There Is an Iceberg of Words in Your Brain
As you learn a new language, consider that the mass of new words, concepts, and cultural understandings form a sort of iceberg in your brain.
Near the upper tip of the iceberg, floating effortlessly above the surface of the water, are words that you use regularly and easily.
Down deep, at the base of the iceberg are those words which you recognize as words, but can only understand if you hear them in their original context. Above them are those words you can understand with some contextual support.
Above them are the words that feel as thought they are on the tip of your tongue. Perhaps you have a sense of what the word starts with, how many syllables it has, what gender it was...
Above them are words you could come up with but haven't needed recently.
Above them are words you have spoken once or a few times.
Finally, at the topmost tip of the iceberg, are the words that you can understand before the person finishes saying them.
Words move up in the iceberg through repeated exposures in which they are heard and understood due to context.
How to Make the Iceberg Work for Me
How many times have you been trying to come up with a word or phrase, and just couldn't? Then you heard someone else say it, and immediately said, "Oh, yeah, that's it!" and felt stupid because you hadn't been able to say it! Actually, you shouldn't feel stupid, but should be glad because you recognized the word, so it was in your mind somewhere -- now you'll be able to think of it more easily next time!
Many language learners put great energy into attempting to master every word as fully as possible on first encountering it. They find that a large portion of the words they tried to master do not stay mastered. We find it works better to simply aim to put the words into the lower part of the iceberg and let them rise.
One person might expend great energy trying to put 300 words into the tip of the iceberg (the goal being to speak them out at will), to soon discover less than two hundred remain there. Another person, for the same expenditure of energy, might put a thousand words into the lower parts of the iceberg (the goal being to understand them when they are again heard in context), to soon discover that more than 200 of them have already risen to the tip of the iceberg. The latter language learner has achieved as much as the former when it comes to the words that are in the tip of the iceberg, but in addition, has another eight-hundred or so words in the iceberg, working their way up. The former language learner has only another 100 words lower in the iceberg working their way up.
The first time you hear and understand a word, it goes into the bottom of your iceberg. Then, as you hear and recognize the same word used in different contexts, it moves up in the iceberg. By the time you've heard it in about a dozen different contexts, it will have moved closer close to the top. You'll be able to use it now and then, and as you use it more, it will become part of the iceberg that rises above the water—words with which you are really familiar and comfortable using.
In our experience, most language learners find the iceberg principle a great encouragement. However, there are some who find it frustrating to apply this principle, and would prefer to learn less words, in order to feel a sense of greater level of mastery (at least they hope) of those they have attempted to learn. When working in accordance with the iceberg principle, they may express frequent frustration that they “can’t remember anything” when it is obvious to observers that they remember a huge amount (as they respond to words or can utter them after being reminded slightly). They just have a very strict standard for what they will count as something “remembered” - expecting instant ability to speak the word exactly right.
Basic Keys to the Iceberg Principle
(1) Get a large number of words into the iceberg, by concentrating on language learning activities during which you are hearing and understanding, before trying to say the words.
(2) Get a lot of exposure to understandable speech so that some words are always being ‘strengthened’, rising ever steadily to the part of the iceberg representing those that will easily emerge when you express your own ideas in your own words. Make sure that these encounters are in multiple contexts.
(3) Make sure your encounters with new words are “real encounters.”
(4) Be goal oriented.
(5) Deliberately refresh words you have encountered.
(6) Think concretely about the growth of your speaking vocabulary (as opposed to your listening vocabulary).
Relieve the Stress of Speaking
Another vivid picture of how words and words accumulate inside the listening and speaking sections of your brain, would be that of a volcano: the pressure of the words below pushing other words up into production.
As you accumulate words through the use of comprehension-led activities, focusing on listening with understanding, you will have more emotional energy to enjoy people and take in more language. As your understanding grows, so will your motivation and ability to express your own ideas with your own words.
Key 1. Get A Large Number Of Words In, Communicatively
And Key 2: Get A Lot Of Exposure To Understandable Speech
Some language learners put incredible energy into trying to master words quickly, by using rote memorization. After this huge effort, they are disappointed to find that, although they are able to access the words at first, a short time later they cannot - the words have gone down deeper into the iceberg, rather than remaining on top, ready for use.
