Update 12: A reflection on my +1 Challenge Experience

The +1 Challenge has been an incredible experience for me.  I’d first like to thank Brian Kwong for making the whole thing possible … his abundance of highly infectious genki (energy) has spawned something truly magnificent. Secondly, a huge thank you to Benny Lewis for providing me with the fundamental tools for learning any language that I might wish to learn.  Thirdly, and most importantly, a jungle massive shout out to all those who have encouraged me and consistently kept my motivation above the red-line … the monolingual hard-deck. Sometimes in those isolated moments of language learning, it can feel like one is floating in the vacuum of space and will gladly float towards the snugly monolingual hard-deck. But my fellow +1 Challengers and assorted language learners … you are the protective force field that prevents me from burning up  as I skim the surface and bounce off into higher realms of enlightenment … ready and prepared to explore alien worlds … such as the Japans.

The +1 Challenge is a globally distributed system … an online mission control centre for polynaughts … yes, I’ve just invented a new word … ha ha … explorers of languages.  Two years ago, I began learning Swahili … my parents sometimes used to speak in Swahili when they didn’t want my sister or I to know what they were talking about. I grew up fascinated by the romantic visions of Africa I saw in the 1970’s … I wasn’t successful in my flimsy attempt to learn Swahili. Hardly surprising really, since my previous experience in regards language learning left me ill equipped for that mission … in actual fact, I’m not even sure I can say I had a mission … I was simply floating around gazing dreamily at the sparkly wonders of language.  Swahili might well have been the moon and my primitive education was akin to believing that I might get to go there if I found springs for my shoes to make that giant leap for mankind!  Then I began learning Japanese … completely by accident … and in hindsight, it really seems that I did not chose to learn Japanese, but instead, Japanese chose me … and it wouldn’t let me go … I was hooked!  

Whilst I didn’t have a plan formulated, I remembered visiting Japan in 1998 and how I’d enjoyed being there and wished I could have spoken more than the three words I could speak at the time. I made some progress, very slowly, very haphazardly and being a learning technologist, I definitely procrastinated over which technologies I would adopt to enhance my learning of Japanese. After just over a year into learning Japanese, I estimate that I had a vocabulary of around 400 words and I knew some basic sentence structures. I could now at least amaze Japanese people with the occasional delightful utterance of an occasional Japanese word or phrase scattered amongst a plethora of modern English words and mimed Japanese mannerisms that seemed to entertain my Japanese friends.  At this point, I was definitely dreaming of moving to the Japans and worried that I could so easily move to Japan and live pseudo-merrily in an expat bubble.

At this point, I had found myself learning some useful stuff from a Tim Ferriss book that a friend (Danial Hagon) lent me and subsequent to watching a youtube video where Tim and Benny talked about language hacking, I found myself at the fluent in 3 months website … still very much a skeptic to this new fangled way of thinking about language learning.  In hindsight, I honestly believe that the most destructive force in the known universe is the anti-language learning pedagogy I experienced at school during the 1980’s. This installed a belief in me that I was not one of the chosen few … the special people capable of speaking another language … no matter what I did. All school inadvertently did was install a mythical belief in the existence of a language gene. In fact, to support my learning, I had spent 3 summers in France still saying, “CUP OF TEA … PLEASE!!!!!!!!” in utter defiance ... my two fingered salut to the misery of enduring dull story’s of Missuer Lafayette cycling to the supermarche. The least they could have done would be have Missuer Lafayette do something anarchic … explain his way out of a bar brawl … these things would have been invaluable to me a few years later!

Anyway … something changed this year … and it began in August 2013 … because I did Benny Lewis’ ‘Speak from Day 1’ course.  I was rather sceptical before I actually came to the conclusion that I didn’t know everything I needed to know already. Amazing isn’t it … this is an invisible barrier that just gets in the way of everything. However, even though I had made some progress in learning Japanese, I was still not talking very much ... I was just paddling in Japanese rather than immersing myself in Japanese … the thought of diving into Japanese still held some intrinsic fear of drowning as far as I was concerned. I would dip my head below the surface and come up for good old English gasps of air.

