How to learn a language with a chronic illness [Transcript]

Natasha

Hello and welcome back to a very special, and somewhat belated New Year edition of the Rest Room, a podcast about living well with chronic illness. I’m your host Natasha Lipman. 

Today I’m joined by one of my best friends in the world, Colin Gorrie. Or should I say Dr. Colin Gorrie.

Colin is a linguist and lifelong language learner. These days he’s working on bringing knowledge of language and linguistics to a wider audience online. Colin also lives with EDS and experiences a lot of brain fog and fatigue, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down and have a chat about some of the challenges of language learning when your brain doesn’t really retain information in the way that you’d like.

If you follow me on social media, you may know that about a month ago I started learning Yiddish, and I honestly don’t think it would be happening or going as well as it is if he hadn’t spent hours blowing my mind with how the way we often approach language learning…is not…great.

Today we’ll be discussing just that. How people currently learn languages, whether there is a better way (spoiler alert, there is!), figuring out how and why we want to learn a language, how to get the most bang for your language learning (and energy) buck, and some ways to think take some of the pressure off and make language learning fun. Because as you will hear, I bloody hate grammar tables.

This is my first interview for the Rest Room, so it’s a bit of a tester to see how it goes. I really hope you enjoy it! I initially had an episode about how to read with chronic illness planned for this slot, but that will be coming out in a couple of weeks time and is full to the brim of helpful stuff that I’m really excited to share. 

As always, there is an accompanying blog post and transcript for this episode, which I’ve linked in the show notes. If you enjoy listening to The Rest Room, please subscribe and rate on on your podcast hosting platform of choice.

And with that…let’s roll the tape and have a chat with Colin! 

Music break

Natasha

Hi, Colin, thank you for joining me today. 

Colin  

Hi Natasha, thanks for having me. 

Natasha  

I’m very excited because this is my first attempt at a two person podcast for the Rest Room. And I thought a nice place to start might be with our fun, friendship origin story. 

Colin  

Oh, yeah. Well, this is probably the most elaborate way in which I’ve ever met anyone. So what happened was, I was browsing the internet one day, and I saw an article that you wrote, I think was Huffington Post. 

Natasha  

Yeah. Which was cringy. So let’s just ignore that for now.

Colin  

Everything for our pasts is a little bit. Hey, if the past isn’t a bit cringy it means you’re not growing. Right.

And I sent a probably pretty cringy email to you. 

Natasha  

Something about us being in the same boat. And it was like it was a very sweet email. Yeah.

Colin  

It was, it was. It was pure, I think. I think it was very pure. And I and then we just started corresponding by email and eventually became friends from the internet.

Natasha  

Yeah, and I remember when we we moved over to WhatsApp, I was living with my parents at the time. And my mom was like, Who is this person that you’re talking to all day? Like, do you know who they are? I was like, Yes. They’re a real person. Don’t worry. Um, but that aside, and we have now been friends for five or six years, maybe? When did you get your PhD? 

Colin  

2014. So 

Natasha  

seven years, nearly? 

Colin  

Yeah, almost seven years, because I think we’ve met in the winter or spring, early spring of that year. So almost seven years. 

Natasha  

That’s so fun. So the reason that we are here, beyond talking about our friendship, is to talk about language learning with chronic illness. And, this is something that I’ve had a lot of messages about, and both of us live with chronic illnesses and we have brain pain a lot in our lives. We complain about it to each other most days. And you have some really great insight into methods of language learning, and why the current systems just don’t seem to work for people. So today, we’re going to talk a bit about that. And we’re going to talk about how we can apply some of these things, to trying to learn languages when dealing with the additional challenges of having a chronic illness. So could you maybe start by telling us a little bit about how people learn languages now, most traditionally, and what some of the issues with that are? 

