#303 - Steve and Alex - Confidence (Part 1)

Steve: Hi Alex.

Alex: Hi there, Steve.

Steve: You know it's been a while since we did these.

Alex: Some while, yes; quite a while.

Steve: I feel badly.

First of all, you were away in Korea for two months or more. Alex: Three months, actually.

Steve: Three months, yeah.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: I was traveling and one thing or another and we didn't do them.

I know there are people, surprisingly, who actually enjoy listening to us. Alex: Yeah.

Steve: That is surprising.

Alex: We had some requests on the forum and some people contact us personally and say hey, we'd love to hear another podcast.

Steve: Right.

Alex: So, here we are.

Steve: I never know what we should talk about, whether we should talk about the weather or politics, the economic situation, but one thing that struck me today that I wanted to talk about and get your opinions on is the issue of confidence in language learning.

I'm even going to do a YouTube video on it. It is certainly true that if something good happens to you, say your favorite team wins a game or you get complimented on something or I score a goal in my Old Timer's hockey, whatever, anything good happens you feel good. Alex: Absolutely.

Steve: You feel good and you're more motivated to do things.

You've got a livelier step and you're just up and at ‘em and you want to do things and language learning is so dependent on the attitude of the learner, perhaps more so than in other activities. I mean if you don't understand Math you can be motivated or whatever, you're not going to manage. It's difficult. But, to me, language learning is like learning to walk. It's very much natural and if you are motivated and confident you'll do better. So I'm thinking to myself, many of the things that they do in traditional language learning actually discourage the learner. Like if you get two out of 10 in a test you're not going to study as hard. That's not going to make you study harder. Sometimes on my YouTube videos I'll go look at the comments.

I have my Russian, for example, and I make mistakes in Russian. Generally, the Russians come on and compliment me and say oh, that's wonderful. I wish I could speak English as well as you speak Russian and so forth and I know that I make a lot of mistakes. But then you'll get the guy who's in his fourth year of Russian studies at some university in the States and he comes on saying you're butchering the cases and you sound pretty bad. Now, me, I'm not affected that much because seven out of 10 say that's good and three out of 10 point out my mistakes, but if all I got was people pointing out my mistakes, and I know that I have mistakes, that would discourage me and I'd be less interested. You know I was thinking again.

I had a conversation in Czech and, of course, I've been working on Korean and trying to maintain my Russian, but my Czech has slipped. I understood everything that he was saying -- we were talking about Czech politics -- but I had trouble finding my words. I knew that I was using the cases even worse than normal, but I'm not discouraged because I can then download my radio interviews, listen to them and I say wow! Isn't that great? I can understand. I can understand this Czech. I'm in this Czech thing. I'm part of that now. I can relate to things Czech like you relate to things Korean, so I'm happy. So what if I speak with mistakes, it doesn't matter. Anyway, to bring this all back to language instruction, because I always talk about the three pillars or whatever, your attitude, the time you spend and your ability to notice, but they are all affected by your attitude because if you're turned off you're not going to put in the time and you aren't going to pay attention, so the key one is the attitude.

So if in language instruction we are doing things that actually discourage the learner, maybe it needn't matter whether the learner gets the subjunctive right just because we taught the subjunctive this term. What does that matter in the long run? What matters in the long run is that the learner continues, enjoys the language and continues reading and listening and doing things with the language.

That's what really matters. So the whole emphasis is like, what can we do? Can we give them you know…what do you call these cola drinks that give you an extra kick? How do we get the person happy, confident, feeling good about what they have achieved, rather than about what they haven't achieved? Alex: Yeah.

Well, I have an interesting experience I guess on both ends of the spectrum because my interest in Korean blossomed out of relationships with Korean people, having friends, having interactions face to face. When you meet people face to face like that they're very positive and very supportive, even if you've just started and you only know a few words. They're very impressed and they applaud you and so from the very start with Korean. What I found was that I had a lot of confidence and I had a lot of motivation, a very positive attitude so that I could continue with Korean, even though I knew I made lots of mistakes, even though some people didn't understand me and so on and so forth. That's just part of the process, but I had kind of this very positive experience with relation to Korean. Now, fast forward a little bit when I went to university.

My first year in university, the first semester, actually, I took a Japanese class and I thought oh, Japanese will be interesting. I've heard that it's grammatically similar to Korean so maybe it's going to be easy for me, I don't know. So I take the class, but it was an intensive class so it's twice as much class time per week, which means you move through material a lot more quickly, but you also have to take a lot more tests, a lot more quizzes. There's a lot more examining that takes place. What I found was I started off very interested, intrigued by Japanese culture, the language and things like that, but I kind of underestimated the workload for the course and so my performance slowly started to slip.

