Category: Language learning

Studying or dabbling, or both?

By Simon

Do you think it better to learn many languages to a basic level, to concentrate on a few and learn them in much more depth, or to learn a few languages well, and to learn the basics of others – perhaps many others?

It will probably depend on what you want to do with each language.

In my case I’ve studied nine languages in depth, and speak four of them fluently (plus English), and can get by in the others, more or less. The ones I’ve spent most time on are Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, French, Irish, German, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish and Manx, and they’re the ones I know well or fairly well. I’ve been to and/or lived in places where they’re spoken, done courses, and do my best to maintain them and use them whenever I can, especially the Celtic ones and French. I’m also learning Breton and Russian at the moment. I’ve dabbled with quite a few other languages, for trips to other countries, to try different languages courses, and out of interest. I don’t actively maintain them.

Recently I’ve been thinking whether I really want to learn any other languages – there are plenty I’d like to know, but I’m not sure whether I have time to learn them, and to maintain the ones I already know. I’m not interested in learning many languages just for the sake or it. I learn each one for a variety of reasons and don’t tend to get very far it I don’t have much interest in the language itself, and/or in the culture of people who speak it. With Breton I will finish the course I’m working on, but may not continue with my studies, unless I find an aspect or aspects of Breton culture that really fascinate me and/or appeal to me. The same is true of Russian.

As well as learning languages, I also play quite a few musical instruments, particularly guitar, piano, recorders, tin whistles, mandolin and ukulele. I used to play the clarinet, but have played very little since leaving school and have decided to sell it. When I mentioned this to a friend he asked me what other instrument(s) I will buy with the money from the clarinet – I haven’t decided yet whether to concentrate on the instruments I already play, or to do that and to get a new one.

Visual addiction

By Simon

There’s an interesting post by Idahosa Ness on learning languages orally over on Fluent in 3 Months today. It suggests that it is better to focus on listening and speaking until you have a good grasp of the pronunciation, rather than learning reading and writing at the same time. This can work even if you believe you’re a visual learning and need to have things written down in order to remember them.

Idahosa believes that you should concentrate on learning to recognize and produce the sounds of a language first, and on learning how they go together to form words and sentences. A knowledge of phonetics and phonology can help with this as it shows you what to do with your mouth in order to make the sounds, and this can also help you to recognize them. At this stage you don’t need to know how the sounds are represented in writing; in fact learning that can interfere with your ability to pronounce the sounds.

This approach seems to make a lot sense to me – I always spend lots of time listening to languages, sometimes before I even start learning them. So my listening abilities tend to develop more quickly and thoroughly than my other linguistic skills. Perhaps I need to spend more time practicing speaking as well.

One book which uses a similar approach to Idahosa’s is Blas na Gàidhlig: The Practical Guide to Scottish Gaelic Pronunciation, by Michael Bauer, which uses the IPA and lots of recordings to teach you the pronunciation of Scottish Gaelic, and only introduces Gaelic orthography once all the sounds have been explained.

The only language I’ve tried to learn mainly orally is Taiwanese. As Taiwanese doesn’t have a standard written form, I concentrated on learning to speak and understand it. I tried to learn everything orally at first, but started writing things down after a while to help me remember them. If I’d had something to record the things I was learning, I might have been able to dispense with the written notes.

Have you learnt or tried to learn a language entirely or mainly orally?

More on grammar

By Simon

The importance of grammar in language learning is often played down in language courses and by people who blog about language learning. They claim that you can learn a language either without actively studying the grammar (whatever they mean by the word), or that you only need to glance at grammar books and explanations now and then. This is partly a reaction against the grammar-translation approach to language teaching in which you concentrate on learning verb conjugations, noun declensions, etc, and on translating from and to the target language.

I think that grammar, i.e. how a language works, and grammatical terminology (if you don’t already know it), can be short cuts to achieving competence in a language. If you spend all you time learning nouns, for example, and don’t know how to put them together with other words to make sentences, then your ability to communicate will be very limited. Grammar provides the framework of a language and vocabulary provides the content. You need to learn both.

