Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

In recessionary times, it’s even more important to keep improving and to consider learning a second language. Now is the time to be upskilling to future proof yourself. The ability to speak a second language puts your business or your job prospects one step ahead of the competition. You are also demonstrating to future employers that you have what it takes to stick to something. Employers realise that people who embark on language learning have some key characteristics that are highly valued in such times: commitment and dedication being some key ones.  Part of what makes knowing a language a great skill to have is simply because it’s not that easy for someone to acquire fluency. If it was, it would quickly lose it’s value and won’t be treasured as much.  Some of you would already have mastering a second language set as a 2010 New Year resolution.

How do you ensure you achieve your 2010 New Year resolution? Your goals have to be SMART. The reasons people give for not learning a language include lack of time, the cost involved and the difficulty of the subject area. The good news is you can craft a SMART plan to overcome the obstacles mentioned, to achieve your goal of speaking a foreign language by the end of 2010.

1) Specific

What does “speaking a foreign language” mean? Should your goal be to know enough French in order to survive in a remote town in France without relying on interpreters?

We have a specific learning outcomes for people who enrol for courses at Euroasia. For example, at the end of the Level 1 French course with Euroasia, you should know enough to “get by” in French: you will be able to cope with the most common everyday situations by asking and answering simple questions, and you will be able to understand people when they speak to you about the situations covered.

2) Measurable

How do you know you’re on track with your goal? You need some objective measure of your progress. This is the main reason why self-help language courses don’t work. This is because learning a language is not like studying history. You need constant feedback from experienced teachers who know how to provide constructive suggestions and correct you when you make mistakes. CDs and software programs can’t do that as well as humans. You need to be regularly “tested” either formally or informally so that you know you’re making progress. Language schools follow lesson plans that introduce progression over time. As long as you keep on top of the coursework, you will keep improving.

3) Attainable

Your goals have to be realistic. Sometimes we get calls from people who need to master a language within a matter of weeks because of an impending transfer offshore, or because they have to meet the future-in-laws who don’t speak any English. Learning a language, like everything else, takes time. There are certainly people out there who promise the world, and will tell you that you do not have to put in the hard yards and yet will emerge fluent within a short timeframe, simply by spending an hour a week listening to CDs or playing some games on your laptop or iphone. This is obviously appealing, in the same way that expensive infomercial weight-loss programmes are. The real secret to learning a language (and weight loss, saving money etc) is having a realistic plan and keeping to it. At Euroasia, we follow a language learning programme that allows people to realistically gain fluency over time.  If we did have magic pills that make clients instantly fluent in Spanish, we would be selling them at a thousand-a-pop and not bother investing so much money in establishing and running a school.

4) Relevant

Why are you wanting to learn a foreign language? If you’re just wanting to learn Italian for fun so that you can order a beer and have a simple chat with hot locals  as you roam around Rome, then your goal should be to complete Level 1 or Level 2 with Euroasia.  A Level 1 course can be completed within 2 weeks, 5 weeks or 10 weeks, depending on how intense you want it to be.  If on the other hand, you wish to conduct business negotiations with your suppliers in China, then a Level 1 course is not sufficient, and realistically it would take a year or two to get a point where you can engage in everyday conversation, comparing your life in New Zealand with other people’s lives overseas; discussing matters of interest, including politics and economics. The more solid your reason for learning a language, the longer the staying power. Visualise your end-goal. When the going gets tough, keep reminding yourself of how it feels to be able to ultimately converse freely with locals. What would also help is if you have career-oriented language goals such as planning to gain a foreign language qualification. If your goal is to pass a formal certification exam like DELE (Spanish), DELF (French) or HSK (Chinese), then you are also more likely to have stronger motivation.

5) Time-bound

What’s your plan in order to achieve your goal? Where do you want to be in 3 months? 6 months? An ineffective resolution is “I will be rich someday”. An effective resolution is “I will save $20K by December 2010″.  You then break this down further into quarterly and monthly targets. In the same way, you would set targets for yourself in learning a language. You may wish to complete the Euroasia Gold Package (4 courses) by the end of 2010.

We wish you all the best in setting SMART goals for 2010!

New Zealand Herald headline today “Imaginary friends boost language skills”

In a study in the latest issue of the journal Child Development, Otago University associate professor Elaine Reese, and former student Gabriel Trionfi, of Clark University in the United States, investigated the language skills of 48 boys and girls aged 5-1/2, of whom 23 had imaginary friends.

They found that the 13 girls and 10 boys who had engaged in imaginary companion play had more advanced narrative skills than children who had not.

“Because children’s storytelling skills are a strong predictor of their later reading skill, these differences may even have positive spinoffs for children’s academic performance,” Prof Reese said.

OK, so having imaginary friends is one way of developing your language skills. If you’re all grown up and not that keen with having imaginary friends, then come along to one of Euroasia’s language classes where you can practice speaking with some real people, and make some real friends in the process.

One of the most difficult tasks for new language students is to figure out how to remember new vocabulary. It can be pretty challenging remembering new words in your native language, let alone new words in a foreign language. In this article, my friend Stephen Bayldon, veteran educator and ex-principal of a language school in Auckland, shares some of his views on how to remember what you learn. Here are some very useful tips for language learners.

His latest thoughts reproduced here:

I find memorising information long term a real challenge. This is certainly true for many of us learning a language. Often as fast as we can learn new words we forget the earlier ones! Or only the most common words which come up frequently enter our long term memory.

Of course practice makes perfect – repetition is the key; but who has time to go through thousands of flashcards regularly? Recently I read an article in Scientific American Mind magazine about an eccentric Polish professor named Piotr Wozniak who’s spend his life working on this problem. He now memorises thousands of facts every week.

Timing is the second key. If you practice too soon you waste your time. (You need time to work on reading, listening and speaking). Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Obvious but useless information! Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. But which are they? Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget ‘exponentially’ as shown in the picture. Of course there are individual differences. So how can we organise the cards perfectly? Manually it’s impossible, but Wozniak’s realised it could be done with interactive computer software.

I found his difficult to use (at least the free version). After some frustrating surfing I found one which is free and easy to download and to use: www.ichi2.net/anki

You can make your own ‘cards’. When a question comes up you click a tab, according to how difficult you found it to remember the answer. The programme then combines that information plus the number of previous repetitions. The next review date is scheduled accordingly – beautiful!

Of course there are other useful tips for learning vocabulary faster:

* Connect new information with something you already know about.You can put example sentences plus info on usage, collocation, pronunciation etc in your “anki” entries.

* Make the connection memorable – funny, personal, sexy, emotional…etc AND including different senses. Eg the Japanese for apple is ringo – so I picture an “Adam and Eve ” scene in which I bite into a sweet smelling, crunchy and delicious apple from my Japanese Eve, only for my teeth to hit a ring that goes around it…

* For more abstract words and topics, you can connect a lot of words together on one topic using mind maps; so they are organised in the same way as the human brain – eg use http://www.bubbl.us/ (free online tool). Then try to read, listen, write and talk to yourself and others about the topic.

* Read, read, read! Anything that you are interested in (see above). Find readers at a level where you know about 80% of the words; then guess the rest. There will be many words in your own language you don’t know. Good language learners are relaxed about uncertainty.