Clear motivation and a “vision” goal

Sometimes my motivation for tackling a new language has been a strong practical need.  

I had to pass a French for my university entrance and end of term qualifying exam.  Russian was essential for me to be able to do my historical research or when I needed German to get a job at Heidelberg University.

Mostly, though, the motivation has been a desire “from within”, for example when I learned Welsh to reconnect with my Welsh-speaking ancestry.  

Even when I needed the languages, it was as an integral part of a wider project that I had chosen and was enthusiastic about.    

Here’s the thing: my motivations have been varied and sometimes change over time, but I’m always clear on what they are.

YouYou’re should get clear on you motivation, too.  

My long-term goal or vision goal with my first four languages was to have as near a native command as possible.  I always imagined myself functioning in the country and with a network of friends using the language for the rest of my life. 

You goals might be more limited, for example survival on holiday or an ability to enjoy a general conversation with friends or perform specific functions at work.  

Figuring out how to get off to a flying start and clock up some quick wins was a great boost to my motivation when I first focussed seriously on French and Welsh.  

Whether your goals are similar to mine, or you’re aiming for something more modest, you’ll want to do the same.  

Focus on core structures

To make as rapid progress as possible at the beginning, I focussed initially on core structures and core vocabulary and today I encourage people I mentor to do the same thing. 

I’ve usually used a textbook to give me a clear roadmap through the basics. When I could, I’d choose one with audio. 

I’d set aside regular slots for focussed study, to work through it.  They’d often be quite short slots of thirty minutes to an hour a day.  

That way I developed a language learning habit.  

I wouldn’t use my textbook passively.  I’d make my study as much of an interaction as possible.  Courses with exercises (and the answers) are great here.  I would also to elaborate the material, for example by retelling a dialogue or other text.  

Some successful language learners are positively turned off by textbooks or their modern equivalent, the on-line course.  If you prefer a freer, more experimental and adventurous approach, go for it! Tackle stuff you find interesting and fun and seek explanations as you need them.  

While “learning by discovery” is great, I still think you’ll find access to some sort of explanation will help speed things up, though. We’re not children, learning randomly as they do. 

The key, though, whether or not you are using course materials, is to interact with the language in as active a way as possible (in addition to getting a lot of passive input exposure).  

Plus, you have to keep at it.  It’s that language habit again.

Energetic, deliberate vocabulary building

From the beginning, once I’d decided that I was serious about a language, I took a systematic (obsessive?) approach to vocab building.  

I’d make flashcards with examples of key structural patterns (aka grammar) in my textbooks and the vocab, unit by unit.  

In the days before there were flashcard apps, I always used small file index cards.  I still do sometimes.   

I’d go beyond the textbook and build out this vocab with words and phrases from published lists of vocabulary (themed by subject).   

My reasoning was simple.  I wanted to use the language in a wide variety of contexts, so I needed to start building out fluency in specific topic areas.  

It was my vision goal that made this relevant.  

If you’re learning because you need the language, say, to work in international client care dealing with Korean customers or because you’re crazy about French cheesemaking, you’d obviously expand in those areas as soon as possible.  

One way to be methodical but hyper-applied is to flashcard phrases you come across in those live situations in which you’re exposed to the language.  Jot down new phrases you hear or ones you try to say but realise you can’t (check with a native speaker how it’s said). 

It’s all about keeping it relevant to you. 

If you don’t fancy flashcards, by the way, you could try the Gold List Method.   

When I started, I don’t think I knew anything about the important techniques of spaced recall and self-testing using flashcards.   

I stumbled on such brain-savvy methods more-or-less by accident.  That was thanks to a weakness: my bad memory mean I’d never just assume I’d remember something.    

You can do it much more consciously, as I do now.     

Using interim staging posts or “path goals”

We all know that the way to tackle a big task is to break it up into smaller pieces.  

One advantage of using a course book was that the units made it easy to set interim staging posts or “path goals” in my language learning journey.  I’m doing it now with my latest project, too.  

Once I’ve got to an intermediate level, the goal might be preparing for a German exam or a Russian exam in three months’ time or ramping up the work for a month in before a big event such as a TV appearance, where I’d have to speak Basque.

I find that interim goals give me something more concrete to aim for than my more general vision of “being fluent”.  

Even if your end goal is more specific, I bet you too will find that marking out the journey into actionable, time-bound stages really helps.   

Lots of listening practice 

I always got as much listening practice as I could.  Often, I’ve done a great deal of listening before I’ve done much speaking.   

With my French self-study, where I already had a basis from school to work form, that meant a lot of listening to naive level radio when reception quality allowed.  For several months I didn’t understand very much but then (thanks to the interplay with my on-going work on structures and vocabulary), I gradually understood more and more.  

Listening practice has always played a huge part in my language learning since then. It has sometimes gone a bit wrong, though.  I’m thinking of when, in the early days of my Russian, I decided to tune in to short-wave radio broadcasts for 20 mins each night, only to be told by a native ten days in that I was listening to the BBC Ukrainian service. 

I now know that getting a lot of oral exposure early on really is a brain-savvy way of working. 

With an early listening binge, you’re going with the flow of nature (babies listen a lot before they try to speak).  

Yes, we need to produce language, and there’s nothing to stop you speaking as early and as often as you like, if that’s your inclination. Exchanges will work better if you can understand the other person.  

I couldn’t find a Welsh self-study course with audio when I started that language. In pre-internet days, you couldn’t pick up Welsh radio in Oxford.  

Once I moved to Wales to live, though, I binged on radio and TV.  For nine months. 

A couple of years before that, I attended my first summer school in Welsh. I got quite a shock just how far out some of my pronunciation had been.  I was saying eye-she-eye for “eisau” (to want), which is actually pronounced nearer to i-shah (“i” as in “bin” and with a short “a”). 

I put a lot of emphasis now on working on the pronunciation at the very beginning. 

I don’t have a natural ear for accents, so it’s doubly important for me return to some work on how I’m sounding it again and again throughout, to stop bad habits forming. 

It’s all part of tuning in to the sounds of the language. 

Visiting the country and really starting to speak when I’d already got a good foundation 

Speaking early and speaking often was not how it went when I was learning my first languages.  I’ve begun all my languages outside the country.  Today, with the internet, that’s so much easier.  I now use the internet to get listening – and to get chatting much sooner.  

I could still have sought people out in England back in the early days, but as an introvert – and shy to boot – I didn’t do that.  

All the same, creating community is a great thing to sustain you in language learning.  

If you’re learning a language because you already need it in a certain social context, that’s a great advantage.  

If you’re an extrovert and social risk taker, that’s great too.  You’ll create community despite yourself.  Just avoid one thing: beware of slipping into English all the time or (if you’re in the country, of ending up an an “ex-pat bubble”). 

With my Welsh, Russian and German, I was determined to go and live Wales, Russia and Germany to use the language daily.  

I was young and carefree. With no obligations at home to hold me back, good health, and the huge advantage of being a kid from a wealthy country (though without parental funds behind me), this was only a question of the determination to do it, and good planning.  

Decades later, I’m very grateful to my younger self in that respect at least.  I now cherish those earlier language experiences.  

They helped tremendously with the language and I’d encourage anyone learning a language to go to countries where it’s spoken.

When you arrive in a country at the beginning of a longer stay, setting up your new life can leave little time and energy for language learning.  I think I got it right, then, not to move abroad until I’d already got the basics of a language.  

When I got to the Soviet Union, I met people who’d learned English without ever having the opportunity to travel.  Even though I’d still say go if you can, I’ve understood since then that you don’t have to spend time “in the field” to get fluent.  Then, the Soviets had the radio (when it wasn’t jammed) a few recordings and books.  Now with satellite TV and the net it’s so much easier.  

You don’t even always go abroad to find real, live communities of people speaking your target language.  There may be immigrant groups living somewhere near you.  

Insisting on speaking your target language

Once I arrived in a new country, I was determined only to use the target language as much as possible.  Because I had a basis, it was easier to build a work and social life through it from the beginning.  

In Russia, not many people spoke English, so keeping things Russian was relatively easy.  

In Germany, knowledge of English is more widespread and there was much more of a risk I wouldn’t use so much German. 

Aiming for a natural flow to my speech helped me “keep it native” in Germany.  

Sounding convincing was all the more important in thoroughly bi-lingual Wales.  

I found I was able to sound relatively fluent even with limited structures and vocab at my command.  Developing that sense of flow is about tuning in.  

It’s not just the pronunciation of individual sounds that matter.  

Stress patterns and the intonation of a whole sentence are important.  It also helps to learn some “fillers” and other useful techniques to keep a dialogue going. 

Another part of the flow is simply speaking at a natural speed.  

When it was a choice between accuracy and speed, I’d choose speed.  I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes, to describe my way round words or phrases I didn’t know or get as close as I could to what I wanted to say. 

Getting into the culture

As I was in the country I discovered new things about language and life there and this fed back into motivation and created new reasons “why?”.  

It was also part of “tuning in” this time to the culture, rather than the sounds.  

I started to see that you can’t always translate words directly.  I discovered that the set phrases and styles of speech could be quite different to what would happen in English. 

I also started to see that even when I understood the words, a phrase or reference would only really make sense if I “got” the cultural reference.  

You can acquire an awful lot of this cultural context from exposure to books, films, lyrics.  

You can read, listen or watch from your armchair at home, too.  

Getting into the culture feeds back into motivation and may create new motivations.  

Playing the long game 

If your aims are relatively modest, learning a new language  doesn’t have to be that long a game.  

Let’s be clear, though: mastery takes years. 

Yet, if you’re building the language into your life, we can see this not as a problem, but a source of deeper pleasure.  

I’ve found that once I’ve reached an upper intermediate level with a language, the ability sticks.  

Then, if you want the language in your life, you need to keep it relevant.  If not, even after a pause of five, ten or twenty years, you can make it relevant again and quickly get back to where you left off.  

These, then, have been some of the keys to my language learning success.  Do you find that they unlock progress for you too?  Are there ones you just don’t agree with or other that I haven’t mentioned?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.  

Look out for the next and final post in the “Dr Popkins Method” series, “Four Keys to Language Learning Success”.

Other posts in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series:

(1) Is there a Dr Popkins Method to get fluent?

