Can writing improve your speaking and grammar?

I’ve found that writing is actually a really valuable method to better my language skills. Not just as a method of bettering my writing but of bettering my speaking and possibly more. For a long time I was a believer in very ‘skill specific’ practice. If you want to better your speaking then speak! Writing is for those people who will need it professionally or students as a part of a course where writing is an unavoidable graded component. However recently I’ve come to realize that writing offers a number of advantages and hidden benefits to your overall language ability.

Now I’m a learner of Mandarin, but what I’m not talking about here is the ability to hand write characters. Although I do believe that being able to hand write characters gives you an additional psychological depth of processing of the physical form of characters that simple reading and flash card use cannot give you. I have always found that being able to write a character by hand (from memory) will guarantee you to be able to recognize the character on sight. However, I’m not convinced that the time spent maintaining your ability to write characters from memory is well spent. This is unless you have a need to write characters by hand, for your job or university course etc. Although writing by hand does give some gains to your character recognition, I don’t believe the time spent doing this couldn’t be better spent on reading more and gaining recognition ability that way.

What I’m talking about is the greater depth of understanding of any language that putting your thoughts into writing brings. This greater depth of understanding comes from two sources, but both relate to the extra cognitive processing time that the written word allows. Firstly, putting any thought into writing, whether in your first or your second language, forces you to think about what you are trying to express in a deeper manner. When speaking if you constantly back track and revise what you have said previously, whether to keep your argument cohesive or to correct mistakes in grammar or vocabulary usage, you will be considered a poor speaker and someone who has no conviction in what he or she says. However if you write something in any kind of medium, people generally expect a coherent (even if not agreeable) argument as well as decent grammatical and lexical finesse with the language. Such finesse at the very least demands a writer who considers their word and phrasing choice, in more than in a passing manner, and rewrites parts of the ‘article’ in order to fit the logical development of the whole.

This kind of careful consideration and planning allows the writer a deeper level of cognitive processing of the structures and lexis involved than only speaking can do. Furthermore, I myself as an English teacher find it difficult to correct the spoken English of my students except in the case of the most glaring grammatical and lexical errors. Although usually, if carefully analyzed, mistakes abound in every single sentence, I find it difficult to consider the grammatical or lexical appropriateness made by a speaker while I am also trying to understand my conversational partner’s message and respond with my own message. This extra cognitive burden detracts from my ability to analyze my conversational partner’s language to a sufficient degree. However, if I read a non-native English speaker’s written work, I am usually able to detect incorrect grammar or word choice far more easily. This isn’t because the written work is of a lesser standard than a student’s spoken ability, in fact usually the opposite. But because written work allows the reader a lot of extra processing time that can be used to consider grammatical and lexical choices in terms of appropriateness and cohesiveness with the whole.

Basically you get more detailed feedback on your written work than you would do speaking. If someone corrects your work then you can come to a deeper understanding of the grammatical structures and nuanced meaning of the vocabulary you have used that simple speaking cannot afford.

I have found that simply understanding your poor choice of words or structures is not usually enough. But that in order to truly absorb the correction you should attempt to memorize your article after it has been thoroughly corrected. If you are at the stage where your corrected output can serve as input then this input will have extra saliency that simple input written by others will not have. Opinions and ideas originating from your own mind will always be more personally relevant, and thus more memorable, than the thoughts of others.

So don’t just write because you want to improve your writing, no matter who you are, you should make writing a part of your language learning program. My personal recommendation is that you write in a way that allows you to recycle the input you use in your learning. For example, at the moment I’m using a text book called Chinese Master 5. When I finish learning the dialogue, through back and forth translation, shadowing the audio and some memorizing techniques, I will then try to create some discussion questions, sticking closely to the theme of the material or at least a question that will allow me to use a lot of the vocabulary and structures. The answers don’t have to be overly long, just a paragraph or so. At the moment I seem to be producing roughly a page of writing for every page of text book dialogue I learn, although this certainly isn't a rule, just a rough guide to how much I do.

