In previous posts, I’ve already described the process I used for my first month of Greek study, which has been mostly about getting comfortable reading and writing in the new alphabet, learning pronunciation rules, and learning some basic phrases.

I’ve already impressed my Greek coworker twice this month with the amount I’ve learned in a short time. And last week, I even had a very brief conversation — basically, an exchange of small-talk — with the man behind the counter at a bakery in Greek Town.

I’m off to a good start already! Without a doubt, having people with whom to speak is a huge key to success in learning a foreign language.

Now that my first month is done, the time for relaxation is over. For the next month or two, I’m going to charge through all the materials I can find, and do it as fast as possible.

Brute-Force Fluency
Based on my results last year with a short Polish experiment, I’m going to give this method a serious chance. Starting with Colloquial Greek I’m going to read through as much material as possible, as fast as possible.

The idea is not to memorize every detail. It’s not even to “study” or to successfully learn everything I see. Rather, I just want to understand each concept as I see it. If something doesn’t make sense, I’ll slow down, re-read it, etc. But as long as I’m understanding what I see, I’m going to keep going.

After going through the entire Colloquial Polish book in just 9 days, I found that in spite of not remembering every word I read, the grammar made sense, the conjugations made sense, even the constructions of words and prefixes made sense. I didn’t get fluent, but I did learn in 9 days what might have taken several months otherwise.

Using this method, I was able to speak and understand Polish at a very basic level in just over a week. Could I get similar results in another language? Could I get even better results by repeating the process a few times with additional books?

We’ll find out. The experiment begins now. If it works, it will change everything about how I approach language learning in the future.

When I recently received a copy of the new book Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A few other language bloggers have recently commented on the book, and while I tried to ignore their comments in order to form my own opinion, one can’t help developing a few preconceptions.

When I finally opened the book and turned to Chapter 1, I began reading with a bit of a defensive attitude. Even after I’d read the first 100 pages, when I was thoroughly impressed with the storytelling ability of the author and admittedly quite enthralled in the book, I remained skeptical about where it might be heading.

I’m pleased to say that as I continued to read my skepticism melted away, and after I’d finished the final chapter I had no sense whatsoever of the controversial attitudes to which I’d been primed by other bloggers who read it before me.

The Super-Polyglot
Babel No More opens with the story of Cardianl Mezzofanti, the famed Italian who is said to have spoken some 76 languages. Erard tells of his pilgrimage to Bologna to learn about Mezzofanti, and of his travels around the world in search of what he calls hyperpolyglots — people who speak 11 or more languages — while also peering into any historical record of the hyperpolyglots of yesteryear, including Mezzofanti or the legendary Emil Krebs, in search of the secrets of language learning.

He tells of his own experiences meeting and interviewing modern-day superlinguists like Professor Arguelles, as well as examining the library of Mezzofanti, and even getting a first-hand look at the preserved brain of Krebs, all in hopes of finding out what gives some people the ability to learn an excessive number of languages, while also coming to grips with exactly what it means to say that you “know a language”.

Measuring knowledge
Erard wastes little time addressing one of the most controversial topics in the language learning community: the question of what standard to hold people against when they say they speak a language.

I’ve seen many — and even been sucked into several — arguments about exactly what it means to know a language. Do you have to have native-like skill? Is it necessary to be capable of carrying out a professional career in the language? Is it enough to be the “educated tourist”? Is it necessary to read literature? Do you even have to speak at all?

After doing the extensive footwork he’s done contacting and/or studying as many hyperpolyglots as he’s met, the author comes to the only sensible conclusion to which any reasonable person can come: the “all or nothing” measure of native-like skill is simply unreasonable. This leaves him with what Erard calls the “something and something” measure: essentially, the kind of quantifications that go “Expert in A and B, fluent in C, D, and E, conversational in F and G, and passing knowledge of H, I, J, etc…”

This touches on my own personal attitude toward quantifying language knowledge. When I have fluent abilities in Spanish, Russian, and Italian, basic conversational skills in German, Polish, and Turkish, survival-level ability in French, Ukrainian, and Tagalog, and at least a passing knowledge of Portuguese, Mandarin, Catalan, Czech, and Serbian… what exactly is the right answer when someone asks me how many languages do I speak?

