ASO Terra Lingua - Train with us!

"Each of us has our own preferred way of learning that is determined by our cultural and educational background and our personalities."

Ever wondered why you pick up some things very quickly while you’re struggling with others? This might well have to do with the fact that we all learn new things differently. Language researchers have categorized the various learning styles in numerous ways. Some researchers have identified different perceptual styles: the visual, the tactile and kinesthetic, and the auditory. Others have looked at cognitive styles and distinguished between field-independent and field-dependent learners. Still others have examined the personality styles of reflectivity and impulsiveness. Let’s briefly examine each of these styles:

• Visual learners usually enjoy reading and prefer to see the words that they are learning. They also like to learn by looking at pictures and flashcards.
• Auditory learners prefer to learn by listening. They enjoy conversations and the chance for interactions with others. They don’t need to see words written down.

(A recent study has found that Koreans and Japanese students tend to be visual learners, whereas English-speaking Americans prefer the auditory learning style.)

• Tactile learners learn by touching and manipulating objects - this is known as “hands-on” work.
• Kinesthetic learners like movement and need frequent breaks in desk activities.
• Field-independent learners (also called analytic learners) like to concentrate on the details of language, such as grammar rules, and enjoy taking apart words and sentences. They are sometimes unable to see the “big picture” because of their attention to its parts.
• Field-dependent learners (also known as global learners) focus on the whole picture and do not care so much about the details. For example, they are more interested in conveying an idea than worrying about whether it is grammatically correct.
• Reflective learners like to think about language and how to convey their message accurately. They tend not to make so many mistakes because they take time in formulating what they want to say.
• Impulsive learners take risks with the language. They are more concerned with speaking fluently than speaking accurately, and so make more mistakes.

Which are you??? 

So what are the practical implications of this information for people learning a new language? Firstly, it is useful to put yourself into one or more of the categories that have been identified above. Most people will not find it difficult to identify themselves as a particular kind of learner (although some may feel that their style varies according to the learning situation and the language task).

Awareness of your preferred learning style may help to explain why some aspects of language learning seem to come easier than others or are more enjoyable. If you are an analytic learner, you are unlikely to feel comfortable doing a language activity which involves a lot of unstructured, spontaneous speech without any concern for grammatical correctness.

Learners who are in a position to choose how they acquire a new language can ensure that their preferred style matches the teaching methodology of the particular language course they want to enroll in. For example, reflective learners may not fare so well in purely conversational classes and auditory learners will probably want to avoid a course with a heavy reading requirement. Of course many learners have no such choice – but at ASO Terra Lingua you will get it!!! Our language teachers are aware of the range of learning styles in their classrooms and try to find activities that will please all the students at some time during the course.

Despite the amount of research that has been done into learning styles over the last few years, there is no clear evidence that any one style is generally better than another. This is just as well, because we cannot do very much to alter how we prefer to learn. What is much more important in influencing the rate of progress in learning a language are the strategies that are employed in the particular learning situation. For example, how you can improve your chances of understanding a difficult text that you have to read.

Come learn with us!

What’s the easiest Way to learn a Language?

Sorting through all the available language learning methods can be a daunting proposition. But if you're going to learn a new language you're going to need a good method. So, how do you start? How do you go about choosing between all those language learning methods? There are endless books, tapes, software packages, schools and tutors, but which method is the best? Where can you buy language learning products? Will they work for you?

First, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

How much time do you have? How much money can you spend? What are your study habits like?

Time. This is self-explanatory. If you can set aside at least a half-hour of uninterrupted quiet time to study every day then you are in good shape. But what if you can't? Your dream of speaking another language is not necessarily crushed. There are several high-quality audio-only language learning methods that you can listen to and use while doing laundry or housecleaning, or taking your morning walk with a walkman. And what about all that time you spend driving to work? What difference does it make how much time I spend in the car? - you may ask. It may make plenty. If you use a method with an audio component, tapes or cd's that is, you can use that time to your advantage. Rather than waste that time staring at traffic and listening to the same songs on the radio, you can do something constructive, like learn a new language! The bottom line is, the more time you can spend learning, the better. But don't overlook those lost minutes in a day. The Language Learning Tips page has a number of suggestions to use the time you have more effectively, and even to recapture time you thought was lost!

