How do you increase your efficiency in language learning? Is it even possible?

[nfera]

I agree with @GMelillo that efficiency (language acquisition rate per unit time probably being the most useful form to refer to at the moment) is a mere trifle to the ability for people to persist in the learning process. As @Obsttorte mentioned in another post a while back, learning English in his school system in Germany entailed 4-6x the number of hours of @LeifGoodwin’s experience of learning French in the English school system.

@Obsttorte

1-2 hours per week, 5 years in total (twice to three times the hours for twice the amount of time, plus a second foreign language for 4-6 years)

@LeifGoodwin

Like many in England, I spent roughly 2 hours a week, 38 weeks a year, for five years studying French at school. That’s about 380 classroom hours. That’s enough study time to reach a decent B1 level, and I think I would have succeeded had I worked hard. I didn’t because I was lazy, and not interested. But I still gained a solid foundation which helped me progress in later years.

There are large amounts of time in every school lesson where you are simply not studying, such as:

• daydreaming and not paying attention by the student, because the student doesn’t want to be there
• class-wide distractions from other students who don’t want to be there
• waiting for the teacher to come around and personally address you and answer your questions
• waiting for all students to finish the activity, which you finished earlier
• start and end times of the lesson, which involving preparation or packing up, not necessarily studying

As you can see, the amount of non-study time is significantly increased by large class sizes of 20-30 students.

Despite this, all this time-wasting appears to not matter much, if you can just keep doing it year after year. That is, the end result of having some form of language competency is eventually obtained. Perhaps the reputation of the respective school systems (bad rap in England and the U.S. vs. Germany, for instance) is merely based on the end results (basic competency or not) of which the largest determining factor is simply hours spent.

Time-wasting activities are all well and good (that is, begrudgingly accepted) when children are involved, because children have all the time in the world, whereas we are time-constrained adults. If we were to take classes again as adults, we would have sufficient advantages over those classes in the school system:

• nearly everyone wants learn (with a few exceptions) and actively signed up to the course themselves
• you are more likely to complete your homework due to the first point
• class sizes after often smaller (especially, if you actively find a course with a small class size or better yet get a private tutor for 1-on-1 classes)

If this is the case, as in not incredibly inefficient, why aren’t more of these Internet polyglots talking about classes and/or taking them? Is it a mere matter of convenience of studying at home, when and how they want, not necessarily efficiency?

@GMelillo

Once your basic language acquisition method is pointed in the right direction (you are no longer doing obviously fruitless, time serving stuff), what would really make your efficiency go up in a noticeable manner is not tweaking the method to squeeze out tiny marginal gains, but magically increasing your IQ ten points.

@GMelillo The issue is ironing out the ‘basic language acquisition method’ to remove all the time-waste. How do we do this? How are we certain such activities are obviously fruitless? You’ve previously referred to using trial-and-error, adjusting your method based on evaluations every six or so months. Trial-and-error like this results in improvements to the method, but slowly, over the years. How do you judge that the latest adjustment to your technique was better than the previous implementation? Your children have the advantage that they can learn from your trial-and-error.

@GMelillo

I’ve achieved above average results in a few different task/learning domains in an audodidactic fashion. A couple of comments:

(1) If you are not just learning, but also figuring out how to learn, you have to resolve to “waste time”. The only other option is to find someone else who has also done the autodidactic part, and to have enough of a philosophical grasp of the learning domain to assess the degree to which their stated methods are responsible for their success, and then obey them for the long haul. The philosophical acumen is rare, and in modern culture the inclination to obey is almost zero, so most likely you are going to go the autodidact route, which again, means “wasting time”.

(2) The key is to waste time intelligently. So you have to have a rough idea of the appropriate time frame over which to test a method of work and a rough idea of a realistic goal at the end of that time period to use to assess your methodology. In my experience you need to be willing to burn at least six months being extremely disciplined with your method, before you can honestly evaluate it. Again, there’s a lot of art here, but any six months spent working systematically and consistently and then actively trying to evaluate for yourself how things went at the end of those six months is time well spent.

(3) You also need to figure out how to tweak your methods in intelligent increments. What I mean by that is that whatever method you use for the first six months of work should form the basis for your next six months. If you change methodology radically rather than systematically, not only are you disrupting whatever skill base you built with your first method, but you are robbing your mind of the structure that you need to actually figure out what works over time.

The worst case scenario is that you pay money for something, try it for two weeks, decide it doesn’t work, fall in love with some new ideology that completely contradicts your first method, pay money for that, try it for two weeks, and then rinse and repeat, with lots of idle periods and wishful thinking in between. That is wasting time.

The inevitable inefficiencies of your first year or two of work are not time wasted if you use them to develop a learning process that not only works for your current domain, but builds skills and character traits that you apply to the next task you set yourself.

@LeifGoodwin

However spaced repetition systems (SRS) use a different principle. Research has shown that long term memory storage improves markedly if the student is forced to recall a piece of information by regular testing over gradually increasing time intervals. There is something about the effort of having to recall a word just as you start to forget it that is more efficient at moving it into long term memory than simply passively hearing the word.

I seem to remember reading something, where it was still debatable on whether intervals performed better gradually increasing over other intervals, but I am not up-to-date on the research Has there been research to conclusively prove that increasing the intervals indeed does have a significant effect over other interval variants (eg. constant, etc.)?

Content as per Zipf’s Law is best considered constant intervals with a decent amount of randomness/noise.