|
Server : Apache/2.4.62 System : FreeBSD fbsdweb2.web.rcn.net 14.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE releng/14.1-n267679-10e31f0946d8 GENERIC amd64 User : www ( 80) PHP Version : 8.3.8 Disable Function : NONE Directory : /domains/markrose/ |
Upload File : |
<html>
<head>
<title>When do people learn languages?</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#C0E0F0">
<img src="process.gif">
<h1><font color="#5070A0">When do people learn languages?</font></h1>
<table width="100%" border=0>
<td width="5%">
<td width="90%">
<i>My concern here is to look at what linguistics can tell us about <b>why and when people
learn a language</b>. (Summary: It's not easy, so they'll try not to.) I'll also cover the
subsidiary questions that usually interest folks more: <b>How can I learn a language?</b> and,
<b>How can I make other people learn this language?</b></i>
<td width="5%">
</table>
<hr>
<h2><font color="#5070A0">The problem: other people's languages</font></h2>
<table width="100%" border=0>
<td width="5%">
<td width="90%">
Just as everyone thinks they're an expert on language, everyone thinks they're an expert
on learning languages... that is, on <i>other people</i> learning languages and why they ought
to. Typical interested parties:
<ul>
<li>People want students to learn foreign languages.
<li>People want immigrants to learn the national language.
<li>People want their home language to be the national language.
<li>Minorities are concerned that their languages not disappear.
<li>Esperantists want everyone to learn Esperanto.
<li>Non-Americans want to learn English.
<li>Non-Americans are worried that everyone will learn English.
<li>Parents may want to teach their children something besides the national language
</ul>
Discussions of these subjects generally veer off into pointlessness, because they're based on
morality and myth. People talk about what people <i>should</i> do, what languages they <i>should</i>
speak or not speak. But you can't talk about that till you know what's involved in
learning a language-- how hard it is, what's needed to do it, when it happens or doesn't
happen. When these things are discussed at all, people generally get their facts wrong.
<p>My purpose with this page is not so much to argue for or against any of these goals, but
to set out the facts (as far as they're known), and draw some mostly unwelcome lessons.
<td width="5%">
</table>
<h2><font color="#5070A0">Some myths about language learning</font></h2>
<table width="100%" border=0>
<td width="5%">
<td width="90%">
Or half-myths; but those can be more dangerous than outright falsehoods.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">Languages are learned in school</font></h3>
People <i>can</i> learn languages in school... but most of the time they don't. To see this,
simply look at American foreign language instruction. Many high schools and colleges
require several years of a foreign language; the usual result is that students make the
absolute minimum effort to pass, and five years later are unable to produce a sentence in
the language.
<p>These courses typically take 3 to 5 hours a week; one might expect more of bilingual or
total-immersion schools. But even here the results are not perfect. Some Canadian
schools teach French to anglophones by immersion; it's reported (François Grosjean, <i>Life with
Two Languages</i>, p. 219) that the students do well enough academically, but have
"great difficulty" communicating with French-speaking Canadians outside the school,
and don't initiate conversations in French.
<p>European schools have a better reputation than U.S. ones, but I'm not convinced that the
situation is spectacularly different. After ten years of English, students may do quite
well; but if they don't have ongoing opportunities to practice, their English may not last
much more than the American students' French or Spanish.
<p>The basic fallacy here is to take learning as an irreversible process. Because someone
learned something in school, whether it's Latin or trigonometry or the exports of
Venezuela, it doesn't mean that they still know it. An example is the father of a friend of
mine, a Brazilian who studied in the US for a year. Forty years later, he can still read
English, but he's quite unable to carry on a conversation in the language.
<p><b>To sum up</b>: school courses may help <i>you</i> to learn a language (see <a href="#advice">below</a>); they can't be
counted on to teach it to a whole population. Immersion schools will probably work,
though even that will be of no use if the student doesn't keep using the language after
graduating.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">My ancestors learned by 'sink or swim'; so can you</font></h3>
This one tends to get trotted out in arguments against bilingualism. The idea is that
immigrants never received special treatment in the past, and yet learned the national
language just fine; so present-day immigrants shouldn't get any help now. It ain't
necessarily so.