(2) “Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in French

(3) “Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in Welsh

(4) “Dr Popkins Method?” How I learned Russian

(5) “Dr Popkins Method?” My strengths and weaknesses

(6) “Dr Popkins Method?” Excited by fluency

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” How I got fluent and you could too appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

We’ve all started a that after a while, some of that excitement and shine can wear off any new project.  In language learning, it’s often called “chapter three syndrome”.  The initial thrill that you’re off on a journey and can already say a few phrases starts to pall as the structures suddenly start to get complicated and new vocab seems to be flying at you from all directions.  Once you’re properly on the road, though it can hit at every and any stage of your language learning journey.

LIke the “Excited by fluency” post, this one is part of the “Dr Popkins Method?” series, in which I’m telling the story of how I’ve got fluent in several languages, to try and lay bare some of the ingredients of success (or warnings about what not to do). There’s an accompanying video to each post, too (link at the bottom).

My clear need for the language (“extrinsic motivation”)

For me a pressing need for my new language has sometimes been a driving force.

The first language focussed on seriously as an independent adult learner was French.  

I was eighteen and I’d already become fascinated by languages but I wasn’t just dabbling because of a rising fancy. To pass the entrance exam to study history at my university, you had to translate a short passage (about 300 words, I think) into English from Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian.  

I’d done German for two years aged 12 to 14 and dropped it at the first opportunity.  The only other language I’d done was French, for five years (aged 11 to 16). Although I could barely say a thing in it, for me it was only the only game in town, like it or not.

Three years later, I chose to stay on at the university to do postgraduate work in Russian history.  The choice of specialism was party because it would give me the chance to learn Russian and spend a year in Russia. 

Once I was on that Russian history path, though, getting good enough at Russian to read my sources was imperative.  

It had to happen as quickly as possible, too, as every month of delay meant burning through a month more of my grant funding. 

To add to my feeling of discomfort as a newbie to Russian studies, most of my fellow beginning doctoral students already had a master’s degree in some aspect of the subject and a good knowledge (at least in reading) of the language.  

I couldn’t get started at the research proper until I’d made great strides with the language.  If I failed at the first hurdle, it would have meant abandoning my doctoral plans, with all the disruption and embarrassment that this could have caused.  

You turn if you want to. The Dr’s not for turining.

German is useful for a specialist in Russia, but it wasn’t essential.  I began German towards the end of my first year as a grad student simply out of unbridled enthusiasm.  The prospect of getting fluent in Russian and living in Russia was not enough, you know?  l wanted to speak German and live in Germany too.  Greedy?  Moi?

My travel plans worked out and I actually got to spend eight months in Germany directly before my research year in Russia.  

When I arrived I Freiburg-im-Breisgau, I needed the language in order to find somewhere to live.  Isn’t that what they mean by being thrown in at the deep end.   

I returned to Germany two years later.  By this stage my post-grad grant funding was exhausted but I still hadn’t finished writing up my thesis.

By a stroke of luck, my supervisor had moved to Heidelberg and offered me a one-year part-time job as his research assistant.  

The only hitch was that, to take this up, I needed to matriculate at Heidelberg university.  My fluent but still rough-and-ready everyday German was not going to suffice to get me through the necessary language exam, the Prüfung zum Nachweis deutscher Sprachkenntnisse (now the Deutsche Sprachprüfung für den Hochschulzugang). 

No certificate, no job.  A summer of focussed work on German was called for.  

After the research job finished, I made my living in Heidelberg by combining English teaching with work as a waiter with a company who sent teams of serving staff to large one-off functions such as weddings, New Year parties and corporate celebrations.  Everything was in German and the more formal the functions, the less comfortable it felt if you couldn’t understand something. I remember the supervisor barking at me one New Year’s Eve event that I should “learn German first” after I had got the wrong end of some instruction.  

After my first degree and before I started as a post-grad, I took a “gap year” in Wales to learn Welsh.

With that language there was no such concrete push factor.  It was a project purely for my own satisfaction. 

You don’t even need Welsh to “get by” in Wales as the dominant language is English. 

All the same, there was still a milder driver in play.

My family and friends all knew that I had “gone to Wales to learn Welsh”.  I would have looked pretty silly if I’d given up without actually getting fluent.  Some “face” was at stake.

Having a plan, goal setting and a study habit

Some people prefer a “take-it-as it comes” approach, but I like a plan to structure my language learning.  

I usually had a main self-study textbook or two to provide roadmap to my language learning projects.  I’ve also used themed vocabulary book for a systematic full-frontal attack the mass of vocab you need to get fluent in a language. 

I could then set completion of such textbooks or vocab collections as the goal for the first stage of learning a language.  For example, I’d give myself six months to work through a course book or a year to learn several thousand words.

I could then work out intermediate, shorter-term goals, for example one chapter every two weeks or one hundred new words week.  

My regular work to move towards such goals became a learning habit.  

I’ve become convinced over the years that habit is actually more important than motivation in language learning. After all, motivation waxes and wanes.  It can be influenced by random factors like how bright and sunny the day is and what we had to eat for lunch.    

Not that motivation and habit are necessarily opposites, though.  

Keeping to a plan and thus achieving those short-term goals sometimes also boosted my enthusiasm.  Even not wanting to break a successful “run” of sticking to a daily or weekly study plan (e.g. thirty minutes at least five days a week) would sometimes spur me on.  

This could sometimes be a double-edged sword when I fell off the wagon.  Yes, of course, I’d often fail to achieve what I’d planned or break my habit for a while. 

But with good materials charting a clear pathway that broken up into clear, natural segments (units of the book) I knew what to do to get back on track.  I could adjust short-term goals quite easily and maybe still even meet the larger goal (or at least just push that back a bit and reschedule the interim stages).   

Judicious use of group classes

Another way I’ve tried to keep myself on the straight and narrow at various stages in my language learning life has been to take evening or weekend classes or an intensive summer or easter school in the language. 

Now, I’m always cautious with classes.  In a group  you’re getting less focussed attention than in a one-to-one lesson.  It’s easier to hide behind other students or put responsibility for your progress onto the teacher. 

Still, from time to time, over the years, I’ve taken once-a-week lunchtime or evening classes in French, Russian and Basque and some other languages (Hungarian, Finnish).  

I don’t expect any magic from such classes. They have helped, sometimes just for a change, sometimes.  Classes have been a chance to get corrective feedback, build some camaraderie….and (yes) benefit from some great content from inspiring teachers.   

I’ve done full-time intensive courses in Welsh, French and German. 

It’s harder to do intensive courses now I have a job.  Two years ago, though, I did a month’s residential Basque course at the Maizpide residential language school at Lazkao (south of Donostia/San Sebastian).  I did this by combining some regular annual paid vacation with a some unpaid leave.

Creating a social context and community

Another thing I’ve always done over the years to reinforce my learning has been to make sure as soon as possible I put myself “in harm’s way”, in situations where I’ll be expected to speak the language.

This works better if I’ve already done some effective foundation work. That’s usually been the case before I visit a country where my target language is spoken. There’s a balance to be struck between “speaking from day one” and blundering out into the field with no structures and no phrases to draw on, isn’t there?. 

I’ve certainly found that by insisting on using the language, avoiding the “ex-pat bubble” and getting involved in activities around a shared interest (not related to the language through which it is pursued) creates situations use of the language, erm, goes without saying.  

Needs change, but interest continues to grow

Over the years, the initial push factors that have spurred me with a language have fallen away.  That’s only natural. 

I passed that French exam. I do not need Russian or German at the moment with my job.  But, because of other choices I’ve made, other interests and personal connections that have developed, I’ve continued to use the languages and thus to get better at them.

The more I’ve got into the culture that comes with a language, the more I’ve wanted to continue to learn.   

Then I can go back, set myself goals, start studying again when I want to improve my abilities in a certain area, talk about new topics, use the language in a new context, or just to freshen things up. Doing language exams have been a great way for me to do this. 

What about you and what’s next up in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series?

So, those are some of the ways I’ve kept going with my language, even at times when I might have feel like giving up.  

Have these strategies worked for you too….or not?  Are there other ways you’ve found to keep yourself moving forward? Let me know in the comments below or drop me an email (address under the “About” tab).  

Next up in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series will be some quick-fire takeaways on how I’ve got fluent and how you can too.  

(1) Is there a Dr Popkins Method to get fluent?

(2) “Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in French

(3) “Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in Welsh

(4) “Dr Popkins Method?” How I learned Russian

(5) “Dr Popkins Method?” My strengths and weaknesses

(6) “Dr Popkins Method?” Excited by fluency

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” Keeping going at language learning appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Now, the main key to getting fluent in a foreign language is applying effective methods consistently. 

Inspiration is overrated. 

That said, even the most disciplined of us aren’t automatons.  Who could keep going without some rewards along the way?

Today’s post is part of the “Dr Popkins Method?”   series, in which I’m drawing out general lessons from my personal language learning journey.  The idea is that you’ll see parallels that apply to you or, conversely, contrasts that spur you react creatively and productively against how it’s been for me.  You win both ways, nicht wahr?   

I’ve already told the story of how I got more-or-less fluent in French, Welsh, Russian and German.  Each post comes with a video (you’ll find the vid to today’s post down below).

In the most recent article in the series, “My strengths and weaknesses”, I explained that getting fluent wasn’t down to any particular talent of mine, but that I’d made what I can of the mix of personal strengths and weaknesses that I have and taken a good few of the chances that have come my way.  

Now, for that foreign language inspiration and excitement.  

The thrill of making weird sounds 

I remember when I was a kid and we used to play sports on the street, I used to enjoy giving gobbledygook commentary on sports in the street. 

This may not have been an effective way to get popular with my mates, but, looking back, I can see that the idea of being able to communicate with different sounds was something that excited me from a very early age.

I don’t really know where this came from.  After all, I grew up in a completely monolingual environment except that, when I was about two and a half, a French student lived with us for a little under a year.  She (I am told) spoke to me in French in the belief that this would help me learn languages later.  

My school performance would suggest that the theory didn’t work…but maybe a seed of desire had been planted.  

Does there even need to be an explanation?  

Who wouldn’t be excited by the thought of being fluent in a second language (except perhaps some nonchalant people who are natural bi- or multi-linguals from childhood and just take it for granted)? 