Colin  

Well, if you look at language learning, as a whole, the most, most people will probably be introduced to it in one of two ways. Either they’ve had formal classes, often as children, they’ll go to school, maybe you’ll have a French class or a Spanish class, depending on where you are. And the other way is through apps like, things like Duolingo and Memorize which are very popular these days. The, if we look at the overall success rate of these methods, just across everyone who does it, we’re forced to say that they’re not extremely high. So you don’t get a lot of stories of “I took French in school for five years. And now I speak French really well. And I am totally comfortable doing anything I want in French”, this is not the norm. And similarly, you don’t get a lot of stories of someone going on to an app for five minutes a day, doing sort of flashcards or doing exercise – these gamified exercises that you see on apps. And by the end of say, a year of doing this, they are living their lives in that language. These kinds of things don’t generally happen. So this is the kind of state of the art that most people are introduced to, if they’re not really hardcore about language learning.

And the main issue with these kinds of approaches is that if you sit down and calculate all of the, say, all the minutes in a week that you’re exposed to speech or writing in the language you’re studying, you end up with a pretty low number, even if you, if you’re in a class for an hour a day, I did this when I was in university, I did a Russian class, it was a great class, I learned a lot. But we met every single day of school for a whole year. And you’d think if you’re studying something for an hour, a day, every day for a year, you’re going to get to an extremely high level. But at the end, I was not nearly as high as I might have hoped. It’s not because any problem with the teachers, it was because the amount of Russian that we actually got in that hour was maybe five minutes. And so you’re going out, you’re schlepping out to a class for an hour a day, you’re spending five minutes in the language, it’s not really an efficient use of time.

So this is the approach that we usually get when we talk about formal classes, and when we talk about apps. And, you know, it’s maybe it’s spoiler alert, but I don’t think it’s a great approach.

Natasha  

So what do you think is a better way to approach language learning?

Colin  

I think that the main issue is just that number, that number of minutes every day or every week that we’re spending, interacting, taking in the language. So whether that’s spoken language, whether that’s written language, we need to start to increase that number, so that we’re living more and more of our lives, so to speak, in the language that we’re studying. These apps are not really optimizing around teaching you the language, they’re optimizing around keeping you in the app, keeping you coming back, and they do a really good job. They have gamified things, they’ve made the design beautiful, you come back, sometimes you get notifications from owls that are disappointed in you, if you don’t go on log into the app. So they’ve really mastered that. But what we haven’t mastered is getting that gamification, that sticky habit forming quality and attaching it to the kinds of things that really work for learning languages. And basically, that’s input, getting input that you can, more or less understand, maybe that’s a little bit beyond your level, in the language that you’re studying.

Natasha  

So, when we started talking about language learning recently, I found it kind of a bit mind blowing, because I think I had only ever been through formal language instruction, I got an A at GCSE French, and I moved to France and could barely ask where the loo was. And, you know, the the ways in which that, the ways in which language had been taught to me was very much here is a grammatical structure. Here are these tables that you need to memorize, here are a few sentences, and it was very much top down, the teacher told you what to learn. And you try to repeat it by rote. And in the end, nothing really of value stuck. And when I lived in France, I got to a pretty high level of French, but most of that was by engaging with and talking to people in French.

And I’ll say, because this will probably come up multiple times throughout this episode. I hate grammar. I am a professional writer, this is a joke with my friends. I am a professional writer, but I don’t know grammar in English. I know. I mean, you said this to me earlier, like I know grammar rules. And you can maybe speak to that in a second. But I don’t know how to describe what they are. And I don’t have the words for them. So if I wanted to go to a language class, and that’s something that has happened recently, and they start talking about, I don’t know, pluperfect, or, I can’t even think of these words right now, but, they’re explaining these concepts in very beginners classes and it’s automatically making me shut down. And so, this is my experience of kind of intro to language learning. But we’ve had some really interesting conversations about mindset shifts around; Why are we learning languages? What does language learning mean? And all of these things, and that completely made me feel much calmer, strangely about language learning. And something that we’ve spoken about before is that you say, language learning is more emotional than we think it is. 

Colin  

I think that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of really interesting things in what you brought up. So I’m going to go 1,2,3,4 maybe. First thing is that your experience with French is an extremely common one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people who say similar things. “I’ve studied, I’ve done very well in classes, And I don’t speak the language. I don’t, I still have this knot in my stomach, when it comes time to actually interacting with someone who’s a native speaker of the language, I don’t pick up, I haven’t picked up a book in the language, I don’t watch TV in the language, do anything in the language.” And yet here, you have a paper that says, “You did really well at studying this language.” So there’s a disconnect there what – there’s a difference between an A or, you know, a high mark in some language course, and actually speaking the language, it’s almost like they’re completely different skills.