<p>First, if those ancestors immigrated as <b>adults</b>, then very likely they <i>didn't</i> learn the
national language well, if at all. For Americans, at least, the details are generally several
generations back and misty. We forget just how multilingual the country was at the
height of European immigration. People generally moved into ethnic enclaves, married
among themselves, and worked in menial jobs where there was little need for English.
There were daily newspapers in half a dozen languages in all the major cities (indeed, a
surprising number of them still exist). Much of the bureaucracy we have to deal with
today didn't exist: income tax, health plans, credit card contracts, forms required by
schools. Older immigrants could often get by with a minimal command of English, or
none at all.
<p><b>Children</b> might indeed be sent to a school which taught in English only. This 'worked'
in the sense that the child learned English; but this is far from proving that this is the only
or best way to treat immigrant children. At the very least these children missed a year or
two of instruction, and the later they came, the less command of formal English they
would have attained.
<p>And maybe that was acceptable in 1880 or 1920, when most jobs required little education
and minimal formal English. Today almost all jobs require a high degree of schooling;
and complicated forms and directions are inescapable. What worked several generations
ago may be insufficient today.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">I know this guy who speaks <i>ten</i> languages!</font></h3>
A complicating factor in almost any discussion of these issues is that the people
discussing them-- and that includes myself and probably most readers of this page-- are
likely to enjoy languages, and may have learned a few essentially for fun.
<p>For such people, the brutal facts about most people's language learning-- i.e., that they
don't do it-- may be hard to believe or sympathize with. We learned French, and enjoyed
it! Look at all those Larousses on the shelf! We had so much fun talking to that
schoolteacher in Versailles, buying French rap at FNAC, reading Daniel Pennac,
answering that Tech Support call from Montréal ... can't people see that learning
languages is both fun and useful?
<p>Well, no, any more than people in general see the fun in manga, or algebra, or skeet-
shooting, or ska. Like it or not, language geeks are a minority, and their abilities are no
guide to language policy.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">Children learn languages easily</font></h3>
This is a popular commonplace, and one asserted by linguists as well, mostly due to
Noam Chomsky's belief in an innate 'language organ'. (Steven Pinker's <i>The Language Instinct</i>
popularizes Chomsky's ideas.) Unfortunately, the evidence is against it.
<p>Children begin learning languages at birth (infants pay attention to their parents' voices,
as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven't really mastered it
subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed, we never really stop learning our language.
(See David Singleton, <i>Language Acquisition: The Age Factor</i>, p. 56.)
This isn't exactly the sort of behavior (like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call
'instinct' in animals.
<p>But at least it's effortless, isn't it? Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice
of languages to learn. What's found is that, to be frank, <b>children don't learn a language</b>
if they can get away with not learning it.
<p>Many an immigrant family in the U.S. intends to teach their child their native language;
and for the first few years it goes swimmingly-- so much so that the parents worry that
the child won't learn English. Then the child goes to school, picks up English, and
within a few years the worry is reversed: the child still understands his parents, but
responds in English. Eventually the parents may give up, and the home language
becomes English. An anecdote from Grosjean:
<blockquote>
Cyril, a little French boy in the States, started going to an English-language day
care center, he brought home English-speaking friends, he watched television, and
American friends of his parents quite often came to dinner. Above all, Cyril
realized that his parents spoke quite good English, and as there was no other
reason for speaking French (no French-speaking grandmother or playmate, no
French -speaking social activities outside the home), Cyril probably decided that
the price to maintain both languages... was too high. Little by little he started
speaking English to his parents and ceased to be an active bilingual, although he
retained the ability to understand his fist language.
</blockquote>
<p>The linguist R. Burling spent two years in the Garo Hills of India; his son grew up
speaking English and Garo-- mostly the latter. They left India when the boy was three;
for awhile the boy would attempt to speak Garo with anyone he met who looked Indian.
But within six months, he wouldn't speak any Garo and seemed to have trouble with even
simple Garo words.
<p>A child is likely to end up as a fluent speaker of a language only if there are significant
people in her life who speak it: a nanny who only speaks Spanish, a relative who doesn't
speak English, etc. Once a child discovers that his parents understand English perfectly
well, he's likely to give up on the home language, even in the face of strong disapproval
from the parents.
