This website is dedicated to Language Lovers!

We are talking here about something important we didn’t find on the Internet.

We are Language lovers too, and we created this project to help us understand something puzzling us for years.

How to find the best language learning techniques?

We spent a lot of time learning languages, but also we spent a lot of time listening to people who sharing their knowledge, and there is something what looks so simple at first but we realized we can write book about it, and still we can’t cover the whole problem. For the question above we can ask more to clarify how someone can find answer.

• From 2 language learning methods, can we measure which is better?
• What if we can measure from 2 persons who is better in certain language?

People avoid talking in foreign language, and often you hear things like “I’m bad in German” (or insert any language name here), but person saying this has solid knowledge.

Interesting thing here is: What “bad” means in this context? That “bad in something” is often better than people claiming that they are good.

Often people like to simplify things, and you can find many groups fighting for their version of truth.

Language learning conspiracy theories

When a random person on the Internet claim that he is expert in something, and say something like this.

• Method A is better than B because I tried both and B doesn’t work for me.
• I didn’t try A but it’s obvious that is nonsense, B is great.
• I discovered B I used A for years and this is much better.
• I know 10 languages, and I’m saying that method A is something I used to get here
• I will show how you can learn a language in 2 months

What is dangerous here?

The same thing like in conspiracy theories! Person claiming that probably believe in what he is saying, and often he has zero proof for his talk, or he is misinterpreting data, and in worst cases inventing.

How they measure if something is effective? With measurement units: “doesn’t work for me”, “nonsense”, “great”, “much better”

These words doesn’t say anything. If you say that you spent 1 month learning something using some method, that is still not enough info to prove anything, if you tell that we should believe to you because you know 10 languages, if there is no enough evidence behind we don’t have a reason to believe.

Recognize bad methodology

To see if something is effective, you must be able to measure it:

• At beginning you must measure what is your current level
• At the end you must measure your current level

Sounds simple? Imagine this:

2 total beginners Ana and Ivan started learning Italian from zero. Ana mostly learned watching movies. Ivan was reading books, and using web apps and trying to understand grammar. Both had 10 classes with a teacher. After one month we are testing their knowledge, we tested if they know meaning of 3000 different words. This is what we found.

• Ana gave correct answer for more than 1800 words, just 200 were wrong. Here pronunciation is great! From 3 sentences you ask her, she understand 2 at least.
• Ivan gave correct answer for 1300 words. In all areas Ana was better, his prnunciation is very bad, and he has hard time to understand things, all the time he asking to talk slower or to repeat, he can construct sentences, but he making a lot of mistakes. Ana just listen and understand, making much less mistakes than Ivan.

What strategy is better if this story is true? watching movies or reading books and using apps? Watching movies of course 🙂

But, we didn’t tell you whole story:

• Ana’s native language is Spanish, she learned Latin on her medical studies, and she is living with boyfriend who is Italian 1 year already. She was the best student in her generation, she has 22 years.
• Ivan only knows Chinese before he started this learning, he finished just high school, he can’t remember when he learned something last time, he is 60 years old now. He learned this because he will move to live in Italy, because his family is there, but he is still waiting his Visa in China.

With this new context, can you answer now what strategy was more effective?

This wasn’t fair! And comparing 2 cases like this doesn’t have sense. With whole this context what Ivan made is much more impressive, but about techniques we learned nothing from this experiment.

You understand now where problem is. If you don’t know the whole context you can’t answer.

There is big list of factors affecting comparison. If we want fair comparison we must make comparison as similar as possible.

You can maybe say that we constructed extreme example, but any unfair advantage for one side is not ok.

How someone can be effective depends of many factors

• What language he is speaking
• How similar is learning language
• Is person has experience in learning other languages
• How motivated is he
• Is he living in envoronment where language is spoken
• Is person has some disabilities
• How old is he

This is just part of factors.

With this we found first problem.

How we know that we learned a language?

“Bad in German” guy from beginning of this story works for German company, 5 years already, he has foreign accent still, but he haven’t had single situation in last 1 year that he didn’t understand something, he told that he is bad because:

• his pronunciation is not great, you can easily spot that he is not German
• his grammar is not 100% correct, not so often but he makes error, spoken or written

Other than that he don’t have other problems with the language.

Now can you say that he is “bad”?

We must find better way to explain someone’s level.

To compare us with someone here is the list of some factors we can consider:

• active vocabulary
• passive vocabulary
• ability to understand spoken language
• ability to hold conversation
• ability to read
• ability to write
• grammar knowledge
• culture of place where language is spoken
• jargon
• difference between formal and informal langauge
• pronunciation, accent, how easy you can spot that he is not native

For all this factors we should have separate scores.

Conclusion

We want to prove that some techniques are better than other, to do that we will create a lot of experiments and we are calling everyone who is interested to join us and help.

Doing that comparison is not simple, we created template to do that, but we need help to test and improve it.