And there’s some evidence that that is the case that they’re that whatever it is, you acquire when you learn to speak a language. And then the knowledge about the language that you get in a classroom setting are different skills. And some people have gone so far as to say that they’re entirely unrelated skills, which is why you don’t see a lot of transfer between classroom knowledge and actual sort of ability to produce and comprehend the language. So that’s one thing. The second thing is that we often have this attitude. Maybe we could call it a no pain, no gain attitude, like if something is unless something’s hard, it probably won’t work. And I think in language learning, this is exactly the opposite approach to what we should have. If something is unpleasant for you, it’s not something that you find yourself drawn to do, you’re not likely to do it. And any technique that you don’t do that you don’t stick with is not going to work, however good it might be in the abstract, we have to factor that into the way we decide whether to use a technique. And then there was a third thing, but I’ve already lost my train of thought on it.

Natasha  

The emotional,

Colin  

The emotional side. So a lot of the things that we talk about, in terms of language learning skills, are actually kind of shifts in mindset or how we think about language learning. One is that one is this No pain, no gain attitude. So there’s that. But there’s also this all or nothing attitude towards language learning, like there’s only one valid goal for learning a language. And that’s to be able to sound exactly like a native speaker and be able to respond, you know, at the drop of a hat, when someone asks you for directions on the street, you want to be able to sound like you were born and raised in the whatever place where the language you’re studying is spoken. And I think that that’s a very limiting way of viewing language learning, I think that there are so many different goals that you could strive for. And it can be different for every language that you learn. So for, in one case, you may be learning a language because it’s a heritage language for you, and you want to reconnect with a language that your family has spoken. In earlier generations,

Natasha  

that’s what I’m doing.

Colin  

That’s what you’re doing exactly. And, 

Natasha  

with Yiddish, not French , by the way.

Colin  

Yeah. And so that may give you different kinds of goals, than, if you’re learning a language, because you really admire the literature of that that’s written in that language, and you want to be able to access these texts in their original forms. Or if you are really interested in a particular historical period, and you want to understand how people wrote at that time, this is, you know, maybe the language is, has no living native speakers. You’re going to use different techniques and different things are going to work better for that, than for a language that you would want to have a very spoken aptitude in something that you could talk with your friends. So all of these things are different possible goals for learning a language and it’s good to be clear on what yours is, because you can have anyone that you want. And then you measure your success based on that goal. You measure your you choose different techniques based on that goal. So it really feeds into everything.

Natasha  

So, like with a lot of things, knowing your reason for doing it and having kinder expectations on yourself for whatever practice that you’re doing is really helpful. So are there some ways of goal setting language learning that isn’t saying, I need to be able to read x by y or I am now this much more proficient because I can take this test or I now know 10,000 words, what are some kind of kind to yourself language goals?

Colin  

There’s this temptation, I think it comes from this whole SMART goal idea to make a metric that you can use, I want to be able to pass this test by this date, I want to be able to do x by y date. The problem with this approach is that not everything is in your hands. And so you may, for circumstantial reasons, not be able to pass a language exam at a specific date, it’s much more helpful to say, I want to read an hour in Thai, Japanese, whatever the case may be, every week, because that’s something that is in your hands, you can prioritize, carve out a spot for it, and make the habit and that’s the kind of goal that is going to stand you in good stead with language learning, because so much of it is habit, can you get the habits that will make this language a part of your life? And can you keep it up?

Natasha  

What are some examples of good habits for beginners to language learning, to start trying to incorporate into their day to day life I can, I can maybe share some that I’ve started doing. So, I’m completely new to Yiddish, I only started learning in December, I have taken a class to learn the alphabet because that was a big sticking point for me, because there’s not much modern media in Yiddish where as I have a lot of friends that really love Japanese. And they learned a lot of Japanese by loving anime and manga. And they could pick it up via the culture. And you’re seeing this now with a lot of people learning Korean, right? Because there’s a lot of K, drama and Kpop. And I don’t really have that same level of input with Yiddish available to me. So now that I’ve learned the alphabet, I’m trying to read a paragraph a few times a week, whatever length that paragraph is, the shorter sometimes the better, because I’m still quite slow at that. When I washing my face, I listened to Yiddish music. And something that would be really great for you to speak about, I think is often those things, even listening to a song is a way of working on your language acquisition. So for total – Oh, and another thing I’m doing is watching this series called 15, minute Yiddish on YouTube. So from your perspective, what are some great ways for beginners to start implementing a few small habits are small steps towards learning a new language?

