The One Thing You Can’t Bullshit In Foreign Language Learning
I made this comment recently on The Linguist Blog and figured it was worth repeating here:
Learning to ‘speak’ a language quickly is not as difficult as people think, but being able to actually comprehend language that’s spoken naturally and quickly takes a lot of time and exposure. It’s the one aspect of language learning that can’t be faked.
Gimmicks that talk about ‘fast fluency’ are flawed for this reason. There’s no such thing as ‘fast comprehension’.
Comprehension, particularly listening comprehension, is the one aspect of language learning that you can’t bullshit.
It’s not that difficult to learn how to speak a language in a very short amount of time (even several weeks), but to acquire an ear for the language and to be able to catch what people are saying takes a lot of time and exposure to the target language.
People want fast results and the gimmick-peddlers are more than happy to offer those fast results for dollars, but unfortunately there’s no such thing when it comes to listening comprehension. You need time. Lots of it.
Of the 4 language skills – speaking, listening, reading and writing – it’s my view that listening is the biggest hurdle and the toughest challenge to beat without a doubt.
What I learned from Australian military language testing
I passed my testing for entry into the Australian Defence Force early last year as a signals operator linguist for the Air Force.
It’s actually been a long-term dream of mine to serve in the armed forces and I saw it as a great way to put my passion for foreign languages to use, and to also be paid to acquire more languages. For a few personal reasons I had to put the application on hold at the time and ended up heading to The Republic of Georgia as a teacher instead.
The point that I want to make concerning the testing that the military do to determine foreign language aptitude is that it’s primarily centered on listening comprehension.
For the test, myself and 30 other people were given a short briefing on an artificial language that the military had designed (with its own grammar system and vocabulary), and then we had to listen to recordings of that language and translate them as we heard them.
This was a very difficult task and only myself and 3 others (out of 30) ended up being successful. Even other people in the room who were saying prior to the test that they could speak a few languages ended up failing the test.
Obviously, the main reason for the test being focused on listening ability is that the job requires listening to and translating a lot of intercepted transmissions but I also believe that it’s because listening comprehension is a major indicator of a person’s aptitude for language acquisition (anyone can learn a language sure but some people do it more effortlessly than others).
Even though it was quite possible and likely that the Defence Force would require us in future to able to communicate (i.e. speak) those languages, the thing they were most interested in for testing was how well we could listen.
A person’s real language level is only evident during an unscripted conversation with a native speaker
There’s a straightforward reason for this:
The learner might be able to say a lot in their target language but as soon as a native speaker says something which warrants a response, it’s going to be very obvious whether or not the learner actually understands what’s being said.
I’ve seen a lot of multilingual videos on YouTube and various blogs, and people claiming to have picked up some language in a matter of weeks (the media has been sensationalizing this in recent weeks) but assessment of their levels can only happen in a two-way, natural conversation with a native speaker. Speaking ability can be faked entirely but listening comprehension can’t.
This is why, for example, IELTS exams consist of a native English speaker having an unscripted conversation with the foreign learner because this enables the examiners to properly assess their level.
It’s also why I dispense entirely with any approach that says speak immediately, because you’re not allowing yourself adequate time to soak up the language around you. Some people speak brilliantly but have poor comprehension and get overwhelmed in conversations because they’ve taken this approach.
Again so you remember it:
You can’t bullshit listening comprehension.
You might not want to hear it, but it takes time and there are no shortcuts.
Expose yourself daily to target language dialogue (take some time to shut up and listen!) and your comprehension level will gradually improve.
Make sure to read this post if you haven’t already: How To Improve Your Foreign Language Comprehension.
This was written by Donovan Nagel.
Do you use StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest or Digg? A quick upvote, like, pin or digg will make my day! Thanks 
Comments: If you’ve got something you’d like to add to this or some constructive criticism you can do that at the bottom of this page. Just please be respectful. Any abusive or nonsensical comments will be deleted.
Related Posts
Related Post
Popular
- Arabic and Hebrew: Why Semitic Languages Are Not Difficult (43)
- You Don’t Need To Study Grammar To Learn A Foreign Language (43)
- 12 Prolific Language Learning Bloggers You Should Follow (42)
- 12 Lessons Learned Proposing To An Egyptian Girl Who Only Spoke Arabic (38)
- Learning Arabic? Here Are 5 Books That I Highly Recommend You Own (36)
languageandculturesolutions
Tim M.
Dave
Chris
Mary Jane Burton
Scott
So very true. Fluency means a lot of different things to people, but honestly, until you can listen, and comprehend conversations in your target language, you shouldn't really claim to be proficient.
You are 100% correct. I am an American who ls currently living in Bogota, Colombia and the way that the people speak here in NOTHING like what was on the audio cds that I listened to prior to coming here. CDs don't use real language spoken as natives speak. For me listening is the HARDEST thing to do. I ask questions but don't understand the answer.