<p>These stories help demonstrate that it's a myth that children learn to speak mainly from
their parents. They don't: they learn mostly <b>from their peers</b>. This is most easily seen
among children of immigrants, whether they come from differing language backgrounds
or merely different dialect areas: the children invariably come to speak the dialect of
their neighborhood and school, not that of their parents. (I found a neat example of this
in my college's alumni magazine: A liberal family in Mississippi sent their daughter to
the public schools, which except for her were all black. She grew up speaking fluent
African-American Vernacular English.)
<p>Supporters of the 'language instinct' make much of the fact that children learn to speak
<b>without formal instruction</b>-- indeed, they notoriously ignore explicit corrections.
For instance, an example collected by Martin Braine [Pinker, p. 281]:
<blockquote>
Child: Wnat other one spoon, Daddy.
<br>Father: You mean, you want the <i>other spoon</i>.
<br>Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
<br>Father: Can you say "the other spoon"?
<br>Child: Other... one... spoon.
<br>Father: Say "other".
<br>Child: Other.
<br>Father: "Spoon."
<br>Child: Spoon.
<br>Father: "Other... spoon."
<br>Child: Other... spoon. Now give me other one spoon.
</blockquote>
This
argument ignores the fact that very little of what we learn is through formal instruction.
Children aren't schooled in video games, either, yet they pick them up with the same
seeming ease.
<p>The apparent effortlessness is largely an <b>illusion</b> caused by psychological distance. We
just don't remember how hard it was to learn language. (In fact, there's some studies
suggesting that memory is tied to language, so that we <i>can't</i> remember the language
learning process.) The perception of effortlessness should be balanced, anyway, by the
universal amusement (which <a href="http://www.zompist.com/bob5.html">some cartoonists</a> have been mining for nearly half a
century) over children's language mistakes.
<p>Another anecdote: my wife liked to tease a young boy who was having trouble understanding
the reciprocal nature of personal pronouns:
<blockquote>
Adult: Is this your ball?
<br>Child (trying to say it's his): Yes, it's your ball!
<br>Adult: So, it's my ball?
<br>Child: No! (<i>cries</i>)
</blockquote>
<p>That's not exactly easy!
<p>Another clue that children find language difficult is that they become agitated when
someone speaks the 'wrong' language. An English-German bilingual child, Danny, was
speaking to a German-speaking researcher; trying to help, his mother (who normally only
used English with him) asked, <i>Was macht der Vogel?</i> ("What's the bird doing?") Danny,
startled, told his mother, <i>Nicht 'Vogel'!</i> ("Not Vogel!") He points to the researcher and
said <i>Du Vogel</i> ("You bird"), and to his mother and said <i>Du sag 'birdie'</i> ("You say
birdie").
<p>Another example: an Italian-German bilingual girl, Lisa, became upset and
started to cry when an Italian friend spoke to her in German. On another occasion, Lisa's
father said something to her in German, and she responded, <i>No, tu non puoi!</i> ("No, <u>you</u>
can't!") Keeping two largely unknown language systems separate is a tricky task, and
associating each with different people helps: Lisa can count on knowing that whatever
Daddy says is Italian. If anyone in her life could use either language at any time, the
learning task would become much harder.
<p>One may fall back on the position that language may be hard for children to learn, but at
least they do it <b>better than adults</b>. This, however, turns out to be surprisingly difficult to
prove. Singleton examined hundreds of
studies, and found them resoundingly ambiguous. Quite a few studies, in fact, find that adult
learners progress <b>faster than children</b> (<i>Language Acquisition</i>, pp. 94-106). Even in phonetics, sometimes the last stronghold
of the kids-learn-free position, there are studies finding that adults are better at
recognizing and producing foreign sounds.
<p>Now, I think Singleton misses a key point in understanding this discrepancy: the studies
he reviews compare <i>children</i> vs. <i>adults who are learning languages</i>. That's quite
reasonable, and indeed it's hard to imagine an alternative approach; but the two groups
are not really comparable! All children have to learn at least one language; but few adults
do. So the studies compare the situation of all children with that of the minority of adults
motivated to formally learn other languages.