Colin  

This is going to depend on two things. One is the language that you’re studying, as you say, certain languages have different levels of availability of different kinds of resources. So as you say, Japanese, there’s a lot of animes there’s a lot of manga that you can read, there’s not as much manga in, I don’t know, Bulgarian, say, as an example. Maybe there is, but probably less than Japanese. So it’s going to depend on the language. And it’s going to depend on the level that you have attained in the language so far. So if you’re a beginner, you’re going to want to do different things than if you’re, if you’re very advanced. So one thing that’s very good is to look at what you’re already doing, what do you do in your first language, on a day to day basis, every day, every week, the things that are part of your life that you do, because not because you have to do because you want to do. So I know. Sometimes I watch interviews on YouTube or other videos, I watch. I listen to podcasts, you know, these are, these are some examples of things that are just sort of part of my life that I don’t think about doing, I don’t have to schedule them in. They’re just natural. And so what I would want to do in a language that I’m studying is try to find versions of these things that I can do in that language. So I love history podcasts. I’m learning Spanish, I want to seek out Spanish history podcasts. That’s a good example. Now, if your Spanish is, if you’re a beginner in Spanish, then history podcasts are probably not within reach. So there, you want to modulate your expectations. For people who are beginners at a language, you’re going to want to look more at things like graded readers, which are books that have a kind of controlled vocabulary appropriate for different levels of the language. So they’re ones for beginners, intermediates, upper intermediates, advanced, etc. and things like bilingual texts. So this is a really, really useful way to learn language if you can find a book that you love in your first language and find the translation into second language, if it’s a reasonably good translation, you can read them side by side. And sometimes they’re even published side by side for learners. And this is a really great way of getting into a language because you have a great context for the story. If it’s something that you love, or you’ve read before, you’ll know it off by heart, or at least you’ll know at least the outline of the story. So you’re going to have more support as you encounter new words, new grammar, that sort of thing. So these are ways of kind of giving yourself a hand to getting into the material of your second language. When you reach a more advanced level, you don’t need these kinds of support. Although one piece of support that always helps is to listen to, watch or read things that you already know a lot about. So the terminology, if something comes up, you probably know what it is in your first language, just from context. Giving yourself as much help as possible, will allow you to listen to things intended for native speakers of that language. So you can listen to the news, you can listen to podcasts, you can watch interviews on YouTube, you can watch people play video games, you know, whatever it is you want to do. So it’s all about picking the appropriate material for your level, and finding the material that’s available in your language. And this is unfortunately, where not every language has the same kind of material available. So this is where you may have to make some compromises with things that you’re maybe not as interested in, if it’s the only thing available. But ideally, it would be something that you were very interested in.

Natasha  

And something that I wanted to talk about a bit more. And I promise I won’t go on about this for too long with my dislike of formal grammar learning. But I want to link that into the wider conversation of issues that people with chronic illness face when trying to learn a language. And I’m not saying there are very specific issues, but some of the things that that came up, were around brain fog, and memory and retention, which I suppose is like memory, but that that kind of that process of being able to take in information and learn it and have it stick. And I think a lot of language learning especially, you know, if you look at these really dense textbooks, or you look at these things, and they throw a lot at you. Um, it can be really overwhelming, even if you don’t have a chronic illness. And so if you already have less energy available, or you have brain fog, and you don’t have the best memory anyway, are there tools and techniques that can be linked to some of the things that you said, but are there some tools and techniques that can make that easier for people to study in a way that feels more accessible to them?

