Professor Paul Nation: The Scientific Way To Learn Languages

hey guys Louis here and in today's interview I managed to get a very special guest Paul Nation who is a professor of Applied Linguistics at the University at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand he's an internationally recognized scholar in the field of language learning and specifically vocabulary acquisition I essentially asked a bunch of questions to Paul Nation specifically how should people like us you know learning languages from home on our own how should we learn languages and so you're going to learn a lot from pole Nation you're a specialist in the domain of SLA

so that's second language acquisition and vocabulary learning too um I think uh for most people for you know to simplify this this is the domain of language learning right and so uh the first thing I want to talk about is what do you think is one of the biggest misconception uh one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about just learning languages in general okay um well probably the one of the biggest misconceptions is probably the role of a teacher and uh and also probably related to that the role of a course book I think

that um a lot of language learning actually requires using the language in some way and I if I want have to put a figure on i' would say about somewhere close to 3/4 of the time spent in language learning should really involve using the language in some way and in most classrooms and in most course books that proportion is not like that in fact a great deal of time and T friends has spent with the teach chks deliberately teaching language features teaching vocabulary and like doing and things like that when much more time should be

spent on leg juice but I'm also a very strong proponent on deliberately learning aspects of language and that should make up about a quarter of the time in a language course and that's when teaching can come into play as a small part of that one quarter so I think the the the greatest misconception I I have that people have I think in learning enough language is to is to think that first of all they need to have a grammar book so that they can get it and then study the grammar and then also to think

that they probably need a teacher for a lot of what they do where in fact they don't need a teacher for much as what they should be doing for Lang yeah that's um that's definitely been my experience in school where uh you know it's mostly just uh teaching there's a lot of teaching going on and I I would say I actually benefited from school a lot but um I don't know I felt like I did not have enough just input and you know opportunities to work on the languages that I I learn on my own

so then what would be ideally the role of a teacher the number one job of the teacher is to plan and that means to make sure that the activities of for the the work that the Learners do is going to be in a good balance and to make sure that they they're learning the right material for their stage of proficiency so from a vocabulary perspective it's it's there are very clear L vocabulary learning goals you know people should be working on the the first few hundred words the most frequent few hundred words and then the

most frequent thousand words and then move on to the second thousand and so on because there's clear cost benefit analysis in in using vocabulary uh in terms of its frequency and usefulness so that Learners get the best return for their learning so so that'd be the first job of the teacher for me that's the job to plan and the second major job of the teacher is to really organize and manage and so that is to get Learners doing say extensive reading and making sure that the extensive reading program is running well to make sure sure

that Learners are are doing some deliberate learning of vocabulary and little bits of grammar and that's going well and getting Learners to do conversation work with each other so that they can learn from each other and and do that and so that that's the second major job the third major job of the teacher is probably to probably test and that is to see where Learners are and their knowledge and to give Learners feedback of their the progress I hate this when I say there are several jobs that you just could always forget one of them

but never mind that's life um and then the and part of testing is monitoring to make sure that Learners are moving a head and they're learning and they see that they moving in their head moving ahead in their learning and then the fourth job of the teacher I think is to train the Learners actually now that I think about maybe that's the third job probably more important than his think but the training the Learners so that they they know the principles of learning they know how learning takes place and they know how to apply those

principles to their own learning so that they can be autonomous as swango flu and then the fifth job of the teacher is to teach and by teach I have a fairly narrow view of what teaching means and for me teaching means a teacher getting up in front of the class and sort of laying down the law and saying well his words these words and these words means so and so or you know let's do some intensive reading together and I will help you using the first language to work through the passage and so like that

and that's what I refer to as teaching and teaching is important but of the five jobs of the learner that is the the job to plan the job to organize the job to train the job to test and a job to teach that's the the jobs in order of importance right um yeah so very different from what is actually happening in most classrooms I mean I don't have any experience in uh like in you know like uh United States or New Zealand or whatever but I went to school like in the French system you know

like in I mean I'm located in Tahiti in French poesia so it's we go to school you know up to high school it's like language classes and it's all about just teaching you know what's the grammar for this and uh doing the exercises and um some input you know some reading but definitely not extensive reading um it's just very limited um paragraphs and just uh you know comprehension texts but I suppose um yeah go ahead you you wanted to say something no but so when when you were learning English did you have much contact with

English sh side of the classroom um towards High School yeah I started on on my own to do a lot of listening and do a lot of reading on my own yeah on your own oh okay but you didn't really have opportunities to speak or to interact with they were speakers they was outside the classroom during your learning a lot not so much I think it's when I went to college I went to um I went to Switzerland which is not you know not a lot of English speakers but a lot of international students I

made it a point to really hang out with the you know English speakers and I think at this point I had gotten so much um you know so much deliberate learning so much input my speaking was not good but I had all this I guess potential that I have I had built up that allowed me to then really speak without you know and progressing really fast with this output thing but um yeah because I think that at every stage of language raring right even from the first lesson learner should be able to make use of

the language even in very limited ways you know the the I know the survival vocabulary for a reasonable number of languages and that's only about 100 or just over 100 words and phrases and you can learn it in a few hours but it's very effective and but it means that you can actually get out and actually just doing a little bit bit of learning you can get out and use what you've known and so with the example of the survival vocabulary um it means that with a small amount of learning you can actually do a

lot and so it seems to me that you know some people have an idea that you study first and it seems to happen to you not through your deliberate choice you know that you did a lot of study and then eventually you got to the quu being able to make use of the language but really being able to make use of the langu should start from day one and it can be gone it's not a difficult goal to achieve right yeah I suppose in my case it was not deliberate it was sort of you know

circumstances but I suppose one of my fears uh it's just my personal opinion but uh sometimes it's like you know when you start especially speaking from the start my fear is that maybe you start using the language in ways that are just wrong in terms of uh you know grammar or in terms of accent specifically so you may use the language and you know those patterns become you know they have their foundations in your head and then maybe my fear is that later on it's hard to get rid of them is this a valid fear

yeah I think I think it's a valid fear and I think that one of the requirements of of early learning and of most learning is that you you generally you should have the best chance of getting things right or getting things acceptable let's put it that way cuz people aring you about what's right what's SM right and you know whether you speaking American English or British English but it doesn't doesn't really matter but I think that as early as possible you should be try also trying to get things right but you know with something like

the survival work C could starting off it's simply memorization of the sentences then being able to use those sentences and so on and and you use them with with a good pronunciation the best pronunciation you can do at that stage you know simply by imitation and and that's good but it doesn't mean when I say using a language it doesn't necessarily mean that you just stumble along and you know make tons of errors and do things like that that's where the teacher planning and the teacher organizing jobs come in to make sure that the lears

have the best chance of getting it right right and uh specifically on the topic of of pronunciation and accents uh I feel like a lot of people they can reach a pretty high level of proficiency in English or whatever uh you know the target language is but um you know they still have a pretty strong accent do you have any recommendations as far as like how to reduce this accent and is it realistic to aim for a native um accent essentially well I think if you ask Learners Learners will say that they want to sound

like they to speak it uh but there's also a strong movement which says well English no longer belong belongs to the English because it's it's an international language now and and different people from different first language backgrounds will speak English in different ways and we should accept that we live with that that's how it is but you know it's up to the learn it to try and make choice of whether they're they're happy with something which is an English proun which is comprehensible or whether they want to aim to sound like an a speak uh

but I think the choice should be V for then then to make but I really don't know a lot about the teaching and learning and pronunciation and certainly not my Stressless area but I think having good models is a really important start to that um I don't go along with the um idea that you should do large amounts of listening before you start speaking I think um just learning to pronounce things early on simply through root imitation seems to me a really good way to get started along getting a BL on surgeon you you probably

know more about that from your experience than me because if I listen to you I would thought of you probably made speaker of English from youro so would you did when you went to Switzerland you must have done the right thing because uh that seems to given you a very good pronunciation as you say you didn't have a very good pronunciation when you started off is that right that's um that's correct so I'm trying to you know it was like more than 10 years ago so I'm trying to put the pieces together uh but also

sometimes you know when I talk about my experience uh to other people it's just you know it's one person it's anecdotal then people are just going to maybe reject it on the you know because oh you're you have some sort of talent or I don't know but um yeah that that's an interesting thing but at the end of the day I don't I don't think it's really important right to really sound like a native speaker I think most people need to be just satisfied with um you know speaking a good English or good whatever language

