Learning Languages
Sep. 5th, 2004 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslPeople 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-05 06:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-05 09:46 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-11 12:42 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-11 01:27 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-12 03:13 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-12 06:45 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-12 07:06 am (UTC)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.