For the same time and effort, by using a variety of comprehension-led or communicative language learning activities, these learners could have put a thousand words into the bottom of the iceberg, and helped other thousands move up higher in the iceberg.
The more words you put into the base of the iceberg, via encountering them in contexts that allow you to understand their meaning, the bigger the tip of the iceberg will grow.
What is a communicative activity?
A communicative activity involves actual communication using the language. You will learn the language most efficiently by allowing your brain to process it as language in context, not by memorizing isolated words and phrases. Here are some examples:
A "quick and dirty dozen" activity commonly involves ten to fifteen objects, actions or pictures (thus roughly a dozen). The goal is not total mastery of the new words, but rather strong familiarization with them. That is, the learning is "quick and dirty", rather than neat and thorough.
The procedure is always to start with two items. Suppose the language learners are learning the names of the parts of a car. They might use a picture of a car, a toy car or even a real one. The language helper might begin with the car door and the steering wheel. She would tell the language learners (a few times) "This is the door. This is the steering wheel."
Then the language helper asks the language learners, "Where is the door? Where is the steering wheel?" They respond by pointing, not speaking.
When the language learners feel ready, a third item is added: "Where is the door? Where is the tire? Where is the steering wheel? Where is the tire? Where is the steering wheel? Where is the door? Where is the door?" They respond by pointing, not speaking.
Every time the language learners feel ready, a new word is added. Only one new word is added at a time. Thus, the rule is, "Start with two words, and only add one new word at a time." It has been found that in early language learning, departures from this rule cause frustration. Later on it may be possible to break the rule sometimes.
Another example: Suppose you want to learn to ask where the bathroom is, and where other rooms are. You might draw a simple floor plan of your house. Your language helper can then point to the different rooms in the floor plan, and tell you (using only her language), "This is the kitchen; this is the bathroom; this is the entry way."
Since she points at each part of the house as she tells you what it is called, you can understand what she is saying, even if you have never heard these words before. You are already processing the language as language in your own brain – not translating into your own language, word for word, but intuitively understanding the meaning by the context. This is an essential concept: You will learn the language most efficiently by allowing your brain to process it as language in context, not by memorizing isolated words and phrases [and not by learning words in translation].
If you are a more advanced learner, watch a silent movie or children’s cartoon film with your language helper, encouraging her to talk about what she is seeing, and recording this interaction. Then replay the recording, pausing it to discuss (in the host language) any parts that are difficult for you to understand. This exposure to new bits of language is also done in a communicative style – where the unknown parts are surrounded by enough context to allow you to grasp them. Thus they enter your iceberg and begin moving upwards.
Advanced learners can also have the language helper retell a familiar story: something you have experienced or witnessed together, or a story you both know. Record this story, and then listen to the recording with your helper, pausing to discuss (in the host language) any difficult parts.
In Total Physical Response activities (developed by James Asher—see his web-site, http://www.tpr-world.com) the language helper gives commands to the language learners, which they carry out, without speaking. Example: "Pick up the ball and throw it to the boy in the green sweater."
This allows language learners to develop their ability to understand new words and sentences without being under pressure to speak. Many communicative activities fall within the broad category of TPR-like activities. Apply the “dirty-dozen” rules to all TPR and TPR-like activities that are introducing new vocabulary. That is, "start with two words, and only add one new word at a time". “Here-And-Now-Descriptions of Us” are activities where the language learners and the language helper perform actions, and someone, either the language helper or a language learner, describes what is happening, speaking to another specific person: "I am reading, you are drawing a picture, and they are playing football". Talking about "you, me, she, us", etc. is essential in early language learning. Here-and-now descriptions provide a means for this from the very beginning, even if they are somewhat artificial.
In the age of digital cameras, it is easy to make pictures of the language learners and language helper in various combinations, carrying out various activities. These can be used in place of “Here-and-now Descriptions of us” or in addition to them: “In which picture are you-plural running? In which picture am I eating?”, etc.