The “process” of becoming fluent, is a fascinating, if at times infuriating, mix of conscious effort and sub-conscious processing.  

There’s some gearing mechanism that links work in to results out but it sure as heck ain’t direct transmission.   

When you can finally do it, what once seemed so difficult just flows.  It flows with ease.  

It’s a miracle.  

You cannot “not understand” what previously was completely impenetrable or not say what you’re now able too.  

Then, suddenly, you hit a new brick wall….and you feel like a fish out of water all over again.   Excruciating.  

Discovering new styles of communication 

Delight in the phenomenon of getting fluent is part of a wider joy of discovery.  

You also start to uncover differences in how the language is itself is used.  

Each culture has its own rhetorical styles.  

Germans and Russians tend to be more direct than I’m used to in British English, for example.  

The Russian have a far more florid style of greeting people for their birthdays or on other ceremonial occasions.   

When I was in Russia, people would ask you directly about how much money you earned…often a taboo subject even among close friends here in Britain.  

The Russian style of giving toasts at the dining table is completely different from what I know from home.  

The more I’ve got into my languages, with reading, going to the country, getting to know people, the more and more interesting I’ve found this whole aspect of language learning. 

What the experts call “pragmatics” has become in itself one of prime drivers as I continue to dig deeper with my advanced languages.

This all feeds into the wider, non-linguistic cultural differences that you come up against when you spend any amount of time interacting with natives of another tongue in their own language. 

Supercharged travel

Like many people, I’ve always loved travelling abroad. 

It’s the new landscape and architecture, a new climate, new smells and of course meeting new people (well, up to a point: I’m an interovert’s introvert, after all).

This enthusiasm is one reason I decided, as a post-grad historian, to go into Russian, rather than British history.  The choice gave me the reason to study abroad, to explore new countries. 

Once I start to get into a new language, I’ve obviously benefitted at the practical level when it comes to ordering at a café or trying to buy a train ticket. 

Then there’s also so much more that I can read, listen to and watch….Whether I’m away from home or not. (When I started, before the net, it was only the reading you could do at home.)    

Armed with my developing skill in a new language, I’ve loved having the opportunity to get far more deeply into the essence of a society than would otherwise be the case. 

For all the occasional embarrassments or misunderstandings, it’s been a delight to discover new ideas around hospitality, gift giving and friendship, different ways of doing business, different attitudes to family, the environment, even to property.…or geography.

There’s a common human core, of course.  No other human society is completely “other side of the moon”.  Still, the scope for variation in ways of living is also greater than we often realise.  

It’s also greater than those pushing one or another political or commercial interest would have us realise.  Multilinguals are less likely to be taken in.    

Or is it all just the caffeine?

Better knowing yourself and own culture

My experiences with foreign langauge and in foreign cultures have also enriched my understanding of my own country. 

For better and worse, I have more info and a higher level of knowledge and understanding. 

I now know that there are other ways of doing things and other perspectives on familiar ideas or stories and this can challenge unquestioned assumptions and even reveal unnoticed ones for the first time.  

This might concern something as (literally) superficial as how accommodation is rented or sold in Germany (they talk about the square meterage not the number of bedrooms) or different attitudes to housing (more secure tenure, home ownership less central to status).  

Once I’ve lived in a foreign country, or once I can follow its media without ever having lived there, I can also see how “we” are portrayed by “them”.  

Talking of “us”, as my linguistic and cultural apparatus becomes more sensitive, I think it’s helped me become more attuned to differences in my own country and speech community, whether by region, generation, gender, class or whatever.

“Home” is far less homogenous than we sometimes think.  

A new personality?

It’s often said that if you learn a new language you get a new personality.  

I wouldn’t go that far, but I do like feeling like a slightly different person when I’m using a different language. 

Maybe this comes from how, when I’m speaking another language, I’m often in a different context, doing different things with different people.  

I wouldn’t say the switch involves trying to disguise your background. 

It does involve opening a new window in your personality, to light up another dimension.

Enjoying the process

I often talk about the importance of routine in language learning. It’s a way of making sure that you’re disciplined to keep doing the right things repeatedly.  

Calling the process “zen language learning” may be going a bit far.  

Still, I’ve got into a place where there is an enjoyment in the process which I experience when I’ve made the commitment to learn a language. 

You have a need and reason to learn.  You get on with the work. You see that putting in the hours will lead to improvement…  

That’s what happened with my French, the first language I got fluent in.  

I’d taken serious action to expand my vocab and I started getting regular listening practice.  

Then, several months in, there was the chance to get out there.  

On a family holiday in France I simply felt that I’d moved into a different league from where I’d been on previous trips (when I only had my passive high school French lessons behind me).  

Since then, I’ve continued to experiment with different methods and hone the techniques that work for me, with French and my other languages. 

To some extent, it’s now a slick matter of rinse-and-repeat.  

It’s the pleasure of the practice of language learning, secure in the confidence that the process will (eventually) work.  

Not every successful language learner I know enjoys my methodical, quite studious approach.

Some of them don’t like learning languages at all and want to get it over with as quickly as possible.  

They all, however, find things that they can do which really move them along, while feeling rewarding as activities in themselves.

—))ooo)–OOO–(ooo((— 

Like most successful learners, then, I’ve had difference sources of language learning inspiration and excitement.  

If you keep going, the initial excitement is followed by later flashes of inspiration.  The milestone wins and unexpected thrills come – and matter – at many stages of our language learning journey. 

All the same, if you’re in for the long haul, it can’t just be spine-tingling excitement or quiet satisfaction.  

With the carrot, there has to be a bit of a stick as well.  In the next post in the series, I’ll look at how I kept going at those times when the last thrill had long worn off and the next reward seemed nowhere in sight.  Brace yourself, for we’ll be moving from the carrot to the stick. 

Related posts:

Is there a Dr Popkins Method to get fluent?

“Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in French

“Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in Welsh

“Dr Popkins Method?” How I learned Russian

“Dr Popkins Method?” My strengths and weaknesses

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” Excited by fluency appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

This post covers roughly the same German ground – but in more detail – as the second half of the vlog linked at the bottom of this post (the first half of the vid, after Russian).

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Greedy for German

When I moved into Russian studies from scratch at doctoral level, I wanted to learn not just Russian but to learn German as well.  Youthful enthusiasm and ambition….?  Yes. Rather reckless?  Yes. Impossible?  No.  Thanks to planning, determination, focus, and a lot of enabling help from others, by the time I’d finished I was fluent in both languages.  

I didn’t start learning German until Autumn 1990, at the beginning of my second year as a graduate student.  

I’d already learned Welsh to fluency, improved my French to a level good enough to use specialist French sources in the final year of my undergraduate history course and was (sort of) on the way with my Russian.  

My approach seemed to be working, so it was a question of rinse-and-repeat.  

Starting German through self-study: methods and materials

I armed myself with a complete self-study course: Paul Coggle’s Teach Yourself German. It came with a cassette tape of all-important audio material.  Coggle, by the way, is still going strong twenty-five years later. I recently received an invitation to his latest book launch in London.  

I worked through the whole book during the autumn term.  

Progress was slow at first, much to the amusement of my friend Patrick (now a professor of German history), who was helping me out a bit.  His verdict on my efforts six weeks in: “Dein Deutsch ist beschissen” (free translation: “your German, while a commendable first effort, perhaps still leaves something to be desired”).

I also got a themed vocab book and started flashcarding the lot, as I’d done with my other languages.  That took me about a year.  

The beauty of the approach to vocab is that it’s systematic.  It gives you confidence that you’ll be able to say something on most common topics and understand as well (provided, in the latter case, that you get enough exposure to the sound of the language).  

Eight months in Freiburg

In January 1991 I was moving to Germany as a participant in the EEC’s Erasmus post-graduate “Free mover” scheme.  At last, I’d have the chance to live abroad and learn a language.  This gave me a clear reason to learn German and some healthy short-term time pressure during the October to December before the move.

Erasmus “Free mover” was a slimmed down (and more flexible) version of the undergraduate Erasmus “exchange”.  You moved to a participant institution in another EEC country and continued your studies more of less on your own.  There was no additional maintenance grant but any fees were waived and you got your travel costs paid.  For me, the other key plus was that you were able to register at the host university without meeting any of the usual language requirements. 

At the planning stage, one option was to apply to go to Sciences Po in Paris. in which I was encouraged by some French friends based at the Maison Français d’Oxford who were helping me keep going with their language.  

That would have been wonderful but I already knew a lot of French and wanted German more than I wanted Paris.  

One of my two doctoral supervisors, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, had studied at Freiburg im Breisgau.  He put me in touch with his Freiburg supervisor, the distinguished and avuncular Professor Gottfried Schramm who agreed to host me in his department. 

In January I flew to Basel in Switzerland and caught a coach to Freiburg.  There I stayed till mid August.  I’ve already told the story of how I arrived and managed to find a room when able to say little more than “Student, Student, Zimmer bitte” on day one, I was nevertheless able to find room to rent in the home of an elderly Germany lady.  Of course, I also met quite a few students my own age and took part in Professor Schramm’s seminars and “inner circle” (for grad students and favoured under grads).   There was even a small group of Welsh learners at the uni, who’d found a native speaker working in the area.  We would all meet up now and again to speak Welsh. 

I was also still actively studying German.  My work was mainly reviewing Coggle and continuing with the flash cards.  I also bought couple of helpful books.  One was a very comprehensive book of grammar explanations and exercises.  The other was aimed specifically at academics wanting to get a “reading knowledge” of German.  I also bought a television, for extra exposure to the language when at home.    

Some of my early German materials

Long story short:   by the time I left I had a good working knowledge of the language.  

In August I had a couple of weeks back in the UK.  On my first night back the abortive coup took place in the Soviet Union.  It collapsed after a few days and so I was able to head out for a research year in Leningrad on time on 1st September.  

How hard was German compared with French, Russian or Welsh?

How hard was German compared to the other languages I’d learned?  I’d now say that there are several features of German that make it more difficult than Russian for a native English speaker.  Fact is, though, at the time I found it quite a bit easier to get off the ground with German than Russian.  Within six months, I’d say I’d reached a level that took me two years in Russian.   

