No battle plan survives first contact with an enemy." Or, so they say — often with a caveat, like: "without modification".
We could, and often do, just plough into a project with little more than a vague set of aspirations. But the caveat about modification, suggests a few reasons why we shouldn't rely on mere ambition ...
- Vague aspirations don't dictate even the first step
- They don't suggest how to preempt headwinds
- Or how to work around those that prove irresistible
So with that in mind, the following list outlines initial parameters for my 21-day Spanish language learning project:
- Only address predefined content with pre-assembled resources
- Only seek to complete tasks do-able within 30 mins
- Practice the full range of language skills
- Prioritise 'breakthrough' skills
- Make most tasks interesting, varied and entertaining
- Ensure that substantive activities are recorded and reviewed
Predefined content with pre-assembled resources
My chimp brain wants to compile a list of topics that I should be able to cover within 3 weeks. But it also knows that I usually over-estimate what’s do-able. And that trying to keep up with an overly-ambitious schedule quickly leads to forced effort, then stress, and finally to demotivation.
That doesn’t always mean abandonment. As I get older, it typically means a dip or pause, followed by resumed slog and grind at a much slower pace than I began. But, ultimately, net output is sub-optimal and the lull before the next phase, or project, is longer than it should be.
Obviously, the rational part of my brain knows that the chimp needs to be kicked out of planning, entirely. Not only must it be relegated to the stuff that it’s good at — impulses and emotions. But its affective agency also needs to be guided towards the positive and away from the negative.
So the human bit of my brain needs to focus on tasks that are concrete enough for me to be certain about:
Which means that, while I’m convinced that I should eventually devise my own learning tools and strategies, I am going to restrict any creation of learning scenarios to activities that can be prepared in minutes — by selecting, organising and (marginally) adapting the work of others.
I’ve already got more than enough Spanish books, audio recordings, videos, exercises and other course materials to keep me going for years — not to mention the infinite free resources accessible via the web.
The problem is that there’s an obvious chicken-and-egg situation — I don’t know how useful most of them will prove to be, without really diving into them. So my only choice, right now, is to select a smallish set of ‘probables’, sample those, and narrow the set down as I go.
Only seek to complete tasks do-able within 30 mins
My curiosity for learning and for understanding processes is certainly above average, and often excessive. So, while swerving the temptation to target too much content, I must also avoid the lure of digging too deeply, before moving on to the next task.There are two sides to this problem for me. On the one hand, I have an excessively ‘completist’ attitude to collecting and ordering anything that is ‘naturally’ grouped into sets. And on the other, I struggle to let go of any learning task, until I’ve really understood the functional parts and their relationships. Both impulses can turn seemingly trivial tasks into ‘string length’ projects.
I must not allow this to happen, this Xmas.
The 30 minute rule doesn’t mean that I’ll be avoiding tasks that take more than 30 minutes to complete. It simply means that I won’t allow myself to pursue that completion for more than 30 consecutive minutes at a time. I’ll break-off after 30 minutes, move on to something else, and come back to open tasks later.
How much later is a matter for experimentation. But I’m inclined to stay away from any incomplete task for at least another 30 minutes. Hopefully, practice will reveal that I can do more than 30 minutes worth of other stuff, without having to backtrack too far when resuming an open task. I’m pretty sure that the appropriate time will vary according to the nature of the task at hand.
Practice the full range of language skills
Part of the reason for limiting myself to 30 minute sessions is simply to prevent tasks extending indefinitely — to the point of boredom and frustration. But the most important reason, is that all knowledge is 'systemic' and in no domain is this more obvious than language acquisition.It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to learn a language by merely ‘consuming’, e.g. watching, listening and/or reading. And not merely, because the idea of ‘speaking a language’, without actually speaking, is pretty amusing.
You can, of course, develop sentence-building skills by writing. But those skills are highly unlikely to be as well developed as they would be in someone who reads, writes, watches, listens and speaks. As we can see from the huge effort required of deaf people to acheive the fluency in reading, writing and speech, that they can easily demonstrate in rich and nuanced signing.
There’s plenty of self-appointed ‘gurus’ out there, who claim to have discovered ‘the one, true’ method for language acquisition. But I’ve yet to encounter any even vaguely effective methods that didn’t combine a variety of approaches. And I know for certain that courses that worked for me haven’t worked for other people.
So my intention is to stripe every day into 10-30 minute spells, using different types and styles of task, method and activity — until such time as I have concrete evidence that a particular combination of approaches works better for me vis-a-vis the same performance outcomes.
Prioritise 'breakthrough' skills
Although I'll sample a wide range of learning techniques at the outset and narrow the selection over time, I don't intend to give them all equal weight. That's partly, because I already know that some are less powerful than others, while some have broader or narrower effects. But it's also, because I've learned enough languages by now, to have a pretty good idea of my personal strengths and weaknesses.I am, for example, pretty good at deploying ‘compensatory’ learning techniques like guessing and pattern recognition, to make sense of words, parts of speech and sentence structures that I haven’t encountered before — or only rarely. Which is mostly attributable to lots of previous language learning in both depth and breadth.
On the other hand, I feel like my Spanish parsing and speaking skills are way below my performance in other areas. In the case of speaking, I think my problem is largely one of ‘performance anxiety’ rather than anything technical like poor comprehension, vocabulary or pronunciation.
On the other hand, I definitely have a technical deficit when it comes to parsing speech and, to a much lesser extent, writing. And I’m sure that part of that has something to do with short term memory — because I really struggle to parse written sentences of over 30-40 words. Even when I have no problem at all with understanding every clause in the same sentence.
I’m pretty sure that, given enough effort and focused practice, I can significantly improve in both areas. Even if I never acheive the performance levels of an accomplished young polyglot, with a more maleable set of neurones.
Make most tasks interesting, varied and entertaining
It should be obvious from what I've said earlier about motivation, why think these three factors matter. And to some extent, the first and the last items on that list will be taken care of by the middle one. Not least, because my high levels of curiosity make even 'naturally' boring activities quite interesting, so long as the don't endure too long or come around again too often.But I plan to integrate entertainment, both passive and active, into the language learning process — and not merely to use it as a break from learning. So, I plan to consume quite a lot Spanish film, telly, music and literature, purely for the purpose of entertainent. If I pick up some new vocabulary or tune in to the cadences of Spanish speech, so much the better. But that won’t be the fundamental point, most of the time.
Similarly, I plan to Spanish-ify a whole bunch of entertainment, leisure and simple ‘maintenance’ activities that I’d be doing anyway, on a typical day.
Ensure substantive activities are recorded and reviewed
Last, but not least, because I won't be starting with a checklist of targets and milestones ... it's even more important that I keep a record of, and review, my activities. Because a large part of this project is 'experimental' — designed to discover and evaluate what works for me.So among the outcomes I’m looking for from this project are better ways of scoping and estimating the next project, and better ways of measuring and evaluating that next project.
Until I’ve got some more sophisticated and reliable techniques, I’ll be taking notes, recording my speech and reporting any provisional finding, by treating this blog as a diary.
That’s already 2½ times the number of words I expected and 5 times what I hoped for. So this is the end.