it is with some accent which adds some a little bit of you know uh a little of fun too right yeah I I think that should be the choice of the of the person uh who's doing the learning and yeah me so so that that but but but it is a an interesting area um I had a feeling that a lot of concentration on the formal aspects of pronunciation don't this concentration doesn't necessarily have the effect of of um bringing about a big Improvement in pronunciation I I have a feeling that the the motivations within

the learner pass the opportunity to to get a lot of morels and input are probably much more important than that aspect but uh you're also um in your own experience you're from a uh you're a speaker of a European language and speakers of most European languages have a much easier job learning English than speakers on languages which are lot from the same Indo European language family so if you're a learner of English in Japan or Thailand or Indonesia which is bases I know a little bit about U then you you've got much hard of vle

to increase your work every size inut to give a good native speaker life pronunciate yeah uh my native language is French so uh I wouldn't really know about that but actually I'm learning Japanese so I can sort of uh relate uh pronunciation is is fine I I think in Japanese but just overall learning the languag is uh I learned uh well obviously English and then also a little bit of Italian when I was in Switzerland and uh learning Japanese is just uh just a different a different ball game I mean it's just a different category

like literally on the FSI website it's a different category but um I was uh I think two days ago I was listening to something in Italian and I have not worked on my Italian in like almost 10 years and I could understand most of it whereas if I watch the equivalent thing in Japanese it's like sometimes like 25% comprehension so yeah we just have to accept her back the um the ADV linguist Paul pla had created a Scale based on his experience of teaching at the Foreign Service Institute in with Virginia I think it is

um where they train the diplomats and peace cor people in in foreign languages and they had a I think it was a five point scale for languages and so language like Japanese Chinese Arabic now perhaps Thai would be on the most difficult end of the scale and then an English speaker learning a language like uh well French and uh Italian would be on the easy end of the scale and and there was and they use the scale to work out how many weeks of tuition people would need or language classes they need in order to

reach a certain level and uh it was when I taught courses on language curriculum design was quite interesting to say well this guy was created for English fees learning other languages and um but you can do it the other way and say well if you're um a speaker of another language learning English does the same level difficulty apply and reverse and I think it does I mean if you're it definitely speak learning English so you've got to learn a new alphabet you yeah different if you're learning Tha or Chinese one of the Chinese languages Bo

you prob in turn that's a hard JW yeah I um I remember listening to an episode a podcast episode I don't remember exactly but uh it was uh your interview I think it was like from I don't remember exactly but you mentioned that you were at least at that at that point in time learning Tai is this uh silly case do you yeah that's right I mean I um I can actually make the tie tones now but this that's enrolled part other and effort and attention um and but I'm I'm finally starting to read TI

now I'm well getting a bit more fluent at doing that but my birthday heav is not really up to it but but my L ring Miss La is going on fine yeah nice yeah cuz my understanding is that Tai is pretty somewhat close to New Zealand so I'm assuming that it's pretty easy to um get there and uh uh spend a nice time um I think it's pretty cheap I mean I don't know but um um I wanted to talk about uh input specifically because you know when I started learning languages I did not know

about you know Stephen crashion or the input hypothesis and all of these things but it seems that right now on the internet at least uh people are sort of separated on you know both sides of the aisle it's like there's one side where it's like okay we're just going to do like the traditional school stuff you know textbooks and learn your vocabulary and so on and then on the other side of the aisle there is the uh you have the input people it's all about input anything else that you try to do uh any kind

of deliberate learning it's just not really a good use of your time and so I wanted to talk about this because actually I'm going to um tomorrow I I will have uh Bill Van Patton um uh I'm going to make a to do an interview with him and I I feel like he tends to be more on the input side but I wanted to get your take on it because I read your book uh I mean one of your books um I think it was you know the very short one what every language learner needs

to know uh to learn a language and um you know input has uh is like 25% of the what you should do right the four strands so yeah uh it seems more uh balanced I suppose whereas if you listen to uh Stephen crashion for example I get the feeling that if he had to put a number on on it it would be 80% or 90% so uh what do you think about the importance of input well I think when Steve's giving it talk he prob put 100% on that it's Steve and I are good friends

and um but but we disagree fundamentally on this but but I also have a feeling that um I'm not quite sure how serious he is about it these days but but still it seems it seems my my point of view is that you need a balance and that's the idea behind the core strand that you should have the strand of input a strand of output to his Str of fluency which are all Rel which all involve langu with use and that takes up 3/4 of a time one quarter three three and then you have a

quarter of deliberate study and deliberate learning and and I'm very much in favor of input as a as a way of language learning but it should make up about one quarter of the course time um Rob wearing and I published a book not so long ago reviewing as much of the research on extensive reading as we could and there's a lot of research really uh supporting the use of extensive reading the the research differes in quality a great deal and so in the book what we did was to pick a few studies which we thought

were exemplary studies which where we wanted to really convince somebody from an academic background that extensive reading was a good thing to do you could then send them to these very well conducted and and and well reported studies but there's also hundreds of other studies which which reach the same conclusion so I think input is really important you know but but once again it's got to be in proportion and so the strand of input involves listening input and reading input and so extensive reading mean fits into the reading input part of the qus now if

you take extensive reading and then you look at fluency development then fluency development also involves extensive reading but really doing easy extensive reading so then that boosts the amount of of input in the course because fluency half of the fluency friend also involves incor I'm waiting to the day which I hope is very soon where um we can actually adapt spoken texts and videos using AI in the same way that we adapt written texts to make graded readers and so if someone took this conversation that we're having here and said I'm going to run this

through Ai and AI will replace the words beyond the first 1,000 words of English with words in the 1,000 words of English wherever it's possible and so that people who know only a th000 words can then listen to it as meaning top of input I know been fantastic and I I I wouldn't mind at all if if these changes were fairly noticeable changes which indicated that this this video has been docked in some way but it would just mean that someone listening to it with a very limited knowledge of English could actually listen to it

in the same way they could read a grade and reader for a simplified text for a simplified version of the interview now I think I think the technology is there to do it and for me this is the next great Frontier in language learning the availability of adapted spoken visual text so that Learners at all proficiency levels can then uh listen and read at the level which is most suitable for men yeah yeah this this sounds like a great business idea actually some sort of uh ability to generate uh graded readers uh from uh authentic

content no graded listen graded listening material graded listening material okay yeah yeah so that means as I say if someone said well we're having this interview and um you know I only know 500 Words of English can you adapt this interview so I can listen to it and watch the people talk and it's all within the mostly within the first 500 Words of English okay yeah that that's a little bit harder but yeah it sounds pretty good well I'm sure all the technolog is there I mean we have the the profiling technology and the word

lists to to indicate which are the words that would need to be changed and we now have the ability it seems to be able to doctor pictures and spoken texts so it sounds like the person who's speaking when it really isn't you know so I think it's all W it's going to come together that's all Yes um still talking about um input and then I want to talk a little bit more about reading specifically um well actually I do have a question about reading right away um I'm learning Japanese and there is a segment of

you know the people watching my channel and I'm sure you know people learning Asian languages I'm talking specifically about uh Japanese and Chinese where the writing system is completely different it's um it's essentially it's a nightmare to learn it's it's like um if you like it doubles the amount of time in my opinion that you need to spend on the language say double uh so I have made from the beginning the decision to ignore the written system obviously in Japanese I know like the basic you know Katakana hiragana and stuff but the actual characters the

thousands of characters that I need to learn plus the tens of thousands of combinations of characters that I would need to learn I just put this on the side I do a lot of listening uh when I do some reading I use some uh you know software to help me read uh Japanese but like the authentic Japanese characters I cannot read so I've been able to reach a pretty good level actually in Japanese where I can you know talk with people no problem I'm not the level where I'm super Advanced but what I'm wondering is

am I leaving something on the table by ignoring the the just you know reading I cannot read Japanese essentially uh is this going to be bad for my listening and my speaking right there it's there listening and speaking um but clearly you are leaving something on the table and that's your deliberate choice and that's that's fair enough um if I were I'd be making sure that I was fluid with the herana in kakana um and there are books simple books in Japanese written in hugana and Katakana that you can use to increase your reading fluency

in that and I I don't know and I haven't thought about it but I'm I imagine there are programs with with con convert kji to H uh we you might be able to take an electronic text which is written using the kji and then have the kji transliterated into hurana so that you could I don't know if that exists but it seems like a a fairly straightforward sort of program which could be a reval to people um so I don't think you've made a bad choice you've made a deliberate choice in in line with your