After I have written my answers I usually pass it on to my language exchange partner and he will go through and correct all the errors that he sees. I usually like to get real time feedback over Skype as my partner is correcting my language. This is so that as he makes corrections I can ask for clarification about the nuances of the language. Often he will make corrections and I can then ask, what was wrong with what I wrote? Often I’m told that I have used a word incorrectly or that my meaning is unclear and I can get a lengthy grammatical explanation from my partner. Once my article has been thoroughly corrected I treat it as another form of input. I rehearse the article paying particular attention to the corrections so that if someone asked me the question orally I could give them the corrected written answer off of the top of my head. I find this way helps me to really take the corrections on board and to notice the subtleties inherent in vocabulary and grammar choice.

So in short, read, write about what you read, get a native speaker to correct it while you ask a lot about the nuances of the language, finally try to read and revise your corrected writing so that the correct language sinks in. Make this a usual part of your routine and you are sure to notice your accuracy and ability to express deeper thoughts in your speaking increase. 

On Extensive Input

Following after the fashions of some of the well-known language learning blogs and the theories of Stephen Krashen I became a devotee of extensive comprehensible input. what is extensive comprehensible input?Essentially the theory goes that we learn languages by exposing ourselves to messages in that language that are understandable. Enough exposure to comprehensible input (messages) and the brain will naturally acquire the language. By extensive it is meant that you expose yourself to large quantities of language but without repeating or analyzing the language too much. The theory is that by seeing so much input overtime you will see many words and phrases repeated in different contexts that allow you to acquire the language without intentionally learning it. Just read things that interest you and listen to content (radio, TV, music, movies) constantly and eventually your vocabulary and understanding of the language will grow. This is somewhat similar to the way we learn our first language. As a native speaker of English I have (as a rough estimate) a vocabulary of about 15,000-20,000 words. I learned most of these words not with my head buried in a dictionary or with a teacher demonstrating words to me and then making me repeat them until they stuck, but by encountering these words in the environment as they were relevant, such as when the people around me spoke them, when I heard them on television or when I read them in a book as I got older.

This was an enticing theory initially, as it meant I could read things that interested me in Chinese or veg out on the couch watching TV for hours and it would improve my language skills as a result. Now this is true to an extent but I’m afraid that if you were to make extensive input the entirety of your study method as I did your language growth will stall in some areas.

For example, I read quite a few novels in Chinese as a part of my method at one point in time. As a result of this I think I greatly improved my reading ability and reading became easier as time went on. Although my reading ability is to an extent very genre specific, I’m much better at reading novels than things like newspapers or even complicated Facebook status updates. I found that although I was exposing myself to huge amounts of Chinese structures and vocabulary, I was very rarely able to turn this into output. The words that I learnt through reading would be able to be recalled the next time I saw them in a novel; however they would not necessarily be available for conversation when I needed them. I had a good passive recognition of vocabulary but often found myself unable to find the words I needed when speaking. I also found that learning new vocabulary through extensive reading sounds good in theory but doesn't really work out that way. Firstly, in order to get to the point where you can guess words from context, so that you can understand most of the input without needing a dictionary you need to know 95% of the other words in the text. As those in the language acquisition game know, once you get to the final 5% those final words become less and less common, to the point where many new words I read in novels when I initially started reading I have yet to see again, dozens of novels and over a year later.

The passing interaction you have with new vocabulary in this method isn't enough to learn them and turn them into words you can use in your everyday speech. So I find that if you want to improve your output you need to be much more active in acquiring new vocabulary with regards to intentional review and practice. However extensive input does have a good influence on strengthening the structures and vocabulary that you have already learned. It’s immensely beneficial to see vocabulary and sentence patterns that you already understand in different contexts; it broadens and deepens your understanding of them. However I find that it can be difficult to rely on extensive input for your initial learning of these words, especially if you want to convert your learning into output and active vocabulary.

Recently I've been much more focused on intensive input followed by deliberate practice and output through writing and speaking. I find that this is helping me convert my input into output and making what I’m learning a part of my everyday language that extensive novel reading and TV watching did not. 

So you can supplement your learning with some extensive listening and reading practice, it's an enjoyable and  relatively relaxed way to study that will help you to reinforce what you already know, but I don’t recommend making it the backbone of your study regime as it might not improve your ability to speak as much as you hope. 

Plans and progress

So the common theme I seem to be coming across among all the other language learning blogs is that if you want to reach the skies you can't just start building and hope to get there. You need plans and mini goals in order to keep yourself motivated and on track.