To use a skydiving analogy (for Skydiving taught me a lot more about learning a skill than anything else) ... when I began jumping, I did ground school ... just like in language learning where you might learn the absolute basics before you have a conversation. I then did AFF (accelerated free-fall)... in language learning, the equivalent of speaking with a tutor. Then I started jumping with any idiot fine upstanding person ... happy enough to jump out of a plane with me ... equivalent of talking to native speakers of my target language. Now, the hopping out of a plane, free falling for a few seconds and then deploying the parachute ... well, that's the equivalent of what I was doing with language. What you need to do is get "air time" ... and play in the air as much as possible ... make mistakes ... loads of them ... safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen whilst your in the air. In fact, another analogy I learned in computing was something I applied to skydiving ... in computing, you make a mistake ... control + z (or apple + z) undoes your last move ... in skydiving ... you try something out in the air ... you recover to a neutral position (boxman, bomb etc) ... language learning ... you make a mistake ... you get a native speaker or tutor to correct you ... forget worrying about making mistakes or being perfect ... you don't learn anything by playing safe in a comfort zone ... and anyone out there who wants to take the piss and laugh at you ... ignore them ... if they want to sit there studying language books forever and never speaking the language - that's their problem ... I got really narked by someone going to great lengths explaining that learning Japanese would take me a very very long time ... in reflection ... I just think that this is what people who take a long time to learn a language tell other people to justify how long they've taken to learn that language. The trick is to learn efficiently ... and the most efficient way (in my experience) is to learn by accident ... lots and lots of accidents ... the child doesn't learn how to walk ... the child learns how to stop falling down! 

Now, in September Benny started learning Japanese. Literally, a couple of weeks after I had got around to doing the “Speak from Day 1” course.  Reading that Benny would be using italki.com I immediately thought I would try it out.  I found that by using Skype with a Japanese tutor to be much more beneficial than any other method of language learning that I had ever used.  Then Benny made a post about the +1 Challenge … for me, I had already formed something of a mission statement, though thinking about other commitments, I had worked on the premise that I would take 6 months to learn Japanese to an upper intermediate level of conversation. When I thought about what I could achieve in 3 months, I simply scaled down my mission for what I felt was achievable within 3 months.  

Amusingly, a couple of days into the +1 Challenge, one of my italki tutors called me on Skype because he’d just finished a session that had amazed him. Apparently, some Irishman had just spoken to him in Japanese for an hour … after only studying Japanese for 4 days! I said, “Was his name Benny?” … the answer, “You know super amazing Benny-san?” … my response, “Not personally, but I know of Benny … and actually, he spent the first couple of days learning the kana! So he just spoke Japanese for an hour after about two days of learning Japanese really” – cue a very very Japanese “eeeeeeeeeeeeeh!!!!!!”.  

Now, at that time, whilst I knew the approach Benny would apply would be keeping himself in the target language 100% of the time, I hadn’t managed to achieve more than about twenty minutes of talking Japanese without coming up for English air. I tweeted Benny to say, “I’m going to try speaking 100% Japanese for an hour. Benny tweeted back, “Let me know how you get on”. “Oh blimey”, I thought, I’m actually going to have to do this now! So I thought I would have a practice attempt at speaking Japanese for an hour with my language partner … and managed 40 minutes of speaking 100% Japanese. That was a milestone moment for me; my language partner exclaimed, “I had no idea you knew this much Japanese”. You see, afterwards it  occurred to me that I had always stuck to a comfort zone when I’d been speaking Japanese over Skype prior to  this. Simply, by attempting to speak Japanese for an hour, I struggled and spluttered out more Japanese than I had ever bothered with before. The following day, I had an hour session with an italki tutor, Hiro-san and I managed to speak Japanese for an hour. I made lots and lots of mistakes … but everything came together … having recorded the session and kept a copy of the chatbox text (where Hiro-san had been typing out corrections to what I was saying) … I had a lot of study material to keep me busy for the next few days.