Colin  

The way that I think about it, when it comes to chronic illness is the same techniques that are going to help anyone else are just so much more important when you’re dealing with chronic illness because your resources may be limited in terms of fatigue, your energy resources may be limited, brain fog, this kind of thing. And so it just sharpens the focus on how important it is to use effective techniques. Because if you only have so much time during a day that you can spend on doing intellectually demanding activities, like reading in a second language, you want to use the effective techniques. And so this is where tactics can really come into play.

Natasha  

And something that happening to me after my first Yiddish alphabet class. And it was they’re quite long for me. And it was kind of too much really, to be taking on as a first step. But I remember calling you afterwards. And being really panicked about “how am I going to remember these things. And I can’t wait, oh my gosh, I’m not going to remember any of it.” And you said to me, what else have you been doing today for you to be in the delightful, you didn’t say this, but like the delightful state that I was in at that point. And I think while we can keep talking about tools and techniques that can be beneficial. I’m gonna say it again, thinking about how we paced every aspect of our day is going to be really important because if we’re already overdoing it, and then we’re trying to add in conscious learning, and we’re trying to force things into our brain, it’s just not going to happen. So from a pacing perspective, you know, think about the other things that you’re doing in the day. Think about what time of day you learn best and I mean Colin will keep talking about some of these things, but some of the different methods will require different types of energy, they might go into your brain differently. And if it is something you enjoy, if you want to watch a K drama, you might be watching a K drama while you’re relaxing. And it’s not going to feel like such a cognitive load.

Colin  

Mm hmm. I think that the best way to think of it, as much as possible is not to think of language learning as something that’s separate from your everyday life, but how do we incorporate it into our everyday lives. So as an example, this is the example I always give, because I think it’s a good, it encapsulates everything really well. I love learning to sing. I’m taking singing lessons now. And I take them in Spanish, because my Spanish is at a level where I can understand the instructions being given, it doesn’t impede the lesson. And so I’m learning to sing. I’m learning Spanish, I spend an hour on each, but it’s the same hour. And that’s efficiency. That’s just in weaving this learning, language learning into my daily life. So the things I do to pace for that lesson I’m already doing because it’s, it’s part of, it’s just part of my day. So it’s not a separate, it’s not a separate thing as much as possible. Granted, at certain levels, you may have to actually do activities you wouldn’t normally do, just to get past a particular plateau or hump in your second language. But ideally, it would be, you’d use the same tools for pacing it as you use for pacing the rest of your life.

Natasha  

So we were talking earlier about some more enjoyable ways of language learning. So what are your favorite methods that could be accessible for a lot of people to kind of use as and when they would be suitable.

Colin  

So one fun method that I really like is learning grammar in chunks instead of by memorizing charts. Some people like grammar, I actually am one of these people, as a linguist, have to. Sorry. But, but even so, it’s fairly clear, I think that memorizing gigantic charts and tables of endings, verb endings, different forms of nouns and things like that, it’s not the most effective way of of learning, what you will want to do instead is learn sentences or learn larger units of, of the language like proverbs, song lyrics that have these grammatical points embedded in them. So every, every song’s lyrics are going to be written to be memorable. I mean, this is this is the job of these lyricists they’re trying to make these songs catchy. And so they have features in them that help them stick in the mind. One of those features is often rhyme, things are easier to remember when they rhyme. Another is meter. So when things have a kind of rhythm, the da da, da da, da da, da da, da da, da da, that kind of thing. They become easier to remember. So these songwriters are writing these lyrics that are designed to be remembered. And they also have, you know, a couple words in them, maybe some of them are new, they also all exhibit the language’s grammar. So you can use these things as shortcuts for remembering particular parts. And every song you learn might have two or three new things in it, that you don’t know. And you’re not going to forget because you it’s it’s sort of burned into your brain, it’s an ear worm. So that, and if you love it so much, moreso if you love music, because that’s something that you would do anyway, is listen. And so you can find, especially if you think about irregular verbs in a language like French, irregular verbs are often the most common verbs in the language. So they’re going to come up a lot, so it shouldn’t be too hard to collect all the different forms as part of song lyrics or sayings or lines from movies that you remember. And then you don’t have to remember anything in a chart, you just remember if I’m going to say, I then the form is am and if you and the form is are because I know the phrase, I am not a crook, you know, as an example for English.

