10,000 hours

By Simon

There’s a idea floating around that in order to become proficient in any skill you need to spend around 10,000 hours practicing it. This figure comes from a study undertaken by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, which found that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in almost any skill.

This idea was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, and the original point of the research, which focused on experts in different fields – i.e. virtuoso musicians, Olympic athletes and others who were at the top of their field, became a bit muddied. People came to believe that to learn a new skill well, not just to expert level, you need 10,000 hours of practice.

There’s some discussion of the 10,000 hour ‘rule’ here which quotes Dr Ericsson as saying, “Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions.” Another study by Gobet and Campitelli found that some chess grand masters had had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but some took a lot longer – up to 26 years, and others reached that level in 2 years. Then there were some people who had the 10,000 hours of practice, but only played at an intermediate level. This seems to suggest that practice alone may not be sufficient to become an expert.

According to Josh Kaufman, whose TED talk I found the other day, you don’t need 10,000 hours to learn a new skill, but instead can attain basic proficiency in about 20 hours. He thinks that first you have to make sure you have the materials, tools, books, etc you need to learn. Then you deconstruct the skill, working out exactly what your goals are and the steps you need to take to achieve them. Then you focus on learning and practicing those steps for about 20 hours, minimizing distractions. He did this for the ukulele, and believes that this approach works for any skill, including learning languages.

While this can work for the ukulele, a relatively easy instrument to learn, I somehow doubt it would work very well for more challenging instruments like the violin or piano, or for languages. In 20 hours you might acquire some basic proficiency of a language, or another skill, but it’s unlikely that you would good at it. There are exceptional people who can learn new skills very quickly, but for most of us it takes quite a bit longer.

One important part of Dr Ericsson’s findings was that your practice needs to deliberate. You need to focus on improving your performance and to notice any areas where you find difficult. When learning a language, for example, you might have trouble remembering how to form a particular tense, or with specific words or phrases. If you focus on such things, you can make more progress than if you don’t worry about them.

By the way, this blog has been nominated in the language learning blogs category of the Lexiphiles Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition. You can vote by clicking on the button below.

Vote the Top 100 Language Learning Blogs 2013

Everything but the kitchen sink

By Simon

The phrase ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ indicates many things or almost everything, as in ‘I took everything but the kitchen sink with me on holiday. The OED gives the earliest use of the phrase in writing as 1965. The kitchen sink part of the phrase apparently comes from army slang and appears in Partridge’s 1948 Dictionary of Forces’ Slang as “Kitchen sink, used only in the phrase indicating intense bombardment ‘They chucked everything they’d got at us except, or including, the kitchen sink.’”

According to Know Your Phrase, however, it appeared in The Syracuse Herald, an New York newspaper in 1918 in the following sentence.

“I have I shall rather enjoy the experience, though the stitlons are full of people trying to get out and the streets blocked with perambulators, bird cages and ‘everything but the kitchen sink.'”

I discovered yesterday that the French equivalent is ‘tout sauf les murs‘ (everything but the walls), as in j’ai tout emporté sauf les murs = I took everything but the walls.

In Welsh the equivalents are popeth dan haul (everything under the sun) and eich holl drugareddau (your whole bric-a-brac).

Are there equivalent idioms in other languages?

Les mots de la semaine

By Simon
français English Cymraeg Brezhoneg
le filet net rhwyd tanavenn
le siège (chair, stool, toilet); la place (on bus/train); la selle (bicycle) seat sedd seziz
la hache d’arme battleaxe bwyell ryfel; cadfwyell kadvouc’hal
le virago battleaxe (quarrelsome woman) hen sguthan; hen arthes oz(h)ac’hwreg
le coucou cuckoo cwcw; cog koukoug
la pendule à coucou cuckoo clock cloc cwcw
le loutre otter dyfrgi dourgi
le slip underpants trôns; drafers bragez vihan
les caleçons; les longs longjohns / leggings trôns llaes; drafers hir bragoù-dindan
le (chapeau) haut-de-forme top hat het silc
le (chapeau) melon bowler hat het galed; het gron (galed) tog-meloñs; tok pompad
le chapeau mou trilby het feddal; het drilbi
le dent; la roue dentée cog dant; cocsyn; olwyn ddannedd rod dantek
être un rouage de la machine to be (only) a cog in a machine bod neb o bwys yn y drefn
la gargote greasy spoon, cheap restaurant bwyty bwyd loddin; bwyty rhad tarzhell
j’ai tout emporté sauf les murs I’ve packed everything but the kitchen sink popeth dan haul; eich holl drugareddau
la gouttière guttering landeri; landerydd; bargod kan-dour
le jardin d’hiver conservatory ty gwydr; ystafell wydr jardin go(u)añv
la croisière cruise mordaith; criws merdeadenn
être en maraude to cruise (for customers, i.e. taxi)

Coal biter

By Simon

kol-bitr in Elder Futhark and Younger Futhork

I learnt an interesting word in Old Norse recently: kol-bitr (“coal-biter”), which refers to an idle person who always sits by the fire. kol = coals, charcoal, and bitr = biting, snapping; cutting, sharp [source].

