Input-Based Language Learning, a Powerful Snowball
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
Today I want to talk about what I'm going to call a snowball effect of language learning. The reason I'm talking about it today is I sudden realized I was leafing through this new history book I'm reading about the history of Czechoslovakia, the Czech lands, so to speak, and I'm just able to read more and more of it.
I grabbed my old copy of _, where when I first started on this working on LingQ and having to look up every second word and not understanding much of what I listened to it was hard going.
I haven't read the book because I'm still working on it with the help of LingQ, but I can open it up just about anywhere and I can actually make sense of most of what I read in the book here and it's a nice, thick hardcover book.
When I listen to any number of the podcasts from Czech radio, and there are so many from _, I can understand most of what they're talking about.
or whatever it is. _, I don't know. I can understand most of it and so it made me realize that the more you understand, the more you can learn. Whereas listening to this before would have just been background noise, I now have enough of it. I have enough words and I'm used to it enough that I'm actually able to just put it on in the background and actually learn from it.
It's this whole sense, and I've described this before, of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The more words you have, the more you can learn, the more you can infer. Just as in our own native language, the more vocabulary we have, the more difficult material we can learn, the more we can improve our language skills through input activities.
I make this point because, I must admit, I don't do a lot of speaking in Czech.
I occasionally talk to some of our tutors, particularly with Yarda. I might do it once or twice a week and then I might go a couple of weeks without doing it. I'm going to try to get back doing it. When I speak, of course, I have a very limited vocabulary, but when I am listening, reading and working through content at LingQ I'm constantly increasing my vocabulary and so the snowball is moving.
I met today with a friend of mine who is an Italian-Canadian who speaks very limited Italian and for 13 years he's been going to the same town in Italy in Calabria.
He spends a month there and says he wants to learn Italian and he's learnt enough that he can say a few things. He has a good friend there, an Italian, and he speaks to his parents and can kind of say very, very simple things. But the biggest problem, he says, is that when they start speaking, he doesn't understand what they're saying.
He can't understand the radio.
He can't understand any of the background. He can't pick up the language from all the stuff that's easily accessible, so his snowball is very small and I was trying to persuade him, you know, don't worry about what you can say at this point. Worry about starting to make that snowball bigger. Worry about building up your comprehension, building up your vocabulary. Once that starts to happen, then you can learn from the newspaper, you can learn from books, you can learn from listening to the radio. So many more things are going to help you.
I think, too, for example, here in Canada the government recently announced that they're going to insist on English language requirements for immigrants and, of course, typically, there was some guy who wrote in the local Chinese paper I read that this is anti-Asian and he drags in the head tax and everything else he could think of.
It's not, it just makes sense. You need English to operate here, but the government is only asking for level 4 on the Canadian benchmarks, which is really quite low.
So I'm going to try and meet with some immigrants who are struggling with English and try to persuade them that they've got to build up their comprehension skills.
They've got to get the snowball going. I mean, eventually, we have to speak and when we speak we struggle, but the bigger your snowball, the more words you have, the more you understand, the more comfortable you are with different aspects of the language, the better you're going to do when you start to speak.
So rather than trying to sort of, if I might say, build a very small, perfect, little snowman out of the little bit that you have, and we all go at these things differently, I'd far rather just let my snowball run down that hill, get as big as it can possibly be and when circumstances permit or when I have the opportunity or the need then I start in with more aggressive speaking.
Yeah, I have to speak a lot in order to be able to speak well, but if I have a big snowball behind me it's going to carry me forward.
So there you have it, the snowball of language learning.