goals and if you're doing well at you're listening and speaking then clearly that has benefited you because because um you know you haven't had to spend a lot of time on learning the characters and so on I think eventually if you want to really know GES of course you got to learn Candi and so on but there's no no problem with coming at that at a latest stake this it's quite a big learning job um but I I'm sure people have all I know people have done studies of the freequency of the various characters of

things right ever if if later in you all language learning in depy you wanted to say well I now want to start moving into reading Tangi then there'd be a nicely graded list or frequency list if you could start working from to get the greatest benefit for what you're doing so I think you probably made a good choice but clearly you L me something on the table but you decided to do that so they're fearing up yeah I'm I'm always a little bit worried about that every now and then I have these uh like an

existential crisis like should I start learning kanji or not but uh then I start you know I open just like the kanji book and I started learning a few uh kanjis and then I'm like okay well I'm not learn I'm not going to spend any more time on this it's just uh I don't particularly enjoy it and like I'm just learning Japanese as a hobby so I I don't see any I mean it's just a huge time investment for not a lot of uh like the return on this investment is not huge I I would

uh think for for your language learning gold and if you can get plenty of spoken input then that seems to me fine the the disadvantage you have from not reading kindy is that then you don't have written input uh the same bread to written input that you could get but if you're getting plenty of listening input then you're probably not going to lose out too much um it's a bit like people learning the native language of English if native speakers of English you know if you don't read a lot then you're not going to pick

up the vocabulary which occurs mainly in written text because the vocabulary of spoken interaction largely is within the first n 9,000 words of English what we call the high frequency and the mid- frequency vocab and if you really want to expand your vocabulary Beyond there you've got to really read a lot you've got to develop spess interests such as Hobbies or or the you know your job or career or something like that or study at University and and then you can increase your vocab much more readily because you're getting more contact with these lower frequency

words with the more Technical and often written words so that's that's that's probably the disadvantage that you will have your weeks written vot which you're not learning but on the other hand if you're not reading then you're not going to know just set with every Gap anyway hey guys it's Louis here and we're going to go back to the interview in 30 seconds but I just wanted to talk a little bit about a little agreement that I wanted to have with you now I'm going to put all of my efforts into getting the best guests

possible for this channel for this uh podcast whatever you want to call it but what you need to do is actually press the Subscribe button on my YouTube channel or wherever you get this podcast because it's very hard for me to get good guests to interview because you know they're busy they have other things to do but if you click the Subscribe button I promise you that I will put all of my efforts into getting the best guests and having more subscribers it's not really significant but it actually helps because when people see that I

have a lot of subscribers they want to come onto the show and be interviewed anyways back back to the interview right um still on the topic of of uh reading uh we always hear about input it needs to be comprehensible so comprehensible input um yeah I suppose I mean I understand where this uh comes from but then at the same time especially if um uh I'm like a beginner or lower intermediate in the language sure I could use you know graded readers and easier stuff but what I really want to do is read the interesting

stuff the stuff I would read in my native language and sure it's more difficult a lot more difficult I'm probably going to have to make extensive use of a dictionary and you know look things up but if this is actually more fun for me is this still a valid way to approach reading yeah that's fine I mean it's it's s the the problem with unsimplified tent with other de that it takes is that how there's a law called Zips law which describes the frequency of words in the language and one of the one of the

findings that is embodied in zipl is that half of the different words in any texe will occur only once and there's a formula you can work out from zip FLW you know how what portion of the text will be words that occur once what will be the POR the words that occur twice and so like it's a fairly simple formula to do that but that means that when you read that text half half of the different words you meet will be there only once and so if you look them up and and you know put

the effort into it you're not going to meet that word again in that text and you're highly unlikely in the lower frequency words to meet them in the next text either and so you're going to have a lot of work to do which is not going to really result in useful learning unless you start putting all those words on word cards you know in deliberately learning them or selecting them according to frequency and learning the higher frequency ones that you don't know and you know things like that you're going to actually waste a lot of

effort but if you're prepared to do that because you're really interested and what you want to read then that's fine um there's wrong if you realize that and then one of the ways you can get around the problem of that is to reread the text if you throtle your way through so for example with my reading of tha uh one of the ticks that I went through is the books that they used in Thai schools to teach reading about 40 years ago and they're really great little books are all about Tha life going to the

temple going to the market you know playing with your friends and you know in the kitchen cooking things and all that great B but I'm probably on my sixth rereading of that first book of the series you I'm I'm getting pretty fluid of reading that now and I know just about all the vocabulary and now but the rereading of it has meant that I'm now getting repetitions of these onetime words which you know 50% of the different words so that I now learn them so that my eff in that sere has been wasted Dev so

yeah I by all means read what you like but you need to be a bit strategic to make sure that the effort you put into the one time of wor is not lost and you can give reward for every by either putting them on cards to learn the deliberately and or rereading the book If you read reading it fast the next time and then reading it you know reading it three or four times over was a clear of a year or yeah um talking about word cards actually um I have um I didn't use word

cards in the beginning but when I started learning Japanese I realized that my mind was just uh a leaking bucket of uh vocabulary and so I started using Anki like you know the the flash card program um and yeah and it's free so I'm going to put a link to uh this in the description of the the video If people want to check it out but uh I get the feeling that a lot of people uh feel like when I say that you know an or flashcards are effective there's sort of a sense that well

you know it's you're learning words or maybe sentences if you do sentence cards but it's it's it feels a little bit artificial so they're wondering is does this really translate into actual knowledge and is this actually effective can you just like get input and get similar results as opposed to boring flashcards yeah um there's there's a lot of misinformed Prejudice about this people believe every word should be learned in context you know you shouldn't be learning words out of context and so on well it it's good to meet words in context and so on and

you do that through meaning focused input but a there's a 120 years of no 130 years of research of the effectiveness of deliberately learning words and isolation and recently and though recently now is probably about 15 years ago I guess uh about 13 years ago one of our PhD students did a piece of research which for me was one of the most important pieces of research and vocab studies for the last 20 or 30 years and she she found that when you deliberately learned words on word cars these words were both uh implicitly and explicitly

available now explicitly available means if someone says what the sound so mean then you can actually go to your mind and tell them what it means implicitly available means when you read and you've only got a split second to bring up the meaning of that word does word card learning give you that implicit knowledge which you can access in very real time in short time indeed and she found that the deliberate learning using word t resulted in both implicit and explicit mod and there are now studies which have supported that now this goes against one

of Steve Crasher ideas in that things which I learned deliberately are not available for normal language use their research showed very clearly that things which are studi deliberately vaby which is studied deliberately is available for normal Ang rutes and so that that's a very important wither finding iPad uh and so uh if if learning vocabulary on word c was the only way that you studied the language they would be terrible but if it's also accompanied by meaning focused input meaning focused output and fluency development then it really speeds up really the more I would well

I mean I've I've reviewed most of the studies about the turning and our earning work Lang is a whole chapter on it and the research show very clearly the the things which just slightly deliberately retained in memory uh they can be retained for a very long time and in all the prejudice against overall they're not supported by respect yeah actually I want to dive a little bit deeper in in this um uh this area because I am developing myself I mean I'm a software developer I'm developing a uh flashcard application that works mainly with a

so what I mean is that an is perfectly fine it works really really well but what I found was that you know because you have a lot of reviews you have to you know the scheduling algorithm makes sure that you review a bunch of stuff at the right time it's super time consuming and I would just get completely burnt out from doing a lot of flashcards so what I thought was actually uh you know I've been through some of the uh p uh programs the which I really like because it was 100% audio I mean

