Category Archives: Goals

Are you the owner or a hired hand?

 

This post might feel a bit heavy, so here is funny picture to get us started:

challengesdemotivator

We’re all going to face challenges in language learning. The question is whether we’re going to persevere or give up. Here are the five best reasons I can think of to give up on language learning:

  1. I spend so much of my work day putting out fires that when I can actually do the work I came to do, it’s a treat. I’m not taking away from that time to study language!
  2. I don’t have a teacher I click with.
  3. I don’t have the right resources.
  4. I don’t need one more thing to be responsible for!
  5. I have to make dinner and I don’t recognize any of the vegetables in the bazaar.

If you’re looking for a reason to quit, go no further than those five! 

When you think about language learning, do you think of yourself as an employee of a business, or as the owner of the business? An employee has no commitment to the business. If there’s work to be done, the employee will do it—if instructed to do so! If the business fails, it doesn’t matter much to the employee, who can seek employment elsewhere.

The owner, on the other hand, is in a very different position. It’s his/her livelihood. It’s his/her way to move forward in life. If the business faces a difficulty—perhaps some crucial component is unavailable—the hireling throws up his/her hands and walks away. The owner, on the other hand, has to find a way to make things work, even in a less than ideal situation.

So which best describes you? In your language study, are you waiting around for someone to tell you what to do? Or are you taking the initiative to make things happen? When you come up with difficulties, is it an excuse to stop working, or does it prompt you to find alternate solutions?

These are of course rhetorical questions: the “right” answer is that we should all be owners. We’re all responsible for our own progress in language learning.

There are tips, techniques, learning strategies, and inventories that you can do to improve your situation, and to make it work. A little while ago I wrote about the importance of motivation. The next post—coming after the New Year—will address the issues of managing emotional energy.

Two weeks from today will be Christmas Eve, so the LCP Blog will give you the day off. Merry Christmas!

A credible plan for learning to read

In this post I want to suggest a plan for learning to read independently, based on the materials that LCP has produced.

Excursus: I want to acknowledge that LCP has placed a lot of emphasis on learning to read and write in this space (and in the resources that we’ve developed). Learning to read is only one part of learning Dari, and it is not even an essential part of it. The recent emphasis on reading has come about because 1) previously there were few resources for learning to read, so we’re making up for that, 2) the lack of resources contributed to an incorrect perception that learning to read was only for advanced learners, and 3) learning to read has helped me a great deal personally, and I think it will help others as well. But none of this is to say that you have to learn to read.

Vision

We need to begin with a vision of what you want to achieve. This is how I would define success in being able to read: “I will be able to read any Dari text, looking up only words that I do not know, and hesitating only over complex grammar.”

Note that having to look up new words is still part of being a mature reader. I still look up words in my native language!

Stage 1: Learning the basics

The first step is to learn how reading and writing works. There are three routes.

  1. The guided tour: get the Let’s Become Literate books from LCP. Go through those books along with A workbook for reading and writing Dari with a teacher, finishing in about 10 weeks. You might want to read A guide for expatriates learning to read Dari to get the big picture.
  2. Roughing it: Read A guide for expatriates learning to read Dari for the big picture. Get the Let’s Become Literate books from LOP, and plough through it yourself. Ask you chaokidar for help if you need it.
  3. The rugged individualist: Get the Let’s Become Literate books from LOP. Figure it out. (Not recommended unless that’s the sort of thing you enjoy!)

Your goal at this stage is to be able to make sense of its spelling. You need to be able to look معروف and understand how that is a possible spelling for [maruf] ‘famous.’ You also want to be aware of some of the differences between the spoken and written forms.

Don’t get lost at this stage. Many people get bogged down in the final pages of Let’s Become Literate, but those are actually the least important letters (i.e., the ones you see least often in print). If you get stuck there, move on to Stage 2 to shake things up.

Stage 2: Developing fluency

Your goal at this point it to start recognizing whole words. You want to see frequent words like شما [ʃʊmʌ] and recognize them immediately. You should start to be able to recognize verb endings without having to think too much about them. This stage might be no more than reading over the Let’s Become Literate books over and over. You might want to move on to short passages that are familiar to you, such as LCP’s fairy tales, or other familiar texts.

Don’t worry if you’re still struggling over the weird infrequent letters. They will come with practice.

You’re ready to move on to this stage when reading the same passages over and over is easy enough to become boring. When you feel that your lack of vocabulary is the limiting factor in your reading, you’re ready to move on.