The question for me is not whether you need to learn/acquire grammar, but how you do so. Some people are able to read a grammar book, absorb the information and apply it – one friend, for example, spent nine months learning Finnish grammar, then moved to Finland (from Germany) and became fluent in Finnish within a few months. For most people though this is probably wouldn’t work. You can absorb a lot of grammar from extensive listening and reading, with some checking of grammar books, but some overt study can be useful as well.

What is your approach?

What do you mean by grammar?

By Simon

A lot of discussions on how to learn languages mention grammar – whether it should be learnt overtly at all; whether it should be introduced gradually from the start, or only after one has a some knowledge of the new language, and so on.

There are often asides about how English-speaking people, especially the younger generations of English speakers, don’t even know the grammar of their own language.

What people mean by grammar is rarely discussed or defined, as it is assumed that everyone knows what grammar is, don’t they?

The OED has the following on grammar:

“That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing.

In early English use grammar meant only Latin grammar, as Latin was the only language that was taught grammatically. In the 16th century there are some traces of a perception that the word might have an extended application to other languages; but it was not before the 17th century that it became so completely a generic term that there was any need to speak explicitly of ‘Latin grammar’. Ben Jonson’s book, written c1600, was applied the first to treat of ‘English grammar’ under that name.

As above defined, grammar is a body of statements of fact — a ‘science’; but a large portion of it may be viewed as consisting of rules for practice, and so as forming an ‘art’. The old-fashioned definition of grammar as ‘the art of speaking and writing a language correctly’ is from the modern point of view in one respect too narrow, because it applies only to a portion of this branch of study; in another respect, it is too wide, and was so even from the older point of view, because many questions of ‘correctness’ in language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.”

It seems that when people say that (other) English speakers don’t know their grammar, what they mean is that they might not be familiar with grammatical terms, such as subject, object, adverb, declension, etc, and/or that they do not always use standard language, or at least that they do not speak or write in the way that the critics believe they should.

In terms of language learning, grammar can refer to verb conjugations, noun declensions and other ways that words change to indicate such things as person, number, tense, mood, etc. So saying that Chinese ‘has no grammar’ indicates that it has no inflections.

What do you mean when you talk about grammar?

Reverse engineering languages

By Simon

Recently I read an interesting book by Barbara Sher called Refuse to Choose!, which suggests ways in which people with many interests, who the author calls scanners, can find time to persue all those interests. I thought some of the suggestions might be relevant to people interested like learning many languages, like me.

One idea is thinking about what you want to achieve, then working backwards thinking about all the steps you need to take to achieve your goal. If you did this for language, you might start picturing the level of competence you want to reach in a language, then work out all the steps needed to reach that level, working backwards.

Have you tried anything like this?

Tuning in

By Simon

I went to a concert featuring poems and songs in Shetland dialect last night – some new, some old, some serious, and some frivolous and very funny. I was able to follow most of the words, but there were some that I didn’t understand, including some of the funny bits, so sometimes when everyone else was laughing, I was wondering what the jokes were.

Some of the performers were more difficult to understand than others, as there is quite a bit of dialect and accent variation between different parts of Shetland that I’m not used to yet. The Whalsay dialect is reputedly the most difficult to understand, and the one people from other parts of Shetland make fun of.

My ears and brain are gradually tuning in to the Shetland dialects and accents, a bit like a radio tuning in to different stations. My understanding of them is on a similar level to my understanding of Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic at the moment – I can get most of them when I really concentrate, and some words which I don’t understand the first time make sense when I hear them again in a slightly different context. Sometimes I find it helps to de-focus slightly and to let the words flow in without worrying that I don’t understand all of them.

Feeling at home in a language and culture

By Simon

The other day a friend of a friend asked me whether I’d found a language and/or culture in which I felt ‘at home’. She told me about someone she knows who has studied many languages and is always looking for a language community (other than his native one) where he fits in and feels comfortable – he has yet to find one. I hadn’t really thought about language learning in this way before. Have you?