Although I know that I have come very far in my Chinese studies (Although not as quickly as I should) I'm at a level now where it's becoming progressively harder to notice progress. Before I could learn a new word or phrase, walk out into the street and use it with someone. The path from study to successful application in real life was immediate and there was instant positive reinforcement letting me know I had been successful.

Now, in most circumstances I am above 90% comprehension of novels, TV shows etc. This means that I have successfully learnt all of the common use everyday language which actually makes up a small amount of vocabulary and grammatical structures. Now just to understand the final 10% that will bring me close to 100% comprehension and a native speaker like level.

However this final 10% makes up a huge amount of vocabulary and language. So in short the returns will be ever increasingly diminishing.

In order to keep myself motivated and moving forward I need to set goals and methods to achieve them.
As of this moment I don't have a specific level I want to be at. I'm not even sure where I am currently.

So first step is to take the Chinese Test of Proficiency to determine my current level. After the first test I will have a benchmark and will be able to set a further goal of how much I need to improve.

My deadline is probably sometime before February next year when my current contract expires and I will go back to Australia to study.

Some looser goals:
Improve my speaking level, currently although my speaking is quite good in some areas I often find myself struggling to say what I want when I enter into deeper waters. I also still have times when I talk to people and they pull a blank face and don't understand what I am trying to say. I want to eliminate this entirely. Ultimately I would like to speak at a level able to operate in a professional environment in Chinese. I believe teaching, especially English teaching is my career calling at this point in time. I would like to be able to succinctly and accurately talk about and explain English grammar and vocabulary at a high level.

Reading novels is getting easier and easier for me, however I have to ignore quite a lot of vocabulary and characters that I don't yet understand. Also my reading speed is quite slow. I would like to bring my reading comprehension of contemporary novels close to 99% and also to bring up my reading speed so as to make reading easy and not a burden.

My listening is actually worse than my reading, I believe. Mainly because I don't expose myself to as much audio with TV and radio than I do reading. I would like to bring up my listening comprehension especially when listening to fast paced audio.

Although hand writing is not really important for me at the moment I would like to be able to type correspondence e-mails with few errors and with relative speed.

My plan:

I am currently using a combination of intensive and extensive reading quite a few English novels that have been translated into Chinese such as The Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Animal Farm. I have 1984, On the Road, The Great Gatsby and The Hobbit in store for later too.

Although I feel that the intensive reading program I am using with The Catcher in the Rye at the moment is really beneficial I find it a little hard to maintain. I think I will cut down the amount I am reading each sentence five times to three or four. My aim is to cover one chapter every day. Aloud using this method Read each page twice straight in a row and then re read the chapter once more from the beginning. When I finish the end of the book I shall re read the entire book out loud from beginning to end.

Aside from this I shall be maintaining an extensive reading program. Silently reading, no reviewing and looking up as little as possible. I think one chapter every day using this method is not too taxing.

Listening I shall aim to do 1 hour of listening everyday. Half an hour watching some kind of Chinese television show such as 康熙來了, or 王子的約會 or perhaps even something from Fusion. The other half an hour using my iPod and trying to shadow the audio. Probably something from the PAVC series.

Speaking I am currently doing two language exchanges, one online and one in person each week which yield about 1.5 each. I am also planning to have a weekly one hour conversation with a tutor every Thursday. This will bring my intentional practice of talking to about 2.5 hours each week. Not including everyday conversations with friends and Phoebe or people on the street. By intentional practice I mean that I hope to utilize my time and link my output to my input. Discuss the books that I have been reading and give myself a chance to practice the vocabulary and structures that I have come across. This is to avoid meandering chats that although enjoyable don't really allow me lock in the vocabulary I have recently learnt.

I shall keep track of these tasks and hopefully sticking to this regime will allow me to improve my Chinese considerably. I'll try to come up with some ways to monitor my skills and see if they have or haven't improved.

The best money investment for your Chinese

I'm going to let you know about what I consider the most helpful gadget you can buy with your money for your Chinese or any other language you happen to be learning. It's a smart phone.

I happen to own an iphone but as far as I can see the brand is unimportant. What is important is the programs that you can put on it and its functions. So I like my iphone but any brand will do fine.

