How to pick the right language book for self-study

Today, I want to talk a little bit about textbooks, language textbooks. I consume a lot of textbooks. I buy them, I use them.

They're a big part of my language learning. Even though I spend most of my time on LingQ, I also love language textbooks. And I have things that I like and things that I dislike.

And I want to talk about that sort of with reference to something called learner centered language instruction. Uh, because someone brought to my attention that this is a bit of a buzzword now within the language teaching industry. So I Googled, I found a graph showing some of the key features of a learner centered, you know, language instruction.

And I tried to relate this to my own experience as a learner. I am a learner. So I am learner centered.

Now, a teacher, of course, has to deal with a classroom. And so for the teacher, the issue is how do you motivate the learner to be interested in learning? And the idea being, if you can make it more about the learner, then the learner is going to be more enthusiastic, more motivated to learn.

Uh, they say make, uh, the class, I guess, relevant to life outside the classroom. Language learning is all about outside the classroom. Language learning is about acquiring a skill that you will use Outside the classroom, if the only purpose for learning the language is to interact with your teacher or interact with other students or do tests, there's not much purpose to it.

The purpose is entirely outside the classroom. And that brings me to someone like me, the independent learner. So I don't go to classes, but I do use textbooks.

And so what do I consider to be the most important features of a good textbook? So I will show you some of the textbooks that I have here, some of which go back over 50 years when I was learning Chinese and some of the things that I found particularly beneficial in those textbooks. In summary, what I feel is this, the average starter book, and I think that the Teach Yourself series, complete Turkish, complete, uh, you know, Romanian, whatever, that, that is the best value for money.

It's not as expensive as some, I searched at Amazon and I found, you know, a range of prices for say Turkish books, but the Complete Series does the job because we have to understand what the purpose of a starter book, and I call them all Assimil, Living Language. These are all starter books. These are books that get you going.

That's all they can achieve. Even though they promise you, you know, B2 in the language, that's not going to happen. They can give you a taste for the language.

And I remember my starter books. And I remember the voice, you know, when I hear for the first time Czech or Romanian, uh, and I see some dialogues, I find that very stimulating. I enjoy them.

And the starter book gets you started because there's essentially very little content in a starter book. If a starter book is 200 pages long, there might be. Max 7, 000 to 10, 000 words of actual language content there.

An average book is, let's say 60, 70, 000 words. There is no more than 10 percent actual content there. Uh, there might be some sample sentences, but there's a lot of drills, which I don't do, fill in the blanks, lots of explanations, all of these things that are not actual learning content.

So the point is that if a starter book, like Teach Yourself, has a couple of hours of audio and let's say 7, 000 to 10, 000 words. If I look at my statistics at LingQ, I will listen, you know, 200, 500, 800 hours since I started on a given language, say Arabic or Persian. And, uh, I will read 500, 000 words, 900, 000 words in the case of Czech, 1.

5 million words. So you have to consume so much time. of the language to achieve any kind of level, certainly in order to achieve a level like B2, that the starter book is just that, a starter book, and which is good, which is important.

It's also a place you go back to. I keep my starter books. If I were to go back right now to refresh my Romanian or my Greek, I would go back to my starter book.

I would also go back to my mini stories to kind of propel me even further, but it is comforting to grab a book, look at things that you have learned before, renew your acquaintance with these content and so forth. All good. So that's the role of a starter book.

I should also point out that when I was studying Chinese, of course, I was not just dealing with starter books and I had a number of textbooks, which I will show you in, in a video, which were very effective because of one thing, and this is something that can apply to all textbooks, lots of emphasis on text. Patterns, patterns, and wherever they tried to explain in a complicated way, the structure of Chinese grammar, for example, I didn't look at that at all. I couldn't figure out, they had symbols and letters and diagrams, didn't know what they were talking about.

But when they say, here's a sample, here's how people say, you know, uh, like even though, nevertheless, that's a pattern. And so five examples, patterns are important. And we don't get enough of that in standard language textbooks.

We get lots of explanation. Lots of drills, lots of quizzes. We don't get enough examples.

I once bought a book in Russian, 53 models or examples of Russian. So just models, just examples, no tests, no quiz, limited explanation, examples. We learn from examples.

We can relate to examples. We don't relate to explanations quite as well. And I don't relate to being quizzed and asked questions that forced me to think.

I just want to see how the language works in many different examples. And I think that's where language textbooks. could improve.

