Module 2b - Learning Principles in Practice

Okay, it’s now time to take a deeper dive into the five core principles which are the foundation of any successful language learning method. These are the very same principles which inform every aspect of the Bidirectional Translation method, and in turn, make it so effective.

Principle 1: Learn every day

If there’s a single secret to language learning success, it’s this: Learn every day, and consistently do so over a long period of time.

If you can do this, then reaching fluency in a language is not just probable—it’s inevitable.

A consistent, daily learning practice can have a number of incredible benefits. In particular, it communicates to your brain that your target language is important to you. When your brain perceives something as important to its survival, it’s much more likely to remember it.

However, just because something is important to you does not mean you’ll automatically do it every day. Sometimes, life gets in the way, and important things can be pushed aside for urgent things. Other times, we simply lack the motivation to get started, and so learning never happens.

To avoid these common problems, you need a weekly language learning schedule, combined with a daily action plan. Having these two things in place will help you:

Find daily time for language learning, even when you’re busy or seemingly overwhelmed. And decrease your need to “wait for motivation” in order to get started.

This second point is especially important. So often we think that motivation needs to come before action, when the truth is actually the other way around. If you get past the friction of starting—even by committing to only learn for just five minutes—you’ll find that you’ll often find the motivation you need to continue for the full length of your learning session.

Speaking of the length of your sessions, don’t fool yourself into thinking this is an “all-or-nothing” approach. You don’t have to learn for five hours a day, two hours a day, or even one hour.

As a general recommendation, we recommend that you learn for at least 30 minutes every day. This is a short enough period of time that even the busiest people can fit it into their schedule, while still allowing you to actually make decent daily progress.

However, if you really can’t find even 30 minutes for a learning session on a particular day, it’s important to remember that something is always better than nothing. Even five minutes of focused language learning can have its benefits.

Again, the most important thing to do is learn every day. The quantity of your learning during those days is not as important as maintaining that daily frequency.

Language learning is a marathon, not a sprint, so if you can maintain that frequency, you’ll build up all the momentum you need to eventually cross the finish line.

Principle 2: Learn Holistically

Conference interpreters have one of the hardest language-based jobs in the world. As they listen to someone speak at a conference or other international event, they must be able to instantaneously translate that language in their heads, and then speak the translation aloud for others to listen to.

Needless to say, these interpreters are highly skilled, and their knowledge of their working languages is quite impressive.

One day, however, when speaking to the director of a conference interpreting school, I learned a surprising fact.

The director was a French native speaker, and one of her primary interpreting languages was German. This means that she had to be able to simultaneously translate any German speech into French at a moment’s notice.

Despite the fact that she was very, very skilled at interpreting German speeches in this way, she revealed—to my shock—that she was completely unable to speak German, nor did she have any interest in doing so.

This wasn’t a flaw on her part, but a conscious choice that she and many other conference interpreters often make: they focus all of their skills in being able to understand their target languages, and none into speaking it.

This reveals an uncomfortable truth: the skills of language (speaking, writing, listening, and reading) do not automatically “translate” between themselves. If all you do is read, you “only” become a good reader. If all you do is speak, you “only” become a good speaker. So on, and so forth.

Following that logic, to become a well-rounded language user who can speak, write, listen, and read well, you need to spend time developing each of these skills on a daily or weekly basis.

Now, you don’t need to spend one fourth of your available time on each skill every day, but you do need to make sure that you get some practice in each area on a consistent basis.

Here, we can see an example of a holistic learning approach: in the course of one week, you could spend 40% of your learning time on reading, 30% on listening, 20% on speaking and 10% on writing. See it this way: to develop a fit, proportional physique, you need to train all key areas, instead of just one or two.

Fortunately, if you steadily work on all four skills consistently, you’ll find that they will support each other—your reading will benefit your understanding, your speaking will benefit your writing, etc. But this is only because you’re doing these activities together, and not in isolation.

Principle 3: Interleave Your Activities

Have you ever learned to play tennis?

Tennis, like any skill, is actually just a large collection of many smaller sub-skills.

For example, to hit the ball well, you need to develop a good forehand swing, a good backhand swing, and also the ability to volley.

If you were just starting out in tennis, you might choose to practice these skills in “blocks”, one after the other. Maybe you spend a week or two practicing only your forehand, then another week practicing only your backhand, and the rest of your time working primarily on your volleying skills.

While there is nothing wrong with this “blocking” approach, studies have shown that there is a more efficient way to learn sets of related subskills in any domain: interleaving.

To learn skills in an interleaved way, you simply rotate between them at short intervals. Instead of spending one full week each on forehands, backhands, and volleying respectively, a tennis player using interleaved practice could practice each subskill multiple times each day.

Neuroscience research has shown that interleaving activities in this way helps reinforce the bonds between various sub skills, and eventually gives you a mastery of them that is more flexible and more adaptable.

