In this series of posts, we will outline a method of learning to read a foreign language, one in which you have absolutely no prior knowledge. We will used one of the most widely researched methods used in training pigeons.

Language is largely "contextual," meaning that nouns and verbs are used in specific contexts or situations. This is why the table of contents of most language books give you a chapter on visiting a restaurant, buying a bus ticket, going on a trip, etc. But, in our research, there's little use for graded readers where you learn the top 1000 words in a language. Frequency lists (the top "x" number of words in a language) are based on a million books of literary language (on subjects you probably have no interest in, not spoken language... so, other than the 300 or so "function words" in a language, graded readers will not provide the specific "content words" that an adult learner will actually use in his specific world. If you learn the top 1000 words in a language, they may be the top words from a million books, but not the newspaper that you want to read every day.

Function words are defined by linguists as all the words that are neither nouns or verbs. The nouns and verbs of a language provide a listener the meaning or content of the message-- function words do not provide any meaning but are rather the glue that holds the sentence together. Function words in almost all languages are rarely added to in number-- they are roughly 300 of them in any language, but content words can be hundreds of thousands. As a society becomes in contact with more and more "contexts" simply because of technology, more and more nouns are created. An astronaut uses different nouns and verbs than an architect, but they always share the 300 function words. If you are an architect and want to learn German or Spanish, you will need to learn architecture nouns and verbs-- you will waste valuable time learning astronaut words.

Graded readers, which start off with simple words, then progress through the top frequency words, will give you most if not all of the function words in a language, but beyond that only provide content words on whatever context they happen to be about.

If you are serious about actually becoming fluent in a language, it's actually much easier than you think because you can skip straight to learning your personal content words. We have taken the time to recording several people's actual conversations as they interact over the course of a week or so, and found the same thing over again. Yes, they have words that overlap with their friends and acquaintances-- but, most of their daily use of words are based on what they do with a language. An architect may share 1500 words with the person he meets in a bar, but the bulk of his working vocabulary is based on being an architect. If an architect wants to become fluent, he needs to learn architecture words, not biology words.

For this reason, we don't use graded readers-- we jump straight into reading what we will be doing with the language. Since this is a highly personal thing-- how we individually use language-- we don't sell books and transcripts. You can find all the content for becoming fluent simply by finding articles, movie transcripts, and books based on what interests you, right on the internet with a few simple searches. If you don't plan to have casual conversations with natives, but really want to read the Rome, Berlin or Hong Kong newspapers, go straight to the source, rather than wade through graded readers and textbooks.

In this series of blog articles, HOW A PIGEON TAUGHT ME TO READ, we are going to showcase the 3 step method we've used in several languages. This first article will give you an overview, and the other articles will give you some insights that we learned along the way.

Why use ALICE IN WONDERLAND in German? First, let's be clear that ALICE is a book that has been translated into 176 languages and is widely available, however, it's NOT the book we would normally start a reading program. In our case, we have no current plans for visiting Germany, but German is commonly thought of as being a difficult language. In our case, we want to be able to read the Berlin newspaper every day, read academic journals in our field, and watch this year's popular German movies. (The method that we will demonstrate can be used for any textual material-- even the graded readers.)The real reason we are showing you ALICE is only because it is out-of-copyright...we want demonstrate to you the method. In our actual self-study, we use what we will be doing from day one-- reading the news, reading academic journals and watching popular movies.

In the German version of ALICE that we used, there were 1669 unique words, and of course, this version contained most of German's function words. We could say that 75% of the words, we will never really use. But, for demonstration purposes, it works fine.

Now, let's discuss the method.

Several years ago, we became intrigued with how many things Behavioral Scientists can teach pigeons. Using what's called Operant Conditioning, where immediate feedback is given the pigeon within one second, pigeons have learned to do an incredible number of things:

---Pigeons (Columba livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images Richard M. Levenson , Elizabeth A. Krupinski, Victor M. Navarro, Edward A. Wasserman Published: November 18, 2015https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141357

It should be noted that it's not the unique ability of the pigeon to learn these things, rather it's the unique method by which they were taught. Operant Conditioning is much like the old "am I hot or cold?" game that many of us played as kids-- in order to get closer to the object, another person said "hot" or "cold" each time we made a move closer or further away. Most of our education is based on the teacher giving the student feedback, but it's been proven that immediate feedback-- within one second of a response-- is what is most effective. Compare this with silently reading an Algebra book, taking a test on Friday, then not learning until the following week, if you were right or wrong.

With Operant Conditioning, you immediately respond and are given immediate feedback. We designed a piece of software on our website (one version is free to all members so that they can set up their own experiments). The software, called ATTENTION POINT LEARNING software gives you immediate feedback based on your responses--and, uses some fairly sophisticated techniques that we can discuss at a later time.

Be quick to understand this next point: simply reading a foreign text in any language is slow and tedious--- but, with APL software, it's fast and effective. reading without feedback is like searching for your car keys without someone saying "hot" or "cold"... you may find them, but it's faster with the feedback.

Now, to reading. Reading is made up of at least 3 components, especially when learning to read a foreign language. First, most people, as they read, say the words in their head. Second, they make images-sounds-and sensations out of the printed symbols that give them some sense of the words in the sentence. And, finally, after reading a paragraph or two, most people can summarize what they just read.

The first myth of language learning that we wanted to burst was that a mew student needs to learn the individual sounds of each letter. In just about every language book we have purchased the first chapter will be devoted to (in German) that "w" is pronounced "V", and "ch" is pronounced another way. It's as if the instructors want you to know the names of all the trees and plants before we go on our first nature walk. We also wanted to dispute that you should focus on the individual sounds of a language -- it's phonemes. We found that reading fluently, ie fast; the reader is looking for the combination of sounds as they are put together, not for the individual sounds. If you see the word "VIC", you are not sounding out V, then I, then C, rather it's treated as one sound unit. This is learning the 2000 or so, morphemes in a language-- the legal sound combinations that all the words that make up the entire language.

We spent about 4 and a half hours responding (and getting immediate feedback) to all the German words in ALICE. By using a native speaker for the sound clips (seriously, do we really need to discuss that you don't want to sound like a robot?) We always use a native speaker rather than artificial intelligence for sone simple reason: you know it's a computer. What we were going for was a simple response--- as soon as we see a German word (hinhunter, sich, denn)) for example, we hear that sound clip in our own head. It's an automatic response as soon as we see the printed word.

How did we know this method was effective? If we could "pronounce" each word out loud, and have a native German speaker understand what we were talking about, then this stage was successful. Our initial goal was to be much like a "parrot reciting Shakespeare." Of course, like the parrot, we had no idea what we were saying, but we did discover that being able to say every German word reasonably well, greatly accelerated the next step-- understanding each word.

With APL-- Operant Conditioning-- we were able to bypass the first stage of learning a language: the ability to look at the printed text and make native-like sounds.

In PART TWO of this series, we will show you the unique way we learned the meaning of each of ALICE's words.

Background article: BLOG: Personal Fluency

Background article: BLOG: Why to NEVER use a FREQUENCY LIST