The Benefits of Failing at French

I remember looking into learning Korean about 6 or 7 years ago and there really weren't many on-line self-study resources and very few classes I could take. This time I found an virtual explosion of resources, free text books, skype practice sessions, listening guides, vocabulary resources, etc. For more popular languages, like French, the number of resources is almost mindboggling.

I've decided to focus the beginning of my studies on raw vocabulary acquisition and I've settled on using Anki to do this. My friends know that I have a pretty bad memory, so I've been shocked and surprised at how well Anki has worked. In 4 weeks I've managed to memorize (to different degrees of recall) about 300 words (out of a list of the 1000 most common).

Last week I sat down to start my grammar lessons with a free university textbook and was even more shocked and surprised at how much of the text I was able to decode. I wouldn't call it comprehension exactly, but maybe 20-40% of the beginner-level sentences I could read well enough to get the gist without knowing any grammar. I checked ahead into later chapters and was amazed that I was still able to work out some non-negligible percent of most of the lessons.

For practice I watched a couple Korean tv shows (they love to put subtitles under everything which is helpful) and was also surprised that I could work out some bits of the nightly news. Not enough to really know what was going on, but within a month going from knowing basic foods and the word "bathroom" to starting some minimal comprehension felt pretty remarkable.

More recently I've been practicing language production and took the attitude the article advocates -- just focus on getting the point across, don't worry about all the grammar bits. So, when something my wife and I are doing involves some vocabulary I remember, I try to formulate a basic sentence around it. I know I'm missing some things, but I told my wife to just grade me on "is it understandable or not?" not on "is it correct or not?". It's eased up the pressure quite a bit.

More importantly, even if my little experiment fails in the end. Outside of language study, I feel much more..."engaged" all the time. Like my brain is turned up a little. I'm finding my memory is definitely improving and some mental tasks that were starting to become harder as I've aged have started to become easier.

It's actually kind of cool.

Language should change over time, take on loanwords, simplify grammatical structures, etc. When they don't, they tend to get passed by by more dynamic languages.

One thing we're definitely learning is that adding lots of loanwords to a language does not mean that the language is becoming the same as the source of the loanwords. It's just becoming a newer version of itself. And eliminating baggage doesn't mean the language is no longer "pure", it's just making room in the language for new ideas.

One thing I'd add, at least as a native English speaker in a very international area, not all foreign accents and mistakes are equally well treated. And this may help contribute to and explain why some populations tend to learn English more poorly than others.

My wife is a non-native speaker (from Korea) and despite speaking and understanding English at relatively high levels, is clearly not a native speaker. But she frequently laments how people we know from different countries seemed to learn English faster or slower than others. It drives her a little crazy to think that all our Persian and Russian speaking friends effectively spoke fluent English inside of a few years (even if they have some lingering accentalisms like w-v confusion), while almost none of our Korean friends have managed the same level, even after decades.

But as an English listener, we definitely tolerate Persian and Russian accents better than Korean accents.