Quickly Learning Russian (or Any Foreign Language)
A native English speaker with no particular “talent” should be able to become proficient in another European language within 12 months...
— guest article by Charles Bausman
The methods described here are practical strategies which occurred to me when I was studying Russian independently, after finishing university. They worked well for me, but one should never forget that people’s minds work differently, and what is effective for one person might not work for another.
I have tried to explain this as succinctly as possible, so that the reader can decide for themselves if this approach might work for them.
The main idea
Typical language teaching and learning spends a lot of time, right from the beginning, on various aspects of language – grammar, vocabulary, speaking, pronunciation, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and writing. While a very little bit of some of these things is worth studying at the very beginning, say, for the first week, the bulk of the effort should be focused exclusively on memorizing vocabulary. 95% of learning a language consists of simply memorizing vocabulary, and reinforcing it with reading comprehension, for without this, the other elements are quite useless.
Knowing the meaning of a lot of words is the key to mastering a language, not knowing all the grammar rules. All the elements of language learning listed above flow almost effortlessly once one knows a lot of words. Likewise, if one does not know a lot of words, the elements above will be almost impossible to master.
My approach focuses on techniques for making quick progress with vocabulary. It is really the only thing the student should be focused on for the first 3-4 months of language study.
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It is also important to realize that language instruction as it is practiced in schools and universities around the world, is one of the greatest failures of human endeavor, ever. When one considers how many hours are invested in trying to teach students to be competent in a foreign language, and that the failure rate is 99%, one has to wonder if there isn’t a better way of approaching the subject.
This failure has huge consequences – for one thing, people get it into their head that learning languages is “hard”, and that you need to have a “gift” for languages in order to do so. They assume they can’t learn them, and so, don’t even try, remembering how little progress they made in school or college, or, they think it will take many years. They think that what they really need is a great teacher, and spend a lot of money on that.
In fact, there is nothing complicated about learning a language. A little talent helps, but it is not the critical factor. It can be done relatively quickly if one spends one’s time on the necessary things and not on the unnecessary ones. Furthermore, it requires no teacher, and in fact, is best done without one.
A native English speaker with no particular “talent” should be able to become proficient in another European language within 12 months, if they spend 2 hours per day, 5 days a week on it for the first 6 months, and 1 hour a day the next 6 months. By proficient, I mean being able to read a newspaper, understand a newscast on TV, or have a normal conversation.
Now, you surely agree, that memorizing words is hardly an intellectually intimidating activity. If it were a sport, it would be like long-distance running. No complicated gymnastics, tricky eye-hand coordination, and other difficult stuff. One just has to plod along, for a longish but doable time, and one completes the course. Not hard.
So here now, is the relatively simple technique.
The Technique
The basic technique is to first learn the basics of the grammar, which one can do in a couple of days, and then to focus exclusively on passive vocabulary knowledge of written text, nothing else.
Passive knowledge is when you can recognize a foreign word when you see it. Active knowledge is when you can remember the foreign word for a word you know in your native language. Passive knowledge is much easier than active knowledge.
Don’t spend any significant effort on anything else at this time. Not speaking, not listening comprehension, not digging deeper into grammar. You will get a sense of how much grammar you need by reading. If you repeatedly run into sentences where you know the words but the meaning is confusing, then see if perhaps there is a grammatical issue which you do not understand.
It is crucial to have a sense of how long your journey will be
Get a sense of the size of the task before you, how long it might take. This is a very important psychological issue. Most people’s experience with trying to learn a language is that they hammer away at if for a while, begin to get frustrated that they don’t seem to be making much progress, and throw in the towel, assuming it is very “difficult”, or that they are just “bad at languages.”
An analogy is Columbus crossing the Atlantic for the first time. Because the crew didn’t know how big the ocean was, the idea of crossing it was nerve-wracking, to say the least. As the days passed and they ate through their food supply, their fear and worry mounted. What if the distance was much further than they thought?
This is true about any task. The first time you do it, it can be a little stressful. Having done it once, you easily do it again in a relaxed manner and laugh at how intimidating it seemed the first time.
So it is important to get a sense of the size of the task at hand. You should know how many words you need to know in order to be relatively proficient in a language, divide that number by how many words you can reasonably expect to memorize in a week, and then you can have a rough expectation of how long it will take you to “break through”, to reach the West Indies.
A good rule of thumb is that knowing about 3000 words in a European language allows you to be proficient in it. A highly educated person might know 15,000 words, but most of them are so rare one hardly encounters them. One can be surprisingly competent having simple conversations with 500 words.
The next question is, how many words can one learn per week? Now, this might surprise you, but if one is using efficient acquisition and memory techniques, the average person can memorize about 20 new words per day, 5 days per week. That is 100 words per week, or 5000 words per year. Now these numbers are approximate, but one can see very clearly from this that the ocean one has to cross is about 1 year. Knowing that makes a big difference.
One can achieve proficiency in passive vocab knowledge in 30 weeks. Having done that, one can then start the next phase, which is passive oral comprehension, listening to audio and watching movies. Only after one is rather good at oral comprehension, should one try to master speaking, pronunciation, and writing. The writing helps one to speak.
