Learning Languages

[gusl]

People often ask me how I learned Dutch so fast. Here's the answer:


Well, first the obvious: it helps to have a lot of grey matter. One might consider using attention / memory enhancers. Being interested and a constant effort (which could come unconsciously to enthusiastic learners) is also important.

* Phonetics is very important as a first step. Perception comes first. You should try to make all the phonetic distinctions natives can make as early as possible, and work very consciously on always pronouncing things correctly (i.e. with the phonemes the natives use).

* Create your personal collection of complex sentences, which explore the grammar of the language. Choose the kind of sentences that could serve as a model for novel sentences (for answering questions such as "which word order is correct?"). This is obviously heuristic, not logical, and it's also how children acquire their first language. Do not waste time memorizing decontextualized words, such as past tenses or word lists, but instead work on dialogs in life-like situations and create as many associations as possible (perhaps by associating it with mental images or relating the word to related concepts).

IN OTHER WORDS, use chunks in context. Memorize meaningful sentences which exemplify difficult words, a strange expression or a difficult word order pattern, and act them out dramatically in your head.
Similarly, when you learn words, chunk them with their article: "DE fiets", "HET kantoor".

This little sentence: "omdat ik mijn huiswerk niet heb gedaan" exemplifies many rules of Dutch grammar, and helps me a lot with producing the correct word order in novel sentences.

* Spend a few minutes a day thinking about how to say things in the language, having imaginary conversations in your head. (I imagine this comes automatically to enthusiastic learners). At the same time, make sure you have contact with fluent speakers who can correct you, before you reinforce wrong patterns.


Though I don't know much about first language acquisition, it strikes me how much this seems to resemble a child learning his first language: first the sounds, later the grammar, and only later the exceptions to the rules.


OTHER NOTES:
I learned Dutch quickly because I *REALLY* wanted to learn it, so I worked very hard mentally. Whenever I heard something I didn't know, I focused my attention there to try to figure out what it meant / why it's said this way.

It's easier to remember something when you yourself figure it out. With flashcards/dictionaries, you may have to go over some words 10 or more times. Books with a lot of repetitive content (the green book approach) may be helpful here. e.g. "Today Bob is sick. He is not feeling well. He feels pain. He is going to the doctor.", because not only do you figure out new words, but it also helps you create a network of concepts in the new language. (although concepts may sometimes (or most of the time) be language-independent)

Don't be shy. Talk to people. Ask them to correct you, and occasionally interrupt them to explain a word or expression they used. It's better for you AND more polite than pretending you understand.

Comments

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard the "create a bunch of sentences that test the grammar" before - it sounds like really good advice. I like the point of view that language is the solution of an engineering problem: "how do I convey the following dinstinctions?" And having a big test set is a good way to understand how a program/machine/whatever functions.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard the "create a bunch of sentences that test the grammar" before
That's because this might be the first time anyone ever wrote it down :-) (although it's probably not) I take credit for this idea. But it's kinda obvious if you've worked with corpus-based language learning.

I wonder if examples of ungrammatical sentences have a place here... it's known that children don't learn from negative reinforcement, but this might be because non-examples have low information content. More likely though, is that we have difficulty representing negation... it's easier to simply copy what we've heard.

I see universal grammar as just the natural constraints (computational constraints of the brain, the information-theoretic capacity of our utterance and perception mechanisms) of the human brain, and optimality theory as a computationally cheap solution for expressing complex sentences.

While this collection of sentences can teach people grammar, it would probably work badly for a computer... because computers don't (yet) have the universal grammar oracle that we do.

Some bits seem to be hanging loose in these ideas, so I'll have to think about this more.

Btw, some people here in Amsterdam talk about language as a communication game and explain linguistic phenomena in terms of game-theorerical equilibria.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

I mentioned this idea to my language teacher today and ended up getting a 2 hour talk on language learning methods! He's been teaching various different languages in various countries in both public schools and in private school and with private lessons for over 40 years. I can't list everything he told me here, in fact he listed about 10 major techniques that are in common use around the world. Anyway the type of method that you describe is quite similar to one of the standard methods that is mostly seen in the United States. In Europe it's out of favour and has been heavily criticised by many language professors in this part of the world. The main problem that people have with it is that it tends to produce speakers who are overly formalistic and say things in fixed ways.

Anyway, let me just try to sum up my teacher's own thoughts on these things...

Firstly he said that the best method of learning a language depends on how the student thinks most naturally, on how much time the student is prepared to put into learning the language, the language being learnt and also on the level to which the person wants to learn the language. He said that the kind of method you're talking about works best when the student is highly motivated, has a fairly logical and orderly kind of a mind that learns well though study, is learning a highly structured language like German that has a ridged grammar and does care if their language doesn't have the full grammatical freedom that native speakers tend to use.

