Packing it all in

I'm currently trying to balance a few too many things in my life. It seems to be settling however and I'm not feeling too rushed any more. While putting most of my effort into my research I still want time to learn two languages, get to the gym and keep a reasonably active social life (frequently focused on Couch-hosting these days). I've found a few things recently which are helping me to manage this all of the above in a reasonably sane manner.

The first tip is that I'm taking full advantage of new technologies for my language learning. Having listened to the 90 half hour Pimsleur lessons for Chinese while I was in Beijing I now need something a little more advanced and Chinesepod is proving extremely useful. They have around 800 lessons, with around a hundred lessons each of six different grades, from Newbie to really very advanced. I'm still only on the second grade and listen to these while I walk to and from work. This gives me around 40 minutes of Chinese language practice every day and while it's not truly interactive, it is helping me to improve. One face to face lesson of Chinese per week on top of this means that I can actually practice what I learn.

(For a great blog on Mandarin, especially the Beijing dialect, check out Beijing sounds. Have a read of this post for the best explanation for the importance of the Beijing-R I've ever heard - from a 6 year old. The recordings on this site are very good and there's plenty of decent feedback after each of his posts - found on Laowai Chinese.)

For Spanish I went through the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur Spanish and found that they weren't quite as good, for me, as the Mandarin lessons had been. So, I've switched to the Michel Thomas method. In this method you and two other students (on the recordings) are taken by Michel Thomas himself from the very basics, quickly building up sentences and discussing some of the rules of the language. The male and female students on the recordings start from zero knowledge and spend about as much time messing up as you do (well, the guy is purposefully, I believe not a great student). With half an hour of this in the evenings I can become a little more familiar with Spanish every day. In particular Michel Thomas is all about relaxation and not about stressful rote learning.

I've also started a regular language exchange after lunch with a physics masters student who is looking to improve his English. It's probably pretty painful for him to hear me murder the language but I'm convinced that there's a barrier in terms of confidence, and not knowledge, which needs to be overcome to really see improvements in speaking. On top of all this is half an hour of more tedious rote learning and three hours of lessons per week.

In terms of not turning into a bag of potatoes as I sit at my desk most of the day I've been following Tim Ferris's advice and getting to the gym twice a week for half an hour each time. That half an hour is murder but I'm finding it just as effective as trying to pack in more time and more sessions. I don't agree with everything on his site by any means but he has a lot of great tips for cutting down wasted time.

Anyway, on this slightly drizzly Saturday evening on which I'm not attempting to expand my social life I thought I'd note down my current pointers for not having a nervous breakdown - Any other tips would be gratefully received!

Spanish update - three months in

I've just come back from my first Spanish language exchange so I thought I'd give a bit of an update on how things are coming on with the language.

After what felt like a blistering start, working very hard and late into the evenings on learning Spanish vocab, things felt like they've hit a bit of a brick wall. I learnt around 1000 words in my first month but I'm not sure that that has increased much in the following two. With such a gradual process it's rather hard to monitor my own progress, but certainly with recent conferences and winter schools, there have been some big breaks in getting into the language.

Things look relatively clear ahead and I'm managing around 4 hours a week of lessons in the evenings, one-on-one. My teacher speaks no English during the lessons and I use almost none. With my work currently moving along reasonably well I'm working solidly in the day and then usually for a while after dinner. The idea of then going through flash cards of vocab and drilling myself on the grammar seems to become less and less appealing.

So, as an incentive to get another mode of language input I went along tonight to a bar in the old town which hosts a weekly language exchange. I turned up late but was still able to find a Spaniard to torture for a while and language was indeed exchanged. I'll certainly be going back as I'm finding the biggest hurdle at the moment is actually using what I know.

As with Chinese I'm going through the Pimsleur course which is a great addition. In the case of Chinese it was the best method I found for picking up the correct sounds, whereas for Spanish, the sounds are less of a problem and the grammar (which is in some senses non-existent in Chinese) is much trickier.

In fact I find it much more relaxing to listen to Chinese podcasts (Chinesepod) these days and am probably picking up more Chinese than I reasonably should be - they have hundreds of lessons at all different levels, highly recommended. As I've said before, having put a modicum of effort into the Mandarin before, I really don't want to lose it.

I thought that watching Spanish television would help but the programs seem to be so mindless that I simply turn my brain off and let it wash over me - not a terribly good solution. Radio is slightly better but harder to understand due to lack of context

Anyway, three months into Spain and I can converse on a pretty basic level. Not quite where I wanted to be by now, but definitely heading in the right direction.