Along the way, I’ve adapted the way I’m learning Japanese … I’ve learned an enormous amount from the other people on the +1 Challenge … some of which I’ve applied to my own challenge, some of which I’ve kept on the shelf knowing that I could easily get sidetracked into spending far too much time playing around with my learning strategy and not nearly enough time spent doing the hard yards of language learning.  Here is what worked for me over the last 3 months:

1 Italki.com : I cannot emphasise enough how useful it is.

a.       I have completed 28 hour long sessions with a variety of tutors.

b.      I record the session audio and cut and paste the text from the chat box in Skype into an accompanying Word document. This lets me easily review what I learned and just as importantly, look into things that I didn’t fully understand during the session. The ability to do this makes learning over Skype massively advantageous.

c.       I have tried out a few different tutors and whilst I have my favourites, as more and more tutors come on-board, it’s great having some variety and even being able to cover the same topic again with a different approach can be helpful. As I’ve got to know the tutors, we’ve began to understand what makes me tick … with Hanako-san, we’ve done shadowing, reading practice, grammar amongst other things. With Satoko-san, I’ve gained a lot of really practical Japanese that I have an enormous amount of fun using when I’m at Japanese conversation meetups. Hiro-san took me on a trip around a convenience store … that was fantastic … I was on his ipod touch, strapped into the shopping trolly and we had a lesson in the car park outside the konbini that then culminated in surfing around the shopping isles with me talking to him about what I was seeing etc.

d.      I practiced an introduction speech with a friend, Ian and then adapted it with an italki tutor, Satoko-san, so that it would sound more natural. Satoko-san even recorded herself speaking my speech on her mobile phone and sent me an audio file. I listened to it on repeat in the run up to a job interview I had; come the time of the interview, I rattled out my introduction speech very confidently.   

2 Memrise

a.       I have acquired an additional 540 vocabulary words via Memrise … in 3 months!  

b.      I learned about chunking vocabulary and want to apply some techniques I’ve learned from Baron-Jon and Olly Richards in the future. What I’ve done myself though, is try and use the vocabulary I’ve learned on Memrise in conversations with my language partner (Mikie-san) and in my italki sessions. Essentially, I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of vocabulary evaporates if you don’t use it, therefore, I try to use the vocabulary I’ve recently learned as much as possible around the time when it’s in short-term memory. I think this is why I’ve been amazed at how much vocabulary has remained in long-term memory when I do comprehensive testing.

3 Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide

a.       I managed to achieve approximately two thirds of the grammar study that I originally set out to achieve. Essentially, I put an end to learning grammar after two months because I felt that at the rate I was going, I wasn’t spending enough time playing with the grammar as I wanted to. Life got in the way, but again, with italki and language partner sessions as well as meetups, the grammar that I have learned helps me immensely with understanding the gist of what native Japanese people are talking about.

b.      I compressed a lot of what I learned from Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide into easy to review flash cards. This has been useful for me so that I can quickly go over grammatical structures in an italki session by just sending the compressed grammar image to my tutor and then play around with making up sentences that use a particular structure, particle or whatever … all the time, playing around with the latest vocabulary I’ve acquired.

4 Other Input Sources

a.       The best input sources … people … I’ve learned lots of Japanese from my language partner, Mikie-san and also friends I’ve made who are learning Japanese.

b.      I listen to Japanese music, watch drama’s, films and read Japanese tweets. My knowledge of kanji prevents me from understanding many of the tweets, but then it’s always a thrill when I am able to read the occasional tweet and understand it.

As a summary of what I’ve learned on the +1 Challenge.

•  Having a mission plan is vital
• Doing something every day is massively important
• Learning with other people is much better than learning a language on your own.
• Anyone can learn a language … yes, it does take effort … but when it’s fun, it doesn’t feel like work … it feels like play … it is a game … so play it … it’s fun!

Before the +1 Challenge, I must admit that I feared being ‘judged’ by other people on my ability to speak Japanese. What I’ve found though, is that I’m my fiercest critic … everyone on the +1 Challenge has been so supportive of my efforts, encouraged me, motivated me … and well, that’s it in a nutshell … I mean this reflection … that’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned throughout this challenge … we’re all in this together, we all want to be lingonauts … polynaughts … explorers of other worlds, other cultures … and the rewards are enormous.

So what now. Well, I’m going to start planning the next 3 months … I’m also going to start a final module (technology-enhanced linguistics) in the Masters Degree that I started a few years ago.  January to March is looking like my schedule is going to be incredibly busy, however, I want to work on a plan … learning Japanese will be ongoing … I’m going to start taking shodo (Japanese calligraphy) lessons in the New Year – when I teach children, it’s always the messy activities that I enjoy the most … so learning kanji whilst making a lot of mess and getting ink everywhere is hugely appealing! Watch this splat!