Notes on Learning Languages
I get asked a lot about learning languages, so I have a few comments about it
here. Hopefully I can awaken you from some dogmatic slumbers about language.
Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language.
This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual people
think that languages are just different word lists that people use. As a result,
101 students will manually look up every word in the dictionary to translate.
This actually increases the mental load of learning a language because people
have the idea that to speak it, they have to think of something in English, then
translate the sentence word by word, then say that. What a pain.
So what is a language if not words? It really is a set of constraints as to how
words can go together: what order they go in when modifying each other, but also
languages are morphology. Verb endings and tenses and such are literally the
most important part of a sentence. If you don't have a productive and reflexive
use of verbs, you are literally just going to be reciting nouns you know like a
monkey.
This is actually why I recommend people learning Romance languages or German to
Thomas doesn't lecture at all about what he's doing, but he focused only on
using verbs and building up basic expressions from the bottom up until it's
understood reflexively by students. To actually learn any language, this is more
or less what you are going to have to mentally do anyway in the process.
I would say it's actually possible to fluently speak a language knowing only
about 50 words. If you understand the "grammar" of a language, you can
basically get by anywhere anytime with a couple dozen words only. What words you
don't know can easily be figured out, but you can't wing it with grammar
and you can't wing it with morphology.
Computer metaphor
Granted, the same is true of programming "languages" as well, weirdly enough. No
one would think "knowing a [computing] language" means just knowing all the
function and variable names. The important thing is knowing the syntax of how
you put functions (loosely verbs) and variables (loosely nouns) together. After
all, variable names are always different and functions can be easily invented
too or called from some obscure library. Someone who knows a language is someone
who can use its syntax to produce novel expressions. If you take a Python
script, replace its functions with C functions, it's still Python, just calling
a bunch of undefined functions. People can only get away with even sort of
believing this in the domain of human languages if you just don't know enough
and end up assuming that all languages just work the same.
Then what is a language?
So really when you learn a language, you can't look at it as new words, but new
patterns of speech that interconnect in a logical way.
Speaking fluently in that language means being able to use and combine its basic
constructions into complex thoughts put in words. This is why I'm really
against "translating in your head." If you're doing that, you're not actually
using the language. You're teaching yourself a silly English-word-replacement
game. I know it's very hard for word-thinkers not to think in words, but if you
can't stop doing that for a second, you're not going to be able to learn a new
language.
You will not learn a language by consoooming media.
There's this lazy idea that somehow if you passively sit around and watch people
using a language this will somehow endow you with the ability to flexibly
produce a language in the same way you see others using it. People want to
believe it because they want to be able to watch TV or play a cell phone game
like Duolinguo or valueless Rosetta Stone-like software and somehow gain
competence in a language.
It's not going to happen ever. Learning to play a boring computer game using
words from a different languages is not the same as learning to speak the
language.
You might say of "just listening to speech" that "that's what children do," but
that's not true at all. Children try pretty hard to participate and understand
conversation. They sometimes have a desperate personal need to understand each
passing sentence and hear the language they are trying to learn for hours a day
for years. You watching some forgettable movie in the background as you play
with your phone don't.
Are you actually thinking?
If you want to know if you are actually learning a language, ask yourself that.
People are weirdly afraid against actually thinking through things and making
new expressions in other languages when that's exactly how you learn them.
A lot of language nerds love to email me about their Anki cards or their
harebrained schemes for mass-memorizing words as if they're an Asian studying
for a chemistry test. Given what I've said about "learning words," you can guess
my opinion on that. Once people abandon the lazy route, sometimes they take up
the via dolorosa: the route of suffering and assume that training themselves
like a Pavlovian dog will help them become fluent in a language.
In reality, the only question that matter is: "Are you actually thinking?" Are
you actually going through the mental process of creating new sentences in a new
language?
When I was learning Latin obviously I had no Latin-speaking friends and could
barely get my hands on anything Latin-related. But after I learned the basics of
the language I started thinking in it constantly. First that starts in my
always implicitly translating English song lyrics or ads in my head into Latin.
That's actually difficult if you're dealing with something modern and idiomatic.