<p>Why <i>do</i> children learn languages well, when even adults who want to learn them have
trouble with them? Innate abilities aside, children have a number of <b>powerful
advantages</b>:
<ul>
<li>They can devote almost their <b>full time</b> to it. Adults consider half an hour's study
a day to be onerous.<p>
<li>Their <b>motivation</b> is intense. Adults rarely have to spend much of their time in the
company of people they need to talk to but can't; children can get very little of
what they want without learning language(s).<p>
<li>Their <b>peers are nastier</b>. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human
beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky's <i>The Society of Mind</i>, but it was most memorably
expressed by David Berlinski (in <i>Black Mischief</i>, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to
depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full
original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the
vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny.
</ul>
<p>If adults could be placed in a similar situation, they might well learn languages as readily
(I don't say 'easily'!) as children. The closest such situation I can think of is cross-
cultural marriage. And indeed, this works quite well. My wife, for instance, a native
Spanish speaker who came here in her late 20s, has learned exceptional English, since we
speak it at home. By contrast, some of her Spanish-speaking friends of the same age,
married to other Spanish speakers, speak English haltingly and with a strong accent.
<td width="5%">
</table>
<h2><font color="#5070A0">So when do we do it?</font></h2>
<table width="100%" border=0>
<td width="5%">
<td width="90%">
By now, I think, the positive content of this paper will be anticlimactic:
<blockquote><i>
Languages take immense effort to learn, and people will only learn them if it's
socially or economically inescapable.
</i></blockquote>
To put it another way: the way children learn or don't learn languages, as reviewed in the
last section, holds for adults as well-- compounded by adults' lack of the special
advantages of children (time, motivation, peer pressure).
<p>So what makes learning inescapable?
<p>Again, we can learn from the children. Mere <i>opportunity</i> isn't enough. As
we saw, immigrant children have an excellent opportunity to master their parents'
language-- but, if possible, they don't. They learn only if they can't interact with
relatives otherwise (e.g., if the relatives are monolingual).
<p>Similarly, adults may be <i>exposed</i> to other languages-- their neighbors speak one, or their
employees do, or it's on another TV channel, or it's taught at a nearby school-- but these
sources are easily ignored.
<p>The exposure has to be from <b>people you <i>need</i> to interact with</b>. For adults, this means
principally employers, relatives by marriage, children, and clients or vendors who don't
speak a language you already know.
<p>The importance of these sources varies, of course, with <b>time and quality</b>. Very little is
needed to learn to buy groceries in another language, or to learn how to do a menial job.
Immigrants will probably not master the local language unless they work mostly with
natives, or marry a local; their best chance will probably be to learn the language from
their children.
<p>Note that harrassing immigrants by requiring government forms to be in English will
accomplish little. Bureaucracies are important and intimidating, but no one interacts with
them enough that they force language learning. The usual strategy is to take a friend or
child along to translate.
<p>'Need' must be interpreted from the learner's perspective, not the observer's.
I discovered this when a Peruvian couple (old friends of my wife's) stayed with us for a
few months. They couldn't find work in Peru, so they certainly had good reason to look
for work here and to learn English. But they approached both tasks haphazardly. The
husband had a tutor for learning English-- but he discovered that the tutor spoke Spanish,
and so they chattered away in Spanish. When he wasn't noodling with his computer, he
looked for jobs-- mostly by checking the want ads in the local Hispanic paper. They
ended up moving to Spain.
<p>It's a bit like weight loss: people will say they "need to lose weight", but they'll believe
any fad or scam rather than actually eat less or exercise more. Our Peruvian couple
didn't take language learning seriously so long as they had a backup plan of moving to
Spain.
<p>Children growing up in a monolingual environment can't avoid the work, so they learn
the language. Everyone else, if possible, doesn't.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">The market for a language</font></h3>
We can also look at this from the perspective of the language. Who will learn French, or
Navajo, or Esperanto?