Natasha  

Well, in French “voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” is like the most famous French

Colin  

right? And if 

Natasha  

sentence,

Colin  

if you know that, that lyric, you’re never going to forget that conjugation of vouloir. So it’s it, these are little ways, little helpful things that as you’re trying to produce these forms in the language, your mind is going to say, going to say, wait a second, I have a sentence stored that’s a little bit like this. And then you can essentially just look that up.

Natasha  

Speaking of kind of holding on to things, are there some tools that people can use to bring certain aspects of their language learning into their memory more to make it easier for them to remember things? So I, I’ve always found that I just highlight things as I go along. Even if I never come back to the highlighting. Are there anything like that. That could be quite helpful?

Colin  

One thing is, I find this is helpful not just for language learning, but for all sorts of learning is just writing things down. Even if I never look at them again, that’s kind of, I don’t know, memory hack, or whatever you want to call it. Another thing is frequency. And frequency is not the be all and end all of language learning. But the more you encounter a particular phrase, the more it’s going to stick out in your mind. And that can help to cement it, especially say you’re reading a book about some topic. And just let’s imagine that you’re learning English here. And you’re really interested in railroads, but you don’t know a particular you don’t know that word for a conductor, you know, a train conductor in English, you’re going to be reading this book, and you see, conductor conductor conductor keeps showing up. What is it and maybe after, you know, four or five times, it clicks from the context, you understand, Ah, wait, this must be the person who, you know runs the train. So that experience of figuring it out, spending that time in that struggle phase, and then having it click, that’s a great way to sort of signal to your mind that, hey, this is worth remembering.

Natasha  

Is that harder now to be in the struggle phase, because we just Google everything, we don’t really allow ourselves to stay in the struggle phase, because it’s so easy to just look it up.

Colin  

The problem with just Googling it immediately, say you’re reading, is that you get a sort of, well, it slows you down. And you don’t want to be looking up every other word when you’re reading. It’s just not fun, and you’re not likely to stick to it. And yeah, the other reason is that it does short circuit that struggle phase, you may remember it, but you probably won’t, if you just look it up once. Now, if you’ve looked it up six times, that is going over to Google six times for the same thing is its own kind of struggle. So

Natasha  

one thing I will say on that though, in Yiddish words that come from Loshn Koydesh, which is the Hebrew words, they don’t have vowels when they’re written. So you just have to know how to pronounce that word. And so as a newbie, I’ll just look at a few letters together, and I’ll be like “cl”, what are the vowels. So looking it up in a Yiddish dictionary that shows that has been really helpful, just purely so I can learn what those words are to pronounce, because I’d have no way of being able to figure them out myself. The struggle is entirely not my fault, I would say, um,

Colin  

and I have the same experience in Mandarin. Except it’s not just a few words. It’s every one. 

Natasha  

Yeah, 

Colin  

like, really, from the way it’s written. So yeah, that’s, that’s hard mode. Right there.

Natasha  

Yeah. So maybe choosing an easier language.

Colin  

Well, I find, well, if, if you want to learn the language, you’re going to learn it.

Natasha  

Yeah, that’s true. 

Colin  

But I find a helpful way to learn when the writing system is not your friend is memorize the vocabulary first by sound, and then learn the, learn the way to write it later. So attaching a written form to a thing that you already have a representation of in your mind is a lot easier than learning it all at once. Because then you have to learn three things, you have to learn the pronunciation, the meaning, and the writing. And all of these links are arbitrary. So learn a link between two of them, say the pronunciation and the meaning first, and then learn the association between those two things and the written form. That’s my technique for Mandarin and it works pretty well.

Natasha  

I will try that out. Thank you.

Colin  

Yeah, it’s loose, it’s it’s a, what is the term?, lightening the load.

Natasha  

Which is a good thing when you’re dealing with chronic illness, and you’re having to learn in hard mode anyway. Something we haven’t spoken about yet is actually speaking a language. And I think for a lot of people, you might get very, quote unquote “booksmart” at a language and you might be able to reproduce a lot of the grammar rules or whatever it is. But that that that process of being confident enough to say the words, especially to a native speaker, is mortifying. So now is quite a difficult time for people because you know, we’re all stuck at home, you’re not necessarily going to be in an immersive environment, or if you have chronic illness, and you couldn’t be any way you were limited to that before. So what are some ways for people to kind of get over that initial hump of feeling confident enough to speak and what are some ways for then people to be able to practice their speaking.