Electronic Dictionary

The first thing you will want is a good electronic dictionary to put on your phone. This is an amazingly helpful resource to have in your pocket when you are out an about. The dictionary I use is called Pleco which as far as I can tell is the best on the market, although I'm sure there are many other good ones. Firstly an electronic dictionary will make looking up characters infinitely easier than a paper dictionary. If you come across a character you don't know the pronunciation for to look it up you need to know the radical, find the radical in a radical index and then count the total number of strokes in the character. I've never done it for a any length of time, so I'm sure it gets easier and easier as you do it more often, but you still need to spend a long time to look up new words. This makes using resources made for native speakers incredibly arduous. In novels made for early teens that I read I usually come across a minimum of one new word or character on every page. Sometimes you can ignore the word and continue and you will still get the gist of the story or sometimes get a vague idea of the word from the context. This is okay to reinforce what you already know, but if you want to use your reading to learn new words you will have to look them up to learn them with any efficiency. With a smart phone and Pleco this is not a problem. Simply roughly draw the character on the touch screen and it will give you a list of characters that resemble what you drew. This only requires knowing the basic stroke order.

So an electronic dictionary makes accessing native materials far easier, which is an enjoyable way to study. Pleco isn't actually a dictionary itself, its a program which you can download certain dictionaries to. Mine has   four different dictionaries. Two are Chinese to English dictionaries. Great for an English translation and a few example sentences to understand how to use the word. The fact there are two makes it great for cross referencing as sometimes the translation slightly differs and more example sentences is always a good thing. The other is an English to Chinese dictionary which takes English words and gives the definition entirely in Chinese.. This is helpful because sometimes English words can have many different meanings and the Chinese to English dictionaries usually only give you one word translations. But go the other way and you will get an explanation for most of the major uses for the word.

Then finally there is an ordinary Chinese to Chinese dictionary which is very helpful as it gives further example sentences and also explains Chinese in Chinese. So you get a lot of great sentences not necessarily using a word you are looking up, but explaining it. This is great because it is often more precise than the English translation and also shows you how to explain things formally if you can't say a word but need to ask a native speaker what it is in Chinese. This is also the hardest dictionary to use as there are often many words you don't understand in the explanation. However the beauty is you can tap on the characters you don't understand and a small window with a definition and pronunciation will pop up. So you can work your way through the new difficult sentences with ease.

Pleco has many other functions such as a character reader that uses the phones camera. This sounds amazing  but in reality it needs good lighting and a steady hand. I prefer to draw the character on the touch screen. It also has a flashcard app but  it doesn't have the ability to add sentences, so I just use Anki. There is also a really cool app where you can copy and paste any Chinese you find into the dictionary and then get quick pop ups with the definition and pin-yin for words you don't know. I've copied and pasted many Chinese wikipedia articles about topics of interest into it. Usually they would be over my head with all the technical vocabulary but using the reader it's easy.

A spaced repetition system (SRS)

A spaced repetition system is like a flashcard program that allows you to put your own vocabulary, definition  and sentence patterns into it. There is a question side and an answer side. You see the question side, try to answer it and then tap the screen to see the answer, be it pin-yin or a definition in your native language. The really important part that distinguishes an SRS from normal flashcards is that you constantly review everything you study at ever increasing intervals. So the first time you see a word you will see it again in a day, then probably every day for a week, after that it will be every two days, then three, then five, then a week, then two weeks, a month, two months, three months and so on. So after you have studied the word thoroughly you will see it often enough just not to forget it. Therefore it makes reviewing incredibly efficient and makes a great way to keep track of how many words you have studied. Also its a great way of keeping yourself disciplined because if you don't do your reviews they build and build until they are out of control. So you get into a good habit of doing it everyday to keep in under control. Once again the selling point is that it is on your phone. So when ever you get some free time you can pull out your phone and study. When you are sitting on the train, or the bus. I've spend flights from Taiwan to Australia using my phone to study and take advantage of the time in a seat. Also I study sitting in bed, when I have breaks from teaching at work or even when waiting in a line. It's a great way of getting back that wasted time. Creating the cards are also easy although typing on the phone isn't as fast a a keyboard I can just copy and paste the examples and definitions straight from the dictionary.