<p>A bit cynically, but realistically, I answer: the ensemble of those who find it completely
unavoidable. No amount of rationalization, publicity, or moral suasion will increase the
figure-- though it may increase the language's popularity among language geeks.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">The "language problem"</font></h3>
Auxlangers and foreign language teachers make much of the "<b>language problem</b>" and
the costs of not knowing languages; but they forget that for most people, the problem
never rises above the level of an annoyance, and the costs are never paid.
<p>Learning a language well enough to negotiate business deals, for instance, could easily
cost an adult five years of time and $10,000 in tuition. An executive or bureaucrat
doesn't have that sort of time-- nor is the capability worth the time investment. He hires
interpreters and translators instead.
<p>It's certainly a disadvantage that so much interesting material, from books to movies to
music to comics, is published in languages we can't understand. But we can hire
translators too, or rather let the publishers do so. Material in other languages is not so
much unavailable as delayed.
<p>Of course, not everything gets translated-- frustratingly so, if you know something about
the source culture. Informed comics fans, for instance, are puzzled why Lewis
Trondheim or Ralf König, enormously popular in Europe, and by no means difficult or
inaccessible, are almost unknown in the U.S. However, there may be reasons for this.
Americans aren't used to long-form comics-- they simply have no category to put
Trondheim in, and vaguely compatible English-language works (say, Joe Matt or Dan
Clowes) are almost as obscure. And Americans are not quite ready to read gay-themed
books like König's, however funny.
<p>By contrast, manga has made a spectacular conquest of American youth... when I see
young cartoonists doodling, it's more likely to be an imitation of manga than of Disney or
Peanuts or even superhero comics. And the desire for more manga and anime has led a
surprising number of fans to try to learn Japanese.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">The cost of learning a language</font></h3>
Auxlangers sometimes attempt to quantify the cost of the "language problem"--
e.g. they tot up the cost of translation within European companies or the
Brussels bureaucracy, and compare it to the huge monolingual market
in the US.
<p>Such efforts are not so much wrong as misleading. First, they benefit
from the specious impresiveness of large-scale sums. Heck, chewing gum
is a $4 billion industry in the U.S. alone. In a $6 trillion economy,
it's not hard to wallop people with high numbers.
<p>The calculations should be done per capita. How much do I lose by
not knowing Arabic? Then let's compare that to the cost of learning
Arabic-- or, if you like, your favorite auxlang. This should be compared
to the cost of hiring a translator for the times I need to talk to
an Arabic speaker or read Arabic media. And let's not forget the opportunity
costs: the money and time it takes to learn Arabic or
Esperanto isn't available to do something else.
<p>I suspect that if you did all these calculations, you'd find that we're
already minimizing language costs, and that
spending more money on teaching a rarely-used auxlang to everyone
would be uneconomical. Translators are awfully cheap, considering.
<h3><font color="#5070A0">Languages over time</font></h3>
Let's look over the history of a language, and how the 'market' for it changes over time.
<p>Historically, a language's fortunes begin to rise when its speakers <b>conquer</b> a wide swath
of territory. The need to learn a conqueror's language is almost always greater than the
conqueror's need to learn that of the conquered; that's why the languages of Latin
America are Spanish and Portuguese and not Quechua or Nahuatl, those of the
Mediterranean are Romance and Arabic and not Berber or Hittite, those of China are
Sinitic and not Thai or Zhuang. (Exceptions arise when the conquerors are few. E.g.,
when about 50,000 Normans conquered England, they were eventually swamped by the
several million English; the same can be said of the nomadic conquests of China.)
<p>We shouldn't exaggerate the interest in learning the conqueror's language. From what
we see in current societies, we may well doubt that many Incas learned Spanish, or Gauls
learned Latin, or Mesopotamians learned Arabic. In pre-modern societies, where
schooling and religion happened entirely within the ethnic community, even their
children may not have learned the invaders' language.
<p>An interesting case study is found in Bruce Mannheim's <i>The Language of the Inka since the
European Invasion</i>. Sometimes the Spanish complained that the Indians continued to
speak Quechua... but in fact the conquerors found it very handy to dominate a people who
couldn't speak their language, and thus couldn't protest or understand the laws used against
them. Measures were sometimes taken against community leaders who learned Spanish too well.