Faced with the question, I usually say four, counting my native English. That answer doesn’t tell the whole story, but I don’t care to misrepresent my abilities. Apparently, most of the people Erard met were of similar mind, preferring to quote rather low numbers in spite of having personal exposure to many more — often exponentially more languages than that. (Presumably, this sense of humility was not the case with regard to the legend of Mezzofanti.)

The Tabula Rasa
One thing I greatly appreciated about the book was the author’s willingness, if reluctant, to accept that all brains are not equal. While there is little reason to believe anyone (short of brain damage) has an incapacity for language learning, there seems to be some evidence that some people do have certain genetic gifts that lend themselves to ease of learning languages, and perhaps even feed the ultralinguist.

Executive function and working memory seem to be facets of the mind that can not be greatly shaped or improved after birth, which offer significant biological advantage to certain language learners. Meanwhile, dopamine (which can be tweaked by the learner) appears to be significant to the process as well.

Interestingly, he shares some evidence of correlation between language learning talent and various mental idiosyncrasies, such as introversion, left-handedness, homosexuality, and OCD. One that stood out to me in particular was the mimic: people capable of reproducing things they hear, such as impressionists. Immediately I was reminded of my own compulsive tendency to copy strange accents, sounds, voices I hear, often to the point where people think I’m mocking them. I’m not, of course… I just have an innate need to reproduce the sounds I hear. I’ve often wondered if there was a connection between that and my interest in language. Apparently, I’m not the first person to wonder that.

Notably absent from the book was any mention of the programmer. In my field, one often finds that anyone worth his weight as a programmer usually has the ability to use several programming languages — indicative of the fact that this person understands the computer itself, and can communicate with it regardless of the programming language he has to use. I’ve often drawn comparisons between computer languages and natural languages in my own conversations on the topic. At the very least, it would have satisfied my curiosity a bit to have seen that avenue explored in this book. (Hmmm, maybe in a sequel.)

Answers and Questions
On the whole, one comes away from the book feeling that it does a great job of asking questions, but doesn’t make many overt attempts to offer answers. Sure, the last chapter seems to sum up the story and tell what he learned, but it also neatly wraps up with the reminder that there’s still a lot we don’t know… and perhaps equally reminds us that there’s also a lot that we do already know.

It seems clear that there is (as we’ve already known) no magic bullet that can make us capable of learning a language in a day or a week. However there is evidence that quite a lot can, in fact, be learned in little more than a fortnight, so that even if you won’t speak fluently in just two weeks, it is quite possible to speak and understand a very impressive amount in a very short time.

In the end, all of the most accomplished language learners have one thing in common: they were willing to put in the work. With or without shortcuts, every one of his hyperpolyglots has spent a notably large amount of time dedicated to the study of the languages they speak. Maybe that’s the best answer of all, because it means we all have a chance at reaching that status if it’s what we really want.

I’ve talked about the Greek alphabet in the past, but as I mentioned last week, there are a few more things one needs to know before effectively reading Greek.

Greek is not a fully phonetic language. A few letters can be pronounced in more than one way, and a few sounds can be represented by more than one letter. However, these exceptions aren’t very large in number, so it isn’t very difficult to figure it out.

In my original post on the Greek alphabet almost two years ago, I explored the sounds for each letter of the Greek alphabet. That was enough for anyone to recognize and read basic words in Greek text. However there are a few letter combinations that combine to make different sounds, and you’ll need to know them if you want to correctly pronounce Greek words.

αι

the /ay/ sound in play

αϊ

the /ai/ sound in fly

οι

the /ee/ sound in feet

ει

the /ee/ sound in feet

ου

the /u/ sound in put

αυ

/av/, like the “ov” sound in ovulate

ευ

the /ev/ sound in never

γγ

the /ng/ sound in going

γκ

the /g/ sound in gate

μπ

the /b/ sound in boy

ντ

the /d/ sound in doll

τσ

the /ts/ sound in its

τξ

the /dz/ sound at the end of beds

In the cases of most of the vowel pairs, they’re just additional ways of writing the same vowel sounds we’ve already discovered. Like so many other European languages, Greek really only has five vowel sounds: α, ε, ι, ο, and ου. Unfortunately (for the learner), there are several ways to write those same five sounds.

