How can linguistics help you learn a new language? Rather than answering this question, I am going to discuss how linguistic theory can hurt your language learning. Just as theory can inform us so we can build cool technology that allows us to do things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do, theory can likewise motivate us to entertain wild-sounding hypotheses and do stupid things we otherwise wouldn't think of doing. Here I discuss a number of "pitfalls" that this enthusiastic 専門バカ senmon baka "eggheaded specialist" has fallen into in the past while ruminating over theory and trying to put it to practice.
My hope is that this will aid you in your language learning (or general learning) endeavors.
Universal Grammar (UG)
Below is a sort of caricature of a mainstream sort of understanding of language, grounded in some influential ideas put forth by the famous Noam Chomsky. While I don't personally know any serious language researchers who subscribe to all the views presented here in a very strong form, these ideas in various forms are found widely in language learning materials, popular publications, and introductory texts to linguistics. Okay, here goes:
Language is an innate human ability. While a human infant simply needs to be around a sufficient amount of speaking in order to acquire language, no amount of exposure or instruction can teach a non-human (e.g. your pet dog) how to use language as a human does. Language is common to all humans, just like having a skull, a having a four-chambered heart, and having a propensity to eat and mate are.
However, it is evident that there are many different languages in the world which on the surface seem very different from each other. In fact, they are not so different from each other. They may be regarded as variations on a theme; they are all instances of Universal Grammar (UG).
Before some critical age, we are "citizens of the world". We possess the ablility to learn any language that we have enough exposure to. If we are fortunate enough to be exposed to more than one language, we will be blessed with the free immutable gift of multilingualism. However, as adults we can only perfectly know the language(s) we acquired as children. That is, only native speakers truly can command any given language. We can get a long way through training, but the second language skills we may acquire are fundamentally different from the first language ability we have that draws upon the full power of UG.
The business of linguistics is to first find out what rules govern any given language, and then identify what is common among all languages – that is, to uncover the nature of UG. What sorts of things belong to the UG? A classic distinction is made between competence and performance. Competence is an idealized capacity for language that is realized as performance when we actually speak (or write, or do another language related task), which only native speakers can have in full. By studying what it means to be competent in a sufficiently large sample of the world's languages, we can unravel what characteristics are common to all language – that is, UG.
How could a harmless theory like this hurt? After all, Universal Grammar (UG) is just a theory, like gravity and evolution ヾ(｡>﹏<｡)ﾉﾞ✧。
Adults learning new languages
To start, let us ask: what does it mean to know a language? Linguistics takes language as its object of study. Spanish class teaches you Spanish. ¿Fácil, no?
A view with something like UG sketched above takes Language to be something very particular, a kind of "mental organ". Language is distinct from other behaviors, such as learning shooting free throws or playing guitar. Language can be realized in many forms – these are the languages we find in the world, like examples are Hindi, Chinese, and Welsh. Speakers of the same language show competence in that language by being able to decide which sentences are acceptable and which are not. These intuitions reflect some underlying set of rules. While native speakers acquire these rules easily as they grow up, second language learners must learn these rules in a much more labor-intensive manner.
An alternative to this sort of view is to treat language as another human behavior that doesn't need a special "module". Just as children learn language, they learn other behaviors demanded by the society they are born into. Children may learn to tie shoes, catch fish, breath through their noses, or ride horses. Why do great musicians often come from musical families? It could help that they are surrounded by other musicians, just as I grew up an English speaker because I was surrounded by other English speakers. Something like this alternative view is what now seems to be more correct to me.
However, language (in particular spoken language and writing that represents spoken language) continues to be given a privileged position as special kind of abstract entity. Language is a special kind of thing, and children are better at learning additional languages than adults. If you are an adult, prepare for blood, sweat, and tears if you want to learn an additional language.