Perhaps the relative ease with which I became a going concern in German was partly because I went to Germany for a long period relatively early in the day.  Note, though, that I had a solid base before I did.  It had been the same with Russian.  That meant that I had something to work with when daily life hit me in my new surroundings.  

As to German versus Welsh or French: I’d say that for a native English speaker, Welsh is a little harder than a Romance language, but a little easier than German.  With Welsh you have the additional challenge of the minoritised status of the language which can mean fewer opportunities to use it (and you’ll never really have to use it in any situation). 

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Russia and Finland….German on the back burner

During my year in Russia, my focus was obviously on my research and on Russian.  Still, one of the foreign research students who started his year at the Central State Historical Archive at the same time as me was a student of Schramm’s whom I’d got to know in Freiburg. Our acquaintance had begun in German and we continued to speak that language during the year in Saint Petersburg.  

The following academic year (1992-3), I was based at the Renvall Institute in Helsinki thanks to a scholarship from the Finnish Ministry of Education.  I was taking beginners Finnish classes at the university and also using Russian quite a lot. That year, though, there was a lot less German.  

It was far from the end of the affair between me and German, though. 

As with a lot of my language learning, it’s happened in phases.  

While I was in Finland, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe left his Oxford fellowship for the chair of East European History at Heidelberg. He offered me a one-year role as a part-time research assistant in his new department. As my grant money was fast running out and as I was keen to go back to Germany, I didn’t have to hesitate before accepting.  

Two and a half years in Heidelberg: German back centre stage 

Thus it was that in July 1993 I returned to Germany, on a ferry down the Baltic from Helsinki.  After docking at Travemünde (near Lübeck), I passed via Hamburg and heading south-west.  My destination was Schwäbisch Hall and a full-time German summer course at the Goethe-Institut, this time thanks to a scholarship from the DAAD. 

The course was pretty relentless: 8.30 till one five days a week (or even Saturday?) for two months.  I had a clear goal to keep me going, though.  At the end I  needed to pass the Heidelberg University German language exam.  Without that I wouldn’t be able to matriculate and to take up the role with HDL.  

I passed the exam and ended up staying in Heidelberg for two and a half years.  As end of the one-year research assistant post approached, I started teaching English too and working as a waiter.  By the time I left, my English teaching was actually taking off.  

My own academic focus was on continuing to analyse the primary sources I’d collected in Russia and the substantial amount of additional material from the library in Helsinki and to write it all up as a doctoral dissertation.

In Heidelberg, one of my housemates had his own computer and Windows 3.1 but there was no way I could afford my own machine.  In any case, I was firmly of the view that I couldn’t possibly think and write on a screen.  I wrote my thesis, all 100,000 words, with a pencil and paper.  When HDL’s secretary had finished for the day, I’d type up what I’d written on the departmental computer.   

My first task on arrival was to sort out somewhere to live.  There was a downturn in the economy, with a result that student numbers were up and it was difficult to find somewhere affordable.  After a spell in the emergency accommodation and sleeping in a tiny windowless basement in Eppelheim, I saw a notice on one of the noticeboards from a German who student who was trying to get a group together to rent an apartment.  (There was no internet yet to help with such things).  

That’s what I’d call a result.  My home life was entirely in German.  Though I never became big friends with any of the housemates, we all got on well enough and would sometimes share meals together.  They also had parents, friends and partners visiting, so I got to have lots of chats and got insights all their lives. 

My real social life was with colleagues in the history department, during and after work.  Again, this was all in German. Some of the friends I made then are still among my best friends today. 

The need to earn a living had slowed completion of my thesis but in summer 1995 I posted it off to Oxford, five and a half years after I’d started my post-grad career.  The examiners weren’t ready to see me until March 1996.  

Leaving Germany via the upper-intermediate plateau

In January of that year, I’d left Heidelberg to become Welsh-medium lecturer in European history (focussing on modern Russia) at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.  

I’d got a long way with German in two and a half years in Heidelberg.  As regards speaking and listening skills, I was functionally fluent and really able to handle anything that came at me in daily life.  

Looking back, though, I had reached a plateau and a solid upper-intermediate level. The idea of fluency as a complex, multi-dimensional thing and for all the listening and speaking experience, my reading and writing skills lagged behind.  The main reason was lack of practice.  I did read a small amount of secondary literature on Russian history in German but did not do much reading for pleasure.  I did read newspapers but still often found them relatively hard-going.  So far as I can remember, I didn’t do any writing it at all.

Back in Heidelberg, spring 2017

Maintaining my German over the years 

That was how things stayed for the next 15 yrs.  

I would go to Germany every few years and make a point of meeting up with my Heidelberg friends.  We always spoke German together.  Most of the people I knew there were in Russian studies and we would sometimes meet up at conferences or when our research trips to St Petersburg or Moscow coincided.  In 1999 I returned to the department Heidelberg for eight months on a sabbatical from my post in Aberystwyth.  

Another thing about fluency: it’s unstable.  While you can certainly “go rusty” what I’ve at I’ve noticed is that once you get to upper intermediate, speaking skills in a language can be reactivated very quickly. On one trip to Germany a German friend said my German sounded a bit like that of a native speaker who’d been out of the country for a long time.  It’s a miracle how the words seem to bubble back out of nowhere. 

Some of my C1 exam preparation materials

Another push forward: the Goethe C1 exam and beyond   

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve begun working again actively on the language.  In the middle of 2015 I decided to do the C1 Goethe Institute exam before Christmas.  Had to work methodically and consistently to get my writing skills up to the next level.  I chronicled the process on the site.  

Through 2016 and early 2017, I continued to have regular italki lessons. That was put on hold, though, as I switched the focus on Russian.  

In May 2017 I paid my first visit to Heidelberg for five years and it was great to check out some of my old haunts.  Several of my “Heidelberg” friends still live there or in the area, so it was another chance to catch up.  

My next goal in German is still the C2 exam.  At the moment my German is back in maintenance mode.  That means reading on my commute.  It also means a lot of listening to the radio when going about my household chores.  I also enjoy watching a programme or two each week on German TV and the odd YouTube video.

You’ll see from my German story that a lot has been about a clear desire, using intermediate goals to keep going, and deliberate choices.  As someone with no special talent for languages, I’m glad to say that I think all these count for more, long term, than do any special gifts.  Is there really such a thing as a “talent for languages” in any case? Next up in the Dr Popkins Method? series will be an exploration of my own profile as a learner, my own mix of strengths and weaknesses (a spur, I hope, to get you looking at yours).

In the meantime, if you’ve got fluent in German how similar was your path to mine? If you’re about to start, do you have any burning questions?  You know where the comments section is….and I’m keen to hear from you  

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Related posts:

Is there a Dr Popkins Method to get fluent?

“Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in French

“Dr Popkins Method?” Getting Fluent in Welsh

“Dr Popkins Method?” How I learned Russian

Project “Revive my German”: three lessons for  your language learning

Learning German: what’s hard, what’s easy?

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” How I got fluent in German appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

If you prefer video, you can scroll straight to the bottom for the link to the companion vlog about my experiences learning Russian (and, in the second half, German). This post covers roughly the same ground, but has a bit more detail (and only covers Russian. German will be up next.).

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First steps learning Russian

I started learning Russian in late 1988 or early 1989 for my upcoming graduate studies in history…..I was half-way through a graduate gap-year in Wales when the main focus was supposed to be getting fluent in Welsh.   

Now, I don’t advocate trying to learn two languages at once… There was a risk that this foolhardy enterprise would ruin my Welsh year and leave me no further forward with the new language….On the other hand: my motivation was high…..There was a clear need on the fast-approaching horizon.

When I’m working on a language, I like a one-volume “complete course” textbook in the sense of one that covers all the main structures and core vocab.  In Wales, following a recommendation from a retired linguist I’d met on my intensive summer Welsh course, I started working through the Penguin Russian Course by John Fennell.  

I made flashcards of the vocab and key phrases to learn using spaced repetition, just as I’d done with French and Welsh.   

I was also working though another textbook, Horace Lunt’s Fundamentals of Russian. 

“Lunt” appealed to me as more comprehensive than the Penguin. It had short sentences and many more exercises.  I gave that the flash card treatment too. There was no audio at all, though.

These two books introduced me to all the structures of Russian and gave me a core vocabulary.  What I didn’t yet have was any speaking practice (or any listening beyond the muffled cassettes you could get to go with the Penguin course).  

What was difficult as I started Russian…and what was easier

The new alphabet had turned out not to be difficult to learn at all.  The language was spelled phonetically.  The chief challenge then (as now) as the difference between hard and soft consonants and a new “i” sound.  

There were familiar international words (mainly Latin or Greek) but, as in Welsh, there were far, far fewer of these than in French.  

What was most challenging was learning a language in which nouns, adjectives pronounce and demonstratives declined across three genders and six cases.  

Then there was the complex Slavic verb system…..Let’s move swiftly on

Lunt tells it like it is

Back to Oxford to specialise in Russian history

Back in Oxford, I moved from Hertford to St Antony’s, an all-graduate college.  

It was a very international and multilingual place.  I was there at an exciting time.  That Autumn, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet puppet regimes in eastern Europe fell one after the other.  It seemed like East European Studies was the place to be.  

As a first year research student I had two tasks: to define my thesis topic and to get good enough at Russian to be able to research it.  

Doctoral studies in Oxford were very unstructured. A lot depended on the informal relationship with the supervisor and an inexhaustible ability just to get on with stuff on your own without any positive feedback. 

For me, there was the added challenge of needing to get a pretty solid reading knowledge of Russian before I could even get going.  

Inspiring help with my Russian

One of my supervisors was Professor Stone, who was known for his linguistic prowess.  He was of view that anybody could pick up a working knowledge of a language in six months.  He’d cheerfully taken me on to study Russian history without Russian where a more cautious don might have sent me away and told me to go off an learn the language first.  

His can-do approach – on top of my previous self-study success with Welsh and French – gave me the self-belief to make it with Russian.  

This was all the more important because there was no framework for beginning graduate students to learn Russian intensively at the university.  

All that was on offer was a Russian reading class aimed at graduate students of Soviet Politics.  The focus was on the turgid, formulaic language of Soviet newspapers. I told the teacher straight out that it wasn’t for me. 