Some people use it for recognising characters and the English translation but I prefer to concentrate on the example sentences. I've found that if you understand and read the example sentences enough not only the word, but the context and the grammar involved in the sentence will become ingrained into your brain. You'll find that if you read enough examples of the correct grammar eventually when you talk the correct grammar will just fall out of your mouth.

Listening and Recording Audio

Smart phones have the ability to record audio. It's quite good to get a perspective on how your Chinese really is or how accurate your pronunciation is. You might be surprised that you actually sound better than you think you do when you listen to yourself talk in a normal situation. Also if you have a private lesson with a teacher you can record it and listen to it after class. It's far easier than taking notes and nothing gets left out.
Finally you can use your phone like an mp3 player to get listening practice in when you are on the move or doing something that needs you to use your hands like driving, washing the dishes, exercising and so on. I have everything from Chinese music, audio CDs that accompany my textbook, Chinese pod-casts and audio ripped from Chinese dubbed anime that I watch. It's a great way to take advantage of those times when you need to do other things.

So in short, buy a smart phone, you can use it to practice every one of your language skills and the portability  means you can be study without dragging books and pencils with you where ever you go. It might be a big expense but it is absolutely worth it if you are serious about learning a language. 

Language learning debates 1: Input vs Output

The Input vs Output debate
The input philosophy- Language enters your brain from messages that you read or hear and most importantly understand. Language can be make comprehensible through the use of translation or with demonstration, acting and pictures. When you understand what a sentence or word means you just need to hear and read that word enough times in the proper contexts for it to enter your brain and become a part of your vocabulary and something you can use. The main components of this theory is that the language needs to be made understandable and also kept simple. If you go straight for the advanced material its very hard to understand how a sentence works because of complex grammar structures and different word usage. So you should start with the most basic S V O sentences and gradually build with lots of repetition to make it stick.

Conversely if you were to turn on the radio in a language you know next to nothing in it is very unlikely you will learn anything. You don't have the basic building blocks of the language to make a guess at the gaps and you don't have any visual stimulus to let you know what they are talking about so because the input isn't comprehensible and is therefore useless.

This approach downplays lengthy grammar explanations and too much free speaking initially. The grammar explanations are useless according to this approach because its useless to search for a rule in your head on how to order the sentence while you are in the middle of a conversation. It would be too slow and frustrating for the listener. The best thing to do is to get as many examples of a grammar pattern using different vocabulary and to listen to them many times over. Eventually the brain will acquire the grammar naturally.

As for speaking, I don't think there is too much pushing for people to never make the sounds of the language with their mouths but just that it be copying a teacher or reading a correct and accurate sentence from a textbook rather than inventing their own when they don't already instinctively understand how to use the grammar as they will make mistakes and reinforce them in the memory through practice.

The output philosophy- The output philosophy has always been around that in order to get better at a language one needs to practice speaking it. It was never called the output approach until the input approach was invented to oppose it. It mainly takes shape as 'communicative language teaching/learning' in the average classroom. In the classroom this means a lot of pair and group work to maximize speaking opportunities as well as debates, asking students to talk about themselves and their opinions etc.

Outside the classroom it generally means actively searching for native speakers to speak to, whether by placing yourself close to them or by doing language exchanges and such.

The idea here is that languages are for speaking and if you just read and listen you will only get better at reading and listening not speaking. It is also believed that language is a social thing and that language sticks in the brain when it is used to communicate ideas with people and to achieve goals.

My interpretation-
I sort of side closer to the input side of the debate but generally feel that they are two sides of the same coin. I believe you should spend the majority of your time reading and listening to learn new words and phrases more efficiently. Although you can get 'input' through conversations such as whenever the person you are talking makes a statement or asks you a question in a comprehensible way this is generally a pretty inefficient way of getting input unless the other person is a trained language teacher. Language exchanges can be pretty meandering chats and it is often on the learner to give the chat structure by asking to be walked through a textbook and continually asking for examples and explanations of word as well as lots of repetition.

However the ultimate goal in language is to use it to communicate and I think if you aren't using it to make friends and new relationships or using it to function in society then you are missing out on half the joy. You shouldn't have to wait until you are good enough to begin enjoying this part of learning a new language. Constantly using a language to communicate gives you a good benchmark of where you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are what you need to work on. Did I understand the person I was speaking to? Did they understand me? This is a good motivator to keep driving yourself forward.

