How to Choose the Right Content for Language Learning

Hi, today I want to talk about, you know, easy language learning content. What makes language learning content easy? And why do we need it? Before getting into the subject, I just want to mention a few housekeeping items. I will be going to Portugal with my wife, mid-October, and we'll be staying in Portugal in Spain traveling around for six weeks or so. I hope to do some videos while I'm there, and I've also set myself the goal of seeing if I can get my Portuguese closer to European Portuguese, since I'm going to be there. Not that European Portuguese is better or worse than Brazilian Portuguese, but it's different. And since I'm going to be surrounded by European Portuguese, I want to see if I can get closer to that. And you'll be able to follow that as I'm in Portugal. My Portuguese is not great because it's very much influenced by Spanish, so it's kind of like a portuguel. I want to see if I can become more almost a natural European Portuguese speaker. We'll see how it goes. The other thing is on the subject of easy learning, the reason it came up is because I have been learning Arabic with Arabic all the time amongst other sources, and Arabic all the time is a website and a system that's the brainchild of Hassan. So I had a discussion with him, which we may be able to show you, or I can at least connect you to that. And similarly, I had a discussion with Kevin Guo in China, and we are going to do more in China. And again, the subject came up. He said a lot of Chinese learners, they understand the theory of compelling input, comprehensible input, but how do you get there, particularly at the beginning. So the whole subject of what makes language learning content easy is an important subject. Because compelling input, okay, I can follow things of great interest at a sophisticated level. How do I get there? How do I get started? And how do I keep going? Because I think when it comes to easy language learning content, there's sort of our two points at which we need easy language learning content, and the needs are somewhat different. So when we are at level zero in the language, we know nothing. So we have certain needs at that point. And when we are like B1, and we are suddenly discovering that there's this enormous amount of vocabulary that we have to learn, then there's a different kind of easy language learning content that we need. Now, I decided to ask three AI bots to give us, give me a summary of what they thought, or what each bot thought was the most important thing to think about the most important elements in making language learning content easy. I went to perplexity, I went to Germany, and I went to Claude. I thought Claude provided the best summary of the subject. I'm a bit suspicious of AI. I'm not sure that this tremendous investment is going to be worth it. But as a user of some aspects of AI, I do find it convenient. I do have to remind myself, and I'm constantly reminded that the information you get is not necessarily accurate. So you can ask the same question twice, you get different answers, you can get stuff that's out of date, that's that you know is inaccurate, and when you challenge AI on it, they come back, oh yeah, you're right, you're smart on you to point that out. So you got to be a little suspicious in dealing with AI, however, Claude came up with these points on what makes language learning content easy, and I thought it was quite interesting, and I want to provide my comments on the things that Claude came up with. I should point out that a lot of the points that Claude mentioned here undoubtedly appear in books, studies on what makes language learning content easy. So Claude can go there and collect all this information, but it is not as if the language learning textbooks that we use today are necessarily based on these what seem to be common sense aspects of making language learning content easier. So the usual beginner books don't do these things. For example, well, the first point that was raised by Claude was known word coverage. So if you have content that's 97% known, that's going to be easier. Of course, but if you're starting new in a language, you pick up a teacher self or any other beginner book, there's no way there's no way it has 97% known words there. You need to learn these words, you have 0% in many cases known words, although there may be some cognates from a language that you already know. So that may be helpful at that BE1 stage, in other words, that it has a high percentage of known words, but even there, I find in my own experience at length where we measure how many new words there are in a bit of content, I would like to have at least 10 or 15% new words, some of which may be named so it doesn't matter, but I want to be gaining vocabulary. I gain the vocabulary, I see it, I look it up, I don't necessarily try to remember it, but I'm engaging with, engaging with new vocabulary, starting those new vocabulary items on a journey, on a journey where they will appear again and again in different contexts and not gradually get a better and better sense of them. But I want there to be a certain number of these new words or even words that I've met once or twice and haven't learned really, I want to have enough of this new material so that I can learn more and progress in the language, and if it's 97% known, I'm not learning very much. So that's point number one, yes, in theory, with the old paper book, if you're reading and it has 97% known words, that's comfortable. But if your task is to learn the language, whether at the very beginning stage, where in fact you know nothing, or even at a BE1 stage, where you have a long way to go and acquire the necessary vocabulary, then 97% known words is not very effective. In some ways, it's 97% known words is almost putting the card before the horse. That's the goal you want to get to that level. You want to get to the point where you can pick up a book and have 95%, 97% known words. But the question is, how do you get there? And that's where you need easier material. So the second point that's raised by Claude is the importance of redundancy, repetition, and there I totally agree that's how we designed our many stories. That's how other people have, in TPR, TPRS, they use circling questions, they use point of view, stories, all of this stuff is important. And the conventional textbook, language textbook, doesn't do that. Conventional language textbook takes you from one so-called scenario to another. So you're going through customs at the airport or you're visiting