<p>Over time the conquerors' language does spread. Some of this is due to very basic
reasons: the conquerors directly colonize the new territory; or they take wives from
among the locals, resulting in a quick population boost. (English took over in North
America due largely to the first factor; Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America due to
the second.) Conquest also allows other outsiders entry, and they or their children will
pick up the dominant language (this has reinforced English, Spanish, and Portuguese in
the Americas). If people from different linguistic backgrounds mix, they're forced to use the national
language-- which is why American blacks speak English and not any African languages.
<p>Some number of outsiders will also learn the language, either to deal directly with the
empire, or to work as translators. Scholars and others may learn the language for cultural
reasons; this effect can persist long after the empire has decayed or fallen. Latin was still
widely learned in Europe 1500 years after (the Latin-speaking half of) the Roman Empire
disappeared.
<p>In modern times, national languages are reinforced by <b>universal education</b>, as well as by
conscription, economic mobility, and other forces that mix up populations. Modern
media are often blamed for spreading language, but this is doubtful: people don't try to
speak like radio announcers and TV actors; they try to speak like the other people in their
neighborhood, school, or barracks.
<p>As with anything that's difficult to master, languages can generate affection, and people
are tempted to explain the cultural influence of a language by its <b>inherent excellence</b>.
Thus the French like to talk about the clarity and logic of French. Pay no attention;
literary and cultural influence ultimately depends only on conquest. Conquest makes nations
big and rich; big populations produce more artists, and rich ones pay for more art. For all
we know, Lappish is the world's greatest language to write poetry in, but we'll never
know, because the Lapps neglected to ever conquer a bunch of their neighbors.
<p>Eventually people abandon a language, a process called <b>language death</b>. This is a sad
process, especially in the case of unwritten languages whose grammars, lexicons, quirks,
and cultural resources are entirely lost; but it's also a natural one, and by no means
limited to modern times. (As Latin thrived, it supplanted Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Venetic, Etruscan, and
other languages of pre-Roman Italy.)
<p>Linguists have studied the process (for a report see David Crystal, <i>Language Death</i>), and
found that it proceeds in stages, often over a couple of generations: the language is used
in more and more restricted contexts, and its grammar simplifies, as its more obscure
rules are lost. In <i>Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things</i>, George Lakoff considers
Dyirbal, whose gender system provided his title. When the language was fully alive,
its four genders had some rather complex rules: e.g. everything female belonged to the
feminine gender, but also objects used mostly by women, and certain birds which were
considered to have the spirits of female ancestors. As the language gave way to English,
the rules were simplified, till the last speakers used the gender only for female humans.
<p>(Thus, when you hear about the last three speakers of a language, all in their 90s, the
language is probably already dead. If they're the last speakers, they may not have
learned the grammar or lexicon in its original extent, or at best they've forgotten most of
it.)
<td width="5%">
</table>
<h2><font color="#5070A0">How-To Section</font></h2>
<table width="100%" border=0>
<td width="5%">
<td width="90%">
<h3><font color="#5070A0"><a name="advice">Advice for language learners</a></font></h3>
General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what
linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously
inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as
me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you.
<p>Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak.
It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you
haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to
break out of this paradox?
<p>At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against
you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So <b>create exposure</b>.
<ul>
<li>Read books in the target language.
<li>Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and
easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.)
<li>Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things.
<li>Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it.
<li>Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself.
<li>Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it.
<li>Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make
new friends.
<li>Seek out opportunities to work using the language.
<li>Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language.
<li>Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language.
<li>Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people
want you to know their language-- they don't want to <i>teach</i> it. Also, this strategy
is tricky for multiple languages.)
</ul>
<b>Taking a class</b> can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet
others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be
needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too easy to
blow off. If you study with someone, insist on annoying them by using the language as
much as possible. You will never learn Spanish by speaking English-- though that'll be
your constant temptation, because it's easier.
<p>And since motivation works in your favor, <b>create motivation</b>.
<ul>
<li>For your reading, read things you're interested in. I think many people are turned
off by languages because teachers foist works on them that they'd never read in
their own language. Pop culture is often the best choice... there's a reason pop
culture is popular: it's easy to digest. But if it's 17th century madrigals or tax law
that turns you on, read those.<p>
<li>Take a trip to the country where the language is spoken-- better yet, study there
for a year. Don't hang out with Americans there; go talk to the locals. Panic is
very motivating.
