Learning - transferable skills

Do the methods that I used to learn Spanish as an adult apply to other things I want to learn?  What did I do to be successful as an adult learner of Spanish?  I’m trying to learn some new skills right now that are not related to languages (I am also working on French and Mandarin too), and I would like to emulate what worked when I was on the road to learning Spanish.  I love learning lots of things, but I’m just going to focus on two for now, photography and guitar.  

I started “learning” guitar as a kid, but really just wanted to play rock songs, be a rock star, and not learn anything about real music.  I practiced and went to lessons, but my heart wasn’t really in it.  Now I’d like to learn guitar for a couple reasons.  First of all, I want my daughters to grow up around music, and I’m trying to teach my older daughter as I learn (we’re working on Jingle Bells right now).  Second, learning an instrument is great for brain health, don’t believe me then check this out. I can’t help but think I’d benefit from more rhythm, coordination, and concentration.  (A bonus to this skill is that I can learn great Spanish songs, which will help my Spanish as well).  So now I’m ready to be a little more serious about playing the guitar. I think I have okay motivation for guitar, yet I have very different reasons for learning photography.

Other than taking pictures with an old point-and-shoot, I’ve never had much interest in photography, well, at least not in taking pictures.  Looking at them was always fun.  My wife, on the other hand, has always loved photography and taking pictures, so a couple of years ago I bought her a DSLR camera for Christmas.  Great gift, right?  Well, actually for the past couple of years we’ve been using the thing in auto-mode the whole time, making it in effect one great big point-and-shoot.  Recently, I’ve taken interest in getting more out of our camera for several reasons.  First, I became the default photographer at a wedding that my wife was in when the photographer didn’t show, and got some okay shots, but nothing spectacular.  Second, I’d really love to get the most out of the camera that we have, as it is a pretty good one.  Third, I’d love to capture our life in a more artistic and meaningful way.  Fourth, who knows, maybe eventually photography could become a side gig.  So these are my “whys” about what I want to learn, but the “hows” are what can come from my experience with learning Spanish.  

What did I do when learning Spanish that can be applied to learning these other skills?

Habits -  This was probably the key to my success in learning Spanish.  I made many habits that I lived daily, like listening to Spanish learning mp3s anytime that I got a chance.  So, what habits will I make with the new skills I want to learn.  For the guitar, practice every day, and make it easy to do so.  I have a mini-goal to practice at least 5 minutes a day.  Some days it has been more, but the point is that even with 5 minutes I’m keeping up with the practice.  I’m also trying to practice in a better way, using a metronome, well, a metronome app to make sure I’m getting my rhythm down, but not all the time, sometimes I’m just having fun with it.  For photography I have a couple of habits I want to follow.  One is to take some pictures every day.  They can be anything, pics of the kids, food, flowers, anything.  Oh, and there’s a catch, this habit must be accompanied by this condition.  I must always use at least a semi-manual mode (like aperture priority or shutter priority) or better yet full-on manual.  If I’m taking pictures, but just using auto mode, then I’m not really learning anything.  This goes back to another habit from when I was learning Spanish, one that I still follow today, if it can be done in Spanish, don’t do it in English!  

Use multiple resources - I feel so fortunate to live in an age where information is at our fingertips and easy to access.  Learning Spanish, I used many resources, and each helped in its own unique way.  I used mp3s and cds, I took two semesters in college, I read Spanish learning books and books in Spanish, I watched Spanish tv and listened to Spanish radio (long before I could understand anything), I talked to people, and tried anything else I could find that I thought could be of value to learning.  While I may not be quite as exhaustive in my new endeavors, I still plan on using several resources.  For learning guitar, there are books, youtube videos, and friends to jam with. I’m working out of two very different books right now, and getting something very different from each one!  For photography I’m starting with books too, well I do work in a library after all.  I’m also taking a photography class on Lynda.com. The online class is great, because I get to see the photographer in action and making the adjustments to his camera, but the book slows things down and helps me to internalize the content so that I can recall it later.  There are also plenty of pins on pinterest that have great photography tips!  