Another alternative to memorizing “survival expressions” is to learn them through reverse role-play. Example: set up a model of several city blocks and pretend the language learner is a taxi driver, and that the language helper is a customer giving him instructions. This is reverse role-play. The language learner wants to learn expressions a customer would use to talk to the taxi driver. Thus, he does not pretend that he is the customer, since that is the role he needs to be able to function in. He first needs to hear what local people say. That is the spirit of comprehension-led language learning. So he takes the role of the driver, and in the process learns what customers say. In the pretend driver role he can hear, process, and respond physically by moving the car about the model town. With suitable props he can use reverse role-play to learn expressions which will be useful in just about any communication situation which he faces during his early period of language learning.
Tips for Tracking How Many Words Are In Your Iceberg
At the end of sessions with your language helper, have them note down new words they have been helping you with. This is your vocabulary log, and will prove invaluable as you measure your progress over the years. Each day, as you assess how your interactions in your host community have gone, also jot down new words you have heard.
Key 3: Make Your Encounters with New Words “Real”
Superficial Encounters
I've been in language classes where a word came up that was unknown to the students. A student would ask the teacher about it, who would immediately translate it into English, and everybody would quickly move on to another topic. I'm quite sure that such brief, superficial encounters do not help the word to lodge significantly in the learners’ minds.
Focus is Vital
It seems to be necessary to focus on the word, on its sound, and on the concept it conveys. For me, at the very least, this means that when I hear and understand a new word, perhaps during a conversation, I try to repeat it over and over to myself in my mental auditory loop, while also thinking of the concept that it conveys.
During language sessions, I try to make sure to stop and discuss each new word. However, I find that it is still all too easy to glide over a new word in an extremely shallow manner, so that it is hard to be certain I had a “strong encounter” with it.
Recording to Reinforce Encounters
In recent weeks, my wife and I have added 690 words to our vocabulary log (and hopefully to our icebergs). It was clear that often we weren't encountering these words strongly enough. So, we started making vocabulary recordings that have proven to be helpful back-ups. The recording is of this sort:
“SLOPE-- I rode my bicycle quickly down the slope.-- SLOPE.”
It works best if the sentence containing the new word relates to the very matter we were discussing with our language helper when the new word popped up in the first place. Then as we listen to the recording, it reinforces our growing relationship with our language helper. Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way for various reasons.
We listen to the recording for a few minutes in the evening. Later I transfer the recordings to the computer, and start deleting whatever seems to have already made a clear impression in our minds. In this way it takes us less and less time to re-listen to the recordings -- they shrink quickly. Even having a vocabulary recording and listening to it from time to time provides a quick way to refresh them. Our 690 words give us about a hundred minutes of recording.
Refreshing Words from the Past
By transferring recordings of fairy tales, made two years ago, into the computer we have been able to quickly refresh words that might still be familiar. Each recording is around three minutes long, so it is easy to listen, stop the computer, select a word to replay a few times, and so on.
The Strength of Encounter is Up to You
The main thing is that you make the effort to ensure that encounters with new words are strong encounters. If the new words just kind of fly by and you are half aware of them, this might put them somewhere in the base of the iceberg, but they will require significant effort to help them rise.
Key 4: Be Goal Oriented
Stints of Focused Language Learning
Due to job constraints, we are only able to manage having language sessions periodically, rather than regularly. We do these stints lasting from 3 to 5 months, once each year, during which we invest ten hours per week of in language sessions. Our situation is similar to that of someone who arrives in a new culture and is immediately given heavy, time-consuming administrative responsibilities or job responsibilities. For those of us with such constraints, having some clear goals to work toward is especially important.
Being Goal-Oriented – the Unit
For the purpose of goal-setting let me suggest the idea of a "unit" of vocabulary. In simple terms, a "unit" is a thousand words. We have a long-term goal (covering our years of commitment to working with a language helper) of deliberately putting ten units into our iceberg (perhaps up to two units per year), and from time to time refreshing all of the words that are still weak.
Not Exactly One Thousand…
In saying that a "unit" is a thousand words, we recognize that under fairly ideal circumstances some very weak words will get added to our log more than once, because we might not recall having made previous acquaintance with them at all. Normally I consider that to be about ten percent of our total words, by the time we have logged in thousands of words. So then a "unit" would require 1,100 words. Then every 5.5 words counts as just 5. Thus since our average hourly goal is 7.5 new encounters, we would count an average of 8.25 words going into our log as meeting that goal.