This seems to make sense. In your case you are highly motived to learn, you have a very logical and orderly mind, and you are learning a language which has a highly structured and ridged grammar. In my case he decided not to follow this approach because when he first started teaching me I didn't seem to have enough free time to do the required study to make the method work. Also the method doesn't, in his opinion, work as well for languages like Italian where native speakers when talking to each other constantly do crazy stuff the with grammar. For example they will say a sentence but not finish it verbally, instead finishing it with a gesture, and then decide to modify the sentence in some way by adding a few extra words which, grammatically speaking, should really have come at the start of the previous sentence.

Anyway, because he thinks I'm a pretty logical thinker he's going to try this method with me for a few months to see how it goes. But he did warn me: While the results can be fast, it requires me doing study on it almost every day for the method to work. Most students in his experience don't have this much focus on the task, especially in places like high schools.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Cool. So I've actually had an influence on your approach?


Anyway the type of method that you describe is quite similar to one of the standard methods that is mostly seen in the United States
what's it called?

I think that "my" method is ideal for acquiring the capacity to produce complex sentences that are grammatically correct. To me Italian seems pretty simple that way, but this could be my native romance bias! Once you've mastered the grammar (which I have in Dutch, and which you probably have in Italian), I don't see the purpose, except for memorizing specific words, expressions, etc.

and you are learning a language which has a highly structured and ridged grammar.
I don't know what you mean. I don't think of Dutch as more "rigid" than other languages. A common tradeoff seems to be word order vs. morphological complexity (suffixes, cases, etc). In Dutch, the complexity seems to be all in the word order, unlike German. So I used the test sentences almost exclusively for the purpose of producing sentences with the correct word order.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Yep, you have influenced my approach :-) My current approach, which isn't really much of an approach at all to be honest, is just a random collect of things like reading books and talking to some people etc. It isn't working very well in my opinion, especially given the amount of time I've spent. Indeed my level of Italian is poor. But it's my first attempt at learning a language, so in part I'm also going through a process of learning about how to learn languages.

Word order is part of the grammar right? So if Dutch, like German, has quite fixed ways of ordering words then that indicates a ridged grammar no?

For the record, even though my teacher has all this experience with different methods etc., at the moment I suspect that this kind of sentence learning approach will be the best for me. I believe that even for a language like Italian, if I can use this method to get my grammar fundamentals up to a good solid base level and then switch to just learning through conversation with native speakers after that, I should be able to generalise beyond just the grammatical structures that I learnt in the first step. That is, I'm not convinced at the moment that the criticisms of this method are valid if the method is used correctly. Well I guess we will see in the coming year if I'm right.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Word order is part of the grammar right? So if Dutch, like German, has quite fixed ways of ordering words then that indicates a ridged grammar no?

Well, English has a very fixed word order, like Dutch. I think German has a more flexible word order, since it's more marked to make up for it. My point was that every grammar is somewhat "rigid", so I don't understand what you are comparing Dutch to when you say it has a "rigid grammar". Or do you actually mean "ridged grammar"? (in which case I don't understand)

Some grammars seem to be inherently simpler than others, though: English for example, seems rather simple.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Ops, yes, rigid. I was tricked because the "gi" is with a soft "g" which sounds very close to a "dgi" sound. I HATE spelling in English, this is something where Italian is much simpler thank god. If we could take English, regularise the verbs more and then totally redo the system of spelling in a consisted and clear way like in Italian, well, I'd be all for that. Anyway...

I've been told that in German the order of the verb, subject, direct object and indirect object as well and the placement of the adjective etc. is not as flexible as languages like Italian. I was under the impression that Dutch is similar. However I don't speak Dutch or German myself so I can only tell you what others have told me.

[troyworks.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered the best approach to learning languages for people with higher grey matter, and what your saying makes perfect sense. I think your approach is important as speech is typically going to be more used in interaction that reading/writing, and as you mention it's really a network of concepts that's important to develop not a word in isolation/conjunction.

I'm currently in Ireland, and Irish accents are interesting because it's not so much a new vocabulary, but the pacing and ommision and focus of syllables. e.g. Toilet = I'let

I'm usually pretty adept at picking up accents, but these have so far been stereotypical, not any person in reality I've heard so far. But I have found the skills of listening getting the baseline sounds down useful. It's kinda like recreating the taste of a recipie is only possible when one understands the tastes and ingredients avaialable.

For myself, when I do accurate pronounciation it's not my 'internal voice' but a recording of a model of those I've heard somewhat transposed onto my voice.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this post for several days now. Trying to relate it to my experiences with learning Italian; what worked, what sort of works and what didn't really work.

More or less I agree with you. Let me try to outline my ideas on the matter though.

Getting the sounds right to start with is really important.

I find that rote learning of word lists works for me, but only for nouns. I read the word in English, then picture it in my head (for example I imagine a river) and then say the word in Italian "il fiume". Nouns are pretty simple things and I so find that I really just need to mentally associate the thing with the word and I am fine.