a doctor or you're, you know, at the store. But there's very little deliberate redundancy. And deliberate redundancy is very important to making language learning material interesting. That's one, excuse me, to making language learning material easy for the beginner, particularly at the early stage. And that is where, again, Arabic all the time, Hassan, when he has conversations with his sister Lotus or with Maha, they are able in a very relaxed way to naturally introduce redundancy, repeat the same word many, many times, even in the same sentence, but it seems natural, comfortable. And I think that's very important in order to make language learning content easy. Just at the beginner stage and also at that transition B1 stage before you head off on the plateau, so to speak. Now the next thing that Claude mentioned was familiar subject matter. True, it's not always possible, but if the subject matter is familiar, that helps. If you're, you know, dealing with nuclear science, you're going to have a lot of trouble. So familiar subject matter, daily activities that people do, things that are familiar to us. If we have that, if that's what we're learning about in the new language, it's easier. So those things make it easier if we combine it with some of these other things like redundancy I mentioned earlier. Another thing that is mentioned by Claude is to keep it short and keep it simple and keep the grammar simple. And one thing that does kind of force the text to be simple is to have short sentences. So I always prefer material that has 5, 6, 7 words in a sentence. Very often that's about the length of what I would look at in sentence mode. And I find sentence mode at length to be very useful in attacking even more complex content because I can deal with it one sentence at a time. In fact, I find that the ability to have short sentences and the look at things sentence by sentence is more important than trying to simplify the vocabulary. Once we're past the very high frequency words, it's somewhat arbitrary as to which vocabulary item is going to be easier to learn than some other. But if we have a structure, which is simplified by the mere fact that the sentences are short, that helps us. I've always advised people writing in a foreign language, for example writing in English, write short sentences. Don't write complicated sentences. It makes it easier to follow. It is easier for you to structure your thoughts, and it's easier for other people to follow what you're saying, and in learning a language, the short sentences help us learn the language. The next thing that Claude mentions is audio quality, and of course this is very important. Here again, I must say that Hassan does a great job. Not only is the audio quality good, but he has a very comforting way of speaking as do his guests. So you have a natural, comfortable environment where there's this natural repetition redundancy of words, and of course the other has to be clear, because audio is so much more important for a learner than for the native speaker who will figure out what's being said, but the learner needs to have very high quality audio. Claude suggested that having audio available is an example of the kind of support that the learner can get in terms of attacking content of interest, but to me, it's a given today. It's a given that we have both audio and text, and that gets back to this earlier 95, 97 percent known word as a definition of what's easy. That assumes you're just going to pick up a book and start reading. But actually when we're learning, we have audio and we have text, and we pick our way through looking at words, engaging with the language in a way that gradually makes us more and more sort of capable of dealing with the language independently of these helps like sentence mode or audio. But in the initial stages, in the A1 stage, in the B1 stage, audio, clear, comfortable audio is extremely important. Now, some things mentioned by Claude are obvious, but not always possible for the learner. So obviously cognates or proximity, like if the language you're learning is similar to one you already know, and there's a lot of common vocabulary that makes it easier. But that works if you're going from, I don't know, French to Spanish. It doesn't work, and even going from English to Spanish, there's a lot of common vocabulary. But going from English to Chinese to Arabic and Persian, there's not very much common vocabulary. So that's not always available, but when that is the case, that will make the content easier. And of course, of course, a key element is interest. So I find that I'm able to fight my way through difficult content if I'm interested in the subject. There are things I can do to make it easier for me, like sentence mode and link, or if say Hassan and his guest were to talk about what to me is a complicated subject, subject that scrapped that. So interest, of course, is key. If you are interested in the subject, you will overcome other obstacles because you want to know, you want to learn about the content. And in my case, I've always been motivated by wanting to learn more about the culture and the history of the language that I'm learning, with Persian or Chinese or any other language. And so, yeah, interest is a powerful motivator. And people have different interests. Some people want to learn German because they like German or something. I don't even know what that is, or K-pop or anime. So whatever motivates the learner, if the learner is interested in that subject matter, a lot of difficulties can be overcome. But there are certain things that inherently make language learning content easier. Those are the ones that I described. And I think we try to help the learner by providing, you know, statistical record of activity level as a motivator. We obviously provide, you know, sentence mode, some statistical indication of the difficulty level of the content. All of these things are there, but ultimately it's the motivation of the learner. And the less resistance the learner encounters at different stages like A1 or B1, the faster and the easier that learner will progress. So interest, redundancy, comfortable voice, all of these things help make language learning content easier, and it's not obvious to me that the traditional language learning textbooks, graded readers, children stories, some of these things are necessarily easier when it comes to getting into a language and progressing in that language. So, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to sharing with you my travels and Portugal in Spain. Bye for now.