When learning a language do you try to learn it as quickly as possible? Like a hare you hurry through the language ignoring anything that might slow you down, like good grammar and pronunciation, perhaps thinking that you can go back later and tidy them up.
Or maybe you take your time like a tortoise, trying to learn every aspect of the language thoroughly.
There are parallels with learning music – the other day a friend who is learning the violin said that she tends to focus on getting the notes of new tunes right at first, then goes back and pays attention dynamics, bowing and so on. She realised that maybe it would be better to learn those things from the beginning. I certainly try to do this when learning tunes on my various instruments.
With languages I like to take things easy and try to learn things quite thoroughly, though might ignore seems aspects of language that don’t seem relevant.
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.
Tomorrow the Bangor Community Choir is going to Manchester where we’ll be singing with lots of other choirs from northern England and north Wales to raise money for WaterAid. The songs we’re singing have a watery theme and are all in English, apart from one in Croatian and one in Zulu. Hopefully it will be a bright, sunny day. This event is called Sing for Water North and is part of the Manchester Day celebrations.
We’ll be singing outside the town hall in Albert Square at about 1.45pm. So if you happen to be in Manchester tomorrow afternoon, please come along.
This week I discovered that in French a hangover is une gueule de bois (“a wooden mouth”), which seems quite a good description of the condition.
In my thesaurus word for hangover in English include after-effects, katzenjammer, morning after, and the morning after the night before. Do you have any others?
I’ve heard of katzenjammer before, but not in this context – to me it’s the name of a band from Norway. Katzenjammer comes from German and means “cats’ wailing”, and according to the Free Dictionary, it means a confused uproar or a hangover, mainly in US English.
Welsh words for hangover include pen mawr (big head); pen clwc (addled head), salwch bore drannoeth (illness of the following morning) and salwch ar ôl y ffair (illness after the fair).
Since I gave up drinking about 11 years ago I haven’t suffered from a wooden mouth, an addled head or a cats’ wailing, and one reason why I gave up was because I didn’t enjoy such afflictions.
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?
There’s a idea floating around that in order to become proficient in any skill you need to spend around 10,000 hours practicing it. This figure comes from a study undertaken by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, which found that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in almost any skill.
This idea was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, and the original point of the research, which focused on experts in different fields – i.e. virtuoso musicians, Olympic athletes and others who were at the top of their field, became a bit muddied. People came to believe that to learn a new skill well, not just to expert level, you need 10,000 hours of practice.
There’s some discussion of the 10,000 hour ‘rule’ here which quotes Dr Ericsson as saying, “Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions.” Another study by Gobet and Campitelli found that some chess grand masters had had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but some took a lot longer – up to 26 years, and others reached that level in 2 years. Then there were some people who had the 10,000 hours of practice, but only played at an intermediate level. This seems to suggest that practice alone may not be sufficient to become an expert.
According to Josh Kaufman, whose TED talk I found the other day, you don’t need 10,000 hours to learn a new skill, but instead can attain basic proficiency in about 20 hours. He thinks that first you have to make sure you have the materials, tools, books, etc you need to learn. Then you deconstruct the skill, working out exactly what your goals are and the steps you need to take to achieve them. Then you focus on learning and practicing those steps for about 20 hours, minimizing distractions. He did this for the ukulele, and believes that this approach works for any skill, including learning languages.
While this can work for the ukulele, a relatively easy instrument to learn, I somehow doubt it would work very well for more challenging instruments like the violin or piano, or for languages. In 20 hours you might acquire some basic proficiency of a language, or another skill, but it’s unlikely that you would good at it. There are exceptional people who can learn new skills very quickly, but for most of us it takes quite a bit longer.
One important part of Dr Ericsson’s findings was that your practice needs to deliberate. You need to focus on improving your performance and to notice any areas where you find difficult. When learning a language, for example, you might have trouble remembering how to form a particular tense, or with specific words or phrases. If you focus on such things, you can make more progress than if you don’t worry about them.
By the way, this blog has been nominated in the language learning blogs category of the Lexiphiles Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition. You can vote by clicking on the button below.
The phrase ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ indicates many things or almost everything, as in ‘I took everything but the kitchen sink with me on holiday. The OED gives the earliest use of the phrase in writing as 1965. The kitchen sink part of the phrase apparently comes from army slang and appears in Partridge’s 1948 Dictionary of Forces’ Slang as “Kitchen sink, used only in the phrase indicating intense bombardment ‘They chucked everything they’d got at us except, or including, the kitchen sink.’”
According to Know Your Phrase, however, it appeared in The Syracuse Herald, an New York newspaper in 1918 in the following sentence.
“I have I shall rather enjoy the experience, though the stitlons are full of people trying to get out and the streets blocked with perambulators, bird cages and ‘everything but the kitchen sink.'”
I discovered yesterday that the French equivalent is ‘tout sauf les murs‘ (everything but the walls), as in j’ai tout emporté sauf les murs = I took everything but the walls.
In Welsh the equivalents are popeth dan haul (everything under the sun) and eich holl drugareddau (your whole bric-a-brac).
