Guardsman Bass wrote:
Language is actually one that I wouldn't be surprised if someone failed at even after getting a degree in it. Simply put, it's hard to easily teach because 90% of people have an absolutely wrong approach to learning a language that will cripple them at any level beyond 1st year of study levels of babytalk produced after long pensive meditation, and in many languages it exacerbates the problem even more than that (Spanish-English for instance the bad approach I'm referring to isn't as much a problem as say English-Japanese or Russian-Swahili).
Without going too far off-track, is the "right way" immersion?
The only other thing I can think of is that way that they teach you the language "grammatically" in university, i.e. by teaching you a bunch of verbs, how to conjugate them, etc in Spanish. I had a classmate in one of my Spanish classes who was married to a spanish-native speaker from Venezuela, and he told me that his wife found our lessons kind of weird - she said that when she was learning the language growing up, they taught you basically a bunch of complete sentences and the like, wherein you picked up the verb structures as part of learning them.
Immersion helps, as does having a use for a language- someone to talk to, books to read, TV to watch, songs to listen to. Learning a language with a vaccuum of use is a good way to not give a shit and not gain competancy, even if you memorize a lot of words and structures. However, immersion is a less basic than what I'm talking about, as basic a strategy as it is. Immersion is about forcing yourself to learn, and having a use for a language is about giving yourself a reason to learn. The thing I'm going to talk about is making it possible
The thing people do wrong is that they try to project foreign words as a list of vocabulary items and translate from english to X. When you try to say, for instance, "Today I had a sandwich" and you say... , okay, "Today", 'jucho', [I had], 'ougak', "a sandwich", 'kwebhalo', sandwich is object so change it to kwebhalwo... word order, "jucho kwebhalwo ougak".
When you do that, you're doing it wrong and will probably have trouble ever becoming fluent. Language X isn't English, and you can't project words 1-to-1. For one, that's a great way to be overliteral and calque from english, like "Had" for "Consumed", and it's a way to ignore grammatical structures like case or vowel harmony if you forget they exist in that language.
It also however is a great way to make your brain take virtual years
to think of a proper sentence, because it has to think of the english thing it wants to say, think of the translation for each piece, then combine them, check for errors, rearrange if necessary, and then go to your mouth. Imagine your mind like a computer program, and you'll see how inefficient that is.
You have to learn grammar. Not like memorizing endings and things, although that's useful in some languages. You have to learn to think in the language you're using, and not consider things like "gau = warrior as a noun, but 'deadly' as an adjective, unless you want to say deadly warrior in which case you say 'jogau' because nobody would say gau gau", "khora = to hear, but also to percieve mentally" or other things. It's too much mental space, and the exceptions pile up. Your brain needs to just think in Language X, as hard as that sounds. You can't try to apply english grammar to Language X grammar, because they aren't 1:1. Gau is Gau, and you can make an english definition for it but when it comes down to it, when someone says Gau you should know what they mean and not have to think 'Gau means warrior or deadly'. Granted, once you're at a certain comprehension level, that is. For the beginning you can think in english definitions since it's difficult to begin immersing your brain in Language X, but to get beyond beginner's level you have to discard mental crutches like that. Whether you do it by mental pictures, just mental association, or some other way, you can't get stuck on the path of making your mind into a literal dictionary of Y = English Definition.
Why do you say "Takenwere" for "They had been taken" in Latin, for instance? You can just mentally substitute the two, but some things are not one to one maps and become more difficult like "Use imperfect tense for 'Used To', 'Often Did', 'Habitually Do', and 'Was Doing'. " Memorizing stuff like that is a good way to never learn when to use it, you'll have to mentally translate the imperfect from Latin into "Used to do/often did/habitually does/was doing" which is awkward and requires you to then figure out which one.
Basically the problem is that people try to translate rather than speak. Other languages aren't ciphers, and people treat them as such. Especially people who think you can just word-substitute a sentence in english on an online translator to produce a foreign language, but even people who understand language. Knowing grammar isn't enough- memorizing charts is just even more stuff your brain has to come with. You have to think
in the foreign grammar if you want fluency. Most of the people who get stuck at the pidgin language level, the 'have to think for 10 minutes of mental lookup charts and consulting mental dictionary level before producing a sentence' level (where skill hardly matters if you can't use it in real time), and the 'says things that are the right words (or just literal calques) but in an improper english-influenced grammar' level I believe are stuck on this because of the way they're filing information in their brain.
This is at least how I understand language learning, and I might be wrong- I have only me and what I've been told and read about other people, but I believe parsimony is on my side after watching all those people in foreign language classes struggle and say things like "yo jugar" for "I play" in spanish and "zu spielen" for "To play" in german. Literal translation, mentally or otherwise, and even attempts to 1:1 define things as just synonyms of english always end badly.