This Just Sounds Wrong
January 30th, 2009 | View Comments
I discovered the joy that is All Japanese All the Time yesterday and I just have to say: WORD to Khatzumoto’s entire language learning philosophy. At some point I may go through the language learning literature and pull references to studies that support his total correctness on everything [1], but today I’m going to focus on this:
Most learners of a foreign language – any foreign language – remain, like a novice skater to the wall of the rink, glued to their textbooks: a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of their target language. As a result, if they get good at anything at all, they get good at handling a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of…you get the picture. Their exposure to native materials is insufficient at best if not non-existent. And their language skills suffer accordingly.
An internet friend of mine once memorably said:
Americans waste their time focusing on verb conjugation. Once you have a feel for how things sound, you’ll know when to use the right form of the verb. I can always tell if someone learned HS spanish or if they learned street spanish because the HS spanish person says things that have not been used since Ferdinand wrote Cristobal Colon a cheque to buy three boats.
I’m up to Lesson 10 of Beginning Chinese Reader and while it’s been fantastic for refreshing me on characters that I once learned and forgot and teaching me new compounds, if you actually used the sentence constructions that appear in some of the readings, you would sound kind of like a Chinese Yoda.
For example:
這兩本書很好. 是你的嗎?
Zhe4 liang3 ben3 shu1 hen3 hao3. Shi4 ni3 de5 ma1?
是的. 那兩本書是我的.
Shi4 de5. Na4 liang3 ben3 shu1 shi4 wo3 de5.
多少錢一本?
Duo1 shao3 qian2 yi1 ben3?
那兩本書三塊九.
Na4 liang3 ben3 shu1 san1 kuai4 jiu3.
Translated, that’s:
These two books are very good. Are they yours?
Yes. Those two books are mine.
How much does one book cost?
Those two books are $3.90.
The whole dialogue is a bit stilted, what with the unnecessary repetition, but big issue is in the third sentence. The text has 多少錢一本?. I may not have native fluency in Chinese [2], but I was raised in a Mandarin-speaking household and that just sounds weird to me. I would reverse the construction and say, 一本多少錢?.
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I’m a cognitive psychologist by training.
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On the other hand, my pronunciation and grammar are such that I can pass as a native speaker for basic interactions. On our recent trip to Taiwan, people generally assumed me to be a local until I blanked on a phrase that a native speaker would know or asked for menus/brochures in English.
Yvonne posted this on January 30th, 2009 @ 12:59am in Chinese, Grammar, Language Psychology | Permalink to "This Just Sounds Wrong"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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Of course I’m commenting again! I just can’t stay away!
I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally unsound about this guy’s premise. After all, this is essentially how babies acquire their first language. They listen to it every day, all day long, and then stuff suddenly starts making sense to them. And eventually, their output starts making sense too. There aren’t any classes or formal drills–or even if there are, it just feels like play to them.
Furthermore, there are languages out there without written systems–although they are admittedly fewer than there used to be–so there are plenty of people for whom reading and writing is moot. There are also lots of people who never go to school and thus never learn the “standard” way that has been dictated by La Real Academia Española, L’ Académie Française, or just the local self-appointed guardian of Language Purity. And even beyond these circumstances, I had a professor last year who was fond of saying that there are plenty of native-born Americans who would never get a 5 on the English language ILR.
So, yeah. There are better ways to learn Spanish than committing 501 Spanish Verbs to memory. If you want to be able to get through–and, more importantly, understand what people are saying back to you–I’m all for this method if you have the time.
BUT (and you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) I think it’s pretty clear that this method, and other “passive” language learning methods have their limits. But this has already turned into a long enough comment, so I think I’ll bring that up elsewhere.
BTW, much WIN! for the post slug.
From a linguist’s point of view, I look at the morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest structural unit of a word with a meaning/inflection associated with it. Thus, verb conjugation (and language in general) becomes a puzzle.
Take the German verb kennen, meaning “to know (a person)”:
Ich kenne
Du kennst
Er/Sie/Es kennt
Wir kennen
Ihr kennt
Sie/sie kennen
The root, kenn- holds the meaning. The suffix endings indicate the subject.
Some linguistic theories argue that to learn conjugation, children will over apply suffixes to the roots, eventually figuring out which ones are acceptable and which are not. We hear English-speaking children using phrases such as, “*He go-ed away.” (He went away.)
In linguistic notation, an asterisk [*] indicates an unacceptable example within the grammar of a language.
With regard to the Chinese example, in doing research for a paper on Chinese syntax, I found that the acceptability of utterances varied based on geography and upbringing. Even siblings disagreed on the validity of some sentences.
Makes sense to me. My German goddaughter does more or less the same thing with declension right now, and is learning through trial and error to recognize case and gender.
And as someone who grew up speaking an agglutinative language at home, I know full well the puzzle that morphemes can be. Sometimes they’re fun ones, and sometimes they can just be a pain in the ass.
Psychologists believe that too. But a key part of the psychological perspective on language learning is how kids figure out what’s acceptable and what’s not, and neural network models in particular suggest that no formal “rule” teaching is necessary. Being exposed over and over and over again to correctly-conjugated verbs will produce the same pattern: an initial overgeneralization of -ed, followed by learning of the irregular conjugations.