Reinventing square wheels.

It's amazing the number of people on the internet that promise to do something entirely new, and then retread the same "new" ground that has proved fruitless for thousands before them.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it's great that so many people are willing to experiment, and I wish I had half the confidence in myself that they have in themselves, but I just wish they'd stop and do a bit more research and a bit more reflection before jumping in and declaring that they have the method to end all methods.

I won't name any names here (although if you've seen it, you'll know which one I'm talking about), but the latest is yet another picture-word mnemonic idea.  Well sorry, but that has been done innumerable times before, and there are even many professional resources on the market based on this idea.

The idea is certainly appealing: you can understand why it should work.  But more insidiously, you're consciously aware of everything you have learned using it, making it appear far more noteworthy than it is.  But it's a very limited technique, as a recent literature review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest aptly demonstrates (see section 5: The Keyword Mnemonic).  It clearly works in the short term, but appears to be a potential barrier in the long term.  Either way, it takes up a lot of time, and the more mnemonic images you have, the harder it is to sort through them.  I myself have a couple of mnemonic images for Russian stuck in my head... but I can't remember what the word means.

Ponimatz.  A pony on a mat.  What does it mean?  I have no idea.
Patchimoo.  A Frisian cow (cos it's all patchy).  What does it mean?  I have no idea.

I can hear these words on TV and recognise them, and see the image, but I have absolutely no notion of what they mean.

The PSPI article picks up on this problem, with the idea of teaching French "dent" (tooth) with the image of a dentist holding a tooth in his pliars.  When you recall the image you have to decide whether you're looking at the dentist, the pliars, the tooth, the patient....  (Of course, "dent" was always going to be a particularly stupid word to teach that way, given that with "dentist" and "dental" in the English language, it's not a hard word to teach as a cognate.)

PSPI states also the obvious: images only lend themselves ready to certain, very concrete, concepts -- the problem with my Russian images is (if I remember correctly) that they were fairly abstract terms that don't have an obvious visual representation.

The latest "big idea" that I started talking about earlier seems to take that on board, thankfully.  The proposer suggests that he's picking some easy and memorable words to start with simply so that the learner has enough vocabulary to be able to learn grammar, based on the belief that you can't learn grammar without enough words behind you.  (Note that this is demonstrably untrue, as Michel Thomas demonstrated multiple times during his life.)  He decided from there that the trick was to use toilet humour, and teach moderately dirty words.

Unfortunately, he's fallen foul of just about every trap in the image mnemonic book.

First up, he mixes phonetic mnemonics with orthographic mnemonics.

So "pene" (penis) is phonetically twinned with "penne" (the pasta shape), but "ballena" (slender L, realised as /j/ in many dialects) is orthographically twinned with "ballet".

His mnemonics are also polluted by native-language phonology, particularly the Y and W-glide long vowels in English.  So "borracho" (drunk) (which he incidentally spelled wrong) is compared with a rat chewing.  Not only is the E blatantly the wrong vowel, but the mnemonic encourages the W-glide, something which has to be actively fought against when teaching Spanish to an English speaker, not encouraged.

This goes a step further when he equates "aburrido" (bored) with "a burrito".  As soon as I read that, I heard his accent.  But the weak US T is not the same as a Spanish D, and like the diphthongisation of vowels, the T/D distinction is something that needs to be actively taught/learned to avoid the learner falling into bad habits that are difficult to shift later on.  Worse: burrito is a Spanish word, borrowed into English, and the two words have nothing in common.  The mnemonic not only reinforces pre-existing phonemic confusion, but it also starts to mislead in terms of morphology: -ido is a past participle ending, and -ito is a diminutive.

Loan-words as a teaching device have always been fraught with difficulties, and there is one bookshelf audio course out there that makes the same mistake, teaching the -ado past participle ending in Spanish by comparison to "bravado", which we borrowed from Spanish in the first place.  The problem is, the teacher says a southern English "ado", with it's weak A sound, not the harder A of Spanish, and with the w-glide O diphthong, rather than Spanish's pure O.

I was going to give this guy a break, and leave him to just run out of steam quietly, but then after all his promises of having a "new" way that would teach grammar using dirty stories and insults, he suddenly popped up again on one of the forums asking for advice on how to teach grammar.

And this is the problem with languages on the internet -- there are a million and one guys out there who have "an idea", but one idea is not enough for an entire course.  There are so many variables to think about in teaching a language that I've been running over them in my head for about 8 years now and it's only after spending hundreds of hours in front of a classroom of students that I really feel I can start to knit my "ideas" together into some sort of coherent whole.

Are ideas useless...?
No, ideas are great.  But if you have one idea, don't attempt to build an entire teaching solution around it.  Start small.  Build resources; make things that other people with other ideas may be able to stitch together into something far more useful than you alone can make.

The internet is full of lesson 1s, sometimes with a lesson 2 and occassionally even a lesson 3.  But if you never get beyond that, and your material is tied to your lesson (whether through technical means or due to your choice of license), no-one will benefit from it.

If you try to be everything to everyone, you will fail, so why not just be something small, and let others may that something part of something big?

One of the big arguments that comes up on the net is over the usefulness or otherwise of rote learning.  It is near universal that people who support "rote learning" don't actually know what rote learning is.  To them, "by rote" is synonymous with "by repetition".  If this were so, we would not have invented the word rote, and there would be no argument, as everyone knows that there is no learning without repetition.

What rote learning is is repetition without meaning.  Rote learning is when we memorise a list of dates, or the order of kings of France without any background.  Learning these meaningfully means looking for linkages and cause and effect.

The example I recently used elsewhere was the presidents of the USA, a subject that I don't really know much about.

Here's four of them:
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford

How did I remember these?

First of all, part of it is mnemonic.  If you look at the syllables, you have !.. !. !. ! (where ! is a stressed syllable and . is an unstressed one).  To me, there's a rhythm in there that's reminiscent of playground chants.  Are mnemonics rote?  To a point, maybe, but mnemonics aim to give artificial meaning to inherently meaningless data, so not strictly rote.  Besides, this is not the main way I learned the order, it's just an additional support.

First up, I looked at the order on the internet.  I looked for links.
The first thing I recalled was that I had seen TV archive footage of Nixon and Kennedy running against each other in the presidential elections.  Kennedy was shot, while Nixon resigned, but that doesn't tell me who was first.  The meaningful information that tells me Kennedy was first is the archive footage mentioned previously, but more specifically the accompanying analysis: it is said that it was TV that won the election for JFK, because he looked so much nicer.  Hearing that said over the top of pictures of Kennedy smiling and waving with Nixon hunched up and looking concerned sticks -- it really means something.

So Kennedy was before Nixon.  How do the other two fit in?

Well, that relies on knowing a little bit about the American terms of office.  If a president dies or steps down, he is replaced by his vice-president.  Nixon and Kennedy ran against each other, so there must have been another president between them, as Kennedy died.  And when Nixon resigned, his VP took over.

The names Johnson and Ford don't really mean much to me, and here's where the mnemonic chant helps, but if we look a little further we can make things more meaningful.

Johnson, as it turns out, was re-elected for a second term.  He won the largest majority of a US president in history.  Why?  Many commentators say it was a sympathy vote for JFK, as it wasn't really that long after the assassination.

Ford, on the other hand, was never re-elected.  Which isn't a surprise given that he took over from someone who resigned in disgrace.  To make matters worse, the economy was on a downturn at the time.

Filling in a picture of the most prominent features of these two gives me context -- meaning -- and looking at their photographs makes them people rather than facts.

I fully expect to be able to recall this right up until I start to go senile, because it now really does mean something to me.