Why Language Classes Don't Work

At school we had to learn at least one language, I chose German. We’d have classes nearly every day and after six years I could hold my own in a conversation; not a bad result (well, worth a ‘B’).

These days I study Japanese, and when I started the first thing I did was get a book and CD to prepare for a 3 month stint working in Japan. I also got a book on learning the hiragana and katakana by James Heisig because it happened to be recommended on Amazon.

Talk about aiming low and underestimating the scale of the task! Even if I mastered the content in those two resources I’d still be stuck with virtually no knowledge of kanji (I’d be functionally illiterate) and would be confined to some pretty formulaic set conversations. Not to mention, these textbooks always hide the difficult Japanese from you so as not to scare you when you’re starting out.

The result was that I struggled constantly with learning the language and I learned an important lesson: you need input. You need to listen to hundreds, thousands of hours of spoken language. You need to read as much as possible. Drilling set phrases and words will only get you so far (perhaps about as far as I got, struggling as I did?).

After returning to the UK to start a PhD programme the first things I did was to look for a Japanese class. I quickly found a place that looked good (its sole purpose was teaching Japanese and was affiliated with the University of Manchester) and e-mailed the guy who runs the center. After arriving 30 minutes late he looked at the speeches I’d brought along (from my time in Japan, these were speeches to my colleagues, thanking them for their hospitality etc.) and told me that I couldn’t join the class as it was for beginners and so I’d be ‘disruptive’.

So, point #1 for why language classes don’t work:

1. The class will proceed at the pace of its slowest member. Somehow it doesn’t seem proper to talk about people in a class being slow, but naturally each member of the class has their own pace for whatever reason. If it was a maths class, they’d simply be stuck, need to get a tutor, and maybe do badly in the exam. In a language class however, there’s an in-built “no one left behind” mentality. If you’re sitting in a class and you’re biting your tongue to avoid answering all the questions, and you find yourself sitting waiting for others to answer, then you’re probably in the wrong class. Tip: go for the most advanced class that they’ll let you in to; you’ll thrive there.
2. You’ll spend 90% of the time listening to non-native speakers’ attempts at the language. Who’s talking more, the students or the teacher? In my experience Japanese teachers tend to conduct their classes in English. I’ve taken classes in French, German, Spanish and Russian and right from the first day the teachers were speaking in the target language at least 50% of the time. It throws you at first, and then becomes completely natural. To then do it the other way, where the only time you hear proper spoken Japanese is when the teacher corrects something or reads out a sentence, is quite painful. The end result is that you’re very rarely hearing the language you want to learn spoken as it should be.

Now, I’d say that these two points are the most damning, and any others that come to mind are either not quite as severe or quite closely related. For example take the problems that you’re given. It’s a bit like maths at school, where you’re forced to solve a set of problems from the curriculum, and told frequently that these skills will be helpful in adult life. Of course, very few people are using trigonometry or even the arithmetic of fractions in their daily life and would have been better served by being taught problem solving skills. Analagously then, in language learning we’re typically given a number of disjoint scenarios with questions about a passage maybe. We learn these examples but when faced with an actual conversation we can’t understand what they’re saying. Then when we manage to work out what they’re saying we find we haven’t had a problem quite like this before, and so end up not being able to say much.

That all sounds rather negative, and it is, but I’m yet to meet someone studying Japanese who has only been through classes and can hold a conversation or read even simple texts well. The ones who make good progress are more likely to be those who, in their spare time, watch Japanese TV, listen to podcasts, read manga or simpler books that interest them (this is the crucial part!) and have so taken measures to immerse themselves in the language. In my case I’m abandoning all classes, turning the system on its head and just reading things that I find interesting, and listening to as much spoken Japanese as possible. This is how I learned English and Icelandic, and really there’s no biological reason why this approach can’t work for adults. But, more on that later.