I guess there are some written exercises but I just like that it's very convenient I can just be cleaning the house and you know learning a language and so I thought okay I'm going to develop a piece of software that does sort of the same thing but it's audio flashcards so for example I'll give you a concrete example uh the software is going to tell you okay how do you say hello in Japanese and then you have to answer in your head so it's recall so then you think a few a few seconds and then

you say okay uh K and then the software is going to give you the answer so I just want to get your feedback on how effective you you think this process is because the Assumption here is that recall is going to be better than just uh you know recognizing the word just uh hearing the word in Japanese uh do you think it could be improved what's your overall impression here well for the last year or two I've been thinking about the principles of but learning but I think that they appi to learning much more widely

than W they appi to learning outside of w as well and it's there are three things that really matter the first is focus and that is you learn what you focus on and so and if you don't focus on rmic form then you're unlikely to learn form and if you don't focus on spoken form your uny can learn a spoken and and so what you're doing is you're you're excluding written form and focusing on spoky and that's fine and if your goal is learning spoky B you're your spot on the second thing which matters is

quantity of attention and that is we learn what we focus on but we learn by spending time on what we focus song and quantity of attention can involve repetition and ideally it's sure and quantity of attention can involve simply giving concentrated deliberate attention at any particular Point yeah and so and and and if you don't give quantity of attention to what you're learning you're not going to learn very much and it will probably not be retained for very long and then the third thing that matters is quality of the tin and that is we have

to focus on something we have to spend some time on it but if the way that we spend time on it encourages us to be deep and thoughtful of our processing of it then that will greatly help learning as well and so quality can come through meeting things in varing contexts so you hear the same word again but it's in a different context is fine or it's it's a different member of the same word family you know you might learn excite and then you beat excitement and that really is like a repetition of the word

excite but now you've got a another member of the word family which en riches Z and so on and so it's those three things which really determine whether something's going to stay in M or not so you can look at your your program from putting these principle buing of have against these principles and you know are you focusing on what needs to be learned and is what you're focusing on accurate and comprehensible for the learner and if it is great you you fulfilled the focus principle requirement are you coming back to the same vocabulary again

is it is it being brought back to you so you have another chance of meeting it when you meet it sometimes do you have time to dwell on it uh do you have time to meet it perhaps in a context or see it an association with a picture or perhaps visualize it so qualtity of attention and quality of attention you can check it up against those things one of our PhD students who's now I consider the world expert in deliberate vocab learning use in flash cards is a man called tsy Nakata and he wrote a

really nice article about oh 10 years ago um critiquing the various flash card programs and he developed a list of principles and then he can the based on the search and he compared those principles with the various flash card programs of which IE was one of the programs and came out pretty well on the program so my advice would be to get hold of ta's article I can tobly send you a copy if you will mind me great yeah and then put your own program up against those criteria and then just see what you think

nice uh do you remember which programs actually uh came up at at the top uh I think I know was one little K you know W I think anky was pretty high oh I can't remember there were about four or five which came out reasonably well but none of them met all of the criteria and I met up with one of the creators of I don't know whether it was an or I know probably an was was that developed in Japan Anki I don't think so I mean the name isn't is Japanese but I think

I know is is Japanese I might be the guy who created I know and I said look you know uh how our PhD student has has looked at your program hear the Criterion what's lacking is X Y and Z in your thing if you make those changes I'm happy to mention your program in my books saying that it's met all the criteria for you know ABC I can't remember whether the actually did at the major or not but it was my way of trying to Blackmail and then to um you know get it with research

cuz the problem is with people writing computer programs for language learning is that people are either know a lot about language or they know a lot about computer programming but they don't know a lot about buzs yeah and every so often I get people calling me up and saying I'm going to write a program for learning vocabulary you know um you know please give me some advice and I so I'll ask them a few questions to see what they know about language learning and then they suddenly go all quiet and realize they don't want to

hear my advice and that's the end of that and and so there is a big gap between many programs which are set up to K Le and and and the principles of you know the world research principles or broke every learning and so on so you can help Ridge that yet by getting up to L on those things of looking at T's article is a really good way to start to get into that so that the program does put well Standish principles into the cus I'll definitely yeah take a look at the the paper yeah

yeah no it's a very good paper I great paper he's actually a very good researcher and uh in continues to research for that same area yeah uh actually I I think we have to talk a little bit about language learning apps because I noticed on my YouTube at least that a lot of people are interested in not necessarily you know abstract sort of abstract principles they just want to know you know which app should I use so um we mentioned uh Ani and we mentioned the the app I'm I'm building I definitely am more heading

towards uh you know optimizing it for just you know better vocabulary attention just making it a good tool as opposed to trying to make it uh something that a lot of people find easy to adopt uh stuff like du lingo or or Babel you know that I think they have a Mass Appeal but I don't know about like how efficient they how effective they really are um if you had to choose one or let's say a few apps like two apps to learn a language uh which ones would you choose well you you youve struck

me in an area of ignorance because I haven't used language learning apps language learning apps I I guess are a little bit like course books uh in the sense that they present the syllabus and they work through the S and and so WR and various things right there my my analysis of course books indicate that half of what you need to do to learn a language is not in the course for and so what's missing is things like extensive reading extensive listening extensive writing fluency development most of those things are not in course books and

have to be added to course books and not added to course books have to be done as additional to coursebook because you couldn't possibly fit the amount of extensive reading people should do into a course B and cater for the many levels of students working in the same course book so so I I I would sort of feel if someone's using just one app to learn a language then they're probably getting a an impoverished menu of of opportunities for them and so that they can look at the app and say well what's this actually focusing

on so what am I life be to learn and where does that fit into the idea of you know learning and you know reading and writing and speaking and listening and so on through using the language and I think you'll probably find that most of them don't cater well for that but Learners can access material with th to some degree C for that Learners of English are very lucky because they have such a range of graded readers and and graded material available for them which is not available in other angrites and so people any other

languages right even Japanese there are a few great readers I understand in Japanese but you could probably count them on one hand whereas English has several thousand great of rebs so the and so then people then have to be strategic as you are probably doing if I'm doing where well I'll read Children books even though Z small wise to cool book but all get rounded by repeatedly reading and doing deliberate learning to go all yeah so I my advice I think and I think I outl it in the book you mentioned you read about the

what you need to know to learn a foreign language um you know I think learn should be creating their own courses of fing vient thrs and metal thr that put of would balance oh opportunties for leing well actually I want to do um I forgot that this was a question meant for the beginning of the interview because I like to do this with uh the other guest but it's kind of a fun one it's a thought experiment let's say for example that from next week from Monday right you are just uh you have no responsibilities

anymore no work no email no cleaning no cooking your full-time just your full-time job is going to be learning a language and let's say let's say it's going to be something fairly hard like um Arabic this is pretty hard um so you have one year to reach um let's say C1 I'm not sure how realistic this really is but in any case what would be your you see why see when according to the Gams F yes so this Advanced F this is yeah pretty Advanced oh I I would probably if my life depended on them

I proba give up a that point because uh I know that to learn another language you need to learn several thousand words uh you know at least 9 or 10,000 different words and uh I I would be interested to see someone reach that level in one year I I it would be possible but you'd be spending a lot of hours of the day doing it exactly so all right so maybe let's say not C1 but anyway the point is you have one year to reach a an extreme high level and your life depends on it

if you don't do this you know it's an apocalypse uh Divine you know judgment and so on uh what would be your yeah so what would you do on a daily basis what resources would you use well I get hold of a frequency list of in the language uh and I make sure that I that was a rough guide to what I learn because um you know the first uh in English the first uh 10 words covers 25% of every text the first uh 50 words covers our first 100 words covers about 50% of the

words in any text so I'd be getting on to that high frequency stuff as fast as I could uh doing deliberate study on them and learning because um I had to learn to read then I'm certainly beginning early on on picking that up because I'm be wanting to get meaning focused input through Reading as quickly as possible and uh I'd be looking around for material which is written more at my level in something like Arabic I think you probably be spring to find it uh as my study and my understanding of Arabic I think there's

this probably a bit like jaanese or something like that where there are many more than one level of the language and so you have to learn to be polite you might have to learn high level language and yet in normal circumstances on talking equals talking to each other you use another level of the language now in the Javanese language there's about 8 or 900 words I think of this which are quite different from one level to another so the word even for table there or the word yeah the word for table could be a different

word depending on whether you're speaking to someone who's in a superior position to you compared to whether you're speaking to someone in an inferior position to you so you I you know you you'd have to get on and do it quite a lot of that early but i' I'd basically be following the force FRS I would say can I get input at the right level for me uh make sure that I have opportunities for output at the right level uh make sure that anything I learned I learned to a high degree of fluency so if

I'm learning a few letters of Arabic per day I want to keep coming back to the ones that I've studied earlier to make sure that they becoming more and more accessible and read readily available there's evidence that when learning to read that writing the letters can have a very positive effect on memory cuz you then give close attention to form when you're writing and that Mak recognitional fory so I'd be doing some copying and things like that as I I went through with basically I'd be trying to get a balance while you know 25% input