Language in a new light

Working, can't stop, a post from a couple of days back:

About a month ago I finished the 90 half hour lesson series of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese. It is without a doubt the most valuable language resource I've found and makes learning Chinese much much easier than anything else I've tried. It's uses interval repetition, such that you will hear a word first slowly and it will be repeated several times over the first minute. Then you may not hear it for a five minutes, and then 20 and then there will be a gap of a few lessons until it will pop up again in context. This format seems to work extremely well. The other technique which is used is that you are prompted to say words and phrases, not with an exact queue but with a hint of the sort of response you should give.

You won't learn a huge amount of vocabulary (just 400 or so words in the 45 hours) but you will learn them well and be able to get the pronunciation and tones accurate by the end of this. This is no small feat in my book.

Anyway, highly recommended - I just wish there were a further 90 lessons with another 400 words.

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On the subject of languages I had a small, retrospectively obvious epiphany this weekend as I was getting on with learning Spanish. I've spoken in the past about my struggle with Russian and it's only just clicked why this was.

I didn't enjoy learning Russian because I didn't have any motivation.

This has only occurred to me a decade after I scraped a C grade at GCSE. I had always claimed that the language, even after 5 years of learning it, simply never clicked. I only realised yesterday quite what why this was.

Around a year and a half ago I wrote a rant of a post about the fact that some schools in England were going to make pupils learn Chinese. I thought that this would simply be a waste of the kid's time and effort for the great majority who would never use it (unless China has its way in another two decades). This thought was largely because I was struggling with the language at the time and had struggled at school with Russian (having been forced to learn it) and achieved only passable French. I now see the reason for these outcomes in a clearer light.

When I arrived here and started learning Chinese it was hard work. It's hard for just about everyone (Japanese and Koreans seem to have a slightly easier time of it). When I arrived in Beijing I had around 100 Chinese words to my name and could actually get by most of the time, I could go into a shop and get what I wanted, if I had a dictionary. I could get around in a taxi and if anything tough came up I could usually blag my way through with a stranger's assistance or by phoning a friend. Frankly I didn't need any more Chinese than that and so my motivation was low. I also didn't like the language very much. The Beijing dialect can sound like a man coughing up a rusty bicycle chain and the women don't sound much better.

OK, so a year and a half on from that I know perhaps a little over a thousand words, at a guess. I can have a basic conversation with most strangers and have spent on occasion a few hours with Chinese people speaking nothing but. My Chinese is still really, really bad but I actually love to use it. Having got used to it I actually rather like the sounds (sometimes, the radio shows and real locals still grate my eardrums when I'm not in the mood). And suddenly there's the motivation: the motivation is because I can see that my life is improved by learning the language, being able to communicate with people and I like listening to it.

The part about it making my life better is something that I NEVER KNEW AT SCHOOL! I knew that if I learnt French then I could go to France on a French exchange and speak with my host family, but why would I want to do that? I could go to France with my family and there were plenty of people in England I still had to meet. From a cultural point of view I didn't see that I was going to be gaining much (this isn't something I contemplated but I can see now that it didn't register at all). The motivation for learning Russian, so we were told, was that Russia was soon going to be taking off as a genuine superpower and we would be set for life if we could do business in the language - what sort of motivation is that for a 10 year old? I learnt to read Hebrew so that I could duplicate the sounds from the Torah. Something which I soon became bored with and gave up on. So, it seems that my past experience at learning foreign languages was marred by the fact that I didn't see a good reason why I should make the effort.

I got myself into a bit of an awkward position with my arguments about English kids learning Chinese at the beginning of my stay here because on the one hand I had spoken about how much I enjoyed the nature of language and reading great literature and on the other hand was saying that I really didn't want to bother with the hassle when I could do perfectly well without. I think that the point is, I think it's difficult to grasp how much joy can be gained from reading great works in another language or talking with the locals on an even footing until you've done so. The fact is that it opens up such a new dimension to your life. I don't claim to be able to read literature in Chinese, nor even the local papers but I can get a sense from having spoken with people about the depths of great Chinese works that it would be wonderful to be able to read them.

I've just started learning Spanish while keeping up with the Chinese and I so look forward to the day that I can sit in a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela and talk with those around me naturally. I'm smiling now thinking of the first time I will be able to open up a Marquez and read the words in their untouched form.

By all this I don't mean that suddenly language is easy or that I will pick up Spanish in just a few weeks but now I actually want to learn it, not just because I think I should, or I'm told to, but because I'm excited about the prospects of it.

This minor epiphany begs the question: could I have been shown this earlier? Could someone have given me good reasons for learning Russian and French and Hebrew and allowed me to explore the enjoyable parts of learning a language (speaking with the people and reading the literature) to a greater extent. Twice I went to France on French exchanges and enjoyed both occasions, but it rather felt that this was a treat so that I would keep learning the grammar and the vocab lists, rather than the whole reason for learning the language.

Perhaps we just need more enthusiastic teachers but with teachers of all calibers running rather low, at least in the UK, there's little room for such requests I presume.

Anyway, some random thoughts after almost 2 years in a foreign land.