The Harry Potter Stage of Language Learning

good afternoon as i've been making videos regularly again over the past few months i realized that i have referred repeatedly to what i call the harry potter stage of language learning but i haven't really explained what i meant by that so that's the purpose of today's mini lecture is to explain that and as i did in my longer lecture series that i gave over the past month and a half i would like to try to make this as relevant as i can to all different kinds of language learners first and foremost those whom i call normal language learners people who are not particularly interested in the foreign language learning process as such but who find that they have a need to learn a particular language at a particular point in time and would like to succeed in that and also to those who have various forms of what i call polyitis basically more or less obsessive compulsive need to collect language learning materials and use them to learn as many languages as possible so i have information in this video that should be relevant to every type of learner so uh if you fit into any of those categories please follow along with me to learn more about the harry potter stage of language learning which is a magical ha ha way of facilitating a transition that can sometimes be unfortunately difficult and frustrating and long and that's the transition from using didactic materials that is materials that have been specifically prepared to help foreign language learners learn a different language um to using authentic materials that is materials that have not been prepared for that purpose but they are rather for native speakers to get entertainment and enjoyment and education and information and knowledge out of and you as a foreign language learner you can use them for those same purposes but you're also pressing them into use to continue your building your knowledge of the language as a foreign language so this transition um as i said um can be a hard thing to affect and um it can you can kind of try to get at it from one of basically two ways one is what i call the scholastic experience and that's when you learn the language as pretty much part of your say your college education so you have maybe two years of language instruction and then another year or two of reading books in the language together with a professor and a number of other students and a class where you discuss them and you read them and i've met any number of people over the course of my career as a college professor who have told me that they learned how to do that at some point in the past um and regret the fact that somehow they let it slip didn't practice it right away and then when they tried to do it just quite hasn't worked the same way and i think that there are a number of explanations for that uh first and foremost um we professors take a lot of the onus of of structuring the the reading and on our shoulders so it's a lot easier when you have other people sort of directing the learning process than when you do it yourself and then frankly speaking in the course of a semester when you read a book or two that's that's not very much and we don't read the whole books and it's it's actually rather a slow pace whereas when you're by yourself and you are trying to read on your own you're probably going at a faster pace maybe not really realizing it and and you haven't practiced right away so it's a harder thing to do so here i would say that there's the main challenge is that we we educators we've been using terms like lifelong learning as buzzwords for far too long without really putting into practice well what does that mean uh there ought to be a way that when you learn how to do something like read a foreign language that you can sustain that ability ideally that would be something that you should be able to to do on your own all the time by yourself but it doesn't work it that way that work out that way and i would say in the majority of cases it doesn't if you learn how to read in a context where you're reading and discussing with a group of other people if there were a way that you could continue reading in that context throughout your life that would be ideal when able to keep this and improve this this skill and then hopefully take it to the point where you can read it on your own now this is a subject for another video that i will have coming up soon i think that the modern contemporary world and changes that are going on have offered us exactly this possibility which is kind of exciting the other way that you can have this experience is what i call the autodidactic experience those are for the um one of the symptoms of polyitis as i described it is that you try to teach yourself languages and so you get a collection of 5 or 10 or 15 different manuals for approaching a language you work your way through a good number of those and they give you different aspects and different perspectives on the language and that's a good thing but you'll come to a point when you say fashion i pretty much have learned it and i'm pretty good at these books and i know everything in here let me try to move on to the authentic materials and um you find that it's a there's a big chasm between what you can do in the textbooks and what's out there in the real things and it's it's very tempting and comforting to say well i guess i need to study more and i'll go back to my textbooks and it's it's uh it's hard to break away from that it's comforting to return uh and think that you're not up to the level whereas if you've gone through a number of them you probably are so the main challenge here is breaking away from your your textbook collection i have one bit of good news in all this anybody who doesn't know it when you have learned some related languages this is not so much of a challenge anymore i said this whole process of transitioning can be a difficult and frustrating one but if you have done it with spanish and then you try to do it say with italian it is much it's it's not so bad but doing it with spanish for the first time is hard and if you do it with spanish and then you try to do it with russian and it's still hard again and so other situations when you don't have the experience and when you're trying to do it with non-related languages this can be quite the challenge so basically why is it a challenge it comes down to vocabulary um again i've made other videos about this this is knowledge that's out there um you if you've gone through uh the basic courses be it you know in two or three years of college education or a pile of autodidactic manuals you should have your basic vocabulary down you probably know three to five thousand words and with three to five thousand words on this side of the vocabulary mountain there's quite a lot that you can do um probably one of the things you can enjoy most is say songs because they've got so much repetition you'll be able to sort of listen to music and you can probably watch movies or watch television or something with um not too much difficulty uh there are probably subtitles that you can turn on uh and you have visual cues and effects also coming in and importantly uh like songs which are obviously extremely short movies are also short generally 90 minutes an hour two hours and this is the you can keep a thread going even if you do not understand everything that's is going on with something that's relatively short that's true of the next couple of things that you can do also as well reading newspaper and journal articles because these are current events you're probably aware of what's going on anyway you have a lot of contacts and the vocabulary for these is is usually international in many cases and they are relatively short so short stories those um might be not uh current event type vocabulary or something but precisely because they're short say eight or ten pages um you can read them at one sitting and even if you don't get everything there's not threads that you need to type together and keep things a larger context in your mind so these are things that it's probably possible for you to do you should probably be able to follow what i call