25% output 25% deliberate study and 25% I certainly wouldn't be giving all my time to the LI studed yes and um of course I'm going to include a link in the description of this this video to the the book that uh I mentioned because there is a detailed outline and detailed description of all the activities that you um suggest uh doing and it's a free book so um just on the top yeah go ahead one other that I'd recommend you you mentioned a p before but I recommend this book not cuz it makes me any

money because it's never going to make me any money this is a book is called what should every efl teacher know and so that book on what do you need to know to learn another language is written for Learners the B what should every year for old pacher knows written the teachers and written within a consult vocabulary of about 3,000 words but it covers all the things which I think are essential for efp and I made a deal with the publisher that if they sold it cheaply then I wouldn't be at all outset even though

it greatly reduces any royalty I get B they sold for less than about $15 US it is one of the books and I think is one of the most useful books are written it covers the idea of the force frames and looks at the skills plus a whole range R so so that would be something I'd also recommend people if they want to get a very basic in introduction to what's involved in learning and teaching another language that's another view from the teacher's view point okay so the content is the same but from a teaching

perspective uh the content is much broader than the the learning mod oh okay like how do you run a class and uh how do you the sa people how do you keep discipline all this respect what do you do with L passes with the pen okay yeah um yeah I was involved for you know a few months in uh like teaching U English and Mathematics and yeah I get the feeling that the the main challenge is uh yeah discipline and uh just motivation or you know lack of motivation um yeah because I taught yeah small

kids even you know High School is just um is just hard um but anyways uh I think most people watching this this interview are more learning a language on their own and one of the questions um that they have that I uh it's I wouldn't say it's a taboo topic but there are different opinions on how long does it take to uh learn a language up to a proficient level um I have mentioned on my channel multiple times the FSI numbers uh saying well you need to approximately you know this number of hours to reach

uh this level and so on uh you know the numbers that you have included in your book uh but I'm wondering do these numbers really apply to people learning languages on their own uh and how long do you think it takes to learn a language approximately depending on how ult it is well what what I did a couple of years ago was to try and look at the relationship between vocabulary size and the Council of Europe framework levels because you know people use terms right there would mean free low intermediate High intermediate you know Advanced

or something like that and I wanted to see well where does where does VAB size fit with most those different levels and I figured that probably uh the lowest level which is A1 it's always funny these counselor Europe Mills I can see why they started at a but people think that a is better than B and B better than C but in fact a is the low a1's the lowest level but anyway once you get get your head around that then I think with the A1 level you can probably get by with even a couple

of hundred words that's a Elementary level and for me that would I reckon that would take probably less than 4 hours 10 hours at the very most of of space well regulated learning you can do it by yourself quite easily um and then to get to A2 which I think would be about a th000 wores uh well native speakers of English took up about a th000 words a year in their early stages or earting a language up to the age of about 14 years years old need a speakers are only about 1,000 words a year

and so I would say that having a goal of a th000 words over the period of a year is is a pretty ambitious goal for someone learning another language but it's a very realizable goal if you break it down into words per day it's only three words a day but that's every day and so it's certainly manageable and pay feasable so and so then I would see that for you know the goal for a year or getting to at least a th000 worth would be quite a good problem now someone was in the certain fance

where you know you put me in before my life's at stake and a song like that I'm sure they can learn more than a thousand words a year they quite quite in do that yeah but then to get to get to the b or the intermediate levels I think you probably need a about t around 3 to 4,000 words and proba the end of intered if B to I think it is is around about 5,000 WS so if you think you know 1,000 words a year is a ambitious but still somewhat relaxed goal there still

don't take 5 years to get to you know High intermediate level if if you want to be more focused and you a lot more time yeah you can do it faster but it's still a big job yeah it's definitely uh very time consuming and um uh listening to you speak I get feeling that for you the main uh predictor of how you know fluent you are or how good you are in the language is uh the vocabulary size that you've been able to master is this correct um I wouldn't say that my specialty is vocabulary

so so that's why I focus on vocabulary but there are certainly plenty of grammatical features to learn and there's also reading skills and everything like that you know recognizing the alphabeth making long meaning connections for that you know there's a lot of things like that but I just view it from the point of view rot because that's where I'm coming from yeah I think other people might take a different view of it but someone's going to do with v one so that's what I do so I'm I'm not not certainly not excluding other things by

Focus of on roever it's just where my expertise and interest fun uh definitely yeah um actually it's my own experience has been pretty similar too in the sense that um I've always felt like vocabulary knowledge for me has always been the main obstacle um even more so with Japanese uh I feel like with the grammar there is a limited um amount of things that you can you know learn uh pronunciation same thing but it's just the words the words you need to know the words and then everything else sort of falls into place I suppose

and yeah yeah there's a famous quote by um to Z there this is terrible but someone who was advocating the functional quot and said uh um without grammar uh was it easy to you can't say uh sorry with go I can't even get the grope right now um um you know with grammar you can say certain things but without VAB you can't say anything at all you know sorry without grammar you can get along but without vocabulary you can't say anything at all and there's are certain fruits of that that us I don't want to

put down the learning of grammar because I think there are some grammatical features which benefit from getting deliberate attention I'm sure that there are a lot of grammatical features which you can only learn through input and having to produce output Bas on that and and that you can't learn through explanation or any idea to this it's just too complete for it it's it's not the way we learn and so but with r you can study just about all r that studium effectively do deliberate learning so on um somewhat different topic a lot of Learners who

are learning languages on their own like myself like a lot of people watching this um they make use of uh tutors uh I suppose they're called you know teachers that you hire online on websites like it talkie or preply uh yeah I suppose the main difference with uh like a classroom environment like when I was in school for example is that number one it's oneon-one and number two you're actually paying for for the class for the lesson so my question is how do you make sure that you make the best use of this time well

that that really is an interest of mine and I haven't spent enough time on looking at it but I but I I think that that you're coming at it from the right angle and that is that you're hiring the tutor and if you can be an informed learner and say to the tutor here's what I want you to do then that's much better probably than letting the tutor dictate what sling and pacing because even though there are lots of courses on teaching for languages and thing you know the methodology of language teaching and all those

sorts of things um not a lot of you know the vast proportion of teachers language teachers are well probably untrained and langu and there is so much what we know about learning a language and teaching a language which is well researched and well and well described but in fact most people don't know it and I think that an informed learner then should really saying now look I me you know once again the idea of the number teacher number one job of training the first job I'll be saying yeah I want to make sure that you

know I don't need the tror to teach me vocab because I can learn it from it actually easily in the sou but what I do need the tror to do is to talk with me so I can get some meaning focused output I can practice get some meaning focused input by getting the the tutor to talk in a simple faith into me and so on like that so I think it's really worthwhile being very strategic about now you use a tutor and one of the ways of being strategic is to take those things I mentioned

and planning and that is to say do I have a balance of learning opportunities across the four strands which of the four strands is is going to benefit me most by having a tutor and how do I make use of a tutor for that and then the other thing is am I learning the right vocabulary for my level you don't want the teach the tutor bringing in really useless words which you're not going to need in the near future and ignoring Words which are really important to you if your currently and it's it's easy for

I think for Learners to get a word list you go to something like sketch engine that'll give you word list in the whole variety of language with which a frequency Bas not made up out of somebody's hair but made out of the study of Corpus study of text and so on so they really are good lists know and so I think it's really important to do that and I think that most deliberate learning can be done by the learner without the tutor except perhaps something like feedback on writing and maybe feedback on pronunciation so feedback

on production that's where you could use a Toth are pretty good Affair and where you don't have a lot of spoken input then it seems to me that tutor would be a really good source and spoken in good at the right level if you can get the truth of to speak at the right level for you and once again that's not a skill that all teachers had but some really you know really good teachers know that well the only knows a few worst TR going to speak at his level so they can understand most of

what I say and that that that that's a skill that's comes from you know having to talk quite a lot so and and with fluency practice there I would say speaking fluency practice and listening fluency practice you could use a tutor for that but reading fluency writing for you you don't even Che different so I'd be going through the four strands looking at the different things that can be done and then um seeing which ones do I you know I get the most benefit from for a cheting I suppose um correct me if I'm wrong

but for the output like I'm I'm thinking specifically of speaking you could do it on your own but the important thing that a tutor would bring to the table would be feedback right that's one of the important thing your feedback pretty important because if you're mispronouncing something and you want to get a better pronunciation then it's it's often have to hear your own mistakes and um and getting feedback on that think be could but but also taking p and conversation is pretty good and if you you know if you have to negotiate things with each

other to get understanding and do let's pretty good too you know and so if you work out a sort of little activity where you you know even something like like look I'm going to the doctor you be the doctor and I'm the I'm me you know and let's play that little dialogue together and you know what things do I need to say and all that re could be really good use of a yeah I um I remember uh on the topic of feedback uh for a few years it was a few years back but for

a few years I was I was a little bit afraid or I did not hire a tutor for you know learning Japanese because well first of all you know it costs money but more importantly I heard uh Stephen crashion in one of his interviews with um Steve Kaufman I think it is like a a YouTuber and it was on the topic of yeah feedback getting corrected and I remember Stephen crashing saying that you know when you get feedback and you get corrected it doesn't really it's not really helpful the Learners don't usually uh learn a