All you have to do is make it half-way, and then your progress will rapidly accelerate
Another important concept to understand is that acquiring that vocabulary is like traversing a mountain. It is harder and slower on the way up, but one you get over the “hump”, word acquisition speeds up. The reason for this is that as you begin to be able to read and listen faster, you can deduce more words from their context and similarity to other words, and again, because you are comprehending faster, they are being reinforced in your memory, at a higher frequency. So the key thing is to get over that “hump” and then one starts to see faster progress.
The reason most people become frustrated using standard language learning techniques is that instead of putting 100% of their efforts into reaching that “hump” in passive vocabulary knowledge, they are spreading their efforts over the usual panoply of things you all remember from school, spending maybe 20% on vocabulary, and not really learning that many words. In fact, most language teachers are obsessed, to a fault, with grammar. Instead of learning 100 words a week, students are learning maybe 10, and they are spending precious resources learning active memory, not passive. One can see very clearly that this will lead to failure, or else require years of effort. Thus, a year into it, they still are nowhere near to being able to read a relatively simple text, and decide that it’s too hard, and quit.
So back to how long it will take you to get proficient. The slog will be at the beginning, and you will gradually accelerate. If you keep up the tempo of memorization, by 7.5 months you will have hit the 3000 words needed for passive proficiency. The reason one gradually has to spend less time learning, going from 2 hours per day to 1 hour per day is that the more words you know, the easier it is to learn new words, because their meaning will often be apparent from their context, and they will be reinforced with higher frequency the faster you learn to read.
One progresses geometrically when memorizing words. The first few months will be slow, the last few you will make rapid progress.
Important techniques for faster passive memorization
The rest of the technique focuses on simple, common-sense things one can do to memorize faster. The fact that most language learning violates these rules is more evidence of gross incompetence in most language teaching.
Read texts you are already familiar with in your native language
Often times, when reading a text in a foreign language that one doesn’t know very well, one is confused and mystified, struggling with new words, etc. Knowing the text in your native language is a huge advantage. It also saves time because you can deduce meanings of words without having to stop and look them up.
Read texts one finds genuinely interesting
It is well worth the effort to find good texts.
If you use such texts, you will find yourself involuntarily thinking about them during the course of the day, and how certain ideas were expressed in the language you are studying, reflecting on this or that aspect of them. This will automatically reinforce the new vocab for you.
Avoid at all costs the meaningless texts one finds in most language-learning “workbooks”, i.e. “See Spot the dog run after the yellow ball” sort of thing, because the minute you put the book down you will have zero interest in thinking about the text. For beginners, in any language, one can find very simple children’s books that can be quite engaging for grown-ups.
If you are familiar with them, the Gospels are the best
If one is familiar with the Gospels in one’s native language, and especially so if one enjoys reading them, this is, bar none, the best text to learn a new language from.
Unlike other books, the Gospels do not become less interesting the more often one reads them. If one is unfamiliar with the Gospels, parts of the texts might not be ideal for language learning because sometimes Jesus’s words are confusing and ambiguous, but they are still an excellent choice, one just has to be a little more selective, perhaps skipping over some of the more confusing sections, sticking to the manger story and that sort of thing.
Late in life, Tolstoy famously taught himself ancient Greek in a short time by reading parallel texts of the Russian and Greek gospels. Yes, I know, he was a genius, but consider that that is also a recommendation for the technique.
Space out memorization during the course of a day
Cram words for 15 minutes at a time, spaced out throughout the day, 4 times a day. If you try to cram words in more condensed time periods, your time spent will be less effective. Your brain is like a sponge, it can only absorb so much information in one squeeze.
Don’t work with a teacher, you’ll actually learn faster without one
As one can see from the technique described above, there is literally nothing for a teacher to do here. The bare basics of grammar one can get in a few days by reading a grammar overview. The rest is just memorizing words, and a teacher can’t help with that.
Ironically, language teachers are the biggest impediment to learning a language. In order to justify their time and cost, they have to come up with overly complex explanations and applications of grammar, which, it turns out, it quite unnecessary and even counterproductive. It is because of the existence of the profession that most students fail at mastering a language.
The End
Thank you for this.
I am now learning Russian on my own for 2 years, started with the free https://learnrussian.rt.com/ course, but after a few months realized I need to put much more effort into vocabulary learning. I found Memrise very helpful for that.
I know 1500 Russian words (reading and writing), and in regular Russian blogger or news articles I understand about every second word. I however felt I was slowing down at learning, and guessed I needed to start speaking with some native speaker, but now I will put in a second effort to find Russian children books or similar, and continue vocabulary learning.
Fr. Joseph, I read this article and found it spot on. I've been teaching English in Russia now for the last 12 years. What you wrote here is another testament to the methods that I use myself. I hope that you don't mind if I copy the material to have my students read. It will definitely be a inspiration for them. Anyway I did get a hold of Fr. Roman. He and I are meeting tomorrow. Thanks, really appreciate it.