Money. This is also self-explanatory. Is a $500 dollar language method really that much better than a $10 one? Probably. The old saying 'You get what you pay for' is basically true here too. But that is definitely not the only factor. Motivation and a passion for learning will get you pretty far too, even with an inexpensive, but good, method. Especially if you supplement it with a few other well-chosen resources. Keep that in mind as you narrow down your choices. As a rule of thumb I ignore the highest end and lowest end products. Anything under $10 that claims to teach you a language is probably going to come up very short of the mark. It may be ok as a supplement, but I wouldn't rely on it as my primary language learning method. Even some software language learning methods are little more than cutesy games that teach you some vocabulary and little else. Anything over $1000 probably works great but is out of the realistic price range for most people.

Study habits. Almost everyone has good language learning skills, even if you don't realize it. After all, if you're reading this then you learned English pretty well didn't you? Imagine learning your new language nearly as well. You have the innate ability to do it. Having good study habits will help as well. Can you study at a regular time, everyday, without being distracted or without letting your mind wander? Were you a good student in school? If you do have such 'bookish' skills, use them. Make sure you choose a method with a good book or text component. If you're using computers all the time, consider a software method. If you are a talkative person, go with a method heavy on audio, with drills or conversational practice. Use your own abilities to your own advantage. Don't expect the method to do all the work for you. Maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

What other factors make a language learning method good?

Audio. An audio component is absolutely essential to learning a new language. Language is primarily a spoken form of communication. We learn our native language as children by hearing the spoken language and then imitating it. This is something often overlooked. Isn't it common sense that learning a new language with its different sounds, vowels, consonants, and rhythms must include an audio component? In fact, I believe that the most successful language learning methods are more audio-based than otherwise. We can't ignore the importance of reading, but clearly the most fundamental aspect of communicating in a language is speaking and listening. One thing we must also keep in mind is that we as adults can actually learn much faster than we did as children. A good method has all this factored in already.

The 'Method'. Is it a 'method' or is it a glorified phrasebook? The word 'method' is thrown around a little too often. Companies know how to package a product to make it sound great, even if it isn't. Unfortunately, many so-called methods really don't teach very much. Others, like the Living Language series (my favorite inexpensive 'method'), don't waste time making false claims, but rather intelligently package a very solid instructional course for the cost. Pimsleur,  TELL ME MORE and Rosetta Stone (the most popular methods) claim a lot and deliver on it, but you must pay for that quality - these methods are noticably more expensive.

Convenience. Can you take it with you? Some method components, like books or tapes, can travel with you, so you can use them when you get a chance. This will help you maximize your time. Others, like a software package, don't travel as easily - you need a computer or laptop with you. Consider this factor as well.

Choosing the right language learning method is essential to success in learning a new language. The decision to learn a new language is very exciting, but all too often we lose our focus or get discouraged while looking around for the right method, or even worse, waste time or money working with the wrong method. Understanding how we learn and how a program will be teaching can make a big difference in how much success we have in this new endeavor.

Let's take a good look at some language learning methods and determine the strong points and weak points of each. Compare this with what you know about yourself, your time, money, study habits etc. to come up with the best kind of method for you. Everyone is different. Everyone has different resources, strengths and needs. Balance what you have with a kind of method that will get you better results. Then you can go to the language learning page of your target language where you will find a few top recommendations and also suggestions for each type of method in several price ranges. As you finalize your choice, don't forget to take a look at the Language Learning Tips page to pick up some suggestions on how to best go about using your chosen method and even supplementing it with other resources. Remember, although your chosen method is the core of your language study, I would recommend to anyone using any language learning method that they supplement it with other complementary books, tapes and resources to really get a good foundation in your new language.

