How to Learn Your Language

What follows is a more theoretical chapter on how you come to learn things. If you’re curious about how learning happens and want to use that information to be a better language learner, read on.

Discover, practice, drill

Discover, practice, and drill are the three fundamental ways you come to apprehend some aspect of your language. Each of them allows you to gradually absorb your language so that you can use it for yourself after time. All three are embodied by the three core resources I recommended earlier. This section will discuss what they are, then talk about how to do them well.

Discover

In many ways, discovery is the simplest aspect of learning a language. This is where you seek and discover or are informed about some aspect of your language. This can be through your beginner course, looking up words in a dictionary, watching YouTube videos, or reading about a rule on someone’s blog, for example.

Your course should be full of avenues for you to discover aspects of your language. The key thing I want you to take away from this section is how powerful discovery is. Just being made aware of a word’s definition or a grammatical form and how it works makes your eventual apprehension of it much faster than trying to understand it by pure exposure.

Principle: Noticing
A great way to passively pick up grammar and vocabulary is by simply noticing. That means noticing words and constructions you have had explained to you before and recalling their function and meaning while using content. As you engage with your content, previously unknown forms gradually will become clear to you.
Keep an eye out for new unknown forms or words as you read. Noticing something, becoming curious, searching for a word, and learning its meaning is a very powerful way to learn. Looking things up every time is usually not practical. Instead, try to be aware so that you can spot common forms, eventually looking them up once you encounter them enough that you have an idea of how they are used.

As discussed in the above section on comprehensible input, just discovering a new word or form will not make you learn it. For that you need practice.

Practice

Practising is the act of using your language for your goal in an integrated fashion. Practice blends and hones the skills and knowledge you already have with less focus on gaining new knowledge. There are two key forms of practice, input and output, and they help you apprehend words and forms in different ways.

Any activity can involve one or the other, but will often be both at once. You can compare reading or writing, which only involve one form, to conversation practice, which requires both input and output.

Input

By being exposed to forms and words repeatedly in context, you will eventually come to remember them and understand how they are used. Using input well can be done by using the principle Use the language in order to learn it. The best input is comprehensible and interesting to you.

Output

Output often features less prominently in beginner methods. This is for a good reason—it is difficult to benefit from output when you know very little of the language.

There are two key ways output can benefit you:

Recalling and using a word or form is a very good way of solidifying it in your memory
Output enables other learners or native speakers to give you feedback—this is a very important aspect of reaching a high level

Beware: output has a hidden danger. While it solidifies words and forms in your mind, there is no guarantee the output you create is native-like. This can mean you accidentally solidify ways of speaking that don’t sound natural to a native speaker. Avoiding this will be discussed in the chapter Mistakes.

Despite its potential pitfalls, output is an incredibly important part of your language learning method, especially as you approach the intermediate stage. A great activity, conversation practice, will be covered later here.

Direct practice

It is often best to directly practise the thing you want to get better at. For example, if you want to improve at conversation, then talk with native speakers. If you find your main goal too difficult, you can do similar tasks, such as listening to podcasts or speaking aloud in a mirror, if necessary.

You may often find yourself doing other forms of practice that are not your goal. There can be good reasons for this:

You may not be able to practise your goal
You may want some variety in your learning
You may need something a bit easier in order to improve on your weaknesses—For example, you may read because you are frequently missing grammatical forms in conversation

This type of indirect practice can be useful; however, it is usually slower at helping you achieve your goals. As much as possible, your practice should be direct.

Learners often substitute direct practice with a related task when they shouldn’t. Those who want to communicate will pass time drilling grammar, vocabulary, or reading news. These tasks have their place, but will not result in progress without a lot of direct practice.

Principle: Get feedback on your ability
A good way to catch errors is to find ways to get feedback on any mistakes you are making. While your language should get better with time on its own, it can be helpful to catch some mistakes you are repeatedly producing so that they don’t become a permanent feature of your speech or writing. Try asking for feedback from your tutor or language partner. You can also try your hand at writing and sending small texts to native speakers to be corrected.

Drill

Drilling is the act of trying to improve a specific component of language by doing an activity that focuses only on that, without worrying as much about how it fits in the broader language.

Drilling works by reducing your cognitive load, which is essentially the number of things you have to hold in your working memory. This lets you dedicate all of your brain power to learning one thing, where normally you would be distracted by all the other elements of your language and struggle to pick it up as fast. Drills are ideal for isolating and improving on an individual weakness. Exercises such as practising pronunciation, textbook activities, and flashcards all count as drills. In the beginner stage, you don’t need to worry too much about picking the perfect drill—flashcards get you most of the way there. Later, we will look at a larger set of drills you could do here.

Drills don’t have to be simple rote-learning activities. In fact, some drills are far superior to others. When you do a drill exercise, you should assess if it is truly helping you.

A good drill exercise:

uses real language as much as possible, such as the content you use
simulates the part of the real-life situation you are looking to improve in
is relevant to the weaknesses currently preventing you from achieving your goals
focuses on building skills or knowledge crucial to understanding

A bad drill would:

be irrelevant to the content you are using
be irrelevant to your goals or weaknesses
focus on aspects of the language that you will come to acquire through input anyway and that do not prevent you from understanding your content

You don’t necessarily need to drill something for you to learn it. Many aspects of your language will be absorbed simply through discovery and practice. For that reason I recommend you avoid drilling too much. A lot of skills will develop naturally over time.

Practise then drill

Combine drill and practice

While drilling alone can be immensely beneficial, these individual skills will not automatically translate into ability with whatever situations your goal involves (such as speaking with people). Similarly, practice can be very powerful, but you will likely progress slower than you might otherwise without time spent working on your weaknesses.

The optimal method balances the two. As a part of your direct practice, you should base your drills off the weaknesses you discover through your language practice, focusing on those which are holding you back from doing the practice at a higher level. For example, imagine you practise through conversation, but find yourself only understanding once your interlocutor repeats themselves more slowly. Your next study session could utilise a podcast episode in which you repeatedly listen to specific parts until you can make out the words, only using a transcript where strictly necessary. This would help you build listening comprehension for fast speech that lets your next conversation practice progress with less hinderance.

Principle: Practise then drill
In order to improve, it is best to practise then drill the weaknesses you identify are holding you back. Follow up by attempting to practise your goal again, consciously employing the new knowledge you have gained from your drills.

Real-world skill at language (or any task) is a complex melding of its constituent skills that involves novel scenarios and unpredictability that drills can struggle to simulate. This is why basic workbook grammar exercises are not a recommended drill. You’ll get very good at doing tests, but what portion of that will easily transfer to your speaking? Not so much.

Balance drill and practice. Both will help you improve, but each has strengths and weaknesses that play off each other. Excessive study without practice will not translate into skills that help you achieve your goals. Excessive practice without study could cause you to develop fossilised errors (this often occurs with people who speak a lot) or cause your rate of improvement to stagnate.

Principle: 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your study
Otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, this principle is applied to basically every field out there and has its origins in management theory. This principle is not a fundamental law, but the observation that the fastest progress can be made by focusing on a certain subset of issues that are having the largest impact on performance.
Applying it to language learning, the principle states that for any domain of your target language, fixing the biggest 20% of your issues will achieve 80% of the impact you can get in that domain. Similarly, 20% of your study time is probably achieving 80% of your results. Some activities you are doing are probably having a minimal impact, while some smaller gaps in your knowledge are probably having an outsized impact on your ability to communicate. Think about what activities seem to give you the biggest improvements and re-assess your study routine.