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'Golden Rules' for
Language-Learning
(in preparation)
David Bond
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Contents (click
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Rule 1. Listen, listen,
listen
Once upon
a time the learning of language in schools privileged the aural over the oral.
A great deal was accomplished through learning by rote. Hearing and repeating.
Although it is perhaps impractical to hope for a return to this virtuous
procedure, it is important to realise that it does make a very great deal of
sense. Everything that one learns, with respect to language, one learns via
one’s ears and eyes (by virtue of what one reads, sees and hears). One learns
absolutely nothing by means of one’s mouth.
Nevertheless
there are fashions in such things as in everything else and today the majority
of language-learners seem to be convinced that what is important is to talk,
talk, talk…. They are quite simply wrong. In fact this is, generally speaking,
the ideal recipe for learning to speak a language badly. Instead of
concentrating on input (and learning accurate modes of expression), one
concentrates on output and almost inevitably confirms oneself in bad language
habits (incorrect usages and unidiomatic forms of expression).
My
first golden rule of language learning is therefore listen, listen, listen….
For
this purpose, the television (contrary again to a common misconception) is
virtually useless. The level of concentration required for television viewing is
so low and the dominance of the visual imagery so great that hardly anybody
ever learns anything whatsoever by means of a television. The radio, on the
other hand, is an excellent means of learning a language and I have known
people who have achieved a high degree of proficiency almost solely by this
means.
Evidence
suggests that records and tapes (and so-called ‘language laboratories’) do not
work very well. The process is too artificial, the degree of engagement too
low. The whole experience, in brief, is simply too uncomfortable and boring.
If one
is in the country where the language is spoken, the simplest way of working at
a language is simple to listen to the people around one. Usually of course that
will involve speaking as well. But do not mislead yourself. It is the listening
not the speaking that is most important. The lazy brain (see introduction) has
a tendency to turn off when the mouth is not required to speak and only to wind
up for action (rather like a computer that has been on stand-by) when one is
called upon to speak. This is natural enough. The brain is protecting you and
itself from unnecessary effort.
When
learning a language, however, that effort is not only necessary but crucial. So
overrule the brain and make sure that you concentrate (if anything even harder)
when other people are talking. And especially – this is a subject I
shall return to in a later rule – when other people are talking to each other
and not addressing you directly at all.
When
seeking language-lessons, students are again inclined to seek opportunities to
speak. This is crazy. Opportunities to speak are easy to find; if necessary one
can talk to oneself. What one needs are opportunities to listen in a privileged
situation, where one can ask if one does not understand or seek further
explanation of things said. Try and find a teacher who does not want to
encourage you to speak but who is instead prepared to talk you and to talk to
you of course just as he or she would talk to a compatriot.
This
last is very important because there is a general tendency (however
well-intentioned people may be in this respect) to talk to foreigners in a
different language. Not enormously different, but different in certain crucial
ways. Slang, for instance, may be avoided because the speaker fears the
listener will not understand it; cultural references may be unconsciously (or
consciously) suppressed. But, as a language-learner, you have need of these
things too and this is where the radio, or a paid ‘coach’ can really be of enormous
help.
Rule 1:1. Listen at every opportunity
If
listening is, as I have argued in the introduction, essentially how a language
is learned, it is important to make use of the opportunities that present
themselves. And they are of course everywhere. But it is important to remember
that the most important opportunities are also the ones most easily missed.
Let me
attempt a sort of ranking. The most obvious occasion for listening is when you
sit down with a friend or neighbour, who is a native speaker, and allow him or
her to rattle on. Alas, this is the most obvious but it is also the least
useful. First of all, you will be familiar (or soon become familiar) with the
voice, which means that it soon cease to provide any real training for the ear.
Your friend and neighbour will also be aware of your knowledge of the language
and make (consciously or unconsciously) innumerable concessions. This is very
kind of them but will hopelessly limit what you can learn. Thirdly, the friend
or neighbour will soon become used to your errors (of phrasing and of
pronunciation) and cease to correct them.