The ι sound can also be made by the letters η, υ, ει, and οι. The ε sound can also be made by the pair αι. The ο sound can be made by ω. All these additional ways of making the same sounds remind me a lot of another language with which people struggle: English.

A note about stress
As I mentioned in a post last week, the rules of Modern Greek specify that a stress mark must be written for any word of more than one syllable. This makes learning pronunciation incredibly easy! However, this rule has an odd effect on vowel pairs. When a vowel pair makes a single sound (as in many examples above) which is accented, the accent mark goes over the second vowel in the pair.

At times, though, the vowels should be pronounced separately. This is when you’ll see the umlaut marker. For example, the pair αι usually sounds like /ay/, as in φαινόμενο (fenomeno), but with the umlaut it becomes αϊ, which sounds like /ai/, as in αρχαϊκός.

Examples

• αιρετικός
• οικονομία
• θεραπεία
• ακουστικός
• Ευρώπη
• Αγγλικά
• μπανάνα
• φαντασία

And that’s it. That’s everything anyone needs to know in order to pronounce written Greek correctly.

I recently finished reading Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus. It’s an entire book written just about the brain and how it works, so as you can imagine there’s a lot of information in there to help learners. The book even contains an entire chapter about language.

Marcus repeatedly uses the word “context” when referring to human memory, in order to underscore the fact that human memory is not only not perfect, but it’s not even well-designed for the purpose of learning facts. Our context-driven memory allows for faster recall of relevant information, but has little interest in whether or not that information is rational or even true.

As I’m quite fond of reminding people, our brains are little more than elaborate pattern-matching machines. They are not well-designed for information storage, like a computer, and that is precisely why learning methods like flashcards are so painful and ineffective.

In the chapter on language, the author describes the mental gymnastics necessary to get words to come out of our mouths at a rate at which communication can be effective without being painfully slow, describing how we must anticipate the next words even as we’re saying the current word, explaining how taxing that actually is on the mind, and why it causes us to get tongue-tied even in our first language.

Throughout the book, Gary Marcus humbly reminds the reader time and time again of those imperfection in the human mind using himself as an example, which I found prompts the reader to probe his own mind for fallacies and flawed thinking — something that’s hard enough to do anyway, but which no one willingly does when they feel threatened.

For anyone with an interest in language, it’s a good book. For anyone with an interest in the human mind, or evolution in general, it’s a great book. And for anyone with a passion for learning or teaching, I feel this book is a must-read.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not yet spending any actual time studying the Greek language. I plan to begin studying intensely when February begins, but for now the most important step is comfortably reading and writing in the native Greek alphabet. Once I begin focused study, I don’t want my progress to be slowed by problems with the alphabet.

What you see in the photo above is some of my typing practice. I’ve added support for the Greek keyboard on my Mac so that I could practice typing the words I learn. Typing the words not only helps me to practice using the Greek keyboard, but it also helps me to commit to memory the words I’m learning.

It’s super-easy to set your keyboard for typing in another language on the Mac. In the System Settings, under Language & Text, you can add as many additional keyboard layouts as you want by checking the boxes in the Input Sources tab.

If you check the option to Show Input menu in menu bar, you can easily change between keyboard layouts by clicking the flag icon in the menu bar. I also assign keyboard shortcuts to cycle through keyboard layouts with a convenient keystroke.

Also, conveniently, when you’re first learning and unsure of where some of the keys are, you can bring up the on-screen keyboard by clicking Show keyboard viewer in that same menu. Personally, I find that I learn faster by reaching for keys (and failing a lot) until I get used to reaching in the right spot. However at times — at least at first — it does help to see where everything is.

You probably noticed the yellow accent key in the photo. It’s yellow because it’s a two-stroke modifier key. Pressing that key adds an accent mark to the next letter you type. According to the rules of Modern Greek, accents are written for all words of more than one syllable — a feature that makes pronunciation quite easy to learn!

I learn to touch-type in every language I learn, since using the language is the whole reason for learning it, and typing is an important part of using it. For languages with a latin alphabet, the U.S. Extended keyboard makes accent marks easy to type. But for any language with a different alphabet, I highly recommend spending a few weeks just getting comfortable with the alphabet, as I am doing, because it will greatly improve the way you learn later!

