Language Learning Part 1

I’d like to start this article with a disclaimer: I haven’t found a definitive way to learn languages, and I’ve stated such in previous articles. However, this is how I went about learning Japanese, and it overlaps to varying degrees with every other language I’ve set out to learn.

So, let’s start with the boring article where we clarify a few things.

What is Acquisition vs Learning?

There are two ways to develop your language skills: study and acquisition. Children, especially when very young, don’t need much in the way of study, but adults should combine the two of them.

To acquire language means to build an intuitive knowledge of it, usually through exposure, and it is all how we began speaking as children, even before starting school and learning how we can express ourselves through writing and all the rules needed to understand how best to do this in a way that’s readable.

As children, and even as we age into our adult years, most of what we say comes from intuition. If I say “the large ripe orange” it sounds right to your ears. However, if I were to say “the ripe large orange”, you would know it sounds wrong. Believe it or not, there is a grammar rule that explains why this is wrong, but you don’t need to be aware of it for your brain to be taken aback by that latter sentence. This is because you’ve already internalized the rules of English, if it’s your native language, solely through exposure.

Studying a language is to learn about a language and build skills. When learning your native language, this means drilling into a child why some of the things that intuitively sound right through exposure, such as the use of the word “ain’t” or the propensity to construct sentences such as “John and me went to the river” instead of the grammatically correct “John and I went to the river”.

For adults, this means learning a language through the study of grammar and vocabulary. In most textbooks, this means learning a grammatical construct and then supplementing it with vocabulary.

In other words, instead of intuitively picking something up, you study it instead. This would mean learning that, for example, in Japanese, the verb comes at the end of a sentence or clause; or that in Norwegian, the verb is often the second word in a sentence.

Learning Solely Through Studying is Stagnation

Learning through studying, or skill-building, feels right to us. After all, that’s how we learn most academic subjects. However, it almost always leads to a lengthier time needed to learn the language. You can become quite proficient at reading the language this way, as this is how we learn to read in our native languages (although some children are able to teach themselves to read through intuition by following along with, for example, an adult), but I’m sure you know of people who studied a language in high school and then were left flabbergasted when encountering a native speaker.

Learning through study is necessary; I don’t want to tell you that you should never ever learn through study. Studying was necessary for you to be able to read this article and write your own articles coherently, and it will be necessary for you to become fully fluent in your target language as well. My caution is that it shouldn’t be the foundation of your learning or the end-all-be-all.

How Children Learn Through Acquisition

Did you know that all babies are born making the same sounds? It doesn’t matter if that baby was born in a busy New York hospital or in a tribal hut, all of them make the same basic sounds. However, give or take about five months and the sounds start to change. They’re mimicking the sounds they hear around them, narrowing down their babbling.

Anyone who has ever been around infants can tell you that they go through stages where they sometimes get fixated on certain sounds they like (my mom claims that I enjoyed an awful, high-pitched shriek for a while) and eventually those babble sounds become real words.

For example, “mamamamamama” will eventually turn into “mama”.

This is because the human brain is a pattern recognition machine. We learned to predict weather changes, seasons, crop growth, to speak, read, and appreciate music because of this fantastic ability we have to recognize patterns. Arguably, most science and mathematics are simply an extension of this pattern recognition.

Even in infancy, the developing brain is recognizing patterns in what it hears.

We don’t lose this ability in adulthood. The difference is that we don’t have parents around us correcting us when fail to properly recognize a pattern or to model new patterns for us regarding languages. We aren’t hearing someone asking, “Do you want a cookie?” over and over again as we learn to recognize this sentence and what happens if we answer “yes” or “no”.

However, we do have the Internet, which has made learning through acquisition much more possible for the adult language learner.

How We’re Going to Learn

Assuming your goals are fluency (we’ll talk more about this later) and you aren’t trying to quickly prepare for a trip or something, this is how I like to tackle languages, especially those that I anticipate will come difficult to me:

Pour Your Foundation

I like to use tools that are traditionally used for studying as a way to enhance immersion, or acquisition. I hope to teach you how to do this and give you some great tools for this.

The purpose is to make what you read and hear more comprehensible, and if your target language uses a different writing system (Cyrillic, hanzi, kanji, etc.) you can use these tools to knock that out of the way first.

Develop Your Comprehension Through Focus

Since I tend to follow the input method, this is where I focus a lot on absorbing media I enjoy. However, you’ll learn not to start with something complex. I mean, you can if you really want to, but it’s a fast path to discouragement for most people.

In traditional study, this is where graded readers usually come in. I have no problem with them, but you can also use easy media. Stuff aimed at children is particularly helpful in this stage.

The other thing I do is that these aren’t supplements as they are in a traditional academic setting, they’re the foundation of learning.

Practice Output

If you’re doing an output-based method, then this is what you’ll be doing early on, supplemented by more traditional study. For me, however, I don’t start doing anything output-related until I have the basics down. If you prefer an output-based approach, I suggest looking up Benny Lewis.

Output is key to further understanding, just as a child won’t know if he’s mispronouncing a word, misusing it, or constructing odd sentences until he speaks and an adult is able to correct them.

Even with acquisition, the brain can make mistakes in pattern recognition. When I was a kid, for instance, my parents found out when I started learning how to spell that I thought “tree” was “chree”. That’s how my brain heard it, so when I figured out that you can combine the letters “c” and “h” to make the sound I was hearing, I promptly began misspelling it everywhere.

Output also allows you to identify the gaps in your knowledge. You may have a broad understanding of the language, but by seeing what subjects you seem to lack vocabulary in or situations where you find you don’t know what to say or have trouble understanding, you can refocus your acquisition or see what you need a more traditional, study-centered explanation for.

Get Ready!

That’s it. We’ll dive into those three steps later.