I suppose that whenever I visit other countries and communities I kind of try them on for size and imagine what it would be like to live in them in the medium to long term. Each one has aspects that appeal to me, and others that I’m not so keen on – things like language, food, climate, scenery, music, etc. I’ve felt reasonably at home in various parts of British Isles and Ireland, in Taipei and Hong Kong, and in Australia and New Zealand.

Reviving neglected languages

By Simon

I often meet people who say that they studied a language or two in school, but have since forgotten most of what they knew as they’ve had little need and few opportunities to speak the language(s). To some extent I’m in a similar position – since finishing school I have rarely spoken French or German, though I did spend three months working in France during my year off before going to university, and my ability in them atrophied. However, since I started going to a French conversation group a few years ago, I have regained my fluency in French – it came back quite quickly, and the polyglot conversation group I started this month gives me opportunities to use my German, which is starting to come back, after nearly 25 years of neglect.

Last week I was wondering why many people seem to find it hard to recover neglected languages they’re learnt in the past, even after only a few years. A friend suggested that my ability to do this might be because I’ve been actively learning languages more or less ever since I was 11 years old, and that by keeping the bits of my brain involved with learning and using foreign languages helps to keep all the languages in there at least partly active. I think there is something in this, as I remember reading about experiments in which bilingual individuals were put in brain scanners, which found that when the bilinguals were focused on one language – hearing it, reading it or speaking it – their other language was also active.

Another factor is how thoroughly you learnt a language in the first place – if you learnt it to a high level, then reviving it later is likely to be easier than if you only acquired a basic knowledge of it. For example I spent only a few months learning Italian and Portuguese on my own, quite a few years ago, and though I can still sort of read and understand them, I can only speak them to a very limited extent. I would need to start again with them really as my knowledge of them is shallow, so there’s not much to revive.

Have you studied languages in the past, neglected them for some time, then managed to revive them?

Breton

By Simon

This week I reached the half-way point in my Breton Assimil course (lesson 50) and have entered the ‘active phase’. So for every new lesson I also go back to an earlier lessons and translate the French versions of the dialogues and exercises into Breton. I also translate them into Welsh, just for fun. So far I’m finding the translations easy, but have to check some of the spellings.

My impression of the Assimil course so far is that it is a good way to learn a new language. Each lesson provides some new words and grammar, but doesn’t overwhelm you with new stuff. In Colloquial Breton the lessons cover far more material, which can be a bit intimidating at first. For example, when a new verb is introduced in Colloquial Breton all forms for a particular tense are given, while in the Assimil course the different forms are usually introduced over several lessons. I think I prefer the gentle, gradual approach of Assimil, but will go back to the Colloquial course once I’ve finished the Assimil one. If I need to know all the different forms of a verb or other conjugated word, I can look in the grammar section at the back of Assimil, or in my Breton grammar book,

As well as studying a bit every day, I listen to Breton radio regularly, and am beginning to get the gist of some of the things I hear, or at least can recognise some of the words. I haven’t heard any Breton songs that I really want to learn yet, but I hope there’ll be a few. I have also bought a Breton version of the first Harry Potter book and plan to read it soon, perhaps in parallel with the Welsh and/or English versions.

Have you used Assimil courses to learn any languages? What are you impressions of them?

Fantastic octopus wiring!

By Simon

The title of this post is an example of the English sentence that appear on tweets by a certain Mr Nakayama, who aims to introduce Japanese people to “Non-essential English Vocabulary: Words that will never come up in tests”. He makes up these useless but memorable phrases as an alternative to all the books and websites that help people prepare for tests, and they are proving popular with English learners in Japan. Nakayama san has also published a books of these phrases.

More examples include, “My brother has been observing the slugs since he got divorced.” and “What nice barbed wire. Thank you, I knitted it myself”, “The mayor got a lot of shampoo hats by dishonest means.”

The writer of the article where I found this suggests that this might be a good way to learn vocabulary in any language as the bizarreness of the sentences makes them relatively easy to remember. Quite a few of them feature somewhat crude language, though that probably makes them memorable as well.