Much
more useful is the listening you do when you meet new people, go shopping,
visit cafés, go out for a meal and so on and so forth. Beware however of
failing to listen when it is most important. Do not merely pay attention when
you are addressed (the least useful for many of the same reasons listed above);
pay particular attention when you are not being addressed. Do not hesitate to
listen to other people’s conversations, either listening to friends when they
are talking amongst themselves or eavesdropping on other people’s conversations
in a queue or at the next-door table.
These,
after all, are the times when they are speaking most naturally. In your own language
you would not ‘turn off’. Even without being especially curious, you would
quite naturally pick up everything that was going on around you. You need to
train yourself to do the same in the language you are learning.
Rule 1:2 Trust your ears over your eyes
What
you hear is the key to everything. Many of the commonest errors in
pronunciation, particularly in languages which are not phonetic (and no
language is perfectly phonetic) arise from pronouncing a word as it looks as
though it ought to be pronounced rather than how one actually hears it.
Of
course you need to be a little careful of falling into native speakers’ bad
habits that other native speakers may disapprove of but this is a much more
minor problem than most native speakers believe. Broadly speaking what you hear
will be right (in the sense that it will represent what people actually
say) and what you think you see will be wrong.
If what
you see, for instance, is “comfortable” but what you hear is “kumft’bl”, it is
the latter you should go for. An attempt to faithfully reproduce the former is
in fact one of the most pernicious pronunciation errors made by foreign
speakers of English. If what you see is ‘à cet heure’ but what you here is
“asteur’, then you can be confident that that is how it is generally spoken
even if, in this case, there will be rather more variation from person to
person.
A lot
of the vocabulary that one learns, one necessarily learns from reading but be
chary of using expressions until you are sure of your ground or, preferably,
until you have heard them used. They may be old-fashioned or inappropriate for
a whole slew of reasons. In many languages, there are quite marked differences
between what is written and what is spoken and what cannot simply assume that
the two modes are interchangeable.
Rule 1:4 Never ignore reactions
Rule 2. Always remember
the other language is different
The
brain protects you and it protects you more and more as you get older. It turns
away instinctively (and more and more) from anything it believes will give you
pain, cause you inconvenience, waste your time, overburden an increasingly
overloaded memory. This is natural and necessary. It can, however, as I have
already suggested, create a great many problems with regard to language
learning.
Your
brain is not going to, of its own accord, welcome the idea of a new language.
Quite the contrary. It is going to resist the idea on the basis that is a
redundant activity. Why learn to rename a world that you already have the
capacity to describe? Why retain two (or more) ways of expressing exactly the
same thing?
There
is therefore a process of training involved. You need to convince your brain
(or, if you prefer, convince yourself at a relatively profound level of your
consciousness) that the activity of learning a language is enriching and
worthwhile. This means being aware at all times of the way in which two
languages are different, of realising that the ways in which they are different
are in effect more important than the ways in which they resemble each other.
Avoid
at all costs the mentality of the equals sign. The moment you tell the brain
that such-and-such a word in one language “equals” such-and-such another in
another language, you immediately pass the wrong message. The brain, if you
will, thinks quite reasonably that you are messing it about. What possible
reason can it have for retaining a new piece of information that is (on the
basis of your own information) identical to something it already knows
perfectly well?
The
best example I can think of to illustrate this is what I have in the past
called ‘blank page syndrome’. You have written yourself, shall we say, a
double-page of vocabulary notes, your own language on one page, the equivalents
in the language to be learned on the other. Between the two you have in effect
placed an invisible equals sign. When you attempt to remember a word contained
in this vocabulary list, you naturally envisage the two pages in your mind. To
your horror, you discover that all that remains in your memory is the page that
contains the words in English. Opposite all that you see is a blank page. It is
a triumph of logic for the brain but a signal failure for the language-learner.
What seems intuitively to be a good way of remembering new words
("Ah! this equals that") is actually a process that makes it more
difficult for the brain to hold onto them. And it is a falsification of the
reality. Every word you learn in a second
language is different from the rough equivalent in your own and it is the
difference that is important. It may consist in the lexical meaning, in the
contexts in which it is used, in the grammatical constructions of which it
forms part, in its associations, in its tone, in its colour. But there is
always a difference to be sought and find. And the awareness of that
difference, the understanding of that difference is essentially the primary
task of the language-learner.
