Maximize work not done
How do you arrive at your goal while doing the least amount of work?
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
When studying languages we may find ourselves doing work on faith, not knowing for sure whether or how it will get us to where we want to be with our language.
For example, if we’re using a language app, we may find that it’s serving up nonsense sentences that we can’t imagine actually encountering. If we’re using a flashcard app, we might be learning words that seem less important than words we could be using right away. Our textbook might be teaching grammar that goes way beyond the level we can actually speak at.
Then we might notice that we are making good progress at, say, conjugating regular verbs in the pluperfect, but we can barely follow any of the last five podcast episodes we listened to.
We make progress in an area that feels less important than an area where we feel we are dragging.
If you created clear goals and know where you’re going, think about whether you could cut out some of the extraneous work so you can get there faster.
Simplify.
I taught an intensive Biblical Hebrew class. If you follow the textbook, you learn how to conjugate the regular verb, “write,” before the much more common but irregular verbs “go,” “come,” and “say.” You learn the simple tenses, perfective and imperfective, before the peculiar Biblical Hebrew narrative tenses. (They look a lot like the opposite tense than they actually indicate.) In actual usage, you will come across irregular verbs in narrative tenses way more often than any other verb. So, the textbook teaches the verbs in the backwards order of least common to most common for the sake of order.
While my students needed to learn the rules, they could not read the first three verses of the easiest book of the Bible without those irregular verbs in this peculiar tense. I simplified. I had them immediately memorize the common words in their conjugated forms, not the “dictionary” form. They didn’t know why “and he went” was formed the way it was, but they began to read real content right away.
Once they had encountered the common, irregular verbs many times in texts, the explanation in the textbook explained their concrete experience rather than an abstract system.
Your goal is likely to get into native-level content eventually. Here are two potential approaches. One, you can begin to read an actual text by memorizing “And he went,” “And he came,” and “And he said.” Two, you can work your way through chapter 24 in your textbook and memorize five verb paradigms and three verb conjugations.
Simplify. If you goal is to “maximize the amount of work not done,” you would choose the first method.
Does that mean that you should never memorize the other verbs or conjugations? By no means! When learning the regular verbs is the simplest way to arrive at your next goal, you should do so. If you find yourself frustrated that you can’t find words in the dictionary, learning all the verb paradigms may help you parse it so you can look them up faster.
Sometimes, the most direct route contains steep slopes so that the seemingly indirect route takes less time and energy — simpler. For example, creating a flashcard deck with the precise words you need may take a couple hours to create before you even start to study. An app may have a deck already made of which half includes words I need. Studying that pre-made deck may get me to my goal with less work than creating my own deck.
Take another example. Creating paper flash cards might take less time to actually create than electronic ones, but I might not memorize words with paper in as short a time as I would on a spaced-repetition app. Electronic is then simpler because it is less work done to arrive at the goal.
The #AgilePolyglot looks for all the shortcuts to access native content. Try to discern what stands in the way of comprehending or speaking better. Create some goals to experiment with the possibilities. Talk to other language-learners who overcame the same sort of hurdle that you did. However you choose to get to your destination, try to find the simplest path. If you find that you improved, great. If not, try to find a better route.
In reality, you will likely not get to where you aim to go by the most direct route. That’s fine. Learn what you can along the way, even from apparent mistakes. Acquiring an extra list of vocabulary or another verb tense will help you eventually, in any case.
Enjoy the ride — but try to make it as simple as you can.