Don’t do too much -  Maybe it’s just my short attention span, but I’ve always had success with learning doing little bursts, 10-15 minutes vs. hours of studying.  With Spanish it was often listening to podcasts that were about that length, or looking at a book for a few minutes.  With guitar, no grueling practice sessions until the fingers bleed. With photography likewise, there won’t be any need to take hundreds of photos a day, 2 or 3 will do.  Timing of these activities can be crucial too, the closer to bedtime, the better of a chance the brain will transfer these activities to long term memory.  I’m not saying don’t learn at other times of day, but reviewing a little before bed could most certainly be beneficial.  

Persist - Learning Spanish I remember feeling overwhelmed the first time we traveled to Panama.  My wife had to translate probably 95% of the time.  I didn’t let it get me discouraged, by the next year I spoke some more, and in a couple more years wouldn’t need any translation.  I already feel overwhelmed like this with photography, so many new terms, new concepts, and so many buttons!  From learning Spanish I’ve learned that learning comes with patience, practice, and good habits.   

Oh, and after I get more experienced with the camera expect to see some photography on this blog, as adding photos that I've taken will also be one of my new learning habits.



What about you?  What have you learned in the past, and how will that help you to learn new things in the future?  

My post on blog where I work: Connecting Kids With Culture

Please see my entry in Eleventh Stack, the blog of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Regionalisms

It’s no surprise that Spanish, being the official or de facto language of 20 Countries and also having had a large diaspora of its speakers, has many regional differences.  Learning about these differences can be beneficial to the Spanish learner, but at the same time too much attention can distract from more beneficial Spanish study.  

Regionalisms are words or phrases that are used in a certain region, the region can be as big as a hemisphere or as small as a city or town.  There are many famous regional phrases in Spanish.  Some very common examples include “Choclo (corn)” in Argentina,  “bacano” (cool) in Colombia, and guajalote (turkey) in Mexico.  There are many, many regionalisms.  With my wife and in-laws being Panamanian, I am most familiar with the words and phrases of Panama, of course.  I’ve also been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to speak with people from many different countries and learn some of the speech unique to their regions.  It is fascinating to learn about the lexical diversity within the Spanish language.  

That being said, I don’t necessarily think that learning regionalisms is the best use of time for the Spanish learner (with the obvious exception of learning about the way of speaking in a region that you’ll be traveling to, or of a local community of speakers).  When I was in an earlier phase of learning, I would try to memorize the different ways of saying things for different countries, and then I’d be talking to someone from Mexico looking for a work that I know how to say in Peru and the Dominican Republic, and would grind to a halt or have to explain to ask my Mexican friend how they say the said word.  My strategy after realizing how futile this was was to focus on what I learn or feel to be standard or that I know from experience.  Sometimes this doesn’t work out, like if I ask at a Mexican restaurant for a “carrizo” (drinking straw in Panama), the waiter may not understand and have to ask me to clarify, but I find not to be too great of an issue.  The time spent learning regionalism could be spent practicing the subjunctive, reading about “buen uso”, or doing some other beneficial learning activity.  I’m not saying that it can’t be beneficial at all, I’m just sayin that if you don’t have a trip to Paraguay planned, you may not need to know who to say “sandals” in Paraguay.  

If you are interested in learning more regional expressions in Spanish there are a couple great resources.

• Spanishpod.com has a great podcast series called “Del Taco al Tango” where they speak to guests from all around the Spanish speaking world. The hosts and guests are lively and they deal with topics other than just language, such as food and culture.  This is a paid subscription, but I found this product probably helped my progress more than anything outside of actually speaking.     
• Pinterest has plenty of infographics floating around on different ways to say things in Spanish, if you just type “Spanish” into the search window, you’ll come up with plenty.  

• Academias are great for learning “proper” regional Spanish.  The most famous academia is the Academia Real Española, which dictates proper Spanish and “buen uso” throughout the Spanish speaking world, and in recent decades has been much more inclusive of “Americanismos”.  Every Spanish speaking country has it’s own academia, including the United States, whose academy has the important role of being the federal government’s consultant on Spanish usage and style, which is a difficult task with the incredible amount of diversity in the origins of the Spanish speakers in the United States.  