For my first month with Greek, the plan has been to ease into the language. The Greek language is written in a different alphabet than any to which I am accustomed, and if I’m going to learn this language it will be necessary to be able to read the words I see in lessons, tutorials, and phrasebooks.

You might remember that during my Italian year, I took a break one weekend and learned the Greek alphabet. I didn’t memorize it, and I didn’t learn any subtleties, diphthongs, digraphs, or other peculiarities of pronunciation — it was really just a quick way to help me make a tiny bit of sense out of the many Greek things I see on Facebook, on Twitter, and in my occasional wanderings in Greektown.

That was almost two years ago and it was a passing interest at the time, therefore it wasn’t much help getting me started. So, the first thing I did this month on my way to learning my language choice for this year was to find a good tutorial on the Greek alphabet. Not only did this help me to reacquaint myself with the letters I’d previously learned, but here they also discussed diphthongs and digraphs which helped me to understand when and why some letter pairs are pronounce differently than one would think on first look.

I haven’t spent any of my time trying to learn genders, cases, articles, conjugations, tenses, particles, or anything else just yet. The most important thing is to be able to read (and write) in this new alphabet as necessary.

As I practice right now, all I’m doing is finding Greek phrasebooks and beginner-level tutorials online (all for free), and learning to read and pronounce basic phrases like “hello”, “good morning”, “good evening”, “please”, “thank you”, “excuse me”, etc, from reading them in the Greek alphabet.

This strategy gives me a lot of practice learning to read Greek, and it also makes a great opportunity to learn basic words and phrases that I can use right away. I’ve already used several phrases with my Greek coworker, prompting him to ask “Who are you speaking Greek with?”

My answer: “So far, just you.” Apparently, I’m learning well!

As I mentioned in my last post, my first goal in choosing a language this year was that I pick something which I will have many opportunities to use. In that post, I listed out several considerations, and I think it’s important to go through a similar process when choosing a new language project for yourself.

In my case, though, there are a few additional things to think about when choosing. Most of my readers probably don’t have a language learning blog. And most of my readers probably won’t be starting another language every year.

But in my case, these are important additional criteria. Having succeeded at Italian and then fallen short with Turkish, it would be a huge discredit to me if I were to turn my attention to another romance language. Whether fair or not, any success would be viewed with the advantage of my Italian success. (Not to mention the fact that I speak Spanish too!) Likewise, having dabbled in Polish for a month last year, and being a fluent speaker of Russian, I couldn’t really choose a Slavic language either, for the same reason.

I don’t want my poor results with Turkish to become an excuse for anyone to say that a language is “too hard”, or that a year isn’t enough time. My failure was mostly an issue of motivation, and the only way I can prove that is by continuing to attack difficult languages and to succeed when I do!

And so it is that I have chosen to learn Greek this year.

The Greek language is not slavic, not romance, not germanic. It has a new alphabet. It has odd spelling peculiarities and is not phonetic. In summary, there is nothing about the Greek language that can be said to give me any advantages in learning.

My only advantage, which it is my intention to prove, is that I will have opportunities to use the language. I work closely with a fluent speaker of Greek. The office where I work is located 2 blocks from Chicago’s “Greektown”. And I intend (hopefully) to move to an apartment in or near Greektown soon.

The bottom line is, this is a language I will be able to use. And that’s the most important key to learning: you must use what you learn.

Well, that’s it, then. Wish me luck!

In spite of the fact that my advice to others has always been to pick a language not for it’s features, or interestingness, or uniqueness, or whatever, but rather to choose a language that you will use, I failed to follow my own advice with my choice of Turkish last year and that led to poor results.

Thus, I have resolved not to make the same mistake this year. So when I began thinking about what I want to learn for 2012, the first thing on my mind was to choose a language with many speakers here around me. That is represented in two distinct but equally important ways:

The first thing to consider is, what foreign-language speakers do you know, and with whom you are likely to find regular use and practice? In my case, I have one coworker who speaks fluent French and another who is a fluent speaker of Greek, and I’m pretty sure another guy there speaks Czech. My dance instructor is Chinese. And the bartender at a place I go regularly is Serbian, which has provided me opportunities to pick up some of that language as well.

