Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
By Federica Lupis, https://www.federicalupis.com/
Author of "Fluent On The First Try" and "Why You're Not Fluent and How To Fix It"
Language trainer, interpreter and translator.
Recently, there has been a lot of hype about the Netflix series ‘Clickbait’. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s about a seemingly perfect husband and brother who is kidnapped and filmed while holding a sign: ‘I killed a woman’.
To make things more interesting, the video is posted on YouTube with a warning: ‘When the video reaches 5 million views, this guy dies’. Obviously, everyone watches it, without worrying about the consequences.
I wish I could tell you I haven’t watched this series, but, unfortunately, I’m part of the audience that has binge-watched it in a couple of nights.
When I got to the end, I felt like I had just opened an ad, cleverly designed to intrigue people. You know, like the ones coming up on your feed that you just can’t resist; you have to read them, or you risk missing out on the secrets of the world!
I had been ‘clickbaited’ and the best part is that whoever created the show had warned me in the title. I found it quite funny, and I appreciated the story more once I had this realisation.
The day after finishing the series, I was trying to decide the topic for my next newsletter, and I started thinking: was there a moment when I clicked on an article about language learning and feared that I had just taken the bait?
The answer is yes, and it was about the Pareto Principle!
To find out if it was a clickbait or not, you’ll need to get to the end of this article. Haha!
Enjoy!
What is the Pareto Principle and who is this Mr Pareto?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, noted that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He conducted several surveys and found that a similar distribution was true for other countries.
About forty years later, Dr. Joseph Juran applied this idea to business quality control by showing that 80% of product defects were caused by 20% of the problems in manufacturing methods. It was him who coined the term ‘Pareto principle’ which quickly spread to other fields such as engineering, sport, health and… learning!
To put it simply, the Pareto Principle states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. For instance:
· 20% of social media posts generate 80% of traffic
· 20% of the marketing efforts represent 80% of results
· 20% of a company’s products represent 80% of sales.
If we consider the Pareto Principle in terms of language learning, you can see how it would get the interest of many students.
What if I told you that you could become fluent in a language, with only 20% of the effort? I’m sure many would give it a try… but does it really work?
Let’s see!
Pareto and vocabulary
If 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort, instead of trying to learn as many words as possible, we should focus on the most common ones.
For example, the term ‘scandal’ often appears in the newspapers, but I suspect that knowing its equivalent in the foreign language won’t be of the utmost importance when travelling abroad for a holiday.
Suppose you start a conversation with a waiter at the restaurant. Would you ever bring up scandals? Sure, anything can happen, but it’s highly unlikely.
Most people, myself included, agree that around 2,000 - 3,000 of the most frequently used words is all we need for everyday conversations. So instead of trying to memorise all the foreign words we come across, we should stop for a second and think:
In what situation will I use the foreign language? How likely is it that I will use these words?
This process will help us build a solid vocabulary knowledge and save the time it would have taken us to learn irrelevant words.
Pareto and learning strategies
Another way to achieve 80% of the results from 20% of the effort is to use the learning strategies that work best for you.
It may seem obvious, but at some point, we all fall into the trap of habit.
To give you an example, when I started to learn Japanese, I chose a grammar book like any diligent student would. It took me a while to realise that the world had moved on and it was time to embrace new strategies like Anki, a spaced repetition software.
Have you tried new language learning websites and apps lately? What about bilingual books or movies with double subtitles?
Trying new strategies may take some time, but once you find the most effective ones, your initial effort will pay off with great results.
Don’t forget to have fun
Learning a foreign language is not a question of numbers. It should bring you joy and a sense of accomplishment.
If trying to optimize your learning habits brings you pain and sleepiness, forget about Pareto and his numbers.
A strategy may not be the most effective, but it may make you feel good and help you progress faster. Our emotions play an important role in learning, and it is not a good idea to sacrifice them for efficiency.
When we enjoy the learning process, we usually learn much better; so don’t forget to have fun while learning a language!
The Pareto Principle. What’s the verdict?
Mr Juran, the man behind the Pareto Principle, was a smart guy. He understood that we can reach our objective with much less effort. It’s just a matter of being more efficient.
In terms of language learning, the biggest takeaway is that learning the most frequent words and using better strategies will save us time. However, this shouldn’t happen at the expense of our enjoyment.
Does this mean that Pareto’s 80/20 split is correct? I have no idea. I’ve tried to work it out, but I think there are too many variables, and I don’t have enough sympathy for Maths to make the effort.
In any case, the proportion doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we can achieve the result we want, i.e. to master a foreign language, with much less effort than we thought.
So full marks for Team Pareto, it didn’t feel like a clickbait after all!
Thanks for reading.
See you next month!
If you enjoyed my article, you can discover my tried and tested language learning strategies in my books:
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This newsletter was brought to you by Saveria Parisi, author of the Italian fantasy book ‘Kyara e l’anello degli antenati’. Second and final chapter out soon. Stay tuned here.
Thank you! Go to the Italian version.
To read my previous article click on the link below:
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