Read about different methods in my next Blog

In India, it pays – literally – to speak English

An Interview with Dr. Nishith Prakash

Language chauvinism is rampant in Indian political circles – be it Hindi, Marathi or Tamil – and some politicians have even called for a ban on the use of English on the ground that it’s “elitist” (they probably don’t speak it well enough and are too lazy to learn it). However, a path-breaking new research study by a team of developmental economists has established that English-language proficiency among Indian workers leads to higher hourly wage earnings (although this is obviously not true for their “leaders”).

The research conducted by Dr. Nishith Prakash, post-doctoral research associate at Charles H. Dyson School of App and Economics and Management at Cornell University and research fellow at the Institute for Study of Labor in Bonn/Germany; Dr.  Mehtabul Azam at the World Bank: and Dr. Aimee Chin at the University of Houston, quantify for the first time in an Indian context, the returns of English-language skills.

The findings have serious implications for language proficiency in a linguistically diverse country like India, says Dr. Prakash. Read the interview below to find out how you can profit from learning English or any other language:

Is English language proficiency a passport to higher earnings?

Our study established that English Language proficiency leads to higher earnings. Men who speak fluent English earn, on average, 34% higher hourly wages than those who speak no English: even workers who speak a little English earn 13% more.

Why are these findings in the Indian context significant?

A big part of labor economics is “returns to education”. That is the understanding that the more educated you are, the higher your earning potential is. We added an additional layer, language proficiency, and estimated the rewards from that in the Indian context. And for the first time, we’ve established clearly that there are significant returns for workers who speak English – and we’ve quantified it! This has implications for Language Proficiency in a linguistically diverse country like India. Knowing the return to English would help individuals and policy makers make decisions about how much to invest in English skills. Language skills are costly to acquire, and it’s difficult to make optimal choices without knowing the expected benefits.

How do you reconcile your findings with the fact that English isn’t the dominant language in India?

It’s true, according to the 2001 Census, that English is only 44^th on the list of languages in India with most native speakers. Only 0.2% of the Indian population reported English as their mother tongue, but considerably more know it as a second or third language. In urban locations, about 35% speak English with some level of proficiency; among the 18-35 age group, about 25% speak English.  Among graduates with more than 15 years of schooling, more than 88% speak English. That’s a pretty big number.

Do women enjoy a wage premium if they are proficient in English?

What we’ve seen is that women who have English ability enjoy 22% higher wages than women who don’t; the premium is less than for men. In urban areas, the wage premium that English proficiency women enjoy is pretty large. This may be accounted for by density of employers and the fact that given the demand-and-supply equation, women with certain skills, being fewer in number, can enjoy wage premiums.

(Source: DNA Bangalore, 21^st August 2010)

A Blog for People who are passionate about Languages

How many Languages are there on our planet?

Have you ever asked yourself how many Languages there are in this world? Well, you might be surprised!

There are a number of coherent (but quite different) answers that linguists might give to this apparently simple question. But one thing is for sure:

More than you might think!

When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like “probably several hundred.” However we choose to count them, though, this is not close. When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. The 1911 (11th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere around 1,000, a number that climbs steadily over the course of the twentieth century. That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been under described. Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of 1997, at least a portion of the Bible had been translated into 2,197 different languages, still a long way short of full coverage. The most extensive catalog of the world’s languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of the Ethnologue organization, whose detailed classified list currently includes 6,809 distinct languages.

A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs (we at ASO Terra Lingua teach them all – and many more – see www.asoterralingua.com ). Considering how widely the Indo-European languages are distributed geographically, and their influence in world affairs, one might assume that a good proportion of the world’s languages belong to this family. That is not the case, however: there are about 200 Indo-European languages, but even ignoring the many cases in which a language’s genetic affiliation cannot be clearly determined, there are undoubtedly more families of languages (about 250) than there are members of the Indo-European family.

Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out the 6,809, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.

We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Centuries of French governments have striven to make that country linguistically uniform, but (even disregarding Breton, a Celtic language; Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken in Alsace; and Basque), Ethnologue shows at least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several others in addition to “French.”

Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed (apart from the status of French in Canada) in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times, over 300 languages were spoken in North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today.

Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity, one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.