The Three Biggest Sins Of Language Teaching and Learning
After over a year of learning Spanish with Duolingo I felt stuck. Theoretically I was supposed to be on B1 level (according to them). But I couldn’t read or listen to any actual native content in Spanish. What gives?
There are many things that are wrong with apps like Duolingo. Even their research is misleading. However, Duolingo is not that different from what happens in most schools and language schools. They’re committing the three biggest sins in language teaching and learning:
- Lack of choice and purpose
- Teaching too much grammar
- Emphasizing writing and speaking correctly
Lack Of Choice And Purpose
Every language school and app claims to give you practical knowledge of the language. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
What they’re doing is trying to simulate real life situations. However, simulation is not reality. You can’t learn to swim on dry land.
A sentence like “¿Dónde está el museo?” (“Where is the museum?” in Spanish) is useful in theory. But it’s meaningless in practice. Because at that moment (when learning the sentence) I’m not looking for a museum in Mexico. Instead, I’m on my couch at home in Thailand.
And because this sentence has no immediate purpose, it’s meaningless. This is why the forgetting curve is still used sometimes to illustrate how many times you need to learn something to remember it — because it’s done the wrong way.
The forgetting curve depicts what happens when you learn meaningless stuff — unsurprisingly, you will forget it, unless you practice it every day. But how many times did you need to learn your mom’s birthday? Or your home address? I suspect it didn’t take you 6 times to remember it. It’s because those things have a meaning to you at the given moment.
Pretty much all of the content in most language classes and language learning apps is made up. It’s meaningless by design. Therefore, you’re doomed to forget it.
Not only that, but often you don’t even get to choose between which meaningless text you have to study. They force you to a track which you have to follow. Essentially, they try to standardize your interests. Which is an insane idea in itself.
Teaching vocabulary in isolation is the same as trying to memorize random letter combinations. Therefore, you forget the words easily (as described by the forgetting curve above) — they have no meaning or purpose on their own.
Words only make sense in context. And context only has meaning if it has a purpose for you personally at a given moment. Not in a hypothetical situation in the future which may or may not come.
This purpose can be learning about a specific topic that you’re interested in. Or it could be just entertainment. I picked up most of my English from Baywatch (I was a teenager) and Miami Vice :) But I also picked up a lot of it from software that I wanted to use — it was all in English.
A similar mistake is made when trying to learn the “top 1000 most frequent words in Spanish”, for example. There’s no need to learn them separately — out of context and empty of meaning. If they’re frequent, you’ll see them anyway in texts.
It’s much better to always have meaningful input, something the native speakers use as well, not something that’s made up or separate from the way the language is actually used.
Instead, you need to learn from things that truly interest you. You need to pick the topics and materials you’re interested in. And learn from that.
Of course, if you’re actually in the country that speaks the language you’re trying to learn, this happens naturally. Every situation you’re in has meaning to you. This is why people learn so quickly when they’re abroad. The magic comes not only from immersion but from meaning as well.
Teaching Too Much Grammar
Did you ever study grammar as a baby to learn your native tongue? No. No-one did. I suspect, that if I would ask you some specific questions about the grammar of your native tongue, you wouldn’t even be able to answer many of them. Yet you’re fluent. This should already make you highly skeptical of the whole concept of studying grammar.
Here’s a fun little exercise — when you’re talking with someone, try to think about the grammar of every word you’re about to utter. You can’t, can you?
You can either speak or you can think about grammar. Speaking is unconscious, thinking is conscious. You can’t do both at the same time.
This also applies to learning. We pick up a language mostly unconsciously. This process even has a separate name — language acquisition. Language learning is conscious, language acquisition is unconscious.
This, of course, is hard to accept for the people who want to measure everything — the ministry of education and the schools.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow
The whole education system is set up to standardize and measure your supposed progress. So, this is what they’re trying to do with languages as well.