Jerry Bauer, ssp
Bogota, Colombia
Agreed!
Thanks, Desmond.
Thanks Jerry.
True. I had the same problem in Egypt when I first started using audio that was unnatural and slow. I didn't have a clue what people were saying.
This is why I urge people to start off with completely natural audio material from the very beginning. There's no such as 'advanced audio' – it's 'natural audio'.
Just keep surrounding yourself with the language and you'll improve (very handy being in Columbia!
).
I absolutely agree!!! It doesn't help to learn to paraphrase sentences from a book.
Purely out of curiosity, are you still going ahead with the Air Force position? That particular position is the only full-time ADF career I've ever considered
It's definitely a possibility for me, David.
Have you gone through the recruitment process yet? There's also a cryptolinguist position in the Navy.
No I haven't. I was an Army Reservist for a while, but my area of study is actually completely different (social work). However, languages have always been a strong point for me having grown up bilingual. Also, I recently returned from some time in a Spanish immersion school in South America.
I guess the RAAF was always one of those "what if" things that has been in the back of my mind.
I had a similar experience when I joined the United States Army.
Anyone who had foreign language proficiency on their enlistment papers was made to take the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery). The test sounds fairly similar to the one you've described in that the government uses a made-up language to test aptitude for learning foreign languages but it has both an oral and a written segment.
I had forgotten about that experience actually, so I'm glad you reminded me! I'll have to write a post about my experience.
I've met more than my fair share of non-native Thai speakers (as in foreigners) at various and sundry schools here in Bangkok. Even ones who had good intonation and sentence structure seemed to struggle when deciphering regular speed normal (colloquially) spoken Thai. This seemed to occur even if they knew the topic being discussed.
I think you bring up a very valid point. Personally I rarely use the term "fluency" (because it can mean many different things to different people). Instead I use; "fluidity in speaking" (pausing when a native speaker would, using cadence in speaking like a native speaker, instead of having that "chopped up" foreign speaker sound to the language).
Interesting post, thanx
I find this article to be inspirational. Too many language blogs out there go off about how easy it is to achieve fluency in a language when in reality it's a lot of hard work and dedication. While this is true to an extent that learning a language is easier than many people make it out to be (i.e. North Americans) but it can be discouraging to those struggling with their language goals. For example, if I go around telling everyone I meet, "Learning another language is super easy! In a few months you'll reach fluency!" and they struggle with it this could make them feel inadequate or incapable of learning another language. I think the best approach is to say, "it's a lot of work but totally worth the effort."
Anyone can spend a few weeks to a few months studying a phrase book and appear to be fluent but when confronted with topics by native speakers not mentioned in the phrase book they are SOL. This is the current state of my Turkish right now.
Hi Mike.
I think the audio material was actually provided to the Australia Defence Force by the US military. You and I might have done the same test.
Thanks Tod.
Very true.
I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences with the Thai language in future. It's a language that I'm hoping to tackle over the next year or so.
Thanks a lot Kevin!
How long have you been learning Turkish for?
Great to connect with another language learning blogger too!
> The learner might be able to say a lot in their target language but as soon as a native speaker says something which warrants a response, it’s going to be very obvious whether or not the learner actually understands what’s being said.
I basically agree with this, but I would put it a slightly different way. Comprehension indeed takes a great deal of time to build, but more telling still is your ability to engage in that scenario. You may feel that you're confident and you can talk about a lot of things, but being exposed to natives and the completely arbitrary gamut of topics they are prone to bring up is the real test of how agile you are.
This is true in our native language(s) too, we're simply not able to have a meaningful conversation about absolutely everything, yet we are very good at engaging on almost any subject whether we know it or not. Thus our "foreign" language ability is a striving to approximate this.
Regarding listening practice, do you have any thoughts on the relative merits of, for example, an hour a day over 4 months versus 4 hours a day over one month ? To what extent can you compress this practice to achieve results in less time ?
Mike,
Do you remember what language the test was in? My father took the test years and years ago, and his recollection was that the language used was Esperanto. I took a similar test a while back as well, and the language used was Kurdish (this was before most anyone had ever heard of Kurds).
Love the post Donovan!
My Turkish has been dormant since 2008 for many different reasons but I'm slowly getting into the habit of studying little by little. The only problem I'm having is finding someone to practice with (as you've experienced yourself being an Australian, the difference in time zones has made it challenging to keep in touch with my friends who speak my target language). My wife and I are working towards my dream of living in Turkey for several months in order for me to reach C2 level in the language
Thanks Jared
That's actually a really good point.
If you have the time and devotion to spend four hours a day listening rather than one I'm sure your listening comprehension will improve at a faster rate.
