October 17th, 2010
Americans are famous for saying they aren’t good at learning languages. They tend to give me the same joke: “I’m lucky if I can speak English.”
The many people who say that always think it’s funny.
No wonder language software companies tell Americans that learning language is fast, fun and easy. How else will they get them to buy?
I suggest our citizens encourage themselves by noticing how many languages people in other countries learn. Take the African employee I met in a hotel lobby in St. Louis. He and his family have four languages in common. To illustrate to you how ordinary this is to them, I asked him if he also spoke tribal languages. He hadn’t thought to mention dialects.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I know four of those because my friends speak them.”
Seven languages and dialects…and English. And Americans joke that they’re lucky if they can speak English. Americans can learn to speak and understand something besides English. It helps to look at modern language primarily as something you use rather than as a subject area.
Tags: Academia, Speaking
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October 2nd, 2010
Language drills are often said to be a bad idea, but they are highly motivating and highly effective if you make them right and use them right. Nothing beats a good drill.
One thing is to match the amount of response time to the difficulty and complexity of the drill. How do you distinguish between difficulty and complexity? That takes too long to explain here, and you might not be interested in knowing, anyway.
Another thing is to put the right number and the right kind of items in the mix. This affects the difficulty and complexity. This too takes too long to explain.
But Max and Max Spanish uses drills whenever it seems good to do so. Students will eat a drill alive when it’s designed right. When drills are poorly designed, people and companies say mean things about them.
Tags: Academia
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September 13th, 2010
I just finished posting a four-part series on the culture of family bands in one region of Tennessee. The Minton family plays traditional music of the South–bluegrass, folk, gospel and Irish styles. On the way back to Indianapolis, I stopped at a store somewhere in the heart of Kentucky to take a break. I heard a woman speaking Russian on the store telephone.
“Hey,” I thought to myself, “I can’t understand a word that woman is saying. She’s either speaking Russian or Norwegian.” I’m not sure I can actually tell the difference between those two languages, but I have been wanting to include a sample of Russian in our lessons. So the woman caught my attention.
She finished the call, and I asked her where she was from.
“Right here in Kentucky,” she said. She said it in English that sounded just like the Russian she was speaking on the phone. She doesn’t speak anything but a regional Kentucky English.
Max and Max Spanish lessons include all kinds of angles to reveal the variety and beauty of language here and afar, to help people fall in love with language, any language.
Tags: Pronunciation
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August 29th, 2010
The smart way to promote language learning inside the school schedule is to build a climate of use. It’s kind of strange that so many Americans complain about languages besides English being spoken inside this country, and yet language courses are traditional in our secondary schools. In other words, people complain about languages being USED, and then expect school courses to make students competent in the languages. But hardly anyone actually is competent in them.
It’s still socially unacceptable among a large part of our population to converse publicly in languages other than English. “Speak English. This is America,” people say.
So where can you get any experience with a language while studying? You better get it all along the way, during class, outside class, mumbling to yourself, talking with others.
School administrators and lots of other people continually tell me they took years of language coursework and can’t do anything with it. The main problem is that there is almost never a climate of use that matches the tons of vocabulary and grammar that are piled on you during the courses. Piles of language take even bigger piles of practice.
Make practice the big item, and you will be really good. Anybody can do it. Humans are tailor-made for language.
Tags: Academia, learning like children, Speaking
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August 23rd, 2010
A large portion of our fourth batch of 100+ video lessons has been completed. Batch 4 is for the 2011-2012 school year. We will have about 500 videos by December 2011. The plan is to do two more batches of this sort, but this is still just a tiny part of what we are up to.
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August 12th, 2010
Two of us just returned from videotaping and interviewing the walkabout entertainers at the Wisconsin State Fair. They took us in, trusted us, and showed us the inside scoop on their work. Hard work. This long series will turn into a documentary in our fourth batch of 100+ Max and Max Spanish video lessons. These lessons will teach kids a lot about hard work, culture and language. They will never, ever forget this series.