Colin  

You can use the magic of the internet to a great extent, with this. There are lots of places where you can find conversation partners online, you can find tutors online, you can try and immerse yourself in the internet version of, of whatever that language community is. If, if that’s a big enough community and a welcoming one. But one thing I will say about the the mental aspect of it, the psychological aspect of it is, don’t hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold yourself in your first language. In our first language is we make so called grammar mistakes all the time, we start sentences, we don’t finish them, we correct I mean, just listen to half of the things I’ve said so far in this conversation. It’s not like writing, speech is much more dynamic, much more fluid, we go down paths, we back out, we change the topic midstream, we correct ourselves, these are normal things, and we don’t take them as a reflection on our skill in our first language. So allow yourself some room to maneuver in your second language. And also know that a lot of the times, no one really cares how, if you have a perfect accent, or, or whatever. They want to communicate with you, and they’re willing to meet you halfway, a lot of times, so it’s, you know, go out and talk to people, if that’s what you want to do. It’s not everyone’s goal in learning a second language. I know sometimes there’s some languages, I want to just learn them so I can have access to more literature. So I want to primarily read in those languages. But if you want to get conversation, if you want to speak a language, conversationally conversation is a good way to do it. It’s not actually probably the decisive factor in you learning the language, but it can help with that automaticity. So you’re, you’re not coming up to a point where you need to order something in a restaurant. Okay, wait, what’s the word for 12? What’s the word? Like, if I say, how polite would it be if I say this? you, you could get it eventually. But you want to be able to get it quickly. And so that’s that automaticity that you can develop when you when you practice, say, spoken output.

Natasha  

Something that you said to me before as well is that making mistakes in another language in front of a native speaker, like an embarrassing mistake will mean that you’ll never make that mistake again.

Colin  

It’s true embarrassment is one of the best ways to remember anything. I don’t know that – I think that there’s a quotation to this effect. But it’s something like embarrassment is the only feeling that is as strong today as the day you first felt it. I can still remember very vividly embarrassing moments from you know, when I was six years old, I went up to someone in the park and I thought it was my mom. And it wasn’t it was someone else. And I was mortified. I and as I bring this up, and I’m starting to blush as I say it, because this is it’s a feeling that sticks with you for a reason. It’s trying to teach you something it’s trying – It’s showing you that you’ve gone out of the off the path that you’re sort of socially supposed to go. And so when we feel embarrassment, our minds put up this huge red flag saying don’t do that again. And if you are talking about a second language, don’t do that, again, is very useful information. Unfortunately, it’s unpleasant in the moment, but but you definitely remember.

Natasha  

I remember where I was when I made my first big faux pas in Paris. Like I literally remember where I was standing and who I was talking to, because it was really hot. And I said, “je suis chaud”. And people said, You can’t say that”. I’m like, “Why? It’s really hot. I’m hot.” And they said, “you just said that I’m horny”. I was like, 19. And I was like, oh God, because you have to say “j’ai chaud’. I have hot, which as an English speaker makes no sense. So I wouldn’t have known because I was just trying, I was just translating in my head. And I’ve never forgotten that. And I still remember where I was when I said it. So it’s kind of hard to put yourself out there. But as you said, most of the time, people are just so impressed, especially if you’re a native English speaker, people are always so shocked that you’re learning another language

Colin  

The expectations are very low.

