Language learning

Editor: You know what sells these days? How to.

Author: So we need to go beyond description.

Editor: And apply what is described to help people get better at something.

Author: I didn’t see this as a how-to book.

Editor: Even academic books can contain something useful. They can go beyond mere “as can be be seen from the diagram…” type phrases to “Here’s what to do in five steps…”

Author: I suppose that’s the difference between descriptive linguistics which show things like how sounds are made and grammatical rules and applied linguistics which goes into the teaching and learning of these.

Editor: Any ideas?

Author: We could throw in evaluations of the conversations, comments on what works and what doesn’t as communication.

Editor: To help people communicate better?

Author: Leading by example. Like one of my heroes, Kenneth Hale. He was a professor at MIT, who could speak 50 or 60 languages. Said he picked up the essentials of Japanese in 30 minutes watching the English subtitles of a Japanese movie.

Editor: A special gift.

Author: And he had strategies. Said he found it more effective to learn not just one language at once but two or three.

Editor: Not for everyone I fear.

Author: Were it so easy to pick up other languages, we would all be linguists in the old sense.

Editor: The old sense?

Author: When linguists were people into learning languages instead of just describing them.

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Podcasting for language learning

What I did, was I listened to 200 language learning podcasts and this is my conclusion. There are no good language learning podcasts.

None?

Not one. Sorry to be so negative. But I did a thorough search, sampled half a dozen lessons of all the major producers on iTunes. My conclusion: podcasting is not suitable for learning languages.

Whoa, back up there a little.Don't we have a conflict of form and content?

Form? Content?

For example, I learn Italian over the radio. Education channel six mornings a week. Good lessons. Lezione una, lezione due. Big fat Italian lady booming 'Bellissimo' frequently. Lot of fun. It could equally well be delivered as a podcast. Effective lesson. Great content. Nothing to do with the delivery method. Motorcycle or van. Good pizza tastes the same.

So you think my conclusion is flawed?

I didn't say that. Quite possibly all the lessons you listened to were bad. I simply suggest that you keep the genre, language lesson, language teaching, separate from the form, the delivery. It's not the technology that's to blame for poor language lessons.

So we could argue that podcasting's not to blame. It''s those early bandwagoners, the early adopters who don't always do the best job.

Exactly.The early bird may catch the worm but the early worm gets eaten.
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