The "Curse of the Monolingual"
Do you think that math is hard? Many resign to the fate that "I'm bad at math" and quit math as soon as they have the opportunity to do so. While I've been blessed with not having any aversion towards mathematics, I have sincerely believed in the "curse of the monolingual" for many years. It is pretty well established that people who have experience in speaking a second language more easily pick up additional languages. Adults that only speak one language, however, are at a severe disadvantage, mainstream understanding goes. As they are not fortunate to have gotten more languages for "free" as children, they are doomed to be "bad at languages" (unless someone decides at some point that they have a "gift for languages").
When I first began studying foreign languages (I started seriously with Spanish in High School), I went in with a "I'm bad at it, but if I work really hard, I might just be able to get by" sort of attitude. Language just wasn't "my thing", though I figured I could make some fair progress with lots of effort. At this point of my life, I hadn't looked at any linguistics before, but the same "I'm bad at math" mentality above characterized my view of myself and language learning. As a monolingual surrounded by many bilinguals, I viewed myself as an underdog in the foreign language learning struggle. In High School, I decided I didn't even want to "compete" with the Chinese heritage speakers (people who grew up speaking Chinese) in Chinese class and instead I would go to Spanish class, which I could enter as a tabula rasa.
The message that second language speakers will never be able to have native level command is not only discouraging, but demonstrably false. A quick search on YouTube for any widely spoken language will yield many, many examples of people who have attained high levels of proficiency in these languages as adult learners. Conversely, there are many "native" heritage speakers, speakers of a target language (e.g. Chinese) that grew up speaking that language, who are quite bad at speaking (not to mention reading and writing) the tongue they are "supposed to know". There seems to be no natural divide between "competence" and lack of competence in a given language. It seems to be more a matter of degree.
Being socialized in any lanugage (whether you have spoken it before or not) in a new environment, such as school or work, can be a complex and challenging endeavor. Rather than simply accepting that kids (including heritage speakers who will acquire language as "natives") are better than adults at learning languages (and that adults, in fact, can never really learn a new language), I think that we should focus our attention on the factors that contribute to success in language learning in general. While there is undoubtedly a biological factor that makes pre-adolescents better at seemingly effortlessly learning languages, it is still unclear to me how much this is "nature" versus "nurture".
Consider some differences in the social situations kids and adults find themselves in, in broad strokes. Adults typically have many things to be stressed out about, such as money, health, and career goals. Many adults reflect nostalgically on their childhood because of the relative freedom from these. Generally speaking, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that children's minds are generally freer to be mindful of the many stimuli around them. Often this happens to include language from parents, peers, etc. This idea has been capitalized on with approaches such as Rosetta Stone which try to simulate certain aspects of child-like learning. Instead of scary charts of verb conjugation and long paragraphs of text, Rosetta stone introduces grammar and vocabulary in the context with pictures and audio, simulating the sights and sounds one might encounter being in a place the target language is spoken.
A kind of corollary to the idea that native speakers are somehow deeply different from even very advanced second language learners is the idea that native speakers somehow have perfect knowledge of some elusive set of "rules" from which they can express any thought they have. This leads us to the next section...
Can you teach me the rules?
In most foreign language resources, grammar is taught as something distinct from vocabulary. Learners must learn a handful of grammatical rules, and many buckets full of "vocabulary words". It seems straight forward enough to say where vocabulary comes from (especially for easily identifiable concrete things), but how do we come up with rules of grammar?
Any explicitly stated rules of grammar is the product of some theorizing. The reason for this is because while we have intuitions about words and their meanings, we lack intuitive descriptive knowledge about these "rules". Grammar for one's native language is very rarely taught (and it is questionable how useful trying to teach it is). Rather, it is "discovered".
There are certainly generalizations that hold up across categories (such as how parts of speech such as noun and verb can appear next to each other), and these patterns are useful for second language learners to become familiar with. However, the way that we arrive at such generalizations is through many examples of specifics. These generalizations are then abstracted into rules, which function as kinds of practical templates for learners to "hypothesize" new utterances which they will pass by the discerning ears of native speakers.