In Elder Futhark runes this is ᚲᛟᛚ᛫ᛒᛁᛏᚱ and in Younger Futhork runes it’s ᚴᚫᛚ᛫ᛓᛁᛐᚱ.

A visitor to Omnglot asked me about this expression and how to write it in Runes. I thought I’d post it here to show the kinds of questions that stream in to Omniglot HQ. I never know what I’ll be asked, and do my best to answer whatever questions come my way, and I’ve become pretty good at finding information, no matter how obscure.

It’s on the knitting needles

By Simon

Yesterday I discovered that the Welsh idiom, ar y gweill, which can be translated as ‘in the pipeline’, ‘on the way’, ‘in hand’ or ‘underway’ literally means “on the knitting needles”. It’s the plural of gweillen (knitting needle). To knit is gwau or gweu, and a knitter is gwëwr, gweuwr or gwëydd.

Here are some examples of how it is used (from MyMemory translated.net):

– Mae hynny ar y gweill = That has been set in place
– Mae cynlluniau ar y gweill = Plans are in the pipeline
– Mae’r paratoadau ar y gweill = Preparations for this are underway
– Mae’r trafodaethau hyn ar y gweill = These discussions are in hand

I don’t think I’ve come across any knitting-related idioms like this before, so it caught my attention. Do you know any knitting related idioms?

More on grammar

By Simon

The importance of grammar in language learning is often played down in language courses and by people who blog about language learning. They claim that you can learn a language either without actively studying the grammar (whatever they mean by the word), or that you only need to glance at grammar books and explanations now and then. This is partly a reaction against the grammar-translation approach to language teaching in which you concentrate on learning verb conjugations, noun declensions, etc, and on translating from and to the target language.

I think that grammar, i.e. how a language works, and grammatical terminology (if you don’t already know it), can be short cuts to achieving competence in a language. If you spend all you time learning nouns, for example, and don’t know how to put them together with other words to make sentences, then your ability to communicate will be very limited. Grammar provides the framework of a language and vocabulary provides the content. You need to learn both.

The question for me is not whether you need to learn/acquire grammar, but how you do so. Some people are able to read a grammar book, absorb the information and apply it – one friend, for example, spent nine months learning Finnish grammar, then moved to Finland (from Germany) and became fluent in Finnish within a few months. For most people though this is probably wouldn’t work. You can absorb a lot of grammar from extensive listening and reading, with some checking of grammar books, but some overt study can be useful as well.

What is your approach?

What do you mean by grammar?

By Simon

A lot of discussions on how to learn languages mention grammar – whether it should be learnt overtly at all; whether it should be introduced gradually from the start, or only after one has a some knowledge of the new language, and so on.

There are often asides about how English-speaking people, especially the younger generations of English speakers, don’t even know the grammar of their own language.

What people mean by grammar is rarely discussed or defined, as it is assumed that everyone knows what grammar is, don’t they?

The OED has the following on grammar:

“That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing.

In early English use grammar meant only Latin grammar, as Latin was the only language that was taught grammatically. In the 16th century there are some traces of a perception that the word might have an extended application to other languages; but it was not before the 17th century that it became so completely a generic term that there was any need to speak explicitly of ‘Latin grammar’. Ben Jonson’s book, written c1600, was applied the first to treat of ‘English grammar’ under that name.

As above defined, grammar is a body of statements of fact — a ‘science’; but a large portion of it may be viewed as consisting of rules for practice, and so as forming an ‘art’. The old-fashioned definition of grammar as ‘the art of speaking and writing a language correctly’ is from the modern point of view in one respect too narrow, because it applies only to a portion of this branch of study; in another respect, it is too wide, and was so even from the older point of view, because many questions of ‘correctness’ in language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.”

It seems that when people say that (other) English speakers don’t know their grammar, what they mean is that they might not be familiar with grammatical terms, such as subject, object, adverb, declension, etc, and/or that they do not always use standard language, or at least that they do not speak or write in the way that the critics believe they should.

In terms of language learning, grammar can refer to verb conjugations, noun declensions and other ways that words change to indicate such things as person, number, tense, mood, etc. So saying that Chinese ‘has no grammar’ indicates that it has no inflections.

What do you mean when you talk about grammar?

Les mots de la semaine

By Simon
français English Cymraeg Brezhoneg
la brute; le tyran bully bwli tirant
tyraniser; rudoyer; intimider to bully gormesu; bwlio gaiet gante; abafiñ
la laisse lead tennyn roll
le pont deck (of ship) bwrdd pont
la passerelle (de commandement) bridge (of ship) pont (lywio) pontenn
l’arête (f) / le dos bridge (of nose) cefn ker
le chevalet bridge (of violin) pont pontig
quand le chat n’est pas là, les souris dansent when the cat’s away the mice will play llon llygod lle ni bo cath