</ul>
<p>I've spoken of kids' brutality toward kids who <b>speak funny</b> as an incentive; but this one
doesn't work as well for adults. Maybe this is biological-- as Marvin Minsky suggests,
nature wants offspring to imitate their parents, not vice versa-- or maybe it's just that
adults are better at avoiding hazing. When it comes to language learning, however, this
means that many adults are terrified of saying something wrong, and just say nothing at
all. Needless to say you don't advance very far this way.
<p>People often complain that people "<b>won't speak the language</b>" with them. It may help
to realize that this is a universal strategy of bilinguals: if you're speaking with someone,
<i>use the language that makes for the most effective communication</i> (see Grosjean p. 135). I've often had the
experience of starting out a conversation in French, going on swimmingly for awhile,
then making one mistake, and the other person immediately switches to English.
<p>This can be quite frustrating when you're looking for opportunities to practice; but you
might want to remember that random foreigners are not paid to be language teachers. If
you want more practice, just keep using the foreign language and let them respond in
English. (This was actually standard procedure for the Apollo-Soyuz missions: the
American astronauts spoke Russian and the Russian ones spoke English. This is an
excellent compromise for a situation that demands clarity: it guarantees that no one's
babbling away without being understood.)
<p>A hint from cognitive science: our brains work by making <b>contextual connections</b>. This
is one reason systems analysis is difficult: if you want a computer to do something that
humans do now, you need to know about every contingency; but the people who know
how to do it <i>can't</i> list every contingency for you. They remember them <i>in context</i>.
<p>So, memorizing vocabulary lists is not likely to be effective, because the words will be
remembered only in the context of reading vocabulary lists-- that is, not when you need
them. Talking to people is better, because words will get associated with real-life
situations.
<p>The number of connections seem to matter, too. If you just remember "<i>jaune</i> means
yellow", you'll probably quickly forget it. But if you say the word out loud, write it out,
hear it on a tape, think about the <i>soleil</i> being <i>jaune</i>, and link it up with 'jaundice', your
chances are better.
<p>While we're at it, here's <b>some tips</b> from my own experience that I can't claim linguistic
backing for:
<ul>
<li>Concentrate on <b>learning words</b>, not on grammar. My favorite example: if a
foreigner comes up to you and asks, "Train station where please?" you can
understand and help, even though the grammar is awful; but you can't help a bit if
he says, "Can you please tell me where to find... uh... er...oh, damn.. oh, the
place where the... uh...." There's plenty of time later for learning the grammar;
but knowing the words will help you communicate now, and help you in learning
the grammar later.<p>
<li>If you're learning on your own, don't just buy a book; buy <b>tapes</b>. You need to
hear the language. Plus, tapes are great for playing in the car.<p>
<li>Don't be unnerved when you can't understand <b>music or movies</b>-- these are
among the hardest types of spoken language to follow.
<b>One-on-one conversation</b> is a lot easier. You're guaranteed to understand half the conversation
(your part), and your interlocutor will help with the rest. You can't easily ask a
movie character to repeat himself.<p>
<li>Use the <b>dictionary</b>-- but sparingly. Not many people can enjoy a book if they're
looking up a word ten times a paragraph. See if you can get the gist without
looking everything up. If you can't, try an easier book.<p>
<li>Be playful. Make jokes, look for puns, don't be afraid of making a fool of
yourself. <p>
<li>As with weight-lifting, you can get to a <b>plateau</b> where you're not really improving.
Look for something to increase the challenge: read slightly more difficult books; give those
movies a try (the hardest Spanish I know is that of Cantinflas); take up crosswords.<P>
<li>Evaluate the methods you're using, and start over if they're not working. Some
people like traditional methods-- classes and textbooks-- but these bore other
folks silly. Personally, I recommend reading comics-- they're fun, the language
is more colloquial (thus a good preparation for meeting actual people rather than
literary characters), and the pictures give enough context that you often don't
need the dictionary.
</ul>
<h3><font color="#5070A0">Implications for language planning</font></h3>
If you want other people to learn a language, you're fighting an uphill battle.