Natasha  

Yes.  And also, it’s usually such a respectful thing that you, you know, you’re learning someone else’s language and you want to understand their culture more. And all of the things that come with learning that language, so people are often really excited and want to help you. Just like if you know someone that isn’t a native English speaker and they make the odd mistake, you might just offhandedly correct them if that is something that is part of your relationship that has been agreed to happen and you barely think about it, you know? And yes, I think a lot of this stuff, again, kind of comes down to mindset and feeling confident enough. For me, with Yiddish, it was taking the pressure off of it and you kind of telling me a lot to take the pressure off of it. We’re making it fun, like, you’re learning with me and Sebastian’s learning with us. So, you’re a linguist, Sebastian’s a native German speaker, Lucy, who is also learning with us, reads Hebrew, so, between the four of us… I’ve got my grandma telling me rude phrases, so I’m bringing that to the group. I think what we’re doing is taking really small steps every day and having conversations about it and figuring out why we want to learn and what we want to do with it. Instead of saying we have to sit down and work through this textbook or trying to find resources. One of the things we’re going to do is find – one of the great things about Yiddish is a lot of the stuff is out of copyright – so there’s this huge repository of online books that you can access for free. We’re going to find a kid’s book and just read it together on Zoom because working with things that are made for children is great because they already kind of do graded readers. They’re nature’s greatest graded readers.

Colin

The one thing about children’s literature or books written for children for second language learning is you do sometimes get this vocabulary that is not going to help you in everyday life. I remember, as a child, there’s a great emphasis on barnyard animals in the books I read and it hasn’t been that applicable to my daily life, but that said, it’s great fun.

Natasha

You do love owls.

Colin

I do love owls.

Natasha

We talk about owls a lot.

Colin

Yes. I guess I get that from Winnie the Pooh.

Natasha

So there we go.

Colin

Yes. Ah! I see. It is applicable!

Natasha

I think especially because we’re using this as reading practise and just getting confident with that, I think it’s quite fun because we’re doing it as a group with low pressure.

Colin

We’re doing the two things we have to do. One is spend the time consuming content in the language and the second thing is enjoying it. If you can master those two things, the language learning is a matter of time.

Natasha

So, very soon, we’ll be fabulous Yiddish speakers.

Colin

Exactly.

Natasha

And what will make me very sad is you already have a better Yiddish accent than I do, not that it matters, actually. My Yiddish teacher, I said something to him about being really sad that I can’t do a good Yiddish accent. My grandma has a very interesting cockney Yiddish accent and, you know, kind of hearing the New York Yiddish accent which is the most famously known one, and he said to me your Yiddish accent is your authentic Yiddish accent, and that’s all that matters. That was really nice because then I wasn’t feeling like I was doing it wrong or not being able to do things. Especially, you know, whatever language you speak, there are sounds that you don’t make in your native language so whenever you’re then trying to learn that and trying to replicate sounds. I can’t roll my r’s  [attempts to make rolling r sounds]. I can’t roll my rs.

Colin

One of those.

Natasha

Did I do it? [attempts to make rolling r sounds] No. I can do like a [French r sound]. At least I can do a [Spanish J sound].

Colin

Yes.

Natasha

So that’s helpful for Yiddish. But yes, I think even being aware that you don’t have to have a perfect accent and you don’t have to, you don’t even have to learn to speak. You don’t have to learn to read. You don’t have to, there’s no “have to” with language learning.

Colin

There’s a great quote which is that, I’m going to probably butcher parts of it, but it’s something to the effect of, “A language is the only thing that’s worth learning, even poorly.”

Natasha

And it’s true.

Colin

It’s true. It’s true. You’re participating in this great tradition that’s been handed down generation to generation to generation. Every language that exists has been handed down from one generation to another for thousands of years so join in! I mean, that’s exactly how it’s always been done.

Natasha

I think on that very wise note, we’ll probably leave it there for today because we could keep on chatting for hours! Thank you so much for joining us in the Rest Room today, Colin! Where can people learn more about the work that you do? 

Colin

So if this approach to language learning sounds interesting to you, I’m running a course called Meta-Skills for Language Learning that incorporates a lot of these ideas. It’s a four week live online course starting on January 16, where we explore mindsets, strategies, and tactics for learning languages effectively. It’s very interactive, and very focused on helping you come up with a roadmap for your next year of language learning.

Oh, and if you use the link in the shownotes there’s a 10% off coupon. I hope to see some of you there!

Natasha

Once again a very big thank you to Colin! You can also find him being delightful on Twitter @ colin gorrie. 

Don’t forget, you can find links to everything mentioned in the show notes. You can find me on social media @natasha lipman and if you enjoy this podcast, please do subscribe and leave us a lovely review! 

And with that, thank you for joining me in the Rest Room. Bye bye for now!