I've come to the opinion that the best way to learn the "rules" of any language is through exposure to many, many examples. Oftentimes these examples will take the form of example sentences, optimally with audio accompanying text. Rather than trying to learn rules well, it is more advantageous to become familiar with the raw data, which is actual instances of language use. Rules are theoretical constructions, but instances of actual target language use are the real deal.
Additionally, some aspects of language are unlearnable through "rules" alone. For example, intuitions about frequencies of words in a language seem to me only learnable through extensive exposure to lots of use of a target language in lots of different contexts. For this reason, even if you happened to know thousands of words and had a solid grasp of grammatical generalizations in a language, you still might end up sounding pretty strange (though you would probably be understandable, at least to a fairly literate person) using a target language. Additionally, if you spend a lot of time with only a particular sort of input (e.g. shounen anime for studying Japanese, an old translation of the Bible for studying German...) you may find that you do not have the breadth of knowledge needed to do things like give directions in a modern city in your target language.
Thinking of language essentially as rules ("grammar") and a lexicon ("vocabulary") can leave you with a bag of tools that feel very awkward to use. While rules given by a grammar book may provide a good framework to get started identifying patterns in actual language use, it is from actual experience with a language itself, not a model of it, that one can truly begin to feel comfortable with it.
Is take-out the same as dining in?
Language, as presented to foreign learners, is often taken out of "the wild", and tamed by being placed in textbooks, dictionaries, and other resources. Maybe one reason foreign foreign language learning is so difficult is because it is packaged in such a difficult to digest way a lot of the time! Many learners, especially "geeks" who pride themselves in relishing in the esoteric, spend lots of time on details of things like word etymologies (origins of words) or how some construction is derived from another. While these details may be interesting (and hopefully memorable), they can also detract from actually practicing using a target language, whether that be having a conversation with an experienced speaker, hearing it spoken in a podcast, or reading material in it.
One place where theory over practice is particularly common is in the practice of describing sounds of a language. Nearly all beginner books of any given language will have some section devoted to describing the sound of the target language (usually in text only, often with inconsistent or hard to make sense of descriptions). How do people actually come to have decent pronunciation of a language? The short answer is most often something like "by imitating the speech of native speakers". No amount of textual description can match actually hearing a particular sound in a language. A sound recording of one word speaks a thousand words. What!
Little by little
From my own experience of 7+ years of relatively serious language study of too many languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, plus dabbling in many more like Indonesian, French...) I have found that flying too close to the sun (doing too much abstraction of language away from just interacting with it as it is actually used) comes at the price of much wasted effort and added discouragement. In addition to recommending to you to not study more than one (or two, if you really have the time) foreign languages intensely at one time because you will need the head space and time to make what you are learning really stick, I think that it is very beneficial for language learners to examine what is the actual data versus what is theory in their language study.
While theory can be interesting and meaningful to study in its own right (e.g. in a linguistics department at a university), it should not be detrimentally confounded with what constitutes practical knowledge of a language. One encouraging point of realizing language as a far messier, less "complete" system than I previously had naively assumed, is the comfort of knowing that my knowledge of any given language can improve bit by bit just like a native speaker learning that language. While there are some things in life that can literally be learned overnight (a skilled programmer, for instance, can easily learn a new related language and do quite well with it on a first attempt), language is full of arbitrariness, redundancy, and ambiguity which makes it a slow thing for anyone to learn. This holds true even for native speakers (including us, for our mother tongues!) who aren't born speaking right away.
Language learning is a life-long process as languages continue to change, as they always have. There is no complete freezing of languages in place to make them easier to learn. Even writing this post, I feel a bit inconsistent referring to particular "languages" like "English" because I know these are ill-defined, moving targets.
What is English how do I even;;
Labels: language, learning, linguistics, psychology