During the year I used to call on the professor once a week for one-to-one help with Russian.  This mainly involved us sitting at his kitchen table while him correcting my exercises from Lunt.  I was also doing translations from Russian Prose Composition, by Borras and Chritianson.

There was a small community of Soviet graduate students in Oxford on an exchange programme funded by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.  

Alexei from Kiev was one of them.  He’d been an outstanding undergraduate linguist and was doing doctoral work on the origins of Islam (and had the languages necessary for that).   

I also took weekly lessons with him in his room, paying him five pounds (which I could barely afford).  He helped me with my spoken Russian, though I still couldn’t say very much.  I remember one particular low, when it emerged I still hadn’t learned the word for “Russia” in Russian.  

That all changed in summer of 1990 when I was Alexei’s guest for a couple of months in the Soviet Union.   This was when things started to move with my conversational Russian, thanks to constant practice.  

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The challenge of listening practice in the pre-internet era

On this first trip to the Soviet Union, I found understanding was actually more difficult than speaking.   I think that was due to inadequate listening practice before the trip.  

Nowadays, if I were to start Russian, I’d be getting hours of audio exposure on MP3 and the net and lessons with native speakers on Skype.  

Then, the technology just wasn’t there.  

The college had just got (somewhat temperamental) satellite TV and you could book in to watch the “Vremya”, the evening news programme.   

I also tried to listen to broadcasts in Russian on my crackley shortwave radio receiver.  One evening when I was doing this, Alexei called round, heard the broadcast and informed me that it was the Ukrainian service.   

Amazing hospitality and lots of practice: my first trip to the Soviet Union

The summer trip started in Leningrad, where I stayed with his wife’s cousin and her mother in a wonderful old Imperial period apartment on Chernyshevskii street  

We then went to Moscow where there were still a lot red flags a-flutter. There were very few adverts or bill boards (just Communist banners and slogans), hardly any western brands.  The shops may have been empty, but the museums, theatres and concert halls were full.  We stayed in run down dacha about forty minutes out in the country as guests of a typical Moscow intellectual and academic architect who lived off ideas (and fried potato and onion, black bread and tea, cigarettes and vodka) and who gave me a copy of his latest lavishly illustrated volume.    

Next, on by train to Kiev. For a month I stayed with Alexei’s parents in their large apartment in very centre of town.  Looking back, that was quite an imposition and I remain extremely grateful to this day.  Neither of his parents spoke any English.  I  saw all the sights and was also invited for several long meals at friends of Alexei’s among the Kiev intellectual elite – both Russian and Ukrainian speaking.  

By end of summer I could had functional conversational Russian.  Sure, that was in no small measure due to all the exposure and practice.  That wouldn’t have got me nearly as far without all the previous eighteen months’ work on the basic vocabulary and structures, though.  

Don’t go to a country with basis in the language hoping to pick it up.  You’ll get further, faster, if you’ve already done serious groundwork.  

I was travelling and making real progress with my Russia and that was about to get even better.  In my second year, I started learning German and in January 1991 went off for eight months to Freiburg in Germany on the Erasmus student mobility scheme.   

Struggling with life as doctoral researcher

In terms of morale, I really needed these exhilarating wins.  The thing was, for the first two years, there was next to movement at all on the academic front.

I’d say that the first two years of my time as a doctoral student were far more difficult than my later period of intensive study at law school and the stresses of working as a junior lawyer, pulling all nighter on multi-million pound financings.  

I several times came close to giving up the research.  

It was only well into the third year, half way through my time in the Russian archives, that I could see that success had became only a matter of time.  

One early problem was the lack of structure of the doctoral student life or of any meaningful feedback (because I wasn’t producing anything to give feedback on).  

It didn’t help that the college was full of much more self-confident students one- or two-year masters courses in economics or international relations.  Some of them already had jobs lined up in UN or the World Bank.

Among the handful of serious, research-focussed Russianists, I was the only who wasn’t already fluent in the language at the beginning and didn’t have a masters degree in either in it or in wider Russian studies.  It felt like I was running to catch up.

Money worries dogged me during the first year.  With no debt from my undergraduate years (student fees were twenty years in the future) and a three-year post-graduate maintenance grant from the British Academy, my position was much better than it would have been today. 

All the same, I was having to earn extra money just to make ends meet (even though technically this breached the rules of the (inadequate) maintenance grant.  I took on quite a lot of paid teaching work. I enjoyed this, but it was hugely time-consuming, slowing up my work at Russian and on the history.  

I also started working several evenings a week at a news company which took advantage of the latest fax technology to produce a daily type written brief on world affairs for leading decision makers.  I had two tasks.  One was to cut up out the foreign news reports from the day’s papers (ready for analysis by the writers the following day).  The other was to fax out that day’s report to the clients.

By now it was Christmas 1990.  I was over a year in (with only two years funding left).  I was ok with conversational Russian but I still couldn’t read my sources.  My “research”, which at this stage mainly involved digging out and photocopying printed materials in the Bodleian library but not actually reading and analysing them.  

Eight months in Freiburg

In Freiburg I started to read the main source I’d collected from Oxford library: decisions from the “Governing Senate”, Russian Empire’s highest court. 

These were stilted reports in nineteenth century Russian legalese.  Each was about a six hundred words long.  While I could now read something like that in, erm, about thirty seconds, it used to take me a day to read one or two and make notes on record cards.  Sometimes I’d have to look up the same words again and again.  

By this stage, I was no longer actively studying Russian…..It was just a matter of ploughing through the texts and noting vocab as I went (and doing spaced recall on it with flashcards).

On 18 August 1991 my Freiburg time came to an end.  By this stage I also had intermediate German, but that’s a story for another post.  

The next stop, in September 1991, was to be Leningrad on a British Council scholarship for my “archival year”.  

First I’d planned a two or three weeks turnaround in the UK. 

The abortive coup launches my media “career” in Welsh

I awoke on 19 August 1991, my first day back in England, to the news that a coup d’état was underway in the Soviet Union.  In a last roll of the dice, Soviet hard-lines staged a putsch, seizing power and arresting Mikhail Gorbachev at his dacha in the Crimea.  

It briefly looked as if the game was up not only for Soviet reforms, but also for my hopes of a year working in the archives in Leningrad. 

It was at this point that my career as a media pundit took off, in Welsh   Well, yes, that’s an exaggeration, but somehow BBC Radio Cymru got my number and I started doing commentary on events in Russia.   

I continued during the year and then when I was an academic back in Wales. 

The coup collapsed on 22 August and on 1st September, I flew out to Leningrad according to plan.  I was one of the last to go on the old British Council/Soviet exchange programme that had been set up during Khrushtsev’s thaw. 

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A year in the USSR….Erm, make that the Russian Federation

That year I was mainly working in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.  Until the late 2000s, the archive was in the Senat-Synod building on the banks of the Neva, next to Catherine the Great’s famous Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great (the building is now the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation).    

I was mainly reading files from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  They were written in copperplate script, which really wasn’t too difficult once you got used to it.  Then, in 1906, the Ministry got typewriters  

I also worked in the National Library on Nevsky Prospekt, where I was mainly looking at newspapers from the 1860s to 1917.  

I also spent some time in the Leningrad provincial archive.  The last month – with the Olympics in full swing in Barcelona – I flew south-west for a month in the provincial archive in Tambov.  

In these local archives, my main sources were hand written village court records from the period 1861 to 1917.  These were pretty difficult to decipher….even for the Russian archivists.  By the end of the year, I was better at it than they were.   

The year was extremely eventful in Russian history and the history of the other former Soviet republics. At the end of 1991 there was a vote for independence in “the Ukraine”, as we then called it. (I still think it should be called “Ukrainia” in English if we’re going to drop the article, as in “the Argentine”/”Argentina” but I suppose Ukraine does rhyme with cheerfully un-articles Bahrain.)

In December the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.  In early 1992 prices were freed as part of the Gaidar government’s “shock therapy” economic reforms.  It was tense and difficult time for Russians.

 In retrospect, perhaps I should have ditched my studies and just gone around with a camera and tape recorder, recording the rapid changes that were taking place and people’s perspectives on them.

Making more Russian friends and travelling to Moldova and Crimea

After a couple of abortive (though story-rich) starts with accommodation, I finally ended up living in the Academy of Sciences Hall of Residence in the north of the city, where I was exposed to a lot of, erm, colloquial Russian.

In spring 1992, one of my friends from the hall of residence invited me to travel down to his home town of Kishinev.  The sleeper train snaked down through Belarus and through the self-proclaimed Prednestrovia Republic, where fighting was taking place (I didn’t see anything, but we weren’t allowed to get out at Tiraspol). 

From Kishinev we went on to Odessa and Crimea.  

I was speaking only Russian at the accommodation and on such trips.  I was also only using Russian with the archivists and academic historians.  I was speaking quite a lot of English and some German too with fellow foreign students (ten Americans and a German).

At the Bakhchisaray Fountain, Crimea, spring 1992

To Finland and then Heidelberg

On 1 September 1992, a year to the day after my arrival, I left Russia by train for Helsinki, where I’d secured a Finnish Ministry of Education scholarship to work in the Slavonic collection of Helsinki University Library and at the Renvall Institute.  

In summer 1993 I moved on again, this time to Heidelberg.  My other supervisor, Professor Löwe, had just got the chair in Russian history there and had offered me a part-time post for a year as a research assistant. 

I stayed for two and a half years, working as a waiter and English teacher once the research job came to an end.  All the time, I was analysing my archival notes and other materials and writing up my thesis.  

Teaching Russian history (in Welsh) and more research trips to Russia

I’d handed in my thesis in summer 1996, though I wasn’t examined in March 1996.  In January that year, I’d left Heidelberg to become a Welsh-medium history lecturer in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. 

As well as lecturing and tutoring on Russian, Soviet and wider history through the medium of Welsh, I was, of course, also expected to continue research and to publish.  

My ongoing research provided a reason to returned to Russia and I made three or four such trips during 1996 to 1998, each time for a month or two.  I would always go back to the archives and libraries of St Petersburg and, during summer 1997, I also worked in Samara and Tambov.  

These trips provided more chance to use my Russian.

Living in Moscow as an international finance lawyer

In August 2000, I chucked my dream job in Aberystwyth to train as a lawyer.  

