What is the best language learning course?

Looking at the numbers

by BENNY LEWIS

Any answer to the question posed in the title of this post will inevitably be
loaded with presumptions, bias, personality preference, anecdotal or
confused sources of evidence, guesses with no actual experience, irrelevant
criteria and many other things that lead it to give an impossible or misleading
real answer, because simply, there is just no one best way to learn a
language.

I could give you my opinion on the best sources of information to find out
about your target language, but that wouldnt mean much to so many people
because of my particular preferences, goals and past experiences, so this is
why I thought it best to get an overall view first from many people about
what the best language learning course/book/material is.

To do this, I asked 267 people a detailed list of questions, and rather than
focus on one final answer, I want to show you how the answer in a particular
context changes everything.

Of course, I tried to be as scientific as possible, but since those polled are

restricted to readers of this blog (or the How to learn any language forum)
and are thus a small segment of language learners in general, it cant be
perfect. Having said that, the results are absolutely worth considering

The deal-breaker: asking the right people the question

If I simply asked the question What is the best language learning course,
the most popular answer could actually be worthless. Think about this for a
second: if you ask the general population a question about what is best, in
many situations most of them are simply not experienced enough in the
matter to give you a useful answer.

For example, if you polled everyone on which girls shoes look the nicest,
then perhaps most guys answering the question (like myself) would be simply
too shoe-stupid to even have an opinion that matters. Their answers would
taint the useful result. You are better asking the fashion-aware such a
question.

This may sound offensive, but frankly I dont care what not-yet-successful
language learners tell me the best course is. Their opinion is based on
extrapolation of potential, how much fun it is (nice, but sometimes irrelevant
in terms of actual results), how much progress they feel they are making
(which is grossly exaggerated in many courses), and use of the language in
the wrong context compared to how they may wish to use it (too much
reading, not enough speaking for example leaving them ill-prepared in all
conversations with natives).

But I still absolutely wanted to hear from them because they sometimes have
much more experience than successful language learners in what definitely
doesnt work. The results were interesting!

The separation:

One of the first questions I asked was What is your experience in learning
languages? The results were as follows:

To attempt to define fluency for the purposes of this question, I said it means
you could confidently live and/or have lived entirely through the language at
some time. It may not be perfect, as I defined fluency in more detail
somewhere else, but it separated people sufficiently.

Responses Percentage

I have already successfully learned a foreign language to *fluency*

independently as an adult using books/courses. 39 15%

I have already successfully learned a foreign language to *fluency* in an

academic environment, or by living abroad/with natives. 41 15%

I am learning a foreign language now and hope to speak it well very

soon/some day. 106 40%

Other 81 30%
As expected, most people reading a blog about learning languages, and a
forum about it too, are in the process of speaking their first foreign language.

Other, when explained, were actually answers already stated but rephrased
to sound nicer. Sometimes giving people an extra choice is a bad idea! Their
answers are not covered in the data below.

Anyway the almost even divide between successful (the 39 + 41 learners)

versus the not-yet-successful (106 learners) made the results based on those
answers quite interesting and definitely worth analysing!

What makes a successful learner?

Now just the first two groups (reached fluency independently and in an
academic/immersion environment) got asked Why were you successful in
learning your foreign language to fluency?

Here is a chart of the results:

Response Votes

My school did a good job & teacher(s) were very helpful 35

I worked very hard and studied much more than other students 31

I might just have a natural talent for languages as I picked it up no problem

14

I had a stay abroad or spent a lot of time with natives that hugely influenced
my learning experience 54

Other 34

This was a selection-box, (not either-or) so they could pick more than one
answer. Its clear that time with natives is the big winner here, but there is no
doubt that an academic background was very helpful to many successful
learners (keep in mind a lot of readers of this blog are Europeans who learned
English to fluency in school for example).

I was happy to read this as it shows that some academic institutions are
moving in the right direction. I dont rule them out as useless, but I think the
traditional learning approach is way inferior to a more improved version. Of
course, answers B & C show that progress depended on a good student
rather than a good system in many cases.

Answers in Other included more flowery rephrasing of what I had already

said (!), as well as several answers saying that they were active in seeking
out conversation even if they didnt have constant access to natives. Others
said they got as much exposure as possible (through TV, radio, magazines
etc.)

The next question I asked this group was Have you ever studied a foreign
language independently?

This was to scope the usefulness of the courses question coming next. Only
4% replied to say that they have only learned in an academic situation and
have never invested their own time/money into separate courses. As well as
confirming the usefulness of the next information, this also tells me that even
those who were happy with their academic background still had to work on
their own.