lot from this and the you can just take a look at all the people who have been living I don't know in New Zealand and America for decades who still make like pretty basic mistakes um so what do you think about this apparently you think that feedback is actually a helpful part of a a teaching well I think whenever you speak You're always being corrected then the message there is don't spit um and and and so I think Steve's right in that one and that if you continually being correct and you don't have the opportunity

to to you know do your thing then it's going to discourage you to speaking but on the other hand if you want to improve your pronunciation but you can't figure out what you're doing wrong then feedback is very important because otherwise you know it's not going to be correct and so it goes back to that early both principles are in the principles of focus you need accuracy in what can funus on and there's some interesting research now in vocabulary on sort of trial and error and whether trial and error is better than test or retest

and test R sorry teach and test teaching test sorry and teaching test comes out better than trial and error because if you do trial and error then you make errors and then you got to figure out which is the right one and if you don't get good feedback on your errors then you end up in confusion but if you do teach and then and test and you're getting it correct then that's much better for learning so what we focus on need to be accurate and so I think you know from that point of view feedback

is is really important but I I also take Steve point that you know when you're getting feedback that's language Focus learning there's some the deliberate learning FR and you want to make sure that your meaning focused input and meaning focused outputs from FRS and not being sacrificed to deliberate Luna so if you do get feedback you say yeah I'm getting teack nks but I also want to make sure I got PL of input in a head task for his F yeah that's definitely been my experience um there's definitely some feedback I got that for some

reason I have um it's hard for me to incorporate it but for the most part it's been pretty positive on the topic of uh people you know making mistakes uh even after Decades of language what would you what do you think is a solution or how can you prevent this well I'm not sure if you can really prevent it uh well I guess you the best thing you can do to prevent it is is to uh make sure that there's not too much opportunity for eror and that is that the focus is on things which

are accurate and comprehensible and so on I think if people do want to improve uh you know correct mistakes they need to have the motivation to do it and so I think you'd have to enlist the Learner in this and say well do you really want to correct this mistake and if you do well I'll give you a list of you know half a dozen mistakes and we to go through them over a period of time one by one and you need to you know when I'm not around as a teacher or something and you

need to to speak or something then you make sure you know cross your fingers to make sure that you're reminding yourself don't make the zero like you know my nephew who's not a native speaker of English used to say oh I have three new people at my school so he used to use have or has instead of there is or there are and I I corrected him a couple of times and I realized he couldn't care less I'm wasting with bread now if you know if if if he reached the point where he said yeah

I know I'm making this mistake I want to do it right then we've got progress but if he doesn't reach that point was in the rare so I think for the correction of error you've got to make sure that the learner really does want a correct the error and then you've just got to Simply find out the simplest clearest way of getting at it you know and sometimes it just copy this model or learn this rule or do something right that you know plenty of plenty of ways of supporting people and getting TOS per it

now that my wife has left the room I can mention about my learning of spoken time um I spoken time makes great progress when my wife isn't around because my wife was a peer of tha and she's at the fist so if I don't get the toes right then I get corrected each with each toe and in the end of I don't want this sorry so I don't really speak tie around her when she's not around and I need a lot of practice and SP Me Tie I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes but

I get much more outward practice because they correction really made keep your mouth shut she wasn't saying that but that's what that's how I took it on board because I thought every time I say something I get great I'm not going to keep say things so I think you've got to you know you've got to look at the z s he this is actually very uh reassuring because I always uh assumed I suppose in a sense that people making the same mistakes over and over again you know decade after decade decade it's like a hard

phenomenon just uh some hard rule about the universe and the human brain where uh you know some people are just born like this and uh they just continue making the same uh mistakes over and over again but I suppose it's more of a a problem of do they actually want to correct it do they have the motivation yeah but there there is another aspect to it too and the other aspect is that often mistakes um require quite a big correction of mistakes qu requires quite a big conceptual job now in languages like Thai and Indonesian

PL plural singular plural is not is not not part of the language and and so whether you know you you talking about one or many is not signal by PL a plural marker and so to learn to make you know disting do make the plural singular distinction actually just isn't a matter of learning S and S is from more than one and you know no s is R uh it's not that simple it really requires a conceptual rethinking of of how you view objects and it's same with English with countable uncountable now sugars uncountable books

are countable and so sugar can't have but book can because you can count them and so this this again is a sort of you've got to really take this conceptual quite significant conceptual learning to do this now you can correct sort of superficial errors but eventually the learner has to take on board that this is a change in the way of VI and something it's not not that you you have to tell them or or do that it's it's something that will come through noticing and through input eventually but it is a big jump to

make and so you can have very proficient speakers of the language who don't do singular plural very well and don't do countable uncountable very well but you know but they communicate perfectly adequately and so on because there is a big conceptual leap here these these learning things are not just simple things they they're quite major conceptual differences and how we bu and what language signals so all I'm saying it's it's not necessarily easy but but with effort and with motivation you can do it yeah this is uh very reassuring um on a different topic um

I want to talk about language learning and age because you know some people even uh it always makes me just uh giggle a little bit because they're like 40 and they're like well I'm I'm just too old to to learn a language and I've seen just countless examples of people certainly over the age of 40 who were able to learn a language to you know pretty high levels so I suppose my question is um obviously there is a disadvantage to learning a language as an adult especially you know at an older age however is this

possible and if so then how big of a disadvantage would you have ah well you see you're talking to someone in Ed 8th birthday last week so uh I'm be an expert on this um the the study of vocabulary growth with native speakers shows that um you know people say oh I can't remember the word for so and so I can't remember the word for this as they get older in fact they probably still have that word in their memory but the problem is not the it's it's accessing that memory and so the little bit

of research which is done with very with old really old um first language Learners is that uh there can be some vocabul but often it's not a matter of words being forgotten it's the links being lost and and I find that sometimes I have to you know try and remember the name of somebody or something like that I know I'm probably not going to get up for the next couple of hours but after a couple of hours of D it'll be back back for me so I think you don't want to don't want to put

um you know put on people down too much by saying that you and you you're out of it also I think we know what is needed for learning we know we need Focus quality and quality of the teaching and so the challenge as you get older learning a language it is to say well how can I apply these principles of focus quantity and quality so that I get the best kind of attention and the things will stick in M for example now there's a there's a cab learning technique called the keyword technique which is a

rather strange technique but it's where you you want to learn a word so say this take Japanese for example you want to learn the word haati which is a word for postcard so the way you apply the keyword technique to V say aaki it begins with the word he h which is an English word and now I'll make a a visual image in my mind of a hag holding holding a postcard or or or the the the visualization that I used was I've been to taii Temple in in Nara and there's a picture of a

monk a carving of a m who' been fasting for 40 days or something really hagged and thin and I think of that picture on the Posta so I'm combining the hag which is a pH phological link and the picture of the Monk on the postcard which is the meaning link and then that makes it stick in my memory now the key word technique uh improves learning by about 20 to 25% and there's probably about 60 70 studies on that um you mean now specifically on the the keyword technique yeah specific and the reason the reason

there's that number of studies is it's fairly straightforward to do research on the technique and the other Psych ol ists have got got into it as a way of looking at memory and they haven't been particularly concerned with language learning but but if I didn't know that technique i' I'd give up learning language now because uh uh that technique allows me the words that won't stick in my memory I now have a strategy for making them stick in my memory and the keyword technique helps me do that and so it just means that as you

get older you've got to use clever and better memory techniques to make things stick but there people saying they're 40 years old and too old to learn ANG right like you ranks me Al not you saying it but you telling me about these people this is uh isn't crazy cuz 80 years old I'm still learning time the the words it's more of a struggle to make them stick in M but I can make them stick sure yeah and specifically about the keyword Tech technique actually I read about this technique in your in your book and

uh I tried to apply it but I suppose my issue with it was yes you increase retention uh but at the same time if I have to do this every time I try to learn a word on a on a word card it's so time well it's not super time consuming but it's certainly more time consuming than doing let's say uh recall every time I had to think about an image in my mind uh so yeah it's time consuming but it seems that what you're yeah go ahead you should only be using it for words

that don't stick in your memory right right so make your word tis I guarantee that after you've made your word cards you go through them you already know 50% of them on the C go through probably more and then you know you do a few more goes through space repetition you know on different days and you get to the point where you've got all except three or four well those three or four you better do something like the keyword technique to make them stick and then once once you've got it in your memory then you