When I chose to be a lawyer it was very much to continue my engagement with Russian culture, but to engage in a different way. 

The immediate transition period 2000 to 2004 turned out to be the least active period in my Russian.  I was busy at law school and then as a trainee solicitor, and still doing some writing and attending conferences in Russian history on the side. 

Once you get to a solid upper-intermediate level with a language, though, my experience is it doesn’t go away.  Yes, you may go a little rusty, but it all comes back remarkably rapidly with use.  

In September 2004, eight years after my last visit, I returned to Russia.  This time, to work in Moscow as an international lawyer.  There I stayed until April 2009.  

I didn’t actually need Russian for my legal work in the law firm and most of my ex-pat colleagues didn’t speak it.  

I chose to speak just Russian with the support staff, though, and used the language quite a lot informally with lawyer colleagues (so long as I could win the battle of wills and stop them switching to English).  

An active social life on the upper intermediate plateau

My social life was overwhelmingly in Russian.  

None of my old academic Russian-speaking friends were based in Moscow, but I was still in touch with them and paid visits to Kiev, Kishinev and St Petersburg to catch up.  

I met a lot of new friends in Moscow, too.  With them, I had a very active social life, tempered only by the exhausting long hours at the law firm (working most evenings till midnight, occasionally all through the night and more but, luckily, only three or four weekends a year).   

There were also new renewed opportunities to travel round Russia.  I made trips to Vladimir, Suzdal’, Tver, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan’. I still haven’t been to Siberia, though.    

I also went to the cinema and theatre quite often, watched a certain amount of television and  listened to lots of Russian radio.  

My Russian was consolidating all the time but on something of an upper-intermediate plateau.  

Force of circumstances (long days spent in front of a screen reading and writing in English) meant that I wasn’t reading much Russian for leisure or writing at all. I certainly didn’t want to spend my precious free time in active study.  Nor was I getting any corrective feedback on my spoken Russian.  

The Kazan’ kremlin, winter 2008

Back in the UK and working on my Russian again

My time in Russia came to an abrupt and unexpected end in early 2009 when my mum deteriorated and died after a late cancer diagnosis. I decided to take a break from the law and return to the UK.

My Russian stayed as it was, until 2015-6, when I started actively studying again (for the first time since the mid 1990s).  I started taking one-to-one lessons and did summer night class in London.  

I began to use exams as  a motivational goal and to provide an objective yardstick, however imperfect.  In summer 2015 I  did the TRKI/Test of Russian as a Foreign Language upper intermediate (B2) second certificate and then the advanced (C1) TRKI third certificate.  

Since then, I’ve continued to engage with the language.  I’m not having lessons at the moment.

I’m not really speaking much at all either and I’m not writing at all again.  Those are things I need to sort out yet again.  When the time is right, a new phase will begin.  

In the meantime, I am reading more than ever and still listen to the radio a lot and watch Russian drama, comedy and follow Russian YouTubers.

It’s nine years since I was last in Russia.  That’s the longest gap since I ventured to the Soviet Union for the very first time back in 1990.  A return to Russia, or another Russian speaking land, is long overdue and I hope to remedy this, even if only for a holiday, in 2019.  

As with French and Welsh, learning Russian has been an on-off project for me…but one that has become a serious, long-term strand in my life.  It’s opened me to all manner of life-enriching and perspective-widening experiences and there’s still so much more to learn and discover.

I’ve written quite a bit about Russian on the site in the past, but there’ll be more to come for learners of all levels.  Are you learning Russian or thinking of doing so?  Let me know in the comments below how your experiences have gone so far (or drop me an email with your comments or questions – address under the “About” tab).  Do you already see parallels with mine or things that have been (or you plan to make) completely different for you?

Beginning to learn Russian? Experience the power of StoryLearning with "Russian Uncovered": click here for deal info.

Related posts:

Why learn Russian?

How to learn Russian fast

Learn the Russian alphabet quickly: three tricks

Is there a “Dr Popkins Method” to get fluent?

“Dr Popkins Method?” Getting fluent in French

“Dr Popkins Method? Getting fluent in Welsh

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” How I learned Russian appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

If you prefer video, you can scroll straight to the bottom for the link to the companion vlog about my experiences learning French and Welsh. This post follows the same plan, but has a bit more detail (and only covers Welsh, I’ve covered French in a previous post).  I’ve also linked the of my recent “Quick Tip Tuesday” vlogs that are right on topic, including two shot in Aberystwyth.

Before we go any further: if you’re keen to find out more about Welsh, my good friend and fellow Welsh-learner Kerstin Cable explores in her “Dabbler’s Guide to Welsh”. It’s a great value taster of what to expect if you dive in to Welsh. Check out her info and enrolment page here: Kerstin’s “Dabbler’s Guide”.

Back to the story: I got the idea for the Dr Popkins Method series in a retreat in Tenerife. There, some of my fellow language learners and teachers, bloggers and vloggers challenged me to help you better by sharing more my language learning journey.

In the French post, I explained one of the spurs for taking that language a lot further than I’d managed to get in high school.  I had to sit a major exam on a French text at the end of my first term as a history undergraduate at Oxford.

The dreaded “preliminary” set of exams meant that the first term was very stressful for us historians. After that, though I had a lot more free time. In my relatively relaxed second term, I knew I wanted to start another language.

After French, which language?

The question was, which one?

I can remember several trips to the language section of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. Now it’s a shrivelled rump of its former self. Then it was an inspiring place, similar to today’s glorious language section in Foyles bookstore in London.  I kept getting drawn to the Welsh shelf, or part shelf (there wasn’t much in stock for Welsh).

I bought T J Rhys Jones’ Teach Yourself Living Welsh.

Even as I bought the book, I remember thinking “What’s the point? Speaking Welsh as a native English speaker will just be a game. Apart from some young children, everyone in Wales speaks English!”.

The deal was done, though. Money was tight, I wasn’t going to buy a book and then let it gather dust.

Why Welsh?

I’ve blogged about reasons to learn Welsh before, but some of these only became real to me as I started to discover the land and culture later on.

As I started, I couldn’t remember the sound of the language (I probably hadn’t heard it for about eight years since one of my childhood holidays to Swansea in southern Wales).

It was, rather, the exotic written form of the language attracted me – all ys, ws, double ffs and dds and circumflex accents (the “to bach” – or little roof – as it’s called informally in Welsh).

Something much more powerful was in play, as well: my own identity and family history.

A few years before my dad was born, his family had moved from near Swansea (in southern Wales) up to Yorkshire. My paternal grandfather (whom I never knew) was a first language Welsh speaker.

He didn’t teach my dad Welsh, unfortunately.

All the same, my dad was aware of his Welsh heritage and when I was little, he explained that this was why I’d been given the Welsh name of Gareth. My surname is also found in Wales more than England.

Besides the name, there were other, small influences on me from Wales.

When he was at school, Dad had made a box in woodwork lessons with a Welsh flag on the top and I was always fascinated with this when I was little.

Then, when I was seven, by coincidence, some close family friends from Yorkshire relocated to Swansea. For several years we went down to there at Easter or Whitsun to visit them. This was a very long and exciting car journey for a seven or eight year-old.

The visits were also always a chance to revive contact with some of my dad’s surviving relatives in the area. Several times I heard some of one of his distant cousin’s children speaking Welsh together, children who were about ten years old, like me. I also occasionally heard Welsh being spoken in the shops in Swansea and there was some Welsh on road signs and other signage on public buildings.

So, the family connection won out and it just felt right to choose Welsh as my second foreign language, despite it not being the most obviously “useful” language to somebody who didn’t live in Wales.

How I learned Welsh: Figuring out self-study, from scratch

This was the first time that I’d started a new language on my own.

I followed the same approach that seemed to be working with French – concentrating on the key structures and most frequent or otherwise useful vocab.

This time, though I was using a textbook to provide the framework.

I working though the book methodically and thought it was a good course.

I discovered that the language had some similarities with French (such as noun gender, adjectives after the noun and a quite complex system of verb conjugations).

It also had fascinating differences. For example, the verb-subject-object sentence structure (most European languages are subject-verb-object) and its use of the “mutation” system typical of the Celtic family of languages (which involves the beginnings of words changing in certain circumstances, rather than the endings I’d seen morphing in French and German).

A big hindrance to my learning was that there was no obvious way for me to hear the language in Oxford.

I didn’t know any Welsh speakers there. There was a university Welsh students society but that was aimed at native (or at least fluent) speakers. I wrote to the organiser. He never replied.

Unlike the volume that later replaced it, the Teach Yourself book didn’t come with a cassette tape.

There was a daytime-only Welsh radio channel, BBC Radio Cymru, set up begrudgingly by the British state in 1979, only about, erm, fifty-five years after they started sounding off in English. There was also a Welsh TV channel, set up (even more begrudgingly) in 1981. But you couldn’t pick either up either in Oxford in analogue, pre-satellite TV, pre-internet days.

Despite the lack of audio, I tried to study Welsh regularly, maybe half an hour a day, and made flash cards of vocab and phrases from the book.

By the end of the first year, I’d worked through about half of the book….but still wasn’t getting any listening practice and had not done any speaking at all.  It was a far from ideal situation.

How I learned Welsh: a summer school in Bangor

To remedy this, I decided to do three-week, full-time summer course in the language at the University College of North Wales in Bangor during the long summer vacation at the end of my first year at university.

At nineteen, I was the youngest of the group (by some distance). The teaching was good and I learnt a lot. I got to hear and speak a lot of the language and we did some trips to interesting places round about.

Still, it was only three weeks and, when I left, I was far from fluent. All the same, I left Bangor fired up to take the language further, though I knew this would be a medium-term project.

I decided, with great reluctance, to set work on the language aside during my second and third year to focus on my history degree. This paid off, as my degree result was good enough to get funding to go on to do post-graduate work in Russian history.

How I learned Welsh: a gap year in Wales to learn Welsh

Before I did that, I decided to take what is now called a “gap year” but we then called a took a “year out” (how come the English language keeps changing around me…? Stop it! ).

This time, the aim was to learn the language thoroughly.

The stakes were high, at least in my own head.

My fellow students had left to start careers and earn real money.

