Self study vs Lessons.

Sorry about the late posts, but I was in Edinburgh with no access to a computer.


To my mind there are three main ways of learning a language.

1 - You teach yourself the language using books, CDs etc.

2 - Lessons make up the bulk of your learning, with vocab and grammar drills outside of class to reinforce what you have learnt.

3 - Mainly self study, but with the biweekly or monthly lesson to clear up misconceptions, correct pronunciation, and generally just push you in the right direction.

Now, which method is best for you relies mainly on just one thing. Can you teach yourself a language? If the answer is yes, then you should probably choose method number 1.

If the answer is kind of, then choose option number 3. And, if the answer is no, then clearly option number 2 is your best choice.

But, it isn't that simple. There are some major differences between self-study and lessons.

Self-study is potentially much faster than lessons. You can self-study for 8 hours a day if you wanted to, whereas 8 hours of lessons a day would be very expensive.

Lessons are generally slower overall than self-study, but they are more structured and thought out.

Think of self-study as a man who is skiing down a mountain, and someone who takes regular language lessons as someone taking a ski-lift down the mountain.

If you are a good skier then you will easily beat the ski-lift to the bottom of the mountain. But, if you are a beginner then the stopping and starting will mean that the ski-lift will easily beat you to the bottom.

If you are the man on the ski-lift then you will make slow and steady progress. Regardless of what happens, everyday you will get closer to the bottom of that mountain.

So that's my butchered metaphor.

There is also the cost. Self-study is undoubtedly cheaper. Books cost £20. Internet resources are free. Private lessons cost about £20 an hour. Weekly evening courses are about £250 for a year. There is really no comparison. Self-study is always cheaper.

So there are all the factors I think that matter. It leads me to this conclusion.

Personally, to learn a European language I don't mind self-studying. But, for difficult languages like Arabic or Mandarin I need lessons. I need a teacher explaining the finer points of grammar, and teaching me pronunciation. So for example, if I wanted to learn Italian (the next language on my European language list) I would get on Memrise, Duolingo, maybe buy a grammar book, and if things got difficult I would get a few lessons to clear things up and put me back on track.

However, if I was learning Cantonese I would be looking at lessons and courses, because if I was self-studying Cantonese I would get bogged down in its alien complexity, and it would take me years to learn. With regular lessons, I feel confident I could learn it in less than 18 months.

My current plan.

Sorry for the late post, but I have been pretty busy lately (which you will already know if you follow me on Twitter).

I thought in this post I would just outline what I am doing at the moment, and my plan for short term future.

Right now I am learning both French and Arabic. Since I am waiting for my visa to go through so that I can make my move to Saudi Arabia, French has taken a front row seat in my theater of interests.

Once I arrive in Saudi Arabia (assuming I am granted a work visa), I will be taking 8 hours a week of Arabic lessons. Since I am starting from scratch with a new Arabic dialect, and considering the amount of classes, I expect to be conversational in 5 or 6 months, and bordering fluency in about a year (maybe 14-15 months). This is based on my experience with Egyptian Arabic lessons in Cairo at a rate of 10 hours a week.

I am fairly optimistic about learning Arabic in Saudi, since I expect to be inundated with the gift of free time (due to my relatively relaxed work schedule and lack of things to occupy my time). So I will be learning French as well in the background.

I have chosen French because it is relatively easy (no such thing as 'easy' in language learning, but compared to Arabic I will make an exception with the word), and is very different from Arabic. In my opinion, if you are learning two languages at the same time you should choose two very different languages so that they don't get mixed up and confused in your head.

I am going to try really hard to self-learn French well between now and going to Saudi Arabia, and have been consuming Memrise vocab at a substantial pace. My only problem right now is grammar, because French has quite picky grammar rules, and I suck at details. Combined, these things make it frustrating for me to learn grammar.

These things might result in me getting a French teacher once I am in Saudi, just to clean up my grammar ability and to practice conversational skills.

Learning French is also a small part of my background challenge for my time in Saudi....and maybe some time after that. Really, this vague plan has no time span or any real commitment, but it is interesting all the same.

I am planning on attempting to learn as many of the Official EU languages as possible.

The list is - English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, Greek, Swedish, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovak, Danish, Finnish, Lithuanian, Slovene, Estonian, Croatian, Irish, Latvian and Maltese.

Quite a list. Call me cocky, but I am fairly sure I can reach a decent level in both French and Italian (my next choice of EU language) by the middle of 2015.

I have been trying to think of a way that I could summarize this absurd/vague challenge on this blog, and I am still working on it.

I am flying to Edinburgh tomorrow, and I seriously don't know when I will be back. So I apologize in advance if I miss another post like I did this weekend.

5 Day Lingala Challenge.

So I said I was going to do a little African language challenge when I got back to the UK, and so here it is.

I spent 5 full days learning Lingala. Unfortunately, since Lingala is a small language spoken by about 12 million people in the DRC, Congo, CAR and Angola, there aren't many resources for it.

The way I learnt was by reading the FSI Lingala course and watching the Lingala Institute videos. Everyday I studied both of them hard (the FSI course more than the YT course). I wrote major grammar structures down to help me remember them, and also a lot of vocabulary.

After 5 days I wrote an email in Lingala to a native speaker, and she replied with corrections on a few instances of incorrect grammar, some outdated vocab (the FSI course was written in the 1960s), and some words that aren't used at all anymore (in favor of French).

Overall, I was quite proud of my progress after only a few days, so I wanted to share it. So yesterday I decided to make a video of me speaking the little Lingala essay. I wrote some notes, so that I wouldn't mumble and take forever to say it (I'm not good on camera), and filmed it on my laptop webcam.

I apologise for the quality, and the lighting. I filmed it at about 10pm, after I had been to the Red Bull Air Race (which was awesome).

 

So there you go. 5 day Lingala challenge complete. I am not going to do anymore Lingala. For a few reasons. Firstly, if I was going to learn Lingala properly I would get a teacher, and I can't afford one right now. Secondly, I started to learn French maybe two days ago, and I am finding it much easier. So I am going to stick with French.