A boa constrictor can be measured in parrots, monkeys or elephants. And by what measure do you measure a foreign language for yourself? How do you define learning filipino to english outcomes for yourself?
Until you find the right answer to this question, any training will not be entirely effective. It will not satisfy you. It will seem to you that you have done a lot of work, spent money, and everything is not right or wrong.
What do you want from the language? How do you see yourself with this language in a month, in three, in a year? These are the same questions, the answers to which, at least in the first approximation, you need to know BEFORE you start training. And these are the questions any good teacher will ask you at the very first lesson. It is at the start that you need to fundamentally determine how your goals correspond to the real possibilities of achieving them.
Good for those who take up the study of a foreign language with some clearly defined goal. For example, first of all, learn how to talk on the phone with foreign partners. With such specifics in the goals, it is not a problem to measure your progress or lack of it. It has become easier or nothing has changed – each of us is able to determine.
Worse, when the goals are set too vaguely, blurry. For example, learning a language to leave for permanent residence is a vague goal if you do not have a clear idea of how, where, with whom, when and how you will need to use the language you are learning (primarily at the starting stage of a new life). “I study the language for communication on tours” is worthy, but not enough in itself. Think over and imagine specific situations, events, interlocutors with whom you will have a conversation! What phrases will you need first? Under what circumstances have you already experienced difficulties in travel related to not knowing the language?
We wrote a lot about goal setting in articles on motivation. Seeing the goal is half the battle! However, practice shows that most of the students see some kind of abstract picture instead of the goal. And that is why the movement on the way to an indefinite goal turns out to be uneven, chaotic. Motivation is lost, you forget where and why you went. As a result, everything is abandoned, forgotten, dissatisfaction arises.
It is impossible not to say what is the worst way to measure the effectiveness of language learning in practice: it is the measurement of language in the number of learned words and grammatical rules. This method may be good for passing some kind of formal exam, which does not determine your real knowledge and skills, but only “hard drive load capacity”.
Remember that the statement “Practice is the test of truth” applies to language learning more than many other things. For example, if you know something about chemical reactions in theory, this is already good and important for real life, because if you are not a specialist, then chemistry for you will be limited to a limited range of practical applications, when it is enough to understand why, for example, lemon acid removes scale in the kettle, but alcohol does not. But with language, the situation is exactly the opposite: it is not so important to know the rules in theory, but to be able to use them in practice. Are you able to recall and formulate many rules of the Russian language now? If this is not part of your professional duties, then it is unlikely. Do you count the number of words you use? It would be interesting to calculate, but it’s not so important, you see! At the same time, you use speech and language on a daily basis. Thus, constantly checking in practice the quality and level of their knowledge.
You tightly mastered your native language for the first three years of your life (oral).
Then came the turn of writing, when you learned to read. And then the letter went, and already at school you started learning the language itself, which took another 10 years. As a result, the native language has become a part of you,
and you are part of that language. And imagine how real the promise to “speak a foreign language as a native language” in three months can be? .. The fact of the matter is that this does not happen. But this does not mean that in the same three months it is impossible to achieve certain practical goals in learning the language. The whole point is that the goals are real, and their achievement is consistent with your capabilities and the capabilities of the teaching method that you choose for yourself.