Persuasion and publicity won't do much; official declarations and government
publications mean very little; schools alone won't do the trick.
<p>Crystal's <i>Language Death</i> offers a number of suggestions, which I won't repeat here
because the book is at the library; I'll
just note that there's no guarantee. In the terms of this paper,
you have to make people feel they need to learn the language.
<p>As with individual learning, <b>exposure</b> helps. I suspect that local-content laws and
signage laws have an effect. I doubt that (say) any Québec anglophone's decisions are
changed by seeing signs in French, but an immigrant to the province might be subtly
affected-- the signs increase the language's presence. Similarly, the Peruvian
government once required an hour of Peruvian content a day on the radio; at the very
least this got a lot of people familiar with traditional <i>waynos</i>, mostly sung in Quechua.
<p>More important, perhaps, is to <b>increase</b> the domain where the language can be used.
Language death involves a steady shrinkage in the areas where the language is spoken;
and defeat is already in sight if the language is only spoken at home. An obvious place to
start is <b>school</b>. Optimally the language is not just studied an hour at a time, but is
actually the language of instruction.
<p>In some areas (e.g. Canada, Catalunya) there's been a push to offer government services
in minority languages. It can't hurt, but I'd argue that it doesn't help much, either:
people don't interact with the government so much that this service affects people's
feeling as to whether a language is needed or not.
<p>There needs to be media in the language. The lesson of manga shouldn't be forgotten-- not just that content needs to exist, but it
has to be <b>content that people want</b>. One Brazilian tribe had the right idea: they were given a tape
recorder, they used it to record their own songs and festivals. (Thank heavens a
bureaucrat wasn't around; he'd have insisted on translating government newsletters, or
some such nonsense.)
<h3><font color="#5070A0">Implications for parents</font></h3>
If you want to teach your child a language other than the national language-- I don't have
to be a wet blanket this time, the prospects are good.
<p>If you've read this far, you already know the drill: languages aren't easy even for
children, and they'll learn only if they reckon they have no choice. The one certainty is
that they'll grow up as fluent speakers of the street language-- the language of their peers.
<p>If you speak a different language at home, your children will grow up speaking it; the
tricky bit is when they discover that you understand the national language too. You may
insist that they speak the home language at home; but results will be better the more the
children hear the home language elsewhere. It's easier to retain Spanish if you live in a
Hispanic neighborhood with plenty of Spanish-speaking relatives nearby. Trips to
wherever the language is spoken full time and frequent interaction with monolinguals
will cement the language.
<p>It's harder if only one parent speaks the target language, especially if it's the father. My
Peruvian brother-in-law, who lives in Brazil, had some idea of teaching his daughter
Spanish. He knew the right approach-- speak only in Spanish at home-- but in practice
found this impossible, and of course the girl is learning only Portuguese. Or consider the
musician Nicolas Slonimsky, who taught his daughter Latin-- an eccentric choice,
perhaps, but the baby didn't know that. Nonetheless, she eventually rebelled, demanding
that he speak "the way Mommy talks".
<p>Complicated arrangements like "speak Spanish on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays"
probably won't work. As noted, children like to use a rule that a particular person speaks
a particular language; it will probably only confuse them if anyone may, at seemingly
unpredictable times, use any language.
<p>How about a nanny? I've heard of this working; on the other hand, my wife used to take
care of children, and none of them learned much Spanish. It's a good way for the nanny
to pick up the kids' language, though.
<p>If a language is used only at home, be aware that the children will learn only an impoverished
form of it-- possibly to their surprise, if they go to college and take courses in it, expecting
an easy A. A high-school friend of mine was German but grew up in the States; returning to Germany,
she was embarrassed to find that her written German was terrible. Similarly, my wife, who was
educated in Peru, is always distressed at the low quality of the Spanish produced by
Hispanics who've grown up here. (I know a linguist whose reaction was, "But they're still
native speakers." Sure, but they have a lousy command of the written standard.)
<td width="5%">
</table>
<HR>
<p><center><A HREF="default.html"><img src="home.gif" border=0 alt="back to Metaverse"</A></center>
</body>
</html>