It has
very wide-ranging implications (some at least of which will be covered in
future “rules”) – for the sort of things it is necessary to notice when
learning a language, for the use one makes of dictionaries and for the way in
which one remembers (or attempts to remember) things one has seen and heard.
There is a tendency to suppose that these skills are instinctive. It is not so.
Or perhaps, with age, one has lost the instinct. It barely matters which. The
fact remains, that learning a second language well involves a conscious effort
and a high degree of awareness.
Make
the experiment. Take any text you like in the language you are learning. Go
through it word by word noticing every possible difference you can think of, in
meaning, in usage, in colour, in tone. You will, I think, be astonished at how
much you learn and how many of the things that you learn are things that, in
the normal course of events, you might never even have noticed at all. Of
course it is not humanly possible to work quite so conscientiously at a
language all the time, but it is a good idea to make the effort periodically.
Rule 2:1 Forget about notes and dictionaries
I start
here with a general rule that is not in the least intended to be absolute and
which I will go on to modify to some extent in later rules. But by and large
the whole paraphernalia of activities most people associate with learning a
language seem to me of very limited use.
It is
only worth taking ‘notes’ if one can be sure of their accuracy, if one is
actually going to make use of them subsequently and if they are sufficiently
selective to be usable. In my experience, the majority of ‘notes’ taken by people learning a language
fail in all three departments. I shall suggest in later rules certain specific
instances where note-taking seems to me worthwhile but in general, concentrate
on taking note (noting things in your head) and forget about note-taking
(scribbling things on bits of paper).
Vocabulary
lists are the worst kind of notes because they reinforce the false equation
between a word in your own language and the broadly equivalent word in the
language being learned. The same is generally true of the use of dictionaries.
If you come across a word or a phrase and understand it in the context, it will
not help in the least to find the equivalent word in your own language. It will
simply make it more difficult to remember the new word. Try to avoid searching
for equivalent words (even in your head) and use dictionaries, by and large,
just as you would use them with respect to your own native language – which,
for most people, means rarely if at all.
Language
is learned by the process of re-encounter, of progressive familiarity. Using
dictionaries attempts to shortcut this but in practice simply prevents the
process from happening. Half the time, having looked up a word, you will then
forget it (the brain naturally preferring to retain the word it knows best)
and, at the same time, will be less inclined to notice it (because after all
“you have looked it up”) when next you encounter it.
Rule 2:2 Take note of your mistakes
If you
wish to have something on paper to jog your memory, then the best thing to make
a note of are your own errors. Since these will always tend to be repetitive,
such an exercise should be splendidly selective. And these, when it comes down
to it, are the things that you need to bear constantly in mind. New words and
phrases you will meet again and again; There will plenty of occasions to
relearn them if you forget them. Your errors, alas, you will go on making, if
you do not pay special attention to them and make a special effort to put them
right.
The
only problem is recognising and identifying them. There are generally three
things that should act as a trigger. One (dealt with in Rule 1:4) is the
reactions of other people. Any kind of hesitancy in understanding or
double-take on the part of a listener will usually be a sign that you have done
something wrong. Once you become used to listening to such reactions, you will
usually be able to identify what it is.
The
second is a sinking feeling inside yourself. Never ignore such instinctive
warnings; they are usually based on some real experience even if you yourself
are only dimly aware of it. Typically, this may be the case when you have used
a flagrantly translated expression. As you said it, it sounded all right but a
moment later a little voice inside you began to express doubt. Make sure you
listen to that little voice.
The
third is the simplest of all, a straightforward realisation that you have made
an error. It may come immediately the horror has escaped your lips or it may
wake you up in the middle of the night. If t was made on the telephone, it will
usually come to you just as you put the receiver down. If it was made in
writing, it will usually occur five minutes after you have sent off the letter
or email.
Don’t
just utter an oath and forget the matter. Make a note (mental or in writing) of
the error and make a solemn resolution never to make the same error again. Be
aware when the same context re-occurs, avoid the mistake, mark your success in
some way, give yourself a reward of some kind.