The only problem is there does come a point where too much study can be detrimental and cause you not to retain as much information. Even in an immersion context abroad there's only so much you can handle each day before you feel tired and overwhelmed.
I'd like to other peoples' opinions on this though.
Came across your website as I was looking for information regarding the Signals Operator Linguist specialist testing. Your website was the only one I found was useful. I've sat the initial JOES Day (Now referred to as the YOU Session) where you sit the general aptitude test and are filtered to suitable jobs.
Do you have any tips or advice on how I could prepare for the specialist testing? As you've passed it, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
G'day Jade.
As they tell you, there's no way you can study for this exam. You either have the right aptitude for it or you don't.
However, one way you can 'warm yourself up' for the test is to go over some basic grammar for languages you don't know (pay special attention to affixes) and listen to audio in those languages to try and spot certain grammatical features.
So for example in Modern Standard Arabic, the suffix -uka on verbs generally means "you (m)" as a direct object, and -uki means "you (f)". So listen to Arabic audio and try to hear these suffixes.
You won't be doing a real language like Arabic but it will help prepare you to listen for these features.
When you do your test, they'll explain affixes and other grammatical rules for the artificial language and then get you to listen to recordings and translate them.
Hope that helps! Good luck
I agree! Thanks for putting this so succinctly.
Arabic is a serious problem in the area, as no one speaks according the rules of Modern Standard, which is the basis of most Arabic courses. I learned Arabic first in Morocco, then Modern Standard, then Levantine. It was better than courses.
I'm looking for more structured ways of learning languages beginning with listening comprehension. That's how babies start: listen for 1.5-2 years, then make up nonsense, then speak.
Do you have any suggestions on how to improve listening comprehension?
Thank you very much for your advice. I have my testing this Thursday so fingers crossed I pass. The statistics of when you sat your testing has me a little worried. 3 out of 30 passing is pretty poor so it must be very difficult.
Well done that you passed
Where are you at with your application or are you enlisted in the RAAF now? I know it can be quite a long process going through recruiting so I hope you haven't had too many issues.
I strongly agreed with everything except the bit about immediately discounting anything that tells you to speak immediately: both the speak-immediately and the silent period methods can be effective depending on a multitude of factors the most important of which is the learner themselves which dictates what will and won’t work for them. Also, speaking immediately doesn’t preclude doing a lot of listening and work on listening comprehension.
Anyway, I have absolutely found that listening comprehension is, by far, the toughest part of learning a language, my experience matches yours, yes, definitely. I also find that my preferred method of dealing with this is movies–movies in the language in question with subtitles in the language in question (the one being spoken), that’s massively important. I find that maybe 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 or so foreign language movies will have subtitles in the language spoken. Luckily right now I’m learning Spanish which is one of the easiest choices in terms of available learning material (e.g. there are more Spanish-language movies available on Amazon on DVD than any other foreign language, around 11,000 vs 6,000 for French, the next most prolific one). My personal favorites so far are Maria Full of Grace and Pan’s Labyrinth, for what it’s worth.
I like your work, keep it up.
Cheers,
Andrew
Great post,
I've applied for a Cryptologic Linguist role with the Royal Australian Navy and will have this test in a couple of weeks. I've also looked at the RAAF role you described too but am more excited about a life at sea.
Thanks mate.
Best of luck with the test!
So true – you cannot fake unscripted conversation! Although I have to say my comprehension has always been higher than my speaking skills and my ability to communicate freely in another language has always been the last skill to come.
Nice post. This has also been my experience. I also find that the better my listening gets, the more natural my speaking gets, and it seems to relate directly to noticing things around me. With Korean putting the radio on all the time when I'm driving over the last couple of years seems to have helped a fair bit.
I've found that the method outlined in on a site for learning Telugu that is based on the Birkenbihl method interesting. It seems like an efficient way to learn to understand a lot of simple content quickly with courses like Assimil or Teach Yourself or something similar. Of course then you'd have to move on to harder content. Global listening of difficult content that you can't understand also seems to be good for adjusting the ears to the sounds of the language. I figure it's necessary to have some tolerance of ambiguity/not understanding things to do this second type of listening. I've noticed a lot of my students really hate listening to stuff they don't understand but actually I quite like it.
Very true observations. It is essentially the Turing test of foreign language acquisition. It's easy enough if you're "scripting," it's when someone asks the robot a super novel question (or makes a novel comment.) Syntax is not equivalent to semantics. That's when the rubber hits the road. I'll never forget this experience when my FIL told me in his native tongue "all dogs have gonorrhea" and I went outside and told my husband I must have misunderstood because I heard him say that all dogs have gonorrhea.
just a quick question…. for the dlab the adf give, do they give you a paper and pencil to work with? and exactly how fast do they read out these questions?
It was all done on computer (no paper) and from memory I think it was naturally spoken speed.
Do you know where to found test for the ADF?