The Balance: Learning vs. Doing

When I hear someone say they “aren’t good at languages”, I just don’t believe them.  I believe that they haven’t had the proper learning methods to help them succeed.  One of the ingredients missing from the repertoire of many language students is actually doing, rather than learning.   I am a firm believer that the earlier in the process a person tries to communicate with a native speaker of the language they’re learning, the better off they will be, even if at first they don’t understand a single thing that the native speaker says back to them!

When I started my first Spanish class, at 24 years old, I had a great encounter that I think exemplifies this concept.  I had just been in my Intro to Spanish class for a couple weeks and happened to be getting on a bus in the outskirts of Pittsburgh.  There was a Mexican couple who got on the bus in front of me, and the bus driver was trying to tell them that the fare would be an extra dollar, as the ride was beginning in zone 2, but the couple did not seem to be understanding what the driver said.   I paid for them, and proceeded to greet them.  All I had was a couple weeks in an intro Spanish class, and my textbook glossary, but we managed to talk for the full hour long bus ride.  It ended up being a great time, with both myself and the gentleman leafing through the glossary, sometimes our thoughts being cut off mid sentence due to how small of a vocabulary we both had, and the limited scope of the textbook glossary.  Did I learn anything from this experience?  linguistically?  I doubt it, but I believe it was still an important step in the development of my Spanish language abilities. It was time spent doing, not learning.  

Now, of course I still had tons of stuff to learn.  I still do!   Language has to be experienced.  Can you imagine someone learning to cook in a classroom, or behind a book.  Sure, you can expand your knowledge of food and technique, but until you get into the kitchen, you will not truly learn to cook.  Now some people will invariably argue “I want to understand what the person will say back to me before I start speaking to them in their language”.  A valid feeling, but understanding is a skill that comes with practice.  Practice actually doing it in conversation.  Understanding exercises in class or audio-programs certainly can be beneficial, but to really learn how to cook, one must enter the kitchen.  

Another concern people have is making mistakes, which can sometimes be embarrassing.  This will happen.  It is part of the process.  Embrace the mistakes, as they are learning opportunities.  When you make a mistake in conversation, if someone points it out to you or you realize it, you are more likely to remember it than if you made the mistake doing exercises from a book or in a classroom.  

My older daughter, who is 4, just started learning Mandarin (which I studied long before I started Spanish).  When we went to a Chinese restaurant recently, I encouraged her to speak Chinese with the waitress.  The waitress was very gracious and spoke back to my daughter and me in Chinese.  My daughter did not understand any of the replies to what she asked the waitress, and looked at me and said “huh”, but still had the courage to express herself in a language in which she only knew a couple basic phrases.  After our lunch, I rewarded and praised my daughter for having the courage to walk through her fear and try something new.  I told her that even though she didn’t understand, that someday she would and that she made an important first step.  I am genuinely proud of her for not allowing her self-consciousness get in her way.

The way children learn their first language is a great example for adults to follow as we venture into second language learning.  If they were afraid of talking because they might make a mistake, they would never end up speaking.  For the longest time my oldest daughter would say “you goed there”?  This follows the grammatical rules, but of course the past tense of “to go” is an exception to the rule.  Eventually she learned, through making the mistake.  As learners, this is what we must do.  We must embrace our mistakes to learn from them.  If we say “yo iré” or “yo voé” to mean “I went”, we will have made the mistake of assuming the verb “ir” followed the rule of adding an “é” to the end of the word in the first person singular to make it the preterite.  This would be a mistake, the correct form is “yo fui”, but having made the mistake this irregular will now stand out in our mind.  As James Joyce said “mistakes are the portals of discovery”.  

So if you are a beginner, or just shy about using the skills you’ve learned, just do it!  It will not make you fluent immediately, but get in the kitchen, it’s the only way you’ll really learn!  And remember, a mistake isn’t the end of the world!  It’s actually a valuable lesson that you’re now less likely to forget!

 

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing”

George Bernard Shaw