Another area, which I think language textbooks should do, which we did with our mini stories at LingQ, give us more repetition within the same lesson and across different lessons of the same vocabulary. Trouble with going in, as we do in traditional textbooks very often, to go from the post office to the train station, to the hospital, to this, to that, you're not getting enough repetition. The assumption is if you come across new vocabulary in a lesson, now you're going to learn that vocabulary.

Well, you won't. You have to see it again and again and again. One more thing with language textbooks that I think is, is unfortunate is if I buy a language textbook, in my view, I should be entitled to the digital text and the audio.

Typically that audio is there, used to be in the form of a CD that came with the book, and now increasingly you can go and download the audio. Although, sometimes it's made difficult, and I have had, The experience, for example, most recently with my Turkish, uh, textbook from the, uh, Emre Yunus Institutu, where you go to a website, they promise you the audio, the audio, the website doesn't exist. I phoned them when I was in Turkey and they say, well, use the QR code.

The QR code doesn't work. I sent them an email and they never answered. So that's perhaps a bad example, but I've had other.

Situations where it was difficult to get at the audio. Maybe too, it was the case that I bought a textbook a long while ago, and the audio used to be at a certain website and it's no longer there. However, very important that we have the audio.

Normally, that is available. But by the same token, and while there might be some concerns about it, Pirating in one thing and another. I want the digital text.

I pay for the book. I'm willing to pay extra for the digital text, but because a good textbook has a glossary for each chapter, not like ASIMIL, which gives you the translation, which is less satisfactory because you constantly have to look over and try and find the word that you didn't understand, a glossary is better. But even a glossary, some of the words in the glossary, you will know.

Not every word you don't know is in the glossary. And by the way, the glossary should be right up against the lesson you're doing, not at the back of the book somewhere, because that's hopeless. You want to see the meaning of the word and review it right next to the text that you're reading, which is usually the case, but not always.

But the digital text, particularly with me who uses LingQ all the time, means that I can bring the digital text into LingQ. I may not be able to match the audio to it, But at least I get the digital text and I can look up the words that I need to know. I can review them.

I can look at it in sentence mode. I can do all the things that I want to do at LingQ. But to do that, I need the digital text, typically not available.

So that to me is a big gap. I mean, we're living in a world now where content is available everywhere. Online dictionaries are available everywhere.

There are all kinds of tools that we can use in a digital environment that help us learn. Yes, I like the book. I like the paper book.

I like the traditional book. But I also want to, in addition, want to have the digital. And as long as I pay for it, I should be able to do that, in my opinion.

Another peeve that I have, and particularly with unfamiliar scripts, give us larger font. Most textbooks for learning Arabic and Persian have very small font. That makes it very difficult.

As it is, I have trouble reading in those unfamiliar scripts because it's, you know, relatively new to me. As I say, I would prefer to have it available. In digital format so that I can look the words up, but I still want to read it on paper.

But if the font is so small, it's just too difficult. And I don't know why they don't, in these Arabic and Persian textbooks, don't give us larger font. And ideally, because the script is such an obstacle, at least for me, ideally with the translation right underneath, as well as a glossary for each chapter.

And very often that's not provided. Now, I understand that very often if you're making an Arabic textbook, you don't know if the learner is a native speaker of English, Chinese, uh, Spanish, Russian. So what are you going to provide the glossary in what language?

That's why we need to have the digital text so that learners can look up using dictionaries that convert to their own language online. The best language textbook, or one of the best, was this Reader in Modern Chinese. And it was just full of structures, patterns, one textbook had the, uh, texts, but lots of structure examples, which is what I always look for.

And as you can see, I write all over these, all of the vocabularies introduced with examples. Once they get into notes and grammatical explanations. I'm lost.

S plus V, N plus whatever. I'm out of there. But when they show actual example structures, uh, then I find that extremely useful.

And I spent a lot of time on it. So this was a great book and a lot of time on that textbook. In a way, this, um, Korean textbook from UBC, uh, continuing Korean has a lot of the same, lots of patterns in the language.

With translation underneath, which is also, in my opinion, very important. When you're looking at sample sentences, you want to know what the words are. If you don't have access to digital text.

Twenty Lectures on Chinese Culture was a sort of easy introduction to Chinese culture. Uh, again, a real favorite as I was discovering Chinese culture. The whole range of textbooks that were available for Chinese were tremendous, the Yale series.