The second thing to consider is, what foreign-languages are well-represented where you live? What connections could you likely make with people you don’t know yet? Chicago has a very large Polish community (the only city in the world with more native Polish speakers than Chicago is Warsaw), and I regularly run into Polish speaking people in my day-to-day activities. After Polish and Spanish, the next highest foreign population here is Chinese, mostly speakers of Mandarin. There is also a large Greek community in “Greektown,” which happens to be near my office.

I seem to encounter many Middle-Eastern people in day-to-day activities, but I must confess to some ignorance about what language(s) they are speaking. I don’t know enough to recognize or distinguish Arabic speakers, Farsi speakers, Urdu speakers, or speakers of the many languages of India, so while it often sounds like they’re speaking the same language, it’s much more likely that every person I meet is speaking a completely different language. I just don’t know.

And if that’s not enough to think about, Chicago is a city with a great deal of tourism as well as home to several foreign consulates, so in addition to our diverse population we also have a lot of foreign people from other places here quite regularly. It’s not uncommon to encounter speakers of French, German, and Mandarin on any given day, in addition to fairly frequent encounters with Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Hindi, and Portuguese.

It’s a lot to think about, and that’s just scratching the surface!

I’m not going to reveal my language choice for this year just yet, because I first want to get you thinking about what influences are around you. Why did you choose the language you’re learning? Or if you haven’t chosen yet, how might these considerations affect your choice?

This year didn’t go as well as I had hoped, but it wasn’t a total loss. And 2012 starts soon! There’s no reason I can’t be much more productive next year.

I won’t reveal my next language project just yet, but I can say this much: unlike this year, my next language will be one that I can much more easily use to interact with people and things around me.

I truly believe the biggest key to success in language learning is just having easy access to opportunities to practice and use the things you are learning. Starting next year, I will capitalize on other opportunities. What language will it be? Watch and see!

As I mentioned in my last post, it’s clear that I will not be speaking fluent Turkish by the end of this year – even if I were to be amazingly productive for the rest of this month. But it’s still not a total bust. I did learn a lot this year!

First, obviously, I did manage to learn a lot of Turkish. I’ve been reading tweets in Turkish daily, and understanding a lot of it. I’ve also learned to read and understand most of what I see on sites like Yonja and Hürriyet. Using music – one of my favorite learning tools – I’ve also learned a lot of new vocabulary and learned to hear and comprehend a lot of Turkish.

Unfortunately, the few Turkish movies I’ve watched have been a bit too difficult for me, much like the few real Turkish conversations I’ve managed to overhear, although I comprehend a good deal of small talk and chit chat like asking directions, the time, plans for the evening, etc.

In addition to Turkish, I did also manage to learn quite a bit of Polish. Again, nothing near fluency, but I was able to leverage my Russian fluency to gain a higher-than-expected level of comprehension in a language related through its Slavic roots in a very short time. This also led to me theorizing a potential new learning method which I will most likely try in earnest with my next language project in 2012.

On top of this, I also dabbled briefly in another Slavic language – Macedonian – and found that with an understanding of grammar and just a bit of practice with a translator, it’s not hard at all to quickly find yourself reading and writing mostly unassisted in a brand new language. I didn’t spend a great deal of time with this experiment, but it was enough to add significant support to my belief that having someone to talk to is the single most important factor for success when learning a language.

While in Italy at the beginning of the year, I learned some additional Italian that just isn’t likely to be learned at home, as one would expect. I also began the process of learning Turkish for the year, as was planned. But on top of this, I took along a German book and spent some time brushing up on things I had learned in school, and learning a few new things.

My dedication to the original plan of learning Turkish without books or other instructional materials also let me to learn some new things about the process of learning languages. As I mentioned, getting in and using the language as soon as possible — even before you have any real vocabulary or grammar skills — yields immediate, tangible results much faster than any study method you can think of. It also helps you to gain confidence with the language early and stave off the dreaded perfectionism that comes up so common for people who spend more time studying a language than using it.

Looking back on my year, it’s hard to call this a failure even if I did fail to reach fluency in my target language. And there’s still hope. If I do eventually find myself spending time regularly with Turkish-speaking people, I’ve got a solid foundation from which to continue.