Yesterday I met Aran Jones, the guy behind the website SaySomethingin.com, and we had a very interesting chat, in Welsh, about language learning. His site started as a Welsh language course, and now also offers courses in Cornish, Dutch, Latin and Spanish. You can learn all these languages through English or Welsh, and you can also learn English and Welsh through Spanish, and he plans to offer more languages in the future. The courses are designed to get you speaking in a relatively short time.

One interesting point we discussed was the way language learning is presented. Many courses claim that you can learn a language quickly and with little or no effort. All you have to do is listen and repeat – don’t worry about learning grammar or vocabulary! Moreover people who encourage others to learn languages tend to emphasize that it is possible, anybody can do it, that you don’t have to have a special language gene/gift/talent, and that it isn’t all that difficult. Just jump in and start speaking! Don’t worry about mistakes!

An alternative approach is to say that language learning is really hard, takes a lot of work, and that relatively few people succeed, and to discourage people from trying it. By presenting it as a real challenge like this you might encourage more people to try. When they find it isn’t as difficult as they expected and that they can succeed, they will have a greater sense of achievement. In other words, a kind of reverse psychology. On the other hand, many people already believe this and are convinced that they can’t learn a language, so it wouldn’t work for everyone.

Another thing we discussed was improving your listening comprehension, especially if you find speech at normal speed difficult to understand. Slowing down your recordings, or asking people to speak more slowly, is a way to deal with this, and can work well. An alternative is to speed up the audio – in some SaySomethingin lessons the audio is at twice the usual speed, for example, and if you listen to it quite a few times you will eventually understand it. Then when you listen to it at normal speed it will be much easier to follow.

Here’s an example of recording in Spanish at normal speed (which sounds fast to me).

Here’s this recording at twice the normal speed.

I do something similar when learning to play classical pieces on the guitar and piano – if I’m struggling with a piece I might try something even more challenging. Then the original piece seems easier when I go back to it. Or I try playing folk tunes as fast as I can, then slow then down to a more normal speed, and they seem much easier.