And as you can see, you know, selected readings in Chinese communist literature. This one was, what was it now, Contemporary Chinese Literature, contemporary meaning, you know, the 1920s, but lots of notes, lots of poring over these and learning. Seminary over here.

Contemporary Chinese literature too. Yeah. So, readers with glossaries.

There's this modern Chinese. More of the same. Uh and here are the texts.

Pretty serious looking texts as I discovered Chinese. So that was a good experience. I didn't have a Japanese textbook.

I basically learned Japanese on my own. Um, a lot of listening and reading. I did a lot of reading in Hiragana, a series called the Naganuma series, but I, I don't have those books anymore.

I had to read a lot of Hiragana because I was not used to Hiragana. Another major effort of mine was in German, where I was able to find readers with vocabulary on the, along the margin. And so that was great.

Lots of readers, you need readers here, you know, another reader. Daveig zum lesen, lots of reading with vocabulary. And of course, typically I underline or highlight.

So that was German, uh, again, the same with Czech, but with the Czech, they were trying to provide translations into German and English and the whole page became very busy and I didn't spend much time on this textbook. Persian textbook that I bought here. Again, you know, the font is so small.

It's very difficult to read for me. And I find it difficult to read in Persian and Arabic for the time being, unless they really almost give you a line by line translations or if a digital text is made available. And, uh, of course, none of these people have digital texts.

This is one of my main. Peaves that they make it difficult for you. I mentioned the importance of phrases and patterns.

This was a great book because it doesn't do a lot of explaining. It doesn't have a lot of exercises. In Russia, but it just has sample structure, how the structure of the language works, and you just see lots of examples.

Uh, this is a great book for Ukrainian beginner Ukrainian. Again. Uh, I found all that with Ukrainian, I graduated very quickly on to just listening to the language and reading it on link because the structure, the Slavic languages are kind of similar.

And 60 percent of the vocabulary is similar to Russian. This is fun. You know, do Ukrainian from Polish or do learn Polish using Ukrainian.

I'm sort of saving these cause I'm going back to Ukrainian. I have a lot of Arabic textbooks, but they all have the same problem. They're not, there's no digital text.

So it's very difficult for me. I was able to load some of these, uh, lingualism texts into LingQ and look up words and that helped, uh, you know, text like this is an example, advanced media Arabic, so they'll have, uh, you know, uh, news items, but they're immediately dated. They're from 2010 or something.

I can get stuff online, bring it into LingQ and learn the vocabulary. And I can be doing it every day with things that are of interest to me. When I was in Poland, again, I like history.

So I bought this book, History of Krakow, which I read in Polish. And here's a history of Ukraine. If there are more history books with glossaries, with audio, with digital text, to me, that's at least in so far as, you know, my interests are concerned.

You know, I mentioned Turkish. Here's a series put out by the Yunus Emre Institutu. Generally, I, I buy a lot of Complete Living, already called Teach Yourself.

It's good value. I have bought a lot of Assimil. I think it's less good value because the sort of content lesson ratio to size of the book is, is not very favorable.

And of course they promise you that, uh, you will reach B2, which of course you won't for reasons that I have explained. So, to summarize, a textbook is by definition learner centered, or should be. The assumption should be that the learner is learning on his or her own.

The learner may be helped in a classroom, but it's his or her book. He or she takes it away. It becomes a favorite possession.

That's how I look on these textbooks. And therefore, they are, in essence, learner centered. And the assumption, and I think in many cases, like teach yourself, the, teach yourself, the assumption is you are not in a classroom.

Uh, it seems, uh, that some of the textbooks used in classrooms, which are no better, but much more expensive and are designed to be teacher centered. Like I showed the other day, an example of a textbook in, uh, Stanford that was for Italian that was selling for two or 300. That's just ridiculous because one textbook can only have.

So much content there. It can only take you so far along the way. It can, it might be a beginner book.

It might be a book at an intermediate level, but it can only provide you with so much of the language. You need much, much more. And, uh, if we are truly learner, learner centered.

Therefore, we are motivated, we are motivated to consume more and more of the language, and therefore we're taking charge of our learning. And if we do those things, and if the language textbook industry improves, recognizes where they fit in as an alternative to learning online, but an important and valuable alternative, and one that should integrate with learning online, if all of that happens, then we can all continue to learn languages on our own, which is what I do. Thank you for listening.