Efficiency
How to avoid redundancy in your language studies
Welcome, aspiring polyglot! I recently reached out to my high school English teacher. With any luck she is reading this now! She was hands down the most influential educator I ever interacted with throughout high school (in 3 countries) and college (in 2 countries). Without her this business likely wouldn’t even exist, though my exchange year played a big part.
One of her pet peeves was, and likely still is, redundancy. To this day I still remember her specific examples.
“Don’t say this morning in the AM. If it’s the morning I already know it is the AM.”
“Deja vu all over again makes no sense. ‘Already seen all over again??’ Do not be redundant!”
Some of the ones that now irk me, since she so graciously imparted this pet peeve onto me, are: basic fundamentals, past history, and free gift. All of these are examples of ways in which many people mess up their own native language every single day. This is a conversation I have with all of my students. irrespective of your ideal timeline, mastering a new language is a lifelong endeavor.
Efficiency
A common theme amongst my students is a desire to use as many words as necessary to express themselves. That is standard. In fact, if you are learning a new language right now you are likely doing the same thing. Keep doing it. I only point it out because the natural next step is learning to express as much as possible using as few words as possible.
Effectiveness is important during the beginning phases of language acquisition. Effectively communicating matters far more than efficiently communicating when every word is a fight. In fact, this very same process is mirrored physiologically in the brain as the neural pathways you are developing at this stage are effective, but they are far from efficient.
Working with an instructor is a good way to avoid a lot of this. After all, if you can learn from someone else’s mistakes then you should. Save yourself the time and trouble of making common mistakes by learning what common mistakes look like. You should do this in both your native and your target language since they often overlap.
With how many mistakes English speakers make in their native language every single day, it really is not surprising that foreign language education in the US is so painstaking. You are ultimately limited by how much you know and if you have to learn a new concept (that you already use in your native language anyway) you are spending valuable time trying to understand things you already know.
That is why I created the “English for Foreign Language Learners” guide. The purpose is to give you names for the highest ROI grammar concepts in English so that you know how they correlate with grammar structures in foreign languages. For the vast majority of you reading this, you probably already know 50% of what is in the guide. If you do not, however, I highly recommend you download it.
I am making this guide free because I think it would be a national disservice to do anything else. If you like it, be sure to check out the Guides page of the website for new guides released every month. Paid subscribers will receive every guide drop direct to their inbox so consider supporting if you aren’t already!
Giveaways
Some of the common giveaways that someone might not completely understand their own native language involve forming perfectly good sentences that are widely employed, just incorrectly. For example, ending sentences with prepositions. That is, the word for or with or at or or or.
A mistake like this becomes a major issue when learning a new language because in a great number of languages it is impossible to form a proper sentence that ends with a preposition. If you don’t believe me, try and construct a sentence in your target language that ends with the word “with”. While it can certainly be done in English, that is technically grammatically incorrect.
Another telltale sign not understanding your native language is redundancy. In almost every system, redundancy is the first thing one attempts to reduce. The extra brain power necessary may seem inconsequential, but if you do it all the time then you are wasting brain power for no reason.
“5 am in the morning” is redundant.
“A free gift” is redundant".
“To revert back” is redudant.
“An ATM machine” is redundant.
The more you know, the more you understand, the less you have to stress about wasting brain power on things that don’t matter. As a working adult, you have way too much going on to be wasting your energy inefficiently. Fortunately, by catching yourself making these mistakes you will improve in both your native language and your target language along with any subsequent language you learn.
Improving your ability
Vocabulary expansion can happen in a few different ways and in order to get the most out of your time you need to make sure you are doing the right things to reach your goal, whatever that goal might be. Vocabulary expansion is made up of two parts: recognition, or words that you can recognize when you see them, and retrieval, or words you are able to employ yourself.
Both parts are necessary and you really can’t have the latter without having the former first. Compression is an exercise that will help you train your retrieval and your precision. So, what is compression?
Write out a story. It needs to be at least 10 sentences long, but the more the better.
Now, take that story and cut it by 20% WITHOUT losing any of the intended meaning
Iterate
This is a pretty advanced exercise, but you will still get something out of it if you are a novice. You can also achieve similar results by choosing someone else’s words and compressing them or paraphrasing them into your own words. Another way to do it is the same way in which Benjamin Franklin did it.
Read an article/essay/story
Take notes
Reconstruct the article based on memory and notes 48-72 hours later
Compare against the original
Grade yourself
Where were you right?
Where were you wrong?
What could you improve?
When will you try again?
Exercises by what they train:
Retrieval and precision:
Take any paragraph you wrote and cut it to half length with zero information loss. The word count is the score.
Banned words: rewrite a page without very, thing, good, bad, get, nice, interesting. Bans force retrieval of the specific word the lazy word was covering for.
No repeats: write 500 words in which no noun or verb appears twice. This will be brutal and immediately reveal of how small your active vocabulary is.
Taboo descriptions: define or describe something without using its five most obvious associated words.
Discrimination:
The distinction game: take near synonym pairs (envy and jealousy, vague and ambiguous, continual and continuous, uninterested and disinterested) and write the one sentence where swapping them changes the meaning. If no such sentence exists, you’ve learned they’re true synonyms, which is also knowledge.
Register laddering: one proposition, five registers, from the bar to a legal brief to King James. That is to say, write the same thing to 5 different recipients with varying degrees of formality to train your true understanding of cultural norms where your target language is spoken.
Acquisition:
The usage quota: writing words into a notebook is worthless without a usage rule. Three genuine uses within a week (conversation, email, anything real) or the word you are going to have to learn the word twice. Retrieval effort is what moves a word into the active set; rereading a list ultimately moves nothing.
Root harvesting: take one Latin or Greek root per week and generate the whole family before checking a dictionary. See my Latin roots material for help with this challenge in guide form; the challenge version is doing it from memory first.
Structural pressure:
Strict verse: sonnets and blank verse force vocabulary search the way nothing in normal writing does, because the right word must also fit into the structure. Writing to conform to standards is a powerful way to force yourself into using words and grammar mechanisms you might otherwise try to avoid.
Round trip translation: translate a paragraph into your target language and translate it back a day later, then compare with the original. The gaps between versions become a personalized vocabulary syllabus.
A quick warning with regards to compression and editing/translation in general. When something is truly written well, it will be nearly impossible to compress. When an author actually uses every word to the fullest, trying to compress the writing means diluting or altogether destroying the intended meaning. If you are getting frustrated, move on to the next sentence or the next excerpt.
Conclusion
My classes have an incredibly condensed timeline. 3 months is not a long time, while it is also a pretty long time. Therefore, I cannot afford to waste my students time or brain power. Every single person I work with has a full time job, most of them have children, efficiency is absolutely paramount to their, and my, success. That is why we do most of these things and why I think you should, too.
Adding these exercises into your weekly routine will drastically improve your vocabulary which, if you were to ask me, is the most important part of learning any new language. After all, there are far more words than there are grammar structures. It is certainly difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.
Exams reward a specific kind of preparation that most self-study methods don’t provide. Paid subscribers get access to exam-focused strategies and frameworks in the Guides library designed to complement what you learned in this post.
Need to hit a score by a specific date? I build exam-specific private courses with targeted preparation for TOEFL, CLEP, DELE, DELF, and more. One of my students passed his TOEFL and got accepted to a New York university after working together for three months. Read his story and others here.
I cannot thank you enough for writing this, and *especially* for the ROI grammar pdf. I've been searching for something exactly like that for a long, long time.