Tags: Feature Stories
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August 1st, 2010
Forget the speech recognition technology when you’re learning to pronounce. That technology allows you to see a wave-like picture of your voice as you speak. Don’t aim for the same voice picture of another person or even of yourself. You can say almost anything properly in ways that produce different voice pictures.
Here’s what works well:
Learn songs, rhymes and short statements. Play them aloud and let them play over and over in your mind. They will work their way down deep. You’ll find yourself singing or saying them repeatedly, getting better at the pronunciation all the time.
Repeat what you hear. Simply repeat words and statements that you hear. Some people can do this endlessly. Others become bored fairly quickly. Do what you can tolerate. Learning to pronounce right takes plenty of time.
Listen a lot. Let language hit you in the head continuously. It will find a happy spot in your brain. Allow plenty of time for that to happen.
At different points in time you will realize that you have not been making certain sounds correctly. You will need some tips, and sometimes you will need to see fluent speakers talking so that you can study their mouths, their tongues, their jaws–the speaking machine.
Don’t compare your progress with others. We’re all different in that way, and we all can master pronunciation. Don’t say, “I’m just not good with language.” Listen here, silly, humans are tailor-made for it. I like teaching pronunciation, because people of all ages enjoy trying to get it right when they are guided well.
Tags: Pronunciation
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July 22nd, 2010
The best way to learn another language is to have lots of random and systematic exposure to it, along with lots of spontaneous, ungraded opportunities to use it. This year we’ll begin releasing a number of high-powered academic exercises that can put kids in grades 4 to 8 beyond what students their age usually do. But the main thing we offer is the way our instruction motivates students to think about language and culture. The people who subscribe to our instruction tend to be the ones who do not see language learning primarily as an academic area. Their students and children are the ones who go around using the language.
Tags: Academia, learning like children
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July 13th, 2010
Lots of things make memory strong. I have shown hundreds of times that content can be mastered without writing, without workbooks and tests–tests as they are usually done. When we build interactive environments that rely on different kinds of responses in order for activity to continue, we are testing. We are drawing out responses. We are staying current. We are finding out where the student is all along the way, sometimes every moment. In this regard, writing is about as slow as you can go, unless you use very short responses. I love short, written responses because I can cover and reinforce so much more with the student.
You can work with text in many ways to retain it, and all adults and school-age kids I’ve known like working with text. Writing does add important options, such as making your own greeting card or other message, but the main thing is to learn the processes that are vital to communication in any form. Master those processes–decoding language and putting it together–and you have built powerful memory for text.
Written exercises are often part of an age-old tradition for keeping students busy and managing behavior. Writing eventually becomes very important in communication, but it is one of the slowest ways to learn language in the early stages.
Tags: Academia
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July 9th, 2010
You know those character banners that decorate school hallways and classrooms? Well, I realize the U.S.-Mexico border is way out of control, but I’m so tired of people complaining to me about illegal immigrants that I have decided to create a video series on the painful similarities between citizens and illegals. I want to do this with those character banners in mind. Here are some:
Respect (no putdowns)
Caring (treating people with dignity)
Fairness (allowing people to have what is due them, and not taking what is not yours)
Citizenship (playing a wholesome role in your society and country)
When we take an honest look at how citizens behave, we find plenty of illegality along with bad citizenship and other character flaws. It’s good to examine our own behavior before despising others. Maybe we have a lot in common.
By the way, even the immigrants who cross illegally tell me that the border is out of control. Most of them are just plain desperate.
The series will appear in the Batch 3 and Batch 4 Cultural Insights, which are for 6th grade and up, including the adults who are with them. I think subscribers will enjoy the lessons and take another look at their feelings. We will not agree on an effective solution to our border issues, but at least we can try a little harder to live up to those character banners.
Tags: immigration
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