I also think that speaking is a skill that needs to be practiced but that you should first try to get a feel for words and phrases by seeing and hearing them many times in context before trying to make your own sentences with them. Nothing annoys me more than teachers who teach a word or sentence to me and ask me to create my own original sentence with it 30 seconds later. So I do believe that output is a good thing but not until after lots of input first.

Listen, read, understand and then speak.

Language Learning methods: sources

Just as a forward none of these ideas were originally mine and my language learning philosophy has been scraped together from the many other and very useful (if you are into languages) language learning blogs about on the internet. So I'll quickly list them now

Fluent in 3 months with Benny
Benny is a polyglot (speaker of multiple languages) who subscribes to a speak from day 1 and speak as much as possible to learn and get better at languages. He can be a bit caustic to those who criticise or disagree with him but he has some really good stuff for motivation and about how to find opportunities to speak the language you are learning.

Steve Kaufman's the Linguist on language
Steve has a blog to but he more often posts videos on youtube these days. He subscribes to an input based approach which emphasises listening and reading (input) over speaking (output) to improve your ability. He also has a site you can go to to learn languages called www.lingq.com I don't really use it because the Chinese portion is all in simplified which I can't be bothered learning at the moment. But I do like the set up and idea of it. He also emphasises content made for native speakers (actual content) over textbooks and things made for learners. He speaks 10 or so languages.

Khatzumoto's all Japanese all the time
Khatzumoto also subscribes to an input over output philosophy with an emphasis on actual content as well as use of Spaced repitition Systems and trying to maximize the time you are either listening or reading so that you are absorbed in the language for the entire course of your waking day. He specializes in Japanese but has also recently added Cantonese to his repertoire. He has some great articles about motivation and making learning interesting.
antimoon
Kind of like the above but by Poles who learned English really well. Pretty interesting
Steven Krashen's youtube video
The original linguist and theorist who created the input hypothesis that many language bloggers base their learning philosophies on. Great video.
Hacking Chinese with Olle Linge
He doesn't ascribe to any particular philosophy as such and uses a take what works middle of the line approach. Absolutely recommended if you study Chinese.

Back from inaction

Well I'm back... after more than a year. I'm not sure why I stopped writing last time, I think I left starting my blog until I had been here for a while, wrote a lot very quickly and then ran out of ideas and stopped. Then I just got into the habit of not writing.

I'd like to get back into the habit of writing this again. I think the focus will mainly be learning Chinese which has been my main interest for the past year and a bit. I will add a few pieces here and there about life in Taiwan but I think I have been here for too long. Everything feels pretty normal and not exotic. It's hard to write what amounts to a travel blog for a place that feels like home.

So recent developments? I'm still in the same job with the same employer and have signed on for another six months. I told myself that my second year would be my last and it was time to move on. However I've decided to study Chinese at university in an effort to get my Chinese to where I want it to be. Seeing as the town I live in has a university with a Chinese program it seems easier to stay in a job where they can work around my schedule and everything is already routine.

As for the choice to study at university, economically it seems better value for money than working with a private teacher at least by the hour. For some strange reason I have this conception that in order to get your Chinese accredited for work purposes you should have credits in it at a university somewhere. I'm sure you probably only have to take a proficiency test.

But for some reason I get this nagging feeling that if I ever get presented with an opportunity by a white employer who doesn't speak Chinese, who then asks 'Where did you learn Chinese?' my claims of self study to proficiency will amount to no more than 'I learned my Chinese from the streets YO.'

Nevertheless there could be a strong chance that I won't enjoy the university experience. Firstly from the few people I have known to study at university here. Most have enjoyed it but almost all have complained of clashing with Chinese educational culture and traditional language learning methods.

Most university courses in Chinese tend to focus on frequent testing as the motivator to keep students working hard. However this is usually paired with an intense workload of many many new words and characters each week. There is nothing wrong with working hard but the problem with introducing too many words each week is the next week you will have to learn many new ones and don't have the time to review the words you learned before. So it is all short time learning. You learn a lot of new words for the test and then forget them all in two weeks because you are busy cramming for the new test.

Either way it isn't a very intensive course. Only six hours a week. I'm sure the homework will be manageable and I'll still have time to study in my own way too.