If this
sounds childish, let me give a personal example. The English and the Italians
have a notorious problem when speaking French with the ‘u’ sound. It I a sound
that does not exist in English (or Italian) and which the English tend even to
have difficulty in hearing. They cannot, that is, distinguish it from the ‘ou’
sound. For years I had intermittent problems with this but did not bother to do
anything systematic about it. Then, one year, I found myself on a course (not a
language course) where the principal tutor took a certain delight in correcting
me on every occasion. At the end of the course, I delivered a brief
presentation in which I made a point, every time I pronounced a ‘u’ of
thrusting my finger in the air and shouting out the name of the tutor in
question. It did not entirely cure the problem, but it went an awful long way
to doing so.
Rule 3. Personality and
language
There
was an expression much beloved of old-fashioned schoolmasters that one never
hears any more –‘inwardly digest’. The
formula, if I remember rightly, was ‘read, note and inwardly digest’ although I
would not swear to the accuracy of the first two. After two rules in which I
have urged the importance of listening and of taking notice (I assume ‘note’ is
intended to have this sense) of language differences, it is only right and
proper than we come, in third position, to the knotty problem of inward
digestion.
If one
prefers a more fashionable neologism, one could I think talk equally of
‘interiorisation’ – making the language learned in some sense or other your
own Here the adult learner often has to
battle against a whole lifetime of habits and prejudices, developed in another
culture and expressed in another language, that tend to prevent him or her
being open to the experience that learning a new language (and a new culture)
represent. It is natural to want to “protect” one’s personality but what one
thinks of as one’s personality will invariably include many things that are in
practice specific to the culture in which one has grown up.
It is
worth, I believe, giving a bit of
thought to the whole question of
what ‘personality’ is and how it develops. The word derives from the
Latin for a mask and the personality is, for a very large part, something that
we assume (“put on” in its original sense) quite systematically during the
course of our lives. We could all, I am sure, identify mannerisms and behaviour
patterns in ourselves, now completely integrated into our personality, that we
have at one time or another developed in imitation of a parent, a friend, an
admired teacher and so on or that we have developed in response to a fashion of
the time, a convention of our social circle or simply from ingrained habit.
Inevitably most of those mannerisms and behaviour patterns will bear the
indelible stamp of our origins – our social milieu, our nationality, even our
regional origins. When we speak another language, they tend simply to signal the extent to which we are
“foreign”.
It is
not easy to know where the dividing line comes between what we have learned
(hand gestures, tricks of voice, style of humour) and what constitutes the
“essential” us, between ‘personality’ and ‘character’, and perhaps in truth no
such strict dividing-line really exists. I have isolated here certain elements
of personality that are clearly relevant to the learning of a language and I
shall return to them in more detail in later “rules”, but for the moment I
simply want to stress the general importance of attuning one’s personality with
the language being learned.
It is
not really possible to speak a different language while maintaining the same
mannerisms, in insisting upon the same attitudes or adopting the same social strategies.
This does not, however, mean that one is abandoning one’s personality. In time
one develops what might be described as a parallel personality in the new
language – something that is recognisably oneself. But this does not happen
overnight and that ‘new’ personality needs to be developed in a manner
consistent with the language one is speaking and with the culture it reflects.
Initially it is inevitable (and also necessary) that one should feel that one
is acting a part to some extent, playing the role of a person (one’s parallel
self to be) that does not yet exist.
This
process can often seem, in the short term, disagreeable and even distressing.
It is a question of trust. One needs to
have faith is one’s own personality, in its ability to imprint itself in time
in the new mould and one needs also to suspend all prejudice with respect to
the other culture, to believe what is in fact self-evidently true - that all
forms of self-expression (including those with which one is oneself comfortable)
are possible within all cultures and within all languages.
As with
all aspects of learning a language, personality cannot be simply translated.
Attempting to express oneself in the same manner as one does in one’s own
language will result inevitably in a sort of caricatural ‘foreign’ way of
speaking (and indeed in a sort of caricatural ‘foreign’ way of thinking). The
parallel personality in the other language needs to be developed in very much
the same manner as one originally developed one’s personality. This involves acquiring points of cultural
reference that one lacks (particularly those suitable to one’s own age, tastes
and interests but also those which, in one’s own language one would have
acquired in any case by osmosis). It involves finding a way of speaking (accent
and pronunciation, certainly, but also emphasis, style, humour and many less
tangible features).