lectures in your field not necessarily academic lectures and in in the school context but i'm just talking about somebody giving a discourse about something that you know about and care about if you're a doctor it might be medicine whereas for those of us who are not doctors it would be really hard to follow but if it's something that you are versed in you can understand what people are talking about and then talking about talking um you should definitely be able um once you've gone through a couple of years of college education or again a pile of textbooks for self-teaching you should be able to have an everyday conversation um talking about everyday life but when that conversation starts to get a bit more complicated that's when you realize there's another side to the amount when it's not just about you know what did you do today and what do you want to do this evening and what do you want to eat and things like that when the conversation gets complex when somebody's trying to convert you from catholicism to communism and you want to resist that and you want to give a counter argument and and say why he should convert from from from communism to catholicism you need to have some solid reasoning some cogent arguments you need to be able to make some convincing points you need to be able to say what you value and what you believe what's important to you and that's something that you need a wider range of vocabulary to do you'll also notice this when you go beyond again reading newspaper and journal articles and short stories and you try to read a longer book whether this is a novel or whether it's an argumentative nonfiction book um something that's not just delivering points of facts information but actually making an argument that's when you find that the length is going to trip you up you might get the first chapter but then the second chapter gets a bit confusing in the third chapter and there's just so many loose threads that you can't tie together and it's because again um the statistics and information is out there that again everyday conversation watching movies you can do that with a vocabulary range of about the 5 000 most common words but to read a standard novel you need to know about 15 000 words so that's a huge gap and a chasm so that will bring you to the point where i hope that people who watch my channel like what i have to say about language learning that you already have it as a goal [Music] to learn to read literature that should be why you want one of your main reasons for wanting to learn the language but if it isn't if even if you aren't particularly interested in reading when you come to the point of realizing hey they have that complex conversation and to be able to expand my vocabulary where i can have a really sophisticated understanding of of whatever i want to hear or say you'll just hit upon the fact that everybody concurs that extensive reading is really the only way to build your vocabulary beyond that five six thousand range to ten thousand twelve thousand fifteen thousands um that's really the only way is by reading and or these days listening to to audio books um so using reading as a tool uh and or uh hopefully uh as a goal uh are ways or what you're gonna come to at this point when you're trying to transition from that didactic material to authentic materials so one thing that you might reach for ideally you would reach for quality native literature if you've learned target language x you should be reaching for material that's in that if you learned russian to read dostoevsky and and and pulstoy i mean you might want to go straight for that and for some people that works um but for many people you find that precisely because that is the the the most dense most complex most sophisticated stuff that you can read it's beyond you you're still not anywhere near that level and so you can go to the opposite extreme and you say well let me swallow my pride i might be i might be 50 years old but i've only been learning this language for five years so in this language i'm a five-year-old so i can read books that are written for a five-year-old i've got a five-year-old's vocabulary uh maybe um so you can try to read children's books uh and say i wanna learn in this natural way and this will give me cultural knowledge too and i like um and again sometimes this works works for a while works for some people um but i think most people find ultimately that children's books are just um too childish you're not a child anymore even if you are developmentally linguistically at that level um your mind is not and staying with things that are really too awkward or juvenile is just not not satisfying it's not enough of a challenge so uh where people tend to end up is looking okay well gosh it's stuff that's really written for you know at the best native level is too hard if stuff that's to try to go and develop like a child into the language that's not satisfying let me read some translations now i could read the translation say from russian into english or an english book translated into russian but uh if my goal is to read widely you might not know that by saying well you know i read the one book by this author and one book by that author and this author doesn't have all of her books or available as audiobooks so i only read it and i didn't listen to it sort of going it looking at different authors or different translations there's nothing wrong with that but what you are probably going to find is that it's taking you longer than you might have thought longer than it seems reasonable for you to develop more and more vocabulary to have higher and higher vocabulary stick and the reason for that is what we call idiolect or the the the particular registers of a particular author for the higher vocabulary range everybody uses the same five six thousand words but when we're talking about the twelve and the fifteen thousand words um people have different frequencies with which they use them and so uh author a has one set of words that he or she uses um in uh in in in his books or and and then so if you read one book you might start to become familiar with those but then you'll switch to author b and still be using a different set of words more frequently so you won't see author a set frequently enough for bs and then you move on to author c and without knowing it you're not really staying with anyone off there long enough to absorb their vocabulary so let's look at what ideal transitional stage material would be ideal material for moving from that didactic textbook stuff to stuff that is intended for native speakers to enjoy and profit from i would say the ideal stuff you would want to have is since we're just talking about it first and foremost multiple books by a single author lengthy books again the purpose is to see those words that are in the 12 000 15 000 range to see them often enough that they stick so it has to be a long book there has to be books by the by the same author so that they stay with that range i would say ideally um again if stuff for adults is too requires too much cultural knowledge and sophistication and stuff for children is too childish stuff that's written for teenagers a young adult level is a good place to start and then ideally it would be really nice if these books would you're going to read multiple works if you're going to be developing your language skills just as the person is developing um if the books could get more difficult more sophisticated longer uh is you read a series that would really be ideal and then definitely if you're using this as language pressing authentic material as language into use as language learning material you want it to be available in both print and as audiobook so you can both listen to it and read it not just do one or the other and then if you have this polyitis condition if you can do this with one language you can use the same material in another language even more easily you want it to be something that's available in multiple languages so when i think about these ideal sort of set of things that you would want to have and use for making this transition from didactic to authentic materials