want to develop fluency and you want to get rid of the not get rid of the keyword that be but side circuit it because you've now made a stick of your memory you you now got to fluen fluently access it but right more quickly so I'm not saying every word used as a keyword technique it's SP the rest of your life to him out but it's just the ones that won't stick and then you put us for a view to viewing for the difficult ones but there are other remedies the other remedies are things right

well look at the word why is it difficult for you to you know recall this word can you see a reason for it and so then maybe putting the word into a context or maybe even just visualizing the word or maybe just writing the form of the word is it the form which is a problem is it the meaning which is a problem is it form and meaning which is a problem and then you know be analytical and try and correct you know deal with your problem but but it should only be for a few

words see yeah that that's a nice piece of information because I I was starting to do this for every single world every single word and then uh it was quite timeing yeah yeah no you don't need to I'm sure I don't know if you're experiences like Ry and my students but you know once you make your word cast just simply making the word cards is enough to get a lot of them to just go into your memory you now you need to reinforce that by coming back to them and you know at least a dozen

times over the period of the coup week but uh when i t ma courses on road Cy one of the tasks the Learners had to do was to take say 50 items of the survival vocab in any language they didn't know and then go away and learn them and keep a record of their learning how many they got right after making the cards how long it took them to go through the cards which ones they got wrong why they thought to get them wrong how many they got right on the second go through and so

on like that it really blew their minds because they they find that within just a few repetitions they know most of the 50 words on the C they can you know do successful recall but then of course they want to put them away for a month you come back a month later have another G make sure that they there forever anyway but but we're very good at learning doing deliberate learning in terms of um you know the word cards and scheduling um this is a question I've been thinking about for a few years is uh

is there like an an optimal schedule like an Optimum sort of uh scheduling system how would this work um I know that there are some pretty simple models where essentially you learn a word on day one and then the program is going to show the same word on day two and then day four and then day eight Etc so the interval is pretty straightforward but they're more complex models what do you think uh about this you've asked me at the wrong time probably and the reason is but I've been rethinking the principles of learning when

I say rethinking then uh it doesn't change it doesn't change my idea about what affects learning but it sort of changes my ideas about know we how we expressing as principles best I know but um I think if you want a rough rule of time I would say do expanding reteval which simply means as you said do on day on day one come back again on the same day and then maybe the next day and so on like that and I think Paul pinsler who I mentioned earlier had a sort of formula for it but

the formula doesn't work once you get too far along but the idea was but but you should bear in mind that you should come back to it a month later and six months later and a year later until we KN that but when I've been rethinking the principle we sort of saying well what does spacing do is there something intrinsic in the spacing which helps learning or does it simply mean that by spacing you forgot through something and therefore the next time you meet it you spend more time on and so it's not quality change

it's just simply adding more quantity and at the moment I'm sort of thinking that it's probably simply adding more quantity but against that is the idea that there's some evidence that when we sleep our brain works on knowledge that we have with organizes that you know during I think during R sleep or something like that you know and and so that you get qualitative differences occuring in learning say over nights you know you learn something and then next day you find you're a bit better at it the next day than you were just before you

went to bed you know and so there is some evidence that that spacing could result in some qualitative brain story change but at the moment I'm just working on the idea that it's simply a quantitative difference and that is when we meet it again the increasing spacing means that we've forgotten a bit more and so we've going to give it more attention and so simply a quantity of attention is right I think I'm probably wrong on that but it's still not a bad way to think about it that is if you want to remember do

it quantity of a ink repetition is a way of doing that and spacing repetition is a way of making sure that each repetition becomes gets enough quantity of attention each time and it's not too soon that we're just wasting our time by getting something that hasn't had a chance to be forgotten a little bit you know right so you need to give it some chance to be forgotten a little bit to make the retrieval a little bit harder and then it sticks better in in your mind well yeah you then spend more time on it

the next time whereas otherwise you just quickly glance at it and move on to the next one whereas you look at oh yeah you know and you've actually they I SP time but I think I think you can't go wrong too wrong with the idea of increasing you know increased spacing but you want to make sure it is longterm and that um I would be aiming for a minimum of at least 10 meetings but those 10 meetings would be over the period of a year probably right right um sort of on a it's it's one

of my recently acquired beliefs that when you work from a course spot you should about a third of the time in a language course should be spent simply going back to material you've already covered before so you shouldn't the whole course shouldn't be moving forward from one lesson to another and forgetting about the previous ones about a third of the course time should be spent revisiting old lessons either in exactly the same way that you did them before or in some other way such as using a reading Bing for a dictation or you know or

speaking about something you read or or writing about something you had to speak about before or some way but about a third of the time should be spent simply getting repetition I I think yeah definitely in my case it's been my my experience that naturally I tend to even without knowing about you know all these uh principles of going back on the same stuff I'm a little bit I would say obsessive about stuff I guess so I tend to listen to the same stuff multiple times and then you know after mult years of doing this

I can say that this has benefited me like so much just listening to the same stuff reading the same stuff um so yeah um but just on the topic of uh you mentioned that you know reviewing old stuff is something that's been sort of uh ignored a little bit in language courses it seems to me that one of the most overlooked areas of uh you know language learning is uh fluen development at least in my experience you know going to school there was a lot of um focus on you know learning grammar and learning new

stuff and uh but not a lot of focus on just getting really good with the stuff that you already know um but overall uh what do you think of the state of language teaching in general well it's a bit unfair because I haven't visited L schools in the last few years and see what teachers actually do so i' you know I'd be criticizing from ignorance really but when I do look at course books I see that there's very little repetition in course books there's very little effort to know bring back what was studied before you

know you might do a do a a reading passage on penicillin today and on Wales tomorrow and you'll never visit penicillin Wales again in the course book and and so the broke ha which you happen to occur with those will not have a chance of being Ru to the S I don't see any of that at all really in Co book so I think there needs to be a major saake off of course book production which is look about a third of the time spend looking at the old material and here's how you can go

back and do that because it's quite easy to go back for old material and deal with it in a slightly different way so um so I I can't really answer about you know language teaching today because I haven't looked at a lot of language teaching today and now that I'm retired I just I read articles and research of other so on but if you know but from the view of course I think course books really are not really designed to gr learning in the sense of providing quality of attention and even focus they don't inform

the Learners of what should be focusing on in this way and what's new and how you could learn it and I think course books need to include quite a lot of learner training so that Learners know how to learn learning how to learn is one of the greatest teaching things that teacher can do not only teach but teach Learners how to learn that seems to me once you do that then Learners can then do all sorts of things yeah I think a lot of uh language Learners just count on the teacher as the main source

of uh information but yeah this is not necessarily a great mindset to have and I think one of the causes one of the reasons for this is uh at least in part that a lot of people feel like they would not be able to do it on their own it's a question of doubting your aptitude um but could you talk a little bit on this because I know a lot of people want to learn um a language but they feel like just naturally they're not wired for this so uh how does language aptitude affect learning

one of my favorite stories is about um when I um uh I was working outside and I fell over and I sort of trained my shoulder a bit so I went to the physiotherapist and it turned out to be a really good physiotherapist I got talking with with him and he know where you're from and I in but but he said oh I know somebody from me and I said oh he's my cousin zo we used to not my cousin my nephew we used to work together in the post office you know we were technicians

in the post office and I said well how would you become a physiotherapist and he said well when I was in the post office we used to have to attend courses to bring us up to date on sort of various technical issues and in one of the courses one of the teachers told us this is what you need to learn and here's how you can go about learning it and gave them some tips now the tips were not very good tips but they were okay there were things like write it on posted notes and sticking

in front of the toilet so every time you go to the toilet You' be able to see it on the wall in the toilet and put it on your refrigerator door and you know and but he gave them tips and how learn and this guy followed it and he and he and he he did really well and he said when I was at secondary school I thought I was done and then when this guy showed me what to do I realized it unlock down I can do it and went and did a degree in physiotherapy

he was made redundant from the post office with a big change in technology and he went and did a degree in physio therapy and that was one of the top phys therapists in new Ze although probably just re timeing you know and this was seemed to me a brilliant example of a teacher showing here's how you can learn this is what you need to do to learn and and it made a big difference to his light and I think that it's not difficult to teach Learners how to live we know the principles of learning to

me are very simple and clear it's the things I've already mentioned you know focus on what needs to be learned make sure that what you focus on is accurate and comprehensible uh make sure that there's quantity of attention that is make sure you're doing space repetition make sure that you're spending you know at one time you spend a reasonable amount of time on the item you want to learn uh make sure there's quality of attention you know put it in a context uh um yeah visualize it you know uh meet it in Reading uh do