Not as bad with church songs. As time goes on, I would overtly remember things
in Latin sentences instead of English. If I mumbled something under my breath I
would make sure it was Latin. At all points in time, I was thinking about how
the language was structured and what it meant to produce sentences in it.
The sad fact is that most people who "learn" languages in school treat them as
advanced cross-word puzzle like games where they don't actually think in
the language, but have hilarious mnemonic devices in their head for relating
what they want to say in English with something in the language they're
learning.
Translating is a bad habit.
If anything, you should become worse at translating the further you go on
and the more independently you can stand on your own in another language.
Latin is a good example. I can read and comprehend Latin very well, but if asked
to translate what I'm reading, I find that more and more difficult the better I
read Latin. Now it's easy for me to report the meaning of a passage, but
phrase-by-phrase translation is something you have to think through because
Latin and English are structurally very different. This isn't just word order,
but even how a Latin speaker approaches expressions and the kinds of phrases
they use can translate only very delicately into English.
The problem nearly doesn't exist between English and Spanish, which are
basically the same language. I'm sure someone who only knows Spanish will feel
like English and Spanish have many differences, but in the context of other
languages, like Latin or Chinese or Japanese, it's hard not to view English and
Spanish as having basically the same kind of syntax 95% of the time. That
actually goes for most modern European languages.
You sound stupid if you don't sound stupid.
Every language has its own set of phonological rules that determine what
particular sounds are said how and where. Phonological rules give us "our
accents." When someone speaks English in an accent, they are really just
speaking English using the phonological constraints of whatever language they're
more familiar with. If they speak English competently, there's at least some
extent to which they are abandoning their native phonological rules.
When you first start learning a language, you might read something aloud and say
"I sound stupid." This is because your natural way of speaking is obviously to
say everything with an accent consistent with English. You can probably remember
the apathetic jock in Spanish class or whatever who religiously pronounced
every Spanish word he mindlessly read with an almost intentionally non-Spanish
accent.
To actually speak another language is to adopt the phonological tendencies and
even the prosodic and tonal traits of that language. When you initially do that,
you will probably sound very stupid to yourself since violating phonological
rules you're familiar with always sounds wrong. If you do overcome that illusion
of felt stupidity, you won't sound stupid when it counts. If you refuse to
improve your accent immediately and from the beginning you will sound like
an utter moron forever.
There's actually a trick too: when you imitate a foreign accent, you are
actually implicitly adopting the phonological rules of their language that you
have noticed in real life. My suggestion is when you are starting out, read
the other language in what you'd guess would be a stereotypical accent of the
person speaking the language. If your imitation is good, you're speaking their
language without an accent.
"The Critical Period" is fake.
That reminds me.
There's an idea in academic and clinical linguistics as well as popular culture
that children have a magical plasticy of the brain that makes them uniquely good
at learning languages. This is supposed to be the reason why children learn
languages "fast" and adults don't. I think this is a myth. You don't have to
send me all the "proof" about this (don't worry, the Universities of Georgia
and Arizona would've failed me totally if I hadn't seen it for my linguistics
degrees there). I sort of assumed that this was true for years, but on further
thought, I think it's just a conspiracy of irrelevant data and copes... or at
least, it's not nearly as true as people pretend it is: adults are just about as
capable of learning languages in most senses.
After all, think about it, children actually take several years to function in a
language, which is often much longer than an adult that knows what he's doing.
The Michel Thomas style tapes which I alluded to above are good at giving an
adult a passable diving-board for a language in about 8 hours. It can be done.
You can also give an adult a crash-course in phonology and articulatory
phonetics that will make it easy to understand and with practice produce the
sounds children take years to master.
The motivation of a child and adult are utterly different. A language-less child
has lots of reasons to invest most of his mental life in attention to language.
Apathetic adults don't.
What I really get sick of is doomer adults who cope with their laziness by
talking about how hard it is to learn a language as an adult. Many adults still
learn languages all the time. There is some circumstantial evidence that infants
cue into some acoustic cues and other things quicker than adults, but I think
in most cases we're just looking at infants semi-consciously honing in on what
details they've acknowledged to be linguistically relevant. In reality,
developed humans have huge institutional and intellectual advantages to learn.