I realized that and I made an effort to do better, but the course was moving so quickly that I found it hard to catch up, even though I was spending more time. But what I found was even though I was working hard on this, I was constantly getting less than satisfactory grades. For myself, I'd like to get an A, but in these cases I was getting a C, some of them I actually even failed these quizzes. So, to me, it was a very negative experience where I'm trying really hard and I'm trying to be motivated, but every other class when I have a test I'm getting a low grade that I know is drawing me closer and closer to a lower grade overall for the class and it just became very difficult.

I tried to go as hard as I could, but towards the end of the class I thought man, this isn't any fun at all. I enjoyed Korean because it was interaction, it was positive, but this is like so rigid, so strict. Even though I can, to some degree, communicate in basic Japanese with a friend, the class says that I'm bad. Steve: Right.

And, realistically, what they test you on is quite arbitrary. What they're saying is we taught you this. We covered this material; therefore, you should know it. One thing that I know from my own language learning is what I covered today is not necessarily what I remember or learn today. That may not click in for another six months or a year. So what are you testing there? My ability to regurgitate something that was given to me over a certain period of time. The only thing that really matters is that you stay active. So, getting back to my own experience now, I'm trying to maintain my Russian and Czech, both of which are very much less than perfect.

Although I understand the languages very well, I speak with lots of mistakes so I still want to spend some time on them and yet I want to devote myself to Korean because I want to get the Korean up to the same imperfect level as my Czech and my Russian. So, I end up being realistic. In other words, there's only so much that you can achieve. Rather than saying oh, gee, I spoke in Czech and I made a lot of mistakes and I feel badly about it I say look, realistically, what can you expect. If I were devoting myself full time to Czech, Russian or Korean I would do better, but then I would lose the other two. So that's what I've elected to do. I think it's important to give ourselves credit for our achievements, rather than have other people come along and tell us where our shortcomings are because we're often well aware of our shortcomings and every so often to say hey, look at me.

Look at what I can do. Six months ago I didn't understand anything in Korean, let's say, and I sense myself understanding Korean better and better. I struggle when I speak, but I am aware of making some progress so that should make me feel good. I should feel good about that. If we put that much time into a pursuit and we feel badly about the results that's obviously discouraging and this is getting back to the classroom. The teacher has to structure it in such a way, given that people learn at different speeds and in different ways, that everyone who is genuinely putting in an effort comes away with a sense of satisfaction that they have achieved something.

If some people have better pronunciation and if some people remember certain words better or faster than others it doesn't matter. You can't squeeze more out of that learner than is there. Assuming that there is a difference in ability, all you really want is that they put the time in and that they feel good about it and so that should be the only emphasis. Like I have 25 people in my classroom, how can I make them all like learning the language, feel good about learning the language? Maybe they shouldn't be learning the language. Maybe they should be learning some other language, so go find them whatever language they should be learning. In other words, the whole thing should be directed towards this issue of making people feel good, making people get a sense of achievement. Now, it can't be phony.

You know like Johnny can barely spell and they say oh, you're doing great. Here's an A, you know? I mean there's a lot of that watering down. So there is a bit of a contradiction there, you don't water to water it down. It's not like a language learner is going to be building bridges. If he can communicate that's fine; that's what most of them hope to do. I don't want a neurosurgeon operating on my brain in any case, but if they are they'd better be a good one. So, for those people, obviously the tests matter. You have to verify the quality of an engineer, of a neurosurgeon and stuff, but people who are learning languages, unless they're going to be interpreting at the U.N., it should all be about enabling them to enjoy it, such as your experience with the Korean. Alex: Yeah, definitely.

One of the interesting experiences that not only I, but pretty much every Canadian and American has shared is learning a foreign language through school and in high school. I can't even count how many people I've met who say oh, yeah, I know some French, but I just learned it in high school and I don't remember any. It's like well, it's a tragedy, you know? If people are really motivated to learn a language, why are we spending time learning languages during school if nobody is following through with it? Isn't the purpose to motivate people to continue to learn those languages to develop more economic opportunities for themselves and for their country? That's why we're -- Steve: Or just the cultural interests.

I mean you can fly off to France or Mexico or Korea and you can communicate with the locals. You can turn on the TV and understand what's there. It's tremendous. It's a tremendous asset. And you're quite right; we devise those programs, at least in North America. In Europe it's better because they are exposed to more languages. It makes more sense for them so I think there's a higher degree of motivation, but here… Why do you even teach a foreign language in school? None of them can speak a foreign language. Alex: Yeah.

Steve: I don't think it's five percent.

I don't think it's two percent of people, unless they're in an immersion program. It's a very small number. Why are we even doing it? We should be really looking at what we're doing there. Alex: Yeah.

Steve: But the whole thing about confidence is obviously important in any endeavor.

Like skiing, if you don't have confidence that you're going to ski down the hill I mean you may as well forget it.