Applying interleaved practice to your language learning is relatively simple to understand: throughout your day and week, all you need to do is periodically alternate between listening, reading, speaking, and writing activities.

Here’s an example comparison between “blocking-based” and “interleaved” language learning schedules in practice:

Meet John. He is learning German. From Monday till Friday, in his initial language learning phase, he engages with the language in the same way, every day. John is learning with the “blocking-based” approach.

Now, meet Lucy. She is also learning German. Differently from John, however, Lucy  practices her German skills in different ways every single day: one day she simultaneously listens and reads,  the next day she writes, the day after that she just listens to audio, and so on. Lucy is learning with the “interleaved” approach.

Ultimately, both John and Lucy spend the same amount of time learning. However, Lucy’s abilities grow faster than John’s, and Lucy feels comfortable using the language much earlier. John also struggles with vocabulary and pronunciation skills, while Lucy’s skills in each area steadily grow, with time.

One final note: though speaking, writing, listening, and reading are often considered the four main skills of language, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t more subskills you can interleave. Within each main skill, you’ll find further subskills that you can regularly interleave as well.

If you want to improve your reading skill, for example, you could practice:

Improving your reading speed

Reading a text aloud, or

Reading extensively (that is, reading a text for a long time, without stopping to look up words)

With interleaving, you create stronger connections between each subskill, so that the overall activity becomes more comfortable and automatic for you.

Principle 4: Space Out Your Learning

Our next principle is quite similar to the interleaving we learned about in the last principle, but instead of interleaving what activities you do, you instead interleave when you do those activities.

This, unfortunately, is not something we usually learn in school. In a classroom environment, we’re typically presented with multiple units throughout the year, each devoted to a different topic. In a language classroom, for example, you might learn about “travel” one week, “family” the next, and “shopping” the one after that.

This might seem well and good, but here’s the problem—by the end of the year, you’ll probably only remember the last couple of topics you learned. Everything from the beginning of the school year gets forgotten, simply because so much time has passed.

The problem is that our brains are not built to memorize things in a short time. Instead, research has shown that human memory works best when the same information is reviewed gradually and intermittently over a  long period of time.

This is why, for example, it’s better to learn for 30 minutes every single day, rather than two hours twice a week. The overall learning time is essentially the same, but the gradual and repeated exposure helps the daily learning schedule create better results.

And here’s  the thing about that gradual, repeated exposure: there’s a science to it!

Instead of just learning a little bit of everything every day in the hope that it all gradually sticks, the most efficient learning schedules will follow the principles of spaced repetition, which is a learning technique developed by a German scientist by the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Put simply, the principles of spaced repetition allow you to apply a formula for repeatedly reviewing any piece of information over time, so that (eventually), it will be years, decades, (or even longer) before you forget it.

This is what flashcard programs like Anki and Supermemo are built upon, and we use the same principles in the BDT, as well.

Principle 5: Value Skills Over Factual Knowledge

There’s an expression in English that goes like this:

“It’s like riding a bike—you never forget it!”

There’s something about bike riding that resonates as a completely unforgettable activity—that once you know how to do it, you never really lose the skill.

However, let me ask you this:

If I asked you to write a meticulous, step-by-step description of exactly how you ride a bike, do you think you could do it?

Probably not. Your description would probably leave out a ton of steps that you just take for granted as an experienced rider.

How can this be? How can you be able to ride a bike, but not be able to verbally describe exactly how you do it?

The answer lies in the difference between two types of memories: declarative memory and procedural memory.

Declarative memory governs factual knowledge, like your name, last night’s sports scores, and who invented spaced repetition (Ebbinghaus, remember?)

Procedural memory governs skills, like riding a bike, driving a car, and yes, learning a language.

When you were in school, nearly everything you learned was taught to you as if it were only factual knowledge, even languages.

For example, your language class may have taught you to memorize word lists, parts of speech, and conjugation tables.

But this is not what language is. Not really.

A child fluent in English, for example, doesn’t have any idea what the “first person singular” is. She just knows that when she wants something, she needs to say “I want”.

That same child has no clue what a noun, verb, or adverb is, and yet she uses them thousands of times a day.

What the child knows is not the factual knowledge of language, but the skill of language.

When you were in school, you learned not the skill of language, but the factual knowledge.

To learn a language well, you need to flip the script and start placing more importance on skill development than gaining knowledge of individual facts.

In a sense, you need to learn from the child, and start approaching in the same way she does it — you need to use the language to communicate, experiment with it, and constantly learn from your mistakes.

If you can do that, then you will find your fluency. I’m sure of it.

Okay, that’s it for the five key learning principles. Soon, you’ll get to see how they all work together within the context of the Bidirectional Translation Method!

Are you excited? ‘Cause I am!

Let’s move on to the next module!