there actually are not very many things that meet all these criteria there are other popular series out there um i don't know that are for young adults uh and there are multiple volumes so the chronicles of narnia or i don't know the hunger games or divergent series something like that um but they don't these books don't get more difficult and sophisticated as they go along they're all pretty much at the same level and i don't know that they are all available in print and audiobooks in multiple languages so it's almost as if jk rowling came along and created harry potter series for this whole purpose in case you don't know the numbers there are seven volumes in the harry potter series and that's a total of about four thousand pages of text when that's read out as an audio book that's usually about 150 hours in any given language of listening to this text and supposedly these are now available in some 80 odd languages it's not to say that all seven volumes are available in both book and print in all 80 languages but um an american speaking probably to a mainly american or european audience most of the languages that you're probably going to be interested in not impor but other languages the main european languages middle eastern languages east asian languages these probably might have to dig a little bit but you can probably get all this material in all of these languages so the harry potter stage then you come to it and you're going to start using this material so um basically i don't know if this is really classic children's literature it's too recent it's only like 20 years old right i mean it takes about 100 years to decide whether time time winnows out and says is this really something people are going to still think is classic good worthwhile reading stuff a hundred years from now i don't know um nobody knows but i do believe that there's really nothing like it out there in terms of a language learning resource apart from the new testament which we've talked about as something that's widely available in in many forms uh something that's available in this length this depth in this variety of languages and ways that it can be used this is really kind of a unique language learning resource out there so that's why i talk about the harry potter stage you can basically use the series as a low high intermediate or low advanced the way you would use an smeal or a lingua phone of course more like the latter because you have one book that's the translation another book that's the target language then the audio in the target language but you can use the series the same way you would use a similar language all the differences um you don't need to familiar self you don't need to familiarize yourself with the contents of a textbook before you use it but you do need to do that with here you need to familiar so familiarize yourself thoroughly with the content before you start to use it so before you start using it to to learn the language you need to read it thoroughly in in english a couple of times before you start out but then beyond that i have made a video in the past about shadowing different ways of shadowing say there are multiple different ways you might do this you might sometimes just listen to the target language sometimes listen to the target language and read the english sometimes listen and read the target sometimes just read the target many different ways that you can do this however you have found useful for the basic learning process you could probably continue that here um most importantly though as i did last week when when i read the first chapter of the first book of latin aloud i would say that reading aloud and trying to do so with narrative flair uh bring the story to life don't read in a flat monotone but really try to listen to a good uh audiobook narrator and try to do something similar when you can bring a story to life as you read it is when you really understand it and can start to internalize that vocabulary so um harry styles spotter series and polyitis now this is for people who again have this share my compulsion to try to learn as many languages as we can as well as we can when you do that you obviously have a challenge of a number of languages that you're balancing so by reading the same chapter back to back in multiple languages first and foremost you are meeting that challenge you've got a balancing act to do a juggling act to maintain different languages and doing the chapters this way you can do it in a comparative context because it's a narrative story and it's relatively long and complex it's not boring like reading the same very short textbook chapter i'm more particularly when you tell yourself in your mind hey that's kind of interesting i said it this way in that language now i'm saying it this way in this language use that you bring that comparative context in there but more importantly for polyitis you can do what i described in the video that i made on advanced shadowing not too long ago and basically piggyback an essentially weaker language on top of your stronger languages so that you can understand the weaker language before you are before you might be able to do so if you just did so for example if you are a native english speaker and you have followed the advice i've been giving forever to learn french and german first and you're pretty strong in those and you've also got i don't know um spanish and swedish going and those are okay pretty good um and then you're trying something more exotic like arabic so if you were just to go and read the book one chapter one of harry potter and arabic in english and then try to do it in arabic that would probably be too hard for you too much for you to follow particularly in the in the audio version but if you were to listen to slash reads shadow it first in german then french then in spanish then in swedish and then in arabic you would find that you could do it in arabic when you couldn't have done it in arabic on its own so you can borrow the strength of these other languages to help you with a weaker language before you're when you wouldn't be able to do so otherwise so it's very useful for polyitis now for poly literacy um i believe the stories that i've heard that the reason why the harry potter books are available in latin and in ancient greek is that the author herself felt that that would be a valuable thing to have and so she paid for that she specifically went out and said i want my books i want these available in these languages and i guess she knew when it became a bestseller you know other countries people are going to do this on their own but she backed this and i suppose beyond that the reason why latin has two and greek has one is probably the first latin volume third sold very well and so it seemed people wanted a second one but that probably didn't sell quite as well nor did the greek um and so uh i think that uh those of us who are interested in these ancient languages for poly literacy uh maybe we still have a shot christmas is coming let's go out and buy all the ancient greek and latin books that we can so that this gets reported back to her and she'll see fit to finance some further versions of them so if they're available in the other volumes and perhaps in other languages who knows um if we put out feelers or calls for this because as i uh explained in my introduction written introduction to the video that i made of me reading the latin chapter one i really think that we rather than learning these dead languages as dead languages if you can also learn to read and hear them and appreciate them by hearing contemporary stories stories that you know really well sort of made through that vehicle it makes it so much easier to approach them as living languages and to have something to subvocalize and understand why you read them so ideally these should be available not just in trench but also in audio so again i think that there's hope to get more of these out there uh if we um all put out a call and a cry for it so i also hope that this video provided some useful and interesting information to you so i thank you for listening and i will talk to you again next time goodbye