Stage 3: Building vocabulary with guided texts

At this point you need to overcome your limited vocabulary. It’s amazing how many more words there are than the ones you hear and use in the course of your day. It’s also far easier to miss new words in speech than it is on the printed page. All of this means that learning to read will be a nasty reality check.

What you want to do at this stage is to learn a lot of new vocabulary. Working with a set of flashcards that are based on Dari (or Persian) script is one way to do that. You could also just print off some text that you think would be interesting, and go through it with a dictionary, but looking up words really slows you down. A good intermediate is to use a collection of interlinear texts—such as the LCP News Collection—which expose you to a lot of new vocabulary without the hassle of looking them up in the dictionary.

Stage 4: Into the wild

Once you’ve got a reasonable base of vocabulary, you’re ready to move into the wide world of texts. Striking out on your own doesn’t mean that reading will be easy, but it should mean that your limitations are your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, rather than your ability to read. That is, ultimately your time spent learning will become pure language learning time. You’ve arrived at the beginning. 😉

Forming a reading group

I suggest forming a reading group—a weekly gathering of two or more people at different-but-similar reading levels. I have been involved in several, and it has always been an enriching experience—and it’s resulted in me reading more Dari than I would have. The best groups I’ve been a part of have involved each person reading the same short passage ahead of time, looking up words, and then coming together to read it again together and discuss it. Since no one is at exactly the same level, more advanced people need to be patient and helpful, and less advanced people need to be patient with themselves and willing to ask questions. There is an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Maintaining motivation for an impossible task

A few years ago a friend described language learning as being on the slope of a mountain with no summit. As much language and culture as you learn, there is always more to learn. You never arrive at complete knowledge of the language and culture.

He made this observation with a tone of voice somewhere between frustration and discouragement, but I think the comparison is a good one. You never do arrive. There is always more to learn. How do we maintain our motivation in the face of such an impossible task?

First, let’s take a step back and observe that endless learning is also a part of our native languages and cultures. I have been learning English for decades and have tens of thousands of hours of experience listening and reading. I still have to look new words up in a dictionary. I still have to agonize over proper word choice and sentence construction when I write. There are plenty of “English” books from which I can do no more than recognize a few words (e.g., technical manuals, medical books, legal texts, etc). Moreover, there are cultural situations in which I don’t know what to say. Or I say something and then agonize later over how it was interpreted, or over what I should have said. And that’s just in English.

So let’s at least acknowledge that some of what we’re going through with Dari (or Hazaragi or Uzbek or Pashtu or…) is the same as what we go through in our native languages and cultures. We’re all still growing as people, and it just so happens that language and culture are with us every step of the way.

Next, it’s important to realize that staying motivated requires that we have some positive feedback. Dwell on the small successes you have in life. This morning I was in an office doing paperwork and understood almost everything that went on. Success! I glanced at an open magazine in the office and was able to get through the first paragraph while a waited. Success! Even without having “arrived,” we can still celebrate the progress that we’ve made.

Finally, I would suggest that rather than having unrealistic expectations about our language learning goals and activities, we should think about language learning with the language of responsibility. I would love to be a person who could read the Shahnameh the Rubayyat, discourse on religious and philosophical subjects, and make causal small talk with the furthest flung villagers on Afghanistan. I could torture myself with those expectations. But instead, I need to think about the language I need to responsibly fulfill my role in this country.

Would I judge myself to have responsibly fulfilled my role if I could not make small talk with people? If I could not go shopping on my own? If I couldn’t talk about my work? No, probably not. I think that a responsible person, given my goals opportunities, would be able to do those things.

Would I still judge myself to have responsibly fulfilled my role even if I could not read the Shahnameh or the Rubbayat? Or if I could not read the Afghan constitution? Yes, probably so. A responsible person with my goals and abilities really does not need that ability.

Those are the obvious cases; many will not be so clear-cut. About eight months ago I began pondering the significance of the fact that, after five years, I still can’t understand the news. On the one hand, that seems really basic, but on the other hand I know that the news uses really high Dari. And what does it mean about how well I participate in society? There’s not an obvious answer, certainly.

So as you think about this impossible task, I encourage you to think not about everything that you could learn, but about the things that a responsible in your position would learn. I will close this with a quote from Dag Hammarskjöld (which, coming from 1954, features a generic use of the masculine):

“A mature man is his own judge. In the end, his only firm support is being faithful to his own convictions. The advice of others may be welcome and valuable, but it does not free him from responsibility.”