If I failed to get fluent in Welsh, I’d have wasted a year and missed the boat for the rest of my life (at least, that’s maybe how it looked when I was 21).

I stated with a full-time, two-months summer course in Lampeter in the west of Wales. This course was something of an institution, famous at the time as the only course of its kind. It had been inspired by the Ulpan model used to revive Hebrew in Israel and the founder, Chris Rees (who had himself learned Welsh), taught me for part of the time.

The mythology was that you came out after eight weeks thinking and dreaming in Welsh. That wasn’t quite true, but I could certainly have real conversations by the end (sufficient not to have to turn to English). As you’d imagine, it was a very intensive educational – and social – experience.

In September, I moved straight form Lampeter to Aberystwyth and lodged with a Welsh-speaking family for about nine months.

Why Aber? I tell the story in this Quick Tip Tuesday vlog, filmed earlier this year from Aber’s Traith y De (South Beach):

My year in Aber had its frustrations, the main one being that I never found work where I could use the language and had to take a job as an office clerk working all day through the medium of English for a very low wage.

Overall, though, the year was a success on my own terms. By the end, I really was pretty fluent in Welsh.

During those Aberystwyth months, I did a lot of self-study. I built on the basis from the my initial study and the Lampeter course by continuing work on my vocab.

I got huge amounts of input. This was radio, television and attending church and chapel (yes, both) on a Sunday. It was also starting to read native-level novels in Welsh (I read five or six during that year).

Best of all, I was speaking with my host family in Welsh all the time.

Leaving Wales, but taking Welsh with me

By summer 1989 it was time to leave Wales.  I was fluent, so that was a “result”.  But that certainly wasn’t the end of the story.

During my time back in Oxford I was now able to become an active member of the university’s Welsh-speaking society.

In subsequent years, when I moved to Germany, then Russia and Finland, I continued to develop my Welsh, mainly by reading.

I also started being interviewed on Welsh radio over the phone and became something of a pundit on all the exciting developments in Russia, beginning with the failed coup in August 1991 and continuing with other unfolding events during my research year in Russia (1991-2) and beyond.

A dream job using Welsh

By summer 1995, I was living (though German) in Heidelberg and finished writing up my Oxford doctorate. By a stroke of luck, I landed a job teaching Russian history through the medium of Welsh at the federal University of Wales’ college in Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University).

So, in January 1996, seven and a half year’s after I’d first arrived in Aber as a Welsh learner (and had failed to find work using the language), I had a dream job back in the same place: teaching undergraduates about Russian and Soviet history through the medium of Welsh.

I was using the language for nearly all my teaching and at least half the time with colleagues and the university administration. I also continued to make occasional appearances on Welsh media and write the odd magazine article or review in the language. I really built a good network of friends and acquaintances in trough Welsh too.  That worked much better than during my first time in the town (because the university job plugged me into networks and simply because I was there much longer).

In an added twist, in late 1996, my parents retired from Yorkshire to the west of Wales, which further strengthened the ties with Wales.

I stayed in Aberystywth until 2000, when I made the difficult decision to leave the academic world for law school.  My plan was to get involved in the law in a Russian context.

I moved back to Yorkshire for a year to take the Post Graduate Diploma in Law and then, via a year in Oxford doing the Post Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, to a two-year solicitor training contrat (practical apprenticeship) with a large international commercial law firm in London.

Running a Welsh bookshop in Swansea

I was next back in Wales for nine months in 2009, at the end of five-year period practising English law in Moscow advising on international finance deals. Following my mum’s early death from ovarian cancer that year, I’d decided to take a break back in Wales.

This time I worked part-time running Siop Ty Tawe, the Welsh language bookshop in Swansea, while the owner was on maternity leave.

During that year I also did a course to teach Welsh to adults. I’ve gone on to teach occasionally at the  day schools put on at the London Welsh Centre.

A natural part of my life

So, that’s how I learned Welsh.

I’ve now been a fluent Welsh speaker for well over half my life.

Although only five years or so of that have been spent in Wales, at various stages in my life since my “year out”, the language has been a constant presence.

I’ve gone on to make friends through Welsh in Freiburg, Heidelberg, Moscow, Oxford, London….the Basque Country and Catalonia……as well, of course, as in Wales itself.

I rented a place with a Welsh speaker when I was back in Oxford at law school and for the first two years after I bought my own house here in London, I rented out two of my rooms to a Welsh-speaking friend and his wife.

While there are always things I could do to improve my skills in the language, fluency in Welsh has long simply been a given that I take for granted.

I read the language daily on news sites and blogs, follow Welsh culture, listen to it very often and use it in emails and on social media, and Whatsapp with friends. In August, I often visit the annual Eisteddfod cultural festival.

I never describe myself as Welsh, as that’s not where I’m from.

But for the last thirty years, I’ve certainly been proud to know that I’m Welsh-speaking. That I got what I wanted was thanks to determined decisions and planning, good methods and the help and encouragement of many different people.

Does this chime with your language learning experience so far….or is your story quite different?  If you’re just about to start, will you be looking to emulate what I did or do you plan a different approach? Let me know in the comments below

Here’s the video and look out for the next post in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series…All about how I learned Russian.

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If you’re keen to find out more about Welsh, my good friend and fellow Welsh-learner Kerstin Cable explores in her “Dabbler’s Guide to Welsh”. It’s a great value taster of what to expect if you dive in to Welsh. Check out her info and enrolment page here: Kerstin’s “Dabbler’s Guide”.  

The post How I learned Welsh…and you can too appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

I got the idea for this series in Tenerife, where I shot the first video.  That cinematic masterpiece ended with rather comic – and totally unscripted – fall into the pool.  I had the camera running as I was shuffling along the edge, trying to work out the best position for a dynamic dive in as a finishing shot. 

The best laid plans….

The “Dr Popkins Method?” project

The reason I was paying my first visit to the Canary Islands was to attend a retreat with a group of very talented group of language learners and teachers, vloggers and bloggers. 

They were pressing me to tell more about how I’ve got fluent in my ‘best” foreign languages and got a basic working knowledge in several others.   

Did my approach amount to a method which I could package to help you better than I have been doing so far on this site and the YouTube channel?  

I’m a bit uncomfortable about this as an exercise for a couple of reasons. 

First, it’s true that I’ve got a doctorate, but I’m a doctor of Russian history not applied linguistics.  On the other hand, I have qualified to teach Welsh and English to adults.  I also have the research skills that you need to complete any PhD successfully and use those skills both in preparing materials on this site and before I give talks at events such as the Polyglot Gathering.     

Second: yes, I’ve got vast experience of being a student in all types of language classes and in successful self-study.  

But it’s that very experience that makes me suspicious that there could be one method in language learning.   

That and the general critical approach that is another thing that goes with the territory when you’re a PhD, academic historian and lawyer.    

Still, l’ve risen to the challenge.  

There posts are very much my personal history.  

General conclusions are for a later stage.  Still, useful pointers may emerge for you (or maybe you’ll be more struck by the contrast with your own experiences – let me know in the comments below).

Beginning to learn French? Experience the power of StoryLearning with "French Uncovered": click here for deal info.

A familiar schoolboy story

My story of French at school is a familiar one.

There were no foreign language taught in the schools I attended before I went to secondary school (aged eleven).

Then we had five years French, culminating in the GSCE “O level” (one of the exams that evolved into what is now called the GCSE exam).

We had to start German in the second year and I dropped it like a stone as soon as I could, after two years.

The only reason I kept going with French, I suppose, was because at my school it was compulsory to do at least one foreign language till aged sixteen.

At sixteen, I passed O level French with a “B” (the highest grade was an A, the subsequent A* grade had not yet been introduced).

On paper, that was not too bad but the truth was that I couldn’t speak or really understand any real French.

This became painfully clear on a number of family holidays to France during my secondary school days.

There, my intense embarressment and shyness didn’t help either.

For me, French to “O” level had been just another subject. The language I’d had to keep going with (because you had to do one language).

That was the only exposure I got in those years. It was before the internet and before home video recorders were widespread. So French video was totally inaccessible. You could pick up some crackly radio broadcasts and, of course, buy French books, but I had no particular interest.

Interest sparks and a need emerges

It was in the last two years of high school (aged 16 to 18) that I become quite excited by the idea of learning French and started to see the appeal of languages in general.

That was a paradox as I had decided not to carry on with French for “A” level. I was studying History, Government and Politics, Economics. I loved the subjects and a had a good time.  Looking back, though, we shouldn’t have been allowed to specialise so much.

I can’t really recall how or why this shift towards enthusiasm for languages took place, but the motivation was suddenly there.

I was studying a lot of French and wider European history all of a sudden and this cultural context may have been part of the picture. Also, several of my group of close friends were studying French, German or Latin for “A” level and getting to travel and explore books and films in their languages.

Maybe, at some level, I’d always liked the idea of being able to speak in a foreign language. Who wouldn’t?

It was just that I couldn’t see how you could get there.

I’d approached French like all my other subjects – as abstract knowledge.

While  getting fluent in a language certainly needs to involve a lot of study, it is also very much a practical skill.

In the autumn of my final year at school, I accepted the offer of a place to study history at the University of Oxford.

One thing, then is certain.  I now had a clear need for the language. At the end of the first term at Oxford, I’d have to sit a major exam on a text in French.

I started to do extra work on the language during the lunch hour, with one of my French teachers from the lower school who had very generously offered to help

The summer after A levels, I continued to work on my French.  I can remember sitting on the bed of the farmhouse my parents had rented for our holiday,  somewhere deep in rural France.

I was feeling overwhelmed at the obvious impossibility of remembering all the words you’d need.

I also felt somewhat angry at the university for expecting this obviously impossible task.

I was, though, starting to get into “France” and was busy reading a new door-stopper of a book all about that country (then in the early stages of Mitterand’s regime).

My themed French vocab book and John Ardagh’s book about (then) contemporary France.

The great leap forward: French “on the side” in Oxford

The French text we were examined on at the end of the first semester was Alexis de Tocquevilles L’ ancien régime et la révolution, which weighed in at about three hundred sophisticated, native-level paperback pages.  The English translation was out of print (again, in pre-internet days, that meant there was no practical way for me to get hold of it).

In second and third term, the exams passed, we historians were under much less pressure (people studying other subjects had there first big exams at the end of the first year, when we had none).

