Learning languages.

I have to break some bad news to you.

You are not going to Teach Yourself Arabic.

You are not going to Learn German in Your Car.

You are not going to speak Japanese in 7 Days.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Spanish will leave you much as it found you: as an idiot who doesn’t speak Spanish.

The fact is that there is no product you can buy that will make you fluent or even conversational in any language.

Which brings me to the Rosetta Stone, a fast-growing company marketing language instruction software that promises that it is the “fastest way to learn a language. Guaranteed.”

The idea sort of sounds good: Children acquire vocabulary by attaching names to objects (and later to abstract concepts). My daughter sees something, we tell her the name, and after some repetition, she has a firm connection between the word and its target. Rosetta Stone tries to mimic that learning process.

The problem is that their system is deeply flawed. It’s vocabulary instruction, but uses pictures rather than English words to teach you the foreign words in question. You see a picture with the foreign word superimposed on it, and you hear the word spoken by a native speaker. There’s little rhyme or reason to what words are presented – the first lesson of each language usually includes the word for “elephant,” which, I don’t know about you, I use about forty-three times every day – and the pace is slow, about forty words per lesson, with the intent that the learner will do one lesson per week.

But here’s the big catch: You can’t learn a language that way. Forty words per week is about 2000 words per year. A native speaker of a language has a vocabulary of at least 30,000 words, with 50,000 the norm. Fluent doesn’t necessarily mean native, but in my experience, fluency requires a minimum vocabulary of about 5000 words, or two and a half years of faithful usage of the Rosetta Stone product, assuming it even goes that far. Oddly enough, that part isn’t on the box. And it wasn’t clear to me that the word-target system works for adults; my retention was significantly lower than it is for the “word-translation” system that underlies most other methods.

But there’s more. Fluency is more than just vocabulary. You may acquire some grammar along the way, but at some point, you’re going to have to get a textbook that actually teaches you the rules. (Good luck learning the subjunctive just by saying “elephant” over and over.)

Fluency also means learning the style of the language. I can’t think of a worse way to learn vocabulary than learning words in isolation. Context provides meaning and gives you clues as to when it’s appropriate to use a certain word.

Learning a language on your own is a lot more time-consuming than any of these products want you to know. Working one to two hours a day, it took me about ten months to become fluent enough in Spanish to pass a first-level certificate exam in 2006, and that was accelerated by the fact that I could already speak some French and Italian, giving me a big leg up on Spanish vocabulary.

The sad truth is that there is no product out there that will teach you a foreign language, or that by itself will let you teach yourself a foreign language. The only way I’ve found any success, whether getting to the bare minimum of fluency or just developing conversational ability, is by combining several methods and products.

• I’ve recommended Pimsleur products many times. They offer 30-lesson “Comprehensive” courses in 28 languages; for three of those, they offer a second set of 30 lessons, and for nine others, they offer a third set for a total of 90 lessons. (If you’re curious, those nine languages are French, Italian, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Arabic, and Russian.) It’s an all-audio system that uses techniques developed by the late Paul Pimsleur designed to increase retention rates. Unlike Rosetta Stone, the Pimsleur lessons tend to present sentences over individual words, and by and large the words are presented in a reasonable order. (There are exceptions; I’ve used the Mandarin courses and don’t know why I needed to know the word for “peony.”) The foreign-language parts are spoken by native speakers, so if you have an ear for accents at all, you can pick up a very good one through Pimsleur.
• Pimsleur alone won’t help you learn to read or write in the language, which is why I suggest using flash cards. I follow the suggestion offered by Barry Farber in his How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own, using a foreign-language newspaper, one article at a time, to acquire vocabulary. You highlight words you don’t know, look them up, and add them to your flash cards. He also details Harry Lorayne’s mnemonic trick for remembering foreign-language vocabulary, for which I can vouch wholeheartedly.
• When learning Spanish, I reached the point where I wasn’t getting enough new vocab from newspapers, so I moved on to tackle a novel and listened to the audiobook as I read the text. A 300-page novel gave me around 2000 new vocabulary words, including – just by luck – a ton of cooking terms.
• You’ll need a decent English-target dictionary – I start with something small, then upgrade to a $50 “complete” or unabridged dictionary once I get far enough along – and a textbook or grammar. You don’t have to do the exercises in the grammar if you don’t want to, but it helps. I’ve never found a decent non-textbook learner that I liked; I had good success with Italian in 32 Lessons (The Gimmick Series) in college, but their Spanish book had a lot of mistakes in the answer key. On the plus side, the Gimmick books offer more exercises than similar books from other publishers, and their grammar overviews are good.
• You need to lose your fear. If you run into someone who speaks your target language, talk to him/her. Just do it. I have never, ever received a bad reaction from someone to whom I spoke in his/her native language. They’re thrilled. The more uncommon the language, the better the reaction you’ll get. I got a 20-minute lesson in Portuguese on a bus in Somerville. I’ve gotten the fastest auto inspection in Massachusetts history because I could exchange pleasantries in Armenian. I’ve had dozens of people help me with a word or a phrase in Spanish because I’m not afraid to ask them if they speak Spanish.

Finally, there is no substitute for time. At my peak while teaching myself Spanish, I was devoting two hours a day to it: reading/listening, creating new flash cards, reviewing the cards I’d already made (which eventually included over 5000 words). Granted, I had a less demanding job and didn’t have a two-year-old running around the house, so it would be hard to replicate that today, but if you’re not going to give language-learning at least an hour a day, you’re probably going to end up more frustrated than fluent.

EDIT: One book I should have mentioned earlier is indispensable for learners of Spanish: Correct Your Spanish Blunders by Jean Yates. It helps point out the key style and grammar points where straight word-for-word translation from English will screw you up, and has the best description I’ve seen of the use/purpose of the
“personal a“.