Learning
a language is not a process that can satisfactorily take place in isolation. It
goes hand in hand with a much larger exploration of the culture of which that
language forms a part. It goes hand in hand too with a form of discovery of
oneself, of aspects of oneself of which one was not necessarily previously
aware. The process is an exciting one but is frequently disconcerting and
invariably hard work. It is also a process that takes a very long time.
Rule 3:1 Learn all you can about the language
Although
in general I would not advocate looking things up in dictionaries on a regular
basis, there is something to be said for browsing through dictionaries from
time to time. Preferably one should always use large dictionaries for this
purpose, put together, as the rubric of the Oxford English Dictionary proudly
proclaims, ‘on historical principles’. Used in this way, dictionaries can
perform very useful functions.
In the
first place they can give a sense of the connection between words in a language
by showing how different meanings have developed. Most languages are in
practice a combination of several different languages and the manner in which
words from different origins (originally synonyms) have developed different
usages can reveal a lot, not just about individual words but about patterns of
word use. In English for instance there is a tendency for words of German
origin to retain their literal meaning while words of French origin are
retained in a metaphorical sense. A similar pattern of differentiation exists
in French between forms that entered the language from Latin at different
periods.
Secondly,
by viewing all the senses of a word, and a whole range of usages where they
exist, one can establish the individual nature of a word. In this sense, one is
using a dictionary not to establish an equivalence between two languages, but
for quite the opposite the reason. To understand why the word in one language
is different from equivalent words in other languages because of the difference
of its history, of its range of meanings or of its colouration.
Without
having to become an expert on etymology, adult language-learners need to
interest themselves in the language in a more comprehensive way than native
speakers because they do not naturally have the same background in the culture.
It pays to read about the language – not language-learning books as such but
books or articles about the history of the language, about its slang, about its
dialects. In every language there are innumerable books of this sort, many of
them humorous (and it is a subject that tends to interest most well-educated
native speakers) so try, as a language-learner, to take advantage of the fact.
Rule 3:2 Find yourself a rôle-model
In
urging language-learners to trust their ears (1:2), I mentioned briefly the
problem of learning native speakers’ ‘mistakes’ or, more probably, rather
sloppy linguistic habits. I do not think this is something to worry greatly
about. One usually has a certain instinct in this regard and, then again, even
to speak as well as the sloppiest native would be to speak better than one
does. On the other hand, it is not something to ignore entirely.
It is,
I think, very important to find a model or models for oneself in the language
one is learning – people, if you like, whose style and comportment you admire
and whose taste and judgement you trust. This is not so much a question of snobbery
as of comfort. You need to establish a personality in the language and you
cannot successfully do that unless you have something to hang it upon.
In
one’s native culture, one develops at a very early age a sense of oneself and
of one’s relationship to others around which allows one, relatively
effortlessly, to calculate one’s language accordingly. In a foreign language,
one has few of the same points of reference and it can be therefore difficult
to ‘find a voice’ with which one is comfortable in the language. For children,
adolescents and young adults there is usually relatively little problem, the
community of age greatly helping. At this age, one also models oneself on
others very readily. For older adults learning a language, often uprooted from communities
based on work, family and friends, the process can be much harder. You need to
know who you are and who you want to be and the best guide to doing that in a
foreign language is to model yourself, to a degree, upon someone you feel
broadly resembles that concept you have of yourself.
This
modelling is particularly crucial when it comes to written language (where
style can be crucially important) and in pronunciation – perhaps the most
difficult of all problems associated with language-learning. There is, in my view, only one way of making
significant progress in this domain and that is by absolutely conscious
imitation of someone else’s voice and that you can only feasibly do if you have
first identified someone whose voice you like the sound of.
(You can link back to the full explanatory text from these rules.)
1:1 Listen at every
opportunity
1:2 Trust your ears
over your eyes
2 Always remember the other language is different
2:1 Forget about notes
and dictionaries
2:2
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