I spoke a lot about the "traditional" method of learning a language in my previous blog post, but I didn't really didn't talk about what exactly it is, and why it does or doesn't work. Whether or not it works depends on why you want to learn the language. If you are a tourist, or you have to go to a foreign country on a very short notice, travel guides and audio books, and other "traditional" methods for learning a language are your friend. If you're not needing or wanting to live in a country or use the language much, you don't need to learn a language like a child does. You don't need to understand the language in a deep or fundamental way, and you probably won't ever care to.
The traditional method I am talking about is any way of teaching a language that has you learning a language without teaching the culture/manners, accent/cadence, voice tone, context, and teaches you in such a way that you must rely on memorized rules and vocabulary to talk in a way that mimics the advanced usage of the language, and does not teach true fluency from the start. If you find yourself in front of tons of books, writing papers and looking at YourLanguage--->ThatLanguage dictionaries to learn new words, you're doing it the traditional way, and it is wrong! At least, it is backwards.
People try to teach advanced usage, grammar rules, and advanced/strange vocabulary first; always teaching by comparing words to their supposed "equivalents" in your native language. It's quick, it's easy, it's a shortcut. So where's the problem? What's wrong with taking a shortcut? If you can learn a language quickly, why not? Nothing's wrong if it works for you. Everyone has different ways of learning. However, the truth is that few people naturally learn that way. You see, if you learn that way you're learning the exact /opposite/ way that your brain is naturally wired to learn. You end up comprehending and understanding at a slower pace if you have to translate everything into your language first before you can know what is being said.
Let's use an illustration. Picture a step ladder. People are trying to get from point A (the base of one side of the ladder) to point B (the base on the other end of the ladder). You see them going through all the effort of climbing up one end of the ladder, and climbing down the other end. There is nothing in between point A and point B that you need a ladder to step over. The ladder is only artificial, and needs to be removed so people can get to point B from point A with one step.
Each "point" was a metaphor for a different language. The ladder represents the pointless amount of extra effort of translating one language to another by recalling memorized rules, and by remembering which word means which word. When you can step from point A to point B because you realise the ladder is artificial, that means you can understand a language without "translating" it because you associate words and grammar/syntax with associated concepts instead of other words. ie; when you are fluent in a language.
You don't need to study and memorize vocabulary and rules BEFORE you become fluent. Obviously children don't, at least not in the same way we think we need to. Children are fluent in a language even if they only know a few words, and can babble to mimic conversation, or can even say one sentence. You are fluent if you can say or understand anything in a language naturally or without extra thought or struggle; you don't have to struggle to understand, or stop to think about something in your own language, do you? You were not born speaking a first language, so how did you learn it? Let's use another illustration.
"Mizu." It means something in Japanese. It's a very basic word, so this isn't a trick. Say mizu (mee-zoo) when you do or think about each of these things because they all have something in common, and try to figure out what mizu means.
Turn on your faucet. Jump in a pool. Look at an aquarium. Watch a waterfall. Take a boat onto the ocean. Take a bath. Throw a water balloon. Stand in the rain. Where can you find a fish? When do you need a snorkel? What do you drink when you are thirsty? What makes the ground wet in the morning?
All of these things may be different but they have a very common thing between them. Water. Water is common in all the above listed things, even though we have different words for things like lakes, oceans, ponds, dew, and water related activities like sailing, swimming, drinking, bathing, and adjectives to describe water like... wet. You learned what each of these words mean by association through many different examples and experiences, asking questions and being told. You don't need someone to tell you what word it was an equivalent to, because you don't know any other word. You associate the word with a CONCEPT, a MEMORY, or an EXPERIENCE. If you learn the word "mizu" and can THINK that word when you think of water, in place of the word "water," then you fluently understand the word mizu.
You learn by example, and association. In order to learn that way, you need lots of examples. Go to youtube or something and watch videos in the language you are interested in. Movies. Blogs. TV shows. News broadcasts.Music. I said this in my first post but if you can't be truly immersed, you need resources. Hours of resources. Hours and hours and hours of resources.
Gee, what are we going to do with hours of videos in a foreign language? Watch them. Watch them all, and watch them all dozens or hundreds of times. Watch everything as many times as you need to. And LISTEN. Let's talk about listening skills, and developing your ear to listen to a new language correctly.
When first presented with a foreign language, it might seem everyone is
talking too fast, and everything sounds the same and is impossible to make out
anything! Sounds can be misheard, voice tone and inflection might be entirely
lost, and it can seem too frustrating and stressful. It may take many many
hours of listening before you become truly comfortable listening. And even if
you have a good ear to hear the language, it doesn't make you any more able to
actually understand it.
I can't stress how important it is that you don't need to understand what
you are hearing. You just need to remember it. If you are going to understand a
word, you are going to understand it. You don't need to struggle and stress
over the sounds to analyze them in hopes it makes more sense. This is a habit
that is only useful for making sense of something you didn't quite catch in
your own language! You don't need to understand every word in a sentence, and
if you do understand a word that means you need to focus on the other words in
the sentence.
Pretend you don't know English, and look at this sentence:
"That cat has radioactive
fleas."
Now pretend you heard that sentence,
along with a cartoon video clip of a cat scratching off green, glowing fleas.
Now say the only word of English you know is "cat." If you don't know
the rest of the English language, you
won't know which word refers to what, if
the sentence is a narration of what the cat is doing, simply a comment about
the cat, or if it is someone talking to the cat. And even if you did know, you
still don't know what the other words mean. However, remember the sentence and
how it was said. You don't know exactly what it means, but you should know
that you can say it every time you see a cat scratching off green, glowing
fleas. Eventually you will be exposed to
many many other examples of the same words used in different ways, and with
each new example you remember, your brain will begin to process all the information
you have been giving it, and you will figure out the words on your own by a mix
of process of elimination, and matching. Let me say this again: You do NOT need
to know exactly what every word means before you can understand when and how to
use those words.
Well that is all I have to say in this blog post. I hope you keep reading,
and comment :D I would love to have feedback and discussions with any of you
about languages!
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