I now had the language bug big time.

I was a little envious of those who were doing modern language degrees. There were also one or two students who’d taken a year out before starting university and had gone abroad and learned languages.

I was determined to get fluent in French. I took control of my own learning and threw myself into self-study.

The summer before I’d been overwhelmed by the immensity of the task.  At least I’d understood that knowing a lot of words is central to real progress in language learning.

Now, in extensive language section of Blackwells bookshop (now a shadow of its former self) I found a book of French vocabulary for A level organised by themes and decided to use it to help me tackle the problem systematically.

In the course of the next nine months or so, I proceeded to learn the words off by heart.  I did this by making flashcards with individual French words on one side (or phrases, there were some of these in the book) and English on the other.  I colour-coded the nouns (red ink for feminine, blue for masculine).

I kept the cards in small brown envolopes of twenty and worked on them using “spaced repetition”.  The system was known of course then but I can’t remember reading about it.  It was something I stumbled on unwittingly.  It just seemed common sense to me, given my bad memory.

I also bought “Teach Yourself French Grammar” and worked through that in the same way, making flash cards twice the size of the vocab ones.  These had explanations and examples on one side and a prompting question on the other (in English).  I was using the “testing effect”.

I started listening a lot to French radio, which you could pick up on and off on medium wave in the evening (I have just discovered why tonight, as I write this post).

For the second and third semesters, I also took a once-a-week lunchtime class but, aside from that, wasn’t doing any speaking or production.

I wasn’t trying to do much reading either for the first year or so.  It was vocab, grammar and listening.

Beginning to learn French? Experience the power of StoryLearning with "French Uncovered": click here for deal info.

The large French dictionary my dad bought me for my Oxford studies (still my main dictionary, despite the lack of any modern IT or internet vocab), plus the Oxford syllabus

The thrill of seeing that I could speak and understand French

In the long vacation at the end of first year, I went on a holiday with my parents to France for the last time.

This was the sixth consecutive summer we’d spent three weeks in France.

The three weeks in the gîte passed much as normal, with no real need to use the language and with me incapable of creating any situations where I could use it.

But then, at the end, we stayed for three or four days as the guests of a French family (work colleagues of an old family friend).

The family could hardly speak English. Thanks to all my efforts, I was now by some margin the best of the four of us in my family in French, so was doing a lot of interpreting as well as free speaking.

It was all very rough and ready but – zut alors! – I was communicating in French. It felt great and confirmed that a lot of listening, the grammar and a lot of words could make difference, even though hadn’t been practising much.

I kept going at French throughout the second undergraduate year in much the same way.

In my third year, I was able to read the language well enough to choose as my specialist “Further subjet” an option called “Literature, Politics and Society in the Third Republic 1871-1914”.

For this, I had to read several French texts as well as a lot of secondary literature in English about the period.

It was one of the highest marked papers in “Finals” (the graduation examinations).

In summer 1988, a few weeks after finishing university, I went off to Wales for nearly a year to learn Welsh.  I also started learning Russian.  More about those experiences in later posts.

Taking French further in my graduate student days and beyond

It wasn’t the end for me and French, though.

In summer 1989, back from Wales and waiting to return to Oxford to begin my post-graduate research, I enrolled on a summer course at Grenoble University.

This was a two or three-week course.  We lived in the university halls of residence.

My plan was to try to find a job there till the end of the summer.  In that, I failed miserably (it was difficult to find something for so short a period), so I was back in Yorkshire for the last six weeks before returning to university.

I was only back in Oxford for four semesters before my studies took me to Germany, Finland and Russia.

Those four semesters as communism collapsed in country after country in Eastern Europe.

I attended events at the Maison Française d’Oxford cultural centre and made several French friends.  I met one of them regularly to practice French.  I even considered going off on the Erasmus post-graduate student mobility programme to spend a semester at Sciences Po in Paris.

In the end, though, I went to Freiburg…  After all, I already spoke quite a lot of French.  German was beckoning, but that’s another story.

I was now able to read French fluently and hold conversations. In the years – now decades – since then, that’s what I’ve kept doing, every now and again.

French is still very much my fourth foreign language, quite a bit behind my Welsh, Russian and German.

One reason for that is that it’s never been a priority.

Another is that I’ve never spent an extended period in France.

Indeed, since the Grenoble courses in 1989, I’ve only even been to France at all five or six times.  I went twice from Germany (1993, 1994) to visit one of the French friends I’d made in Oxford.  Then there was a fifteen year gap until a visit for a week in New Year 2009. Spring 2011 saw me over in Brittany for a few days to take part in Ar Redadeg, the sponsored run for the Breton language. In summer 2016, on my residential Basque course, I crossed into the “northern Basque Country” (from the Spanish to the French state) for an afternoon.

A couple of years ago I did an online evaluation with the Institut Francais.  That showed me on the B2/C1 border. At some point, I’d love to take my French further to do the DALF C1 exam. I’ve got the books

Ready and willing. My French C1 books.

In the meantime, I  listen France Inter radio a few times a month as I got about my household routine.  How much easier that is now I can stream the channel on my internet radio or phone.

When I do get back to French big time, I know what my challenges will be: the colloquial language, including slang, plus writing, which I’ve never much done and is always the skill I find hardest. Maybe it’ll make more sense to start with the B2 exam.

So that’s my story with my first langauge love.  I’d love to hear how YOU got started with your language(s), too. That’s what the comments section’s for down below

Beginning to learn French? Experience the power of StoryLearning with "French Uncovered": click here for deal info.

Next up: how I learned Welsh.  Check out my French and Welsh stories in the video:

The post “Dr Popkins Method?” Getting fluent in French appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

The view from our villa

We also did a day trip up to La Laguna, the original capital of the island and to the beautiful hills and coastline around.

During the workshop, we were taking apart each other’s work and assumptions and suggesting ways we could each improve.

My colleagues challenged me to explain to you in a more personal way how I’ve got fluent in several languages and got up and running – after a fashion – in several others.

Does what I do amount to a bespoke “Dr Popkins Method”?

If so, am I putting that out there as well as I might to help you in your language learning?

A courtyard garden in La Laguna

Lots of learning projects

It’s four years since I started blogging here on Howtogetfluent. In that time, I’ve covered several of my own language learning projects in detail.

From the start I’ve been talking about learning Basque. I’m doing this from scratch, snatching such time as I can from quite a demanding job in the law and alongside the rest of my life.

I’ve also told you about how I’ve been levelling up my already not-too-bad German and Russian. I blogged on taking the German Goethe C1 exam in 2015. Then I went for the equivalent Russian exam, the TRKI third certificate, passing four parts in 2016 and the final part (and thus the whole exam) in 2017.

I’ve also done two “taster” projects.

The first was a week learning basic Indonesian on the beautiful island of Java (check out the daily travel vlogs if you haven’t seen them; I think they’re among my best).

Then, last autumn, I threw myself into beginners’ Icelandic, before my first trip to Iceland.

This month, Basque is centre stage again.

This year, though, I’ve been focussing much more on considering general language learning questions. This site is called “How to get fluent”, after all.

But what about learning principles?

The challenge, then, is to bring these two strands together: practical projects and underlying principles.

More than that, I want to bring in my thirty year back story as a serious language learner.

I’m up for the challenge of telling my own story in more detail and we’ll see what emerges at the other end.

I’ll say now, if you’re expecting some magic method or a silver bullet, you’ll be disappointed.

It’s not an accident that there’s a question mark at the end of the title to this series. I’m instinctively sceptical of magical language learning methods…

I think, though, that most of you will be too.

The thing is, as I correspond with Email Club members and read comments at the bottom of posts, I’m struck by the high calibre and sheer accomplishment of the average Howtogetfluent reader.  You may be unsure what to do in language learning, but you’re not expecting “something for nothing” in the quest for fluency….

My experience of language learning – like yours – is that it hasn’t been easy and it hasn’t been quick….

There’s been a good deal of trial and error along the way.

Often it’s felt like the weakest link has been, erm, me.

Straight in at the deep end!

The “Dr Popkins Method?” project kicked off straight away in Tenerife, in vlog form.

I shot the first video in the series on the side of the pool.

At the end, I was actually a little too close to the side of the pool….. The camera was running as I was edging along, trying to find the best position from which to dive dynamically into to the water and swim off determinedly into the distance.

That, at least was the plan.

Instead, I slipped right in.

I’m sure there must be an EU Regulation against using gloss paint on the edge of pools.  It took my ankle three months to recover from the sprain.

Before you say it….several wags have already pointed out that this clears up the question of my method.

It’s gotta be Total Immersion.

The Plan

The Execution

What’s coming up

I’m now taking the “Dr Popkins Method?” project forward.

In addition, I’ve begun the “Momentos” occasional series here on the blog. They vignettes here on the site from my own language learning life over the last three decades.

Some of them “Dr Popkins Method?” videos are already up over on the YouTube channel.

At the moment the plan is for six video instalments.

I’ve decided to post on this here on the site too. The written word gives me more space for a bit more detail. Plus, I know that some of you are a lot less into YouTube than I am.

I want to tell my own personal story, with my best languages: French, Welsh, German and Russian but also with the five or six others I’ve worked on to a less than fluent level.

I’ll look at my personal strengths and weaknesses.

Then I want to look at why I was – and am – excited by languages in the first place….

…and how I keep going even when it doesn’t feel like there’s any progress or when that initial excitement starts to wane.

At the very least, this project will help me get clear on what I’ve done and how it’s changed over the years.

Fact is, even if I still have to go, I’ve gained massively in experience over the years.

I’ve kept learning languages.

I’ve read and more about language learning.

I’ve trained as a Welsh and English teacher…. What could possibly go wrong ?

Over to you

As you follow my story maybe you’ll think “Ah-ha! that’s where I’ve been missing the ponit”.

You could equally think “Ah-ha! glad I haven’t made the same dumb mistakes as you, Gareth”.

Either way, I hope you’ll find the series worth checking out.

It’s a good opportunity for us to get to know each other better as language learners and as people…..So please tell your own story in the comments below or get in touch by email (address under the about tab).

And for those of you who DO share my love of video, here’s the first episode in vlog form too.

Look out for upcoming posts in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series!

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