows, but I have found that most are not that applicable and the pronunciation and cadence is exaggerated to the point of being detrimental in the main languages I have looked at learning.
Written Language
At a lower level, structured readers are the best for the written language, followed closely by coursebooks. Structured readers, or readers, are basically a collection of stories or other text with the vocabulary and grammar controlled for the specific level. The goal is for it to be more authentic without being too overwhelming. They tend to follow a more generic set of courses or language test standard, but not always. You might get lucky and find some good resources for the written language online for a lower level, but I would not hold my breath at all.
As you progress however, free materials reign supreme. News sites are everywhere and use natural, authentic written language. A good dictionary (digital or paper) can help make these much more digestible. There are also things like literature, short stories, etc. which can be used to bolster understanding of the written language. The internet makes this part of basically any language more accessible than it ever has been before.
Dictionaries
Even though a dictionary is not really a particular part of any given language, picking a dictionary (or dictionaries) to learn with will help you smooth out many other parts of your language learning experience. With languages like Chinese, picking a dictionary can be very complicated, while other languages aren’t quite as complicated aside from taste or quality of materials. It’s okay to have more than one dictionary for a language, and usually encouraged.
Pick what works for you and makes your life easier. Most phrasebooks include a basic dictionary, but these are rarely as efficient as a standalone dictionary. Sometimes a very basic dictionary is best if you’re at a more basic level because it skips words you’ll never deal with at your level. Other times, it pays to have something with more literary terms which is denser. A dictionary which includes grammatical explanations and similar is great, but can also be unwieldy at times too. It’s all about identifying what helps you hit your goals and addressing your needs.
Personally, I start collecting them to make life easier. An easy, simple dictionary is great in the beginning. Then, I add in something with better explanations of usage and grammar. Finally, I add in more formal dictionaries or dictionaries which are more specialized to the task at hand. The mix of dictionaries means for basic textbooks, the basic dictionary is enough and much quicker to cross reference, but you still have more expanded dictionaries for when you need to delve deeper into a word or phrase. You can also use electronic dictionaries, though I would advise against this in the beginning at least, since the physical act of using a dictionary has helped me learn many, many words faster than a digital dictionary.
Culture
No one book is ever going to teach you about a culture. I find that reading up on history, literature, etc. for a given culture gives you a window, but you need to get some degree of immersion as well as more formal and informal rules to help. Phrasebooks and travel courses can help with some of the common basics of a given culture, but can’t give you much more than getting by. Immersion is about the only way to really cross this gap past the basics of don’t stab your chopsticks in a bowl of rice in Japan or give someone a clock in China. There are books dedicated to culture and etiquette, but they need to be tempered with experience usually. That being said, it never hurts to read up on what interests you as long as you know it’s just a piece of the puzzle.
Putting It All Together
Now that you know what resources to look for, let’s go over some tricks for making the learning process much easier. We are trying to bolster our weaknesses or further enhance our strengths depending on our goals. Pick the materials you add in based on whether you want to get much better at a specific aspect first, or want to balance yourself out. If you are going for fluency, balance tends to be best long term, but if you are getting on a plane tomorrow, you probably want to just be able to communicate first and don’t need to worry yourself with literary language tidbits.
When learning, do not be afraid to use tools like Anki to make flashcards and employ them in your study routine. Anki is free and open source, and is one of the most amazing tools for flashcards in general. The algorithm it uses will save you a load of time for little investment. Most coursebooks will have a free deck somewhere as well. I wouldn’t lean on these as your primary way to learn, but they are a great tool to save time and speed up the learning process of what you’re learning. You can also make your own cards (which is a great idea as you progress), but again, this is a tool to learn in conjunction with other resources and not the only thing you should be using.
Begin augmenting your coursebook or course as soon as you can, or as soon as you see a flaw in what you’re doing. Even though the coursebook may not be perfect, you can always add to it and flesh it out with extra resources. I am fond of coursebooks because they cover so many things at once and give structure and provide topics and exercises, but they definitely have their flaws. Sometimes, you just have to throw the coursebook out as you fully augment all of the various linguistic elements or you advance past the standard courses. The more authentic materials you can work with, the quicker you’re going to get up to speed with your goals.
How Long Should I Study?
A lot of people make the mistake of trying to learn a language like they try to go to the gym on January 1st. Start slow and spend a little bit of time each day starting out rather than big blocks of time. Some people start trying to soak up too much and get burned out, others try to cram their time into one or two sessions a week with breaks in between. The best approach starting out is a few minutes (15-30) a day, every day, with longer sessions where you want or need. This can grow as you get more familiar with the language, but treat it like the gym if you haven’t been in a while. If you go the first day and lift for two hours, go the second day and try to lift for two hours, you probably aren’t going to be going on day three.
Where to Go Next
As you work through a given course series, you will eventually hit a natural end. This doesn’t mean that you just stop learning. You can either find other courses which are more relevant to what you’re doing, or use your other resources to move on to more authentic materials and work to learn via natural materials rather than just going through coursebooks which will begin getting diminishing returns. Pivot towards your goals with each move between resources, but don’t neglect bits and pieces which can help with overall linguistic functioning for your goals. That is, if you plan to travel, you can’t just avoid all writing even though speaking is what you will do 95% of the time. Balance your learning, even if it is just the bare minimum to get by in another aspect of the language.
Conclusion
Obviously, there is no one size fits all approach to language learning, but by analyzing your own goals and aspirations, and dissecting the language, you can find and use resources which suit your strengths and address your weaknesses to get up to speed as soon as possible. Taking your course or initial foray into the language and augmenting it with resources touching on each part of the language allows you to move through a given course and learn faster. Adding in other resources adds reinforcement to the structure the underlying course ideally already has. Once you finish a given course, you can look for more advanced courses, or aim to hit more authentic resources when ready.