Essentially, they’re trying to teach you linguistics — grammar rules, the “correct” way of pronouncing etc. It probably happens that way because:
- it’s easier to measure conscious effort than unconscious one;
- the materials come from lingvists (who are obsessed with grammar and organizing info);
- as adults we can direct our attention consciously and it tends to be the default choice when learning something (which doesn’t mean it’s always the most effective way to learn).
It’s no wonder then that it took me 9 years in school to barely learn German (unconsciously) but it only took me a couple of years to learn English on my own (unconsciously).
This is why many people who studied languages in school say “I’m not good at learning languages.” Well, you might be bad at learning languages (studying linguistics) but you’re definitely excellent at acquiring languages (becoming fluent). Or you wouldn’t be speaking your mother tongue.
Note that when you first start learning a new language, it is definitely useful to know a little bit of grammar. A general overview of how the language works — especially if it’s a language that’s very different from the ones you know. But the usefulness of explicitly studying grammar wears off very quickly (in a matter of weeks, I suspect).
Emphasizing Writing And Speaking Correctly
We acquire languages mostly by input (reading, listening) not by output (speaking, writing). More output does not result in major improvements. It’s the other way around. The more input you get, the better your output will be. This is why we progress so slowly in school and with most language learning apps.
Consider a baby trying to acquire a language and someone who relies on Duolingo. On average, a baby hears about 15,000 words per day. How many words does an average Duolingo user see/hear per day? Maybe 500? Maybe 1000? So, it’s not even close — there’s an order of magnitude difference.
The same thing happens in school. Instead of spending the time reading or watching the stuff you’re interested in, you spend it in made-up situations for speaking and writing which slows you down and robs the content of meaning.
So, not only do you see 10–50x less content, it’s also meaningless content. So, really, the efficiency of learning probably goes down by something like 100x in worst case scenarios.
In addition, we are forced to be perfect. The time you could have spent on going through additional material is eaten up by correcting mistakes.
I’m not saying feedback is bad. But the strive to perfection (especially for beginning and intermediate learners) is what kills all the fun and efficiency. Duolingo doesn’t even let you finish a lesson unless you correct every single mistake you made.
Perfection is unrealistic. No-one even speaks their native tongue perfectly. We are fluent in some topics and not fluent in others. We constantly correct ourselves while we speak or write. And we constantly make mistakes or have idiosyncrasies which are considered to be mistakes by some.
So, the question really is — how can you 10x the amount of content you consume and how can you move away from perfection. It’s not by speaking and writing more, that’s for sure.
Fluency Is Magic
When I picked up English, I didn’t even notice I was doing it. And even if I would have paid attention to it, it would have been hard to measure the exact progress. It’s not about how many grammar rules you know or how many words you’ve gotten right in a test. It’s about understanding content.
We need to trust our brains like we did as babies. Our brains are very good at recognizing patterns and acquiring languages. When you get enough input (reading, listening) you will get fluent. It’s similar to what they say about going bankrupt:
“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
If you keep getting optimal input (texts that are not too easy and not too hard) and use native speaker content you’re really interested in you will get fluent. First gradually, then suddenly. You just have to have a little faith in yourself. Like you did as a baby.
Are There Any Apps That Help You Acquire (Not Learn) Languages?
I’m glad you asked :)
I just launched Lingo Champion. It works on the principle of comprehensible input.
- You can choose the native speaker content (news articles) and the topics you’re interested in (meaningful content).
- You can filter the content by the percentage of new words you’re comfortable with (not too easy, not too hard).
- You can read the content as normal but you can easily look up words and have AI explain the meaning to you if it’s ambiguous.
- The app will keep track of which words you’ve seen, so, you can see how your vocabulary grows over time.
- You can (soon) also practice the words with flashcards and import your own content as well.
Another startup I launched recently (Duolingo Ninja) works based on similar principles but is meant especially for Duolingo users. Instead of having a separate place for reading the news, it’s a browser extension translates words on the websites you visit.
Happy learning!