analysis of it so you know this is principle number six do analysis of it break it into paths if it's a word to see how the paths relate the whole and these basic principles can be applied to any kind of learning that you like you know and but it's important that Learners know them because people don't really have good ideas about what heal learn and there is some research on you know what people think helps learning and what really helps learning which shows that both teachers and Learners often don't have very good ideas about you

know whether what they're doing is correct or not but these principles that I've mentioned of focus and accuracy of repetition and time on task of quantity oh sorry of elaboration of quality of attention and Analysis as a way of getting attention the key word technique as a kind of analysis the these simple half a dozen simple principles are really you know they make a big difference and then if you add to this the principle of the four strands of balancing your learning opportunities then it seems to me that Learners can quite easily learn how to

learn and then take control of their own learning and take control of the teacher or tutor you know if they give a teacher or tutor so you know they're doing things which are really good for REM so I think coursol should include plenty of you know instruction to go back and look at something you've done before but also saying when you do this this is going to help your learning because and this relates to the principle of cuz there's only about you know seven or eight principles to learn and over a period of a year

or two easy to learn them and to learn how to apply them so I think this is something really important that's should be the teacher should know about and yeah I think the only book that I read that sort of applied at least the principle of going back on what you already Learned was uh I don't know if you're aware of the uh Asim method uh from France no yeah anyway it's it's a book where uh I don't think it's particularly great but you have a hundred lessons based on conversations that get gradually you know

harder and harder and then they tell you well on this day you need to go back on this lesson Etc oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so this is good start this seems good St you know learning requires quantity of Ain and one of the ways of getting quantity of attention is repetition and so you should you teachers course book should be made to any r at way and soly if you're in Ed in following up on the principles there will be an article up on my website which just appeared a couple weeks ago on the

principles are ring in while rethinking it was faceful it's available free from my website under Publications but it's not that I've got to got to go get this secretary work to so probably be after in the week or so yeah this would be really interesting um I want to talk about a little bit of language learning research uh towards the end because we're reaching the end of the the two hours but um one thing one of the perks of learning languages and especially Japanese I feel is that I get to talk to uh Japanese people

you know on on the internet and uh have you know very interesting conversations that I would otherwise you know if I learned like an another European language I would definitely not have that kind of experience and so one of the things that sort of uh I find interesting is sort of the difference in how Japanese people uh want to learn languages and I I think I remember uh in one of the um the interviews I listened to you mentioned that you had uh taught a little bit in Japan so uh could you talk a little

bit about of trained teachers in Japan yes there's an American University called Temple University from Philadelphia which has a campus in Tokyo and oar a campus just means couple flors of a building really but they run courses for um Master's level and some doctor level students they also run undergraduate courses but they graduate but they do graduate courses and apply Linguistics Fortis there called the Mars and about half of the luners in the class that are Japanese who are teaching English in Japan and they come because they want to do something different for us nor

we done and and teaching and uh yeah yeah it's it's it's very interesting I think Japanese people do take a different approach to learning but it's a way that they've learned the Japanese language and the way they've had to study with Kani and things like that um there's a researcher did an interesting study comparing Japanese Learners and American Learners and their skill of broad learning trying that the Japanese Learners were much more skillful of broad learning than the American students and um uh so I I think there are different ideas about it but it comes

from the maybe their experience of learning their first name than having to learn the the difficult country roing the system most I have a feeling that most Japanese teaching that that the teaching of English in Japan is following a grandma translation of BR where probably 90 to 100% of the past are simply the strand of language Focus learning with yeah I think that the teachers that we got coming in wronging to adopt grip say mes of coures were people wanted something different from that who wanted to teach a different way right in addition to to

this I suppose um for a lot of uh Japanese English Learners there's the the barrier of like this is you know these are two very different languages so if you only do deliberate learning for a language that is radically different from your own um you're probably not going to get uh very far even after years of uh language classes in school but me f yeah yeah and um so the last question I have is actually about language uh learning research I suppose it's it's uh two questions um first of all is there something that in

uh the research that you feel excited about uh something that hasn't been quite established yet but you see a bright future for it and uh second question is for people listening to this uh who are interested in the research uh how can they you know stay up to dat and I suppose this this is a self-interested question because I try to read what I can but at the same time I'm not a I'm not a specialist so I try to find stuff that's at my level yeah some was asking me two questions and I didn't

forget the very strong yeah the first one is um was neglect findings of neglected research was that or uh no so the first question was um an area of language learning research that you're excited about is there any thing that uh comes to mind I I mentioned this idea of graded listening earlier on and I think that for me this you know if if they did have uh some some app or some program which would been produce graded listening material in the way that we can now produce graded reading material uh I think that would

be great I think that' be a major step core um and so that that would be something that I you know I see as being a really interesting future development and I think AI is prob made of enormous impact of the resoling there because if you go and you know even if someone wants to listen to our talk right try to speak fairly simply if I can and avoid Jer but you would probably need a vocabulary of at least 2 to 3,000 words to be able to follow what we we've been saying today it wouldn't

it be great if someone would have vote there 500 words could listen to aosion which they to being following and so I would think that's that's one of the things which is um going even further back though you know the research on extensive reading is still not really applied very much um when we look at how many teachers actually have extensive reading programs as part of their language course it's it's still only a very small Rumble but there are people making very strong efforts to do something about that the extensive reading Foundation is a is

a non-commercial volunteer organization set up to to encourage extensive reading to as a way of learning other languages and they run really good workshops and provide materials and lots of good information on their website and and I still think that the m if if a teacher wanted to make a really the bit the most fruitful change to the course the most fruitful thing they could do would be to have an extensive reading program through it it doesn't take a lot of work and nowadays there are actually electronic extensive reading programs there's one called X reading

you know is care X and then reading and and for a very small fee a teacher can enroll a class in that and Learners can have access to about 3,000 R readers at all different levels and readers much not and I think there still you know I would say less than 5% of schools and probably only 1% where you have extensive R program and it's are such a world proven um thing to haveen of course okay the second question was yeah and the second question was uh for people like me who are not know researchers

how do we stay up to date well I'm just I was working on that this morning actually we have a newsletter in New Zealand called the the tsol ANS ANS is a which is a marry name for New Zealand a in New Zealand and and I have now U convinced without a great deal of effort convinced the editor to include a a series is called practical applications of research and teaching which are short descriptions of our 800 or less words long which take a piece of really important research and say what does it mean for

the teacher and it doesn't give much description of the research or the methodology or anything it just says they they found this and this is what you should do now I I really appreciate the difficulty that people people have of keeping up with research because first of all even on vocabulary alone there's enormous amounts of research being done uh it's increased fantastically over the last 20 years I would say probably half of the research ever done on voty over the last3 years has appeared in the last 20 years and and to someone like me who

tries to you know keep up with that area even for me really hard to keep up with so much appearing I think the only answer that you can do is to buy books or or or to occasionally get a book which surveys areas and and just you know gives you the findings of the research because one of the pieces of research I going be working on tomorrow for this tactical application to research and teach is actually a very bad piece of research but it has some really interesting find ICS and even academics who read this

bad piece of research don't realize that it's not a very big piece of research when you point out the weaknesses of it which are considerable they say oh gosh here I never noticed that and so someone just reading it would say oh gosh what they're saying is really good and interesting in fact what they're saying is completely wrong and their research showed the grumblin with it you know and so to get to the level where you can read research because you bring a lot of background knowledge of research methodology and knowledge of that particular field

it's really difficult so I think what you have to do is to read books that people like me and lots of other people write which tries to bridge the gap between the research and the application and teacher and so in a way what I've been doing with my academic life probably is that I also do research but my main interest is in how do you how do you get this research so that teachers can understand that they look want and so I think you one way is to sort of you know buy the general sort

of survey books and things like that there really good ones around that you I to keep up for that and I don't think it's that easy to keep up to date with the actual research studies they just so many first of all it's expensive if you want to buy the Articles cuz the journals often don't make them available three and and um and they're difficult to read and they're even more difficult to critique and so uh I just would say you have to rely on people who try to bridge the G between the Earth and

learning and go with L Bas honey but also be a bit skeptical when you do so all right well Paul thank you so much this has been great I'm sure people have learned a ton from this interview um and um yeah there you go thank you so much good thanks sir see you well that's it for today I hope that you like this conversation who do you want me to interview next and also make sure to subscribe if you're on YouTube to get the next episodes or wherever you're listening to this conversation see you next

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