Channel: Alexander Arguelles

Views: 938

Keywords:

Id: mZv5pU3XiiY

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/xanthic_strath]

Thoughts:

• he made a 25-minute video saying, "Read Harry Potter first"
• I disagree with this idea--I think Harry Potter is kind of a cultural colonizer at this point, fencing learners in, keeping them learning about Anglophone culture, filtering so many languages through Anglophone expressions
• he means well, but I'm not even sure if he's aware of these issues--most learners aren't or don't care (and I fully expect this comment to be downvoted as people defend Harry Potter)
• I think the books are fine. I own them, like everyone else. But this idea that no matter what language you learn, the go-to option should be Harry Potter (even supporting them for Latin and Greek!) represents almost an injustice towards the literature in several other languages that have reasonable substitutes. (Maybe not 7 books, but you can chain together substitutes)
• because the big fear is that there are--to generalize--two big buckets of learners: Readers and non-readers. Readers will eventually read everything--don't worry. Non-readers (and most people are non-readers) will read maybe 10 books in their TL--and that's it. If 7/10 are Harry Potter, well--that's my point (please, Redditors, don't respond by saying you've read 17 books or whatever and that there are people in between. I know haha. That's not quite my point)
• the video was well made, however! Well structured; nice graphics to highlight the main ideas