Because of our less than ideal approach of yearly part-time stints, we find that there is more need to overlap and reinforce words that we likely have been exposed to previously. We expect 20% of the words that feel new to actually turn out to be repeats of words we were exposed to in earlier sessions, so that 6 words going into our log counts as 5. That means that our current "unit", in terms of our vocabulary log, is 1,200 (which amounts to 1,000 truly new encounters). That means that 9 words per hour of session counts as 7.5. We've been adding an average of 10 words per hour. So we're now over the 1,000 mark on our way to the next unit of 1200.
What reasonable and hope-filled goals will you set for building your iceberg?
Key 5: Deliberately Refresh Words
Original Recordings and Organized Logs
The best way we have found to refresh words that we aren't encountering enough under principle (2) is to have recordings of the original sources of the words -- stories built from picture-story books, shared stories, ethnographic interviews, native-to-native resources. These recordings need to be well-organised, referenced to a well organised word log. Then when we re-listen to, for example, Goldilocks in Arabic, we will refresh all of the words that were put into the iceberg during the language sessions in which we were “massaging” that story and “negotiating the meanings” of all the new words. The word log will remind us of words to watch for as we listen once again to Goldilocks. Two Types of Vocabulary Recordings
Vocabulary recordings are also extremely efficient, concentrated ways to refresh vocabulary. Both of the following types of recordings I find to be very powerful. We have been making these types of recordings, leaving about ten or fifteen minutes at the end of each two-hour language session for this purpose.
The first type of recording was described in Key (3). The other type of recording involves simply taking a list of each day's new words and discussing them, in the host language, with the language helper, one after another. Record this discussion as you do it. This will be a great way to refresh the words for many months to come.
Key 6: Focus on the Growth of Your Speaking Vocabulary
Notice the Iceberg Affecting Speech
This is the last tip on how to increase the size of the iceberg of words in your brain: It may help to pay attention to how steadily words from the iceberg are coming into your speech (as opposed to your listening vocabulary). You can even make a point of talking about a certain topic again just to increase the likelihood that new vocabulary, which is deeper down in our iceberg, will come up into your speech.
Remember that your goal has been to inject new vocabulary into the lower parts of the iceberg MUCH more quickly than you are trying to get new words into your speech. The words will keep rising up and becoming part of your speech for years, and some words actually may never need to become part of your speech. In the long term, if you have a healthy iceberg, MOST of the words may be ones that you understand, but don't speak.
For example, in my Kazakh iceberg are words for three or four different breeds of sheep. I will certainly recognise them when I hear them in a relevant context, but I may never speak even one of them, unless I come into a situation where I am interacting a lot about sheep.
Icebergs are for Understanding First
I've been reading lately that reaching the point of "self-sustaining growth" in language learning for European languages appears to involve recognizing around 10,000 words when you hear them. In contrast, to reach the point at which you can express yourself on most topics that you regularly talk about involves recognizing less than 2,000 words when you hear them. If so, then 8,000 words make the difference between being able to carry on relationships with people who know you well (and thus will flex their language to fit into your limited ability), and being able to understand most of what you might hear in normal conversations between two or more host people.
How can you get the right 10,000 words into your comprehension vocabulary, or the right 2,000 into your early speaking vocabulary? Well, if you:
- get enough words into the iceberg, and then
- hear enough speech that you understand, so that
- some of the words are always being refreshed, and
- others are being rapidly strengthened, and so on,
- then nature will take care of making the most important words the strongest ones of all the earliest of all,
- followed by the next most important ones and so on.
Then you won't have squandered a huge amount of time on words that are destined to rest in the depths of the iceberg rather than rising to the top, in any case.
The Key: Keep Meeting New Words
Having raised these six points, you may say, "But the iceberg principle seemed so simple and encouraging, and you are making it sound so complicated". Well, I don't mean to be. The original point is that we don't need to worry about mastering words, but just about making clear acquaintance with them, and then letting them get strengthened over time. That is still the key point.
Maybe you prefer to simply apply this iceberg principle in the flow of life, really paying attention to new words that you encounter and understand, and leaving it at that. However, if you start becoming discouraged that the iceberg approach isn't working, then you might take time to re-consider the six points discussed in this article.