Letting your school do all of the work for you and simply following their
directions and nothing else is clearly not a practical path to fluency.

Choices of successful learners

Now for the moment youve all been waiting for Which of the following
courses/materials have you used and found to be beneficial?
Answerers could pick more than one. I asked the exact same question of both
successful and not-yet-successful learners. As I was totally expecting, this
does not point to one dramatic winner, but there are some that do come out
ahead for successful learners:

Most beneficial Resource: Votes

Websites (busuu/Livemocha/LingQ etc.) 23

Book/course specific to my target language 41

TV/radio/podcasts/reading 67

Other was a place to write the specific course for specific languages, and I
didnt find anything consistent enough to merit a mention, since learners are
covering such a wide range of languages.

The clear winner here is not actually a course at all, its native material.
TV/radio/podcasts/reading win over everything else by far.

Other than that we have Busuu, Livemocha & LingQ and other websites which
I didnt separate because these are language-learning tools rather than
courses (Busuu & Livemocha are useful for meeting people online, and the
free version of LingQ is very useful for input to practise reading & listening
neither actually have a course that gets you anywhere beyond the basics),
and I have covered these in detail before.

Then Teach yourself, Assimil and Pimsleur come out as the clear winners as
courses.

I have experience in using these myself and can agree to them being ahead
of the rest.

Although it got less votes, Michel Thomas was more voiced in comments as
being useful. I have also had good experience with Colloquial (such as in
Portuguese) but it seems to be slightly less mainstream.
If you are curious, the answers to the same question for the not-yet-
successful learners were slightly different. Teach yourself came out on top of
the courses and the same number of people voted for the websites and
tv/radio/podcasts/reading. As I said, these results were the least interesting to
me as they only discuss potential and I prefer to look at information based on
actual results.

The most unhelpful courses

Here are the successful (1st group) and not-yet-successful (2nd group)
learners answers to the question Which of the following courses/materials
have you used and found to be unhelpful?

The obvious loser is Rosetta Stone. This was accompanied with mountains of
comments and colourful language about why it doesnt work.

It will waste your time in terms of reaching fluency, although the comments I
received that were praising it (as expected, almost entirely restricted to the
not-yet-succssful learners) say how enjoyable it is to use. I recommend that
these people buy a fun computer game if they want to mouse-click their way
to enjoyment.

The runner up loser is Pimsleur. You can read the thorough and honest
Pimsleur approach review here.

After that come the websites which I still say are useful, but are simply not
complete enough to help people learn what they need to reach fluency in my
experience.

What is also interesting is when you compare these two side-by-side as I have
placed them. From this, you can make two observations:

As I mentioned at the beginning, I had approximately the same number of

successful & not-yet-successful learners in this poll. And yet the numbers of
votes per course are much higher (double!) for not-yet-successful learners
(see the indication below the bars). This is because they selected more
options (this was a check-box question) this indicates to me that
unsuccessful learners dont stick with one programme consistently enough
and may own several (since I said in the question that they have used them,
rather than simply being familiar with them). More courses does not equal
more success. Use what you have and use it well, rather than spending more
money (or downloading more courses) and feeling that is getting you closer
to your target.

Not one single successful learner found TV/radio/podcasts/reading to be

unhelpful. That big gap in the chart is a pretty clear reinforcement of how
useful exposure to non-course native-material can be. Not-yet-successful
learners have tried this, but clearly they are doing too many things at once to
get any real benefit from any one in particular, including native-material
exposure.

Conclusions

I had asked other questions in this survey, but the results from those are just
minor interesting points I will raise at another time, or they simply contain no
useful information from a statistical perspective. However, I would like to take
this opportunity to thank everyone who took part! This information is really
interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your accompanying
comments!

What is clear from the answers here is that there may not be a best course,
but there are certainly bad ones. I will investigate the top good results (no
point in beating a dead horse and dwelling too much on the bad ones) and
analyse what they are good for and what they are not good for, and hopefully
that will bring people who are wondering which one to invest in, one step
closer to a decision!

However, I want to make this absolutely clear: It isnt about the course!! I am
discussing the topic because its on so many peoples minds, and some
courses are indeed slightly better than others for particular situations, but
buying the perfect course means nothing if you dont put the work in, and
get out of your shell to practise with human beings, or at least get as much
active exposure as you can.
Do you think you will follow in the footsteps of successful learners before
you? Can you stay focused on the course you have and even abandon it as
soon as possible to expose yourself to actual native content and even meet
up with natives? Do you agree with these results, or would you draw different
conclusions based on the information? Let me know in the comments!

Oh and dont forget to share all these pretty bar graphs !