language learning

Last night I spent a couple hours watching Polish television on Onet.tv Platforma.  They have mostly clips on specific themes or topics but a few full shows.  I particularly like the "Podróże" section ("Travels").  There was a full episode of Podróże.tv (a travel channel) about Egypt and another showing a Klub Podróżnika ("Traveler's Club") in Kraków, where a guy was giving a presentation about his time in Kurdystan in Iraq.  Very, very interesting!  You can also find shows/clips on news, weather, cooking, film, music, games, etc..

Until now I've had a lot of trouble finding Polish television online.  A friend of my pointed me to wwiTV.com, where you can watch streaming live television from around the world, but I didn't have much success.  Many of the channels don't work and I just couldn't find a time when anything good is on!  By the time I'm home from work, its really late in Poland and there is mainly "adult programming."  I watched news on the religious channel for a bit, but that was pretty much all.

While I mainly like to listen to audio books, there are people who swear by the tv method of language learning.  Maybe it will help, maybe not.  But it is fun!  And on the occasion I feel like watching television, why not do it in Polish?

On Friday, while walking home from work, I finished listening to Harry Potter i Więzień Azkabanu (the 3rd Harry Potter book in Polish). This is the first one where I had both the text and the audio. I tried doing a couple of things with this:

1. Simultaneous reading and listening.
2. Listening then later reading.
3. Switching off, doing which ever one I feel like at the time.

#1 turned out to be waaay harder than I thought. I read at a different speed than the actor read the text. I kept wanting to pause the audio so I could catch-up. This turned out to not be very enjoyable for me. #2 worked great, although it was a little boring at reading time. There would sometimes be a word or two that I failed to catch in the listening that the later reading would clarify, but nothing that ever changed my understanding of the text.

I just read a post on Steve Kaufmann's blog about language learning and Web 2.0, which included a link to this YouTube video he made on the same topic. As a guy experimenting with creating Web 2.0 language learning applications, I feel like this message is aimed directly at people like myself.

I completely agree with the general message of the video: Focusing on grammar in language learning is detrimental and yields very little in the way of actual proficiency in using the language. But its the specifics I keep getting hung up on.

I've been studying Russian and Polish language for about four years now. It has been a great experience for me. I discovered that not only do I love learning languages, but I seem to be pretty OK at it. During that time, my thoughts on how one should learn a foreign language have been constantly evolving.

In the beginning, I was largely focused on grammar. This was primarily because the class I was taking focused on grammar. This agrees with a general trend in modern American education, which emphasizes understanding the ideas rather than memorizing the facts. In general, this is good thing. Language courses of the past focused on memorizing vocabulary. Now understanding grammar is the main focus.

Also grammar was easily interesting to me in its own right. Its like math with words. My programmer brain liked it. And it was comfortable. I didn't have to go out on a limb and risk personal embarrassment like with speaking.