The Assembly Line: Keeping Things Flowing

People who are in the process of learning a language will get the most out of this, but it might help those who are just thinking about it too.

When you're studying something new, let's say a specific vocabulary word or phrase, it's possible to never get past the stage where it feels "new," and therefore "not sufficiently learned."

Also for people studying on their own and using a textbook, there's a tendency to study the same chapter forever. You realize that you don't "know it" perfectly, so you figure that you might as well do it right, and "master" this before moving on.

This is a trap. Don't do it. Or if you are doing it, stop. It seemes to make sense, but honestly, it's a trap. I'll explain why.

When you concentrate on one item for a long time, from my experience it seems that you are increasingly unable to maintain an accurate perspective as to how well you know it. The new item has had the tag "New" attached to it, and that tag is stubborn and will stay there, until you force it to give it up.

What I've found in my own experience is that there's a way to push these "studied but not mastered" items deeper into your knowledge-bank. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this way is to simply learn something new.

"The New Language"

I first encountered this when I was beginning my study of Chinese. It's a very broad level application of the principle, but it still definitely applies.

I had been studying Japanese for several years, including about 3 years while living in Japan. For some reason at that point I decided that Chinese would be a good language to begin learning.

Within about a month, I belatedly realized two things: the first one was simply that I was studying Chinese via broadcasts in Japanese(!). I honestly hadn't thought about it at the time, but I guess that meant that my Japanese was pretty good! This was a bit of a shock, as I had been so accustomed to thinking of Japanese as "that language that I always need to get better at," that I hadn't really noticed the effects of my gradual improvements. Or at least had never noticed whenever it was that I passed from the rank of "beginner" over the threshold of "not bad."

The second realization was that, since I was studying Chinese in Japanese, there was a clear de-facto heirarchy set up. Before I began my Chinese study I had already realized that I was often irritated at the "ridiculously simple" examples they were always giving on the radio/TV Japanese courses. But when I took my first steps in Chinese, I was unspeakably grateful for every little repetition and every simplified sentence. I had forgotten what it had been like to _begin_ an unfamiliar language. When I realized this, my attitude toward Japanese had to change. I finally had something against which to measure my progress.

In other words, the position of "my new language" had now been taken over by Chinese. Which resulted in Japanese being bumped out into the cold, where I eventually realized that it was to become by default "that other language (that I can already use pretty well)."

That's what you call "undeniable progress." It was a very happy day when I figured that out.

The upshot of all this being that I had looked at the Japanese lanugage as eternally being "my new language" until something else came along to push it out of the way. Once that happened, I quickly began to gain confidence in using my Japanese: for the first time, I had undeniable evidence that I had indeed been making good progress.

"The New Chapter," "The New Words," "The New . . ."

In the same way, individual vocabulary items, grammar patterns, and even chapters of language textbooks, will stay there as "the new one," haunting you and keeping your confidence low, until you just push on and take up the next one.

Once you add another vocabulary item or go on to the next chapter, and get involved in learning the totally new items, you'll find to some surprise that the old items that you used to consider intractable enemies, are now the old friends that comfort you in the otherwise unfamiliar territory.

And by keeping a flow of new items always coming in, like an assembly line, you'll steadily approach your goal of mastery of the language.

Balance

Certainly it's a good idea to learn your items as well as you can, don't misunderstand me. No-one benefits much from bouncing from new item to new item without actually getting a handle on what came before. Think of trying to shift gears too quickly, before you've used the previous gear to first achieve an appropriate speed: shifting into fifth gear while still in the parking lot is kind of pointless.

But neither do you want to stay in the same gear forever, or you'll never get anywhere. At some point you'll really just have to try shifting gears, and see whether you grind to a halt, or instead go even faster.

Balance is the key.

An RPG Metaphor

Here's another metaphor that keeps this in perspective for me:

For those of you who have played computer Role-Playing Games (Wizardry comes to mind for me, but any one will do), think of it like this: When you first started playing at level 1, you carefully tested your way around each corner because who knew what horrors might lurk there. You'd encounter a group of level 1 monsters, fight them when neccessary, then go home and nurse your wounds.

When you got to about level 3, you still had to go through level 1 to get there, but by this time you were familiar enough with it that you just breezed through on your way to more interesting places. You fought when there was no option, usually you just avoided the monsters there. Either way, no big deal. Your standards for what was "a tough monster" had evolved.

Now flash forward to level 8 or 9, and now when you went though level 1 it was at a dead run. Not because of fear, but simply because the level 1 monsters were no longer worth your time. You know you'd win, and they didn't give you enough experience points to be worth the effort of fighting. Sometimes you'd encounter a group of level 1 monsters and if you were in a good mood, just for kicks, you'd "play" with them for a while before eventually setting off some over-the-top magic spell that did 15 times the damage you need to kill them...

In other words, what was once a serious enemy, in time became no big deal, and eventually wound up as something so familiar that you could ignore or play with it at your leisure.

Foreign languages, and the elements within foreign languages, work like that.

Summary:

• The way to move vocabulary words (grammar patters, or whatever) from the "new/lacking confidence" category to the "old friends/comfortable" category, is simply to begin studying some new items that you _really_ don't know. Then you'll realize how much you _do_ know.

• Don't stay in a single chapter of a textbook too long: you really don't have to absolutely master one chapter before you move on to the next. You'll stagnate.

• If you've been studying one language for a long time, take a look at studying another language, even for a short time: it'll show you how much you've really learned!