After having had quite a bit of success with nouns I tried to apply a similar method to verbs and adjectives and other stuff. It really didn't work at all. I spent quite a bit of time trying to learn these verbs and tenses and stuff and I would either just forget them or was unable to use them quickly enough to be able to talk at a reasonable rate. I think the thing is that the grammar has to be something that you don't even think about.

I think it's more like learning a physical movement like a tennis backhand stroke. To start with it feels a bit weird but after a while you just do it without even thinking about it. So, like when learning a stroke in tennis, you might have a little theory for a minute to start with from your coach, but from then on it's mostly a matter of doing it until it comes naturally. Of course you might get it a bit wrong in the process so it's sometimes useful to have some technical help as to what you are doing wrong. But eventually you need to forget the rules and just feel your way through the language.

I think the best way to do this is to learn a decent sample of sentences that exemplify some aspect of the grammar, as you suggest. When I think of the verbs I learnt the most easily, is was when I was doing this type of thing. "In Nuova Zelanda avevo una bella machina rossa" (In New Zealand I have a beautiful red car). I still clearly remember learning this sentence when trying to learn the "I had" form of "to have", and I still get "bella" adjective before the noun but colour after it without even thinking about it. Had a spent more time learning from sentences like this I'm sure that I would be far far better at Italian than I am today.

I think that once I get the grammar really sorted out I will then be able to learn verb more like I learn nouns, well at least regular verbs. Because then my brain will already have the structure of everything mapped out and I'll just be dropping another verb word into this same pattern. But that's some way off for me yet.

I also find that reading things like Mickey Mouse quite good. The sentences are grammatically well written (so I'm told) but they are also quite basic. My ability to read Italian has really improved now to the point where I can sort of read the newspaper. Unfortunately this hasn't translated into an equal ability to understand people talking. That's something that I still find really hard sometimes.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts on this. The fact that I can't communicate properly yet is a constant irritation for me. You comments certainly got me thinking hard about what has and hasn't worked for me. I think that what I should do now is to focus on building up a really good collection of example sentences in Italian to learn the verbs and grammar. With nouns I need to get back to just learning lists. I get thought them but there's just a rather large number to have to learn. Perhaps once I have a good list of example sentences I should put them on the internet as other people trying to learn Italian might find them useful.

One last thing. I have a Disney Tarzan kids DVD, it's kind of like a book with subtitles and a narrator reading the words like he was reading the story to some kids. I wonder if half learning all the words by writing them down and reading through them a number of times and then listerning to the narrator and trying to follow him saying the words would help my ability to pharse the spoken language... I might try this.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

A few questions.

You say that you build up a collection of complex sentences? So you don't learn simple ones like "What is her name?", but rather things like, "That girl over there in the corner next to the door, what is her name?" Is this correct?

How many sentences did you actually memorize in total? 200, 2000, 5000?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Well, of course I learned simple sentences too in the beginning. But I don't think of those as memorizing, since I learned them more or less automatically. (ok, sure I forgot them easily, but after seeing them enough times, you learn it)

Since my goal was to resolve word-order problems in Dutch, 20 sentences should be more than enough for most cases. But it also seems like a good idea as a general technique. So my idea here was more for consciously producing grammatical sentences. Once you learn it well enough, though, it becomes unconscious.

I actually don't remember memorizing many sentences (though I'm sure I rehearsed tons of sentences... I just didn't keep them with me for very long). Off the top of my head, I actually only remember one (the one in the example). The others I've already forgotten.

So I'm not using this anymore. Although, I could still benefit by memorizing examples of conversations (for purposes other than grammar, that is).

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... so you didn't actually memorize that many sentences. I was expecting to have to memorize a few thousand!

There are so many things in Italian that I seem to get wrong in every sentence. Often I have to stop mid sentence, and think about grammar for 15 seconds!

For example, "These are my red tables". I want the word for table, so it's "tavolo", but it's got food on it so it's actually "la tavola" and in this case it's plural so it's "tavole". The word for red is one of the color adjectives that has both gender and number so the form of the adjective is "rosse" and it's a regular adjective so it comes after the noun. Next I need to choose the correct form of "my" which in this case is "mie" as it's feminine plural. As it's not a family member I need a definie article before "mie" that agrees in gender and count which would be "le" and the form of "this" also has to agree in gender and count so it's "queste"... finally I get "Queste sono le mie tavole rosse". Phew!

I'm not too bad at doing that in my head but it still takes me a few seconds to work it out sometimes... and I often get it wrong. In English there is only one word for "this", one word for "my", one word for "the", one word for "red" and one word for "table" with a simple plural form. I'm not used to this kind of mental work just putting a trivial sentence together.

So my hope is that by learning lots of sentences like this I will be able to mentally automate a lot of this complexity to the point where I don't need to think about anymore.