Anarchocyclist

I wonder if there’s a “how to learn languages” book around somewhere? i haven’t seen one, and i’ve been mostly making up my strategies as i go. Perhaps this is a job for one of those “wikibooks” on the wikipedia associated sites. They have some for “learning german”, “learning french”, etc, but the ones i looked at all left a bad taste in my mouth.

One of the reasons is that they mimic standard language textbooks in their repetition of grammar structures and short dialogues. learning a language is a rather large undertaking (as i’ve been discovering) and it’s next to useless to have just 1 “book” with maybe 12 chapters covering a couple items like “how to buy some oranges at the market” or “how to buy a bus ticket”. Really this is just a jumped-up phrase-book, and the reader is left to personally reinvent ways to actually learn to speak the language. The big downside of such phrase-book approaches is that even if you master all the phrases therein, you still probably won’t be able to understand the replies, so what good did it do you?

What’s needed instead is a collected set of strategies on the various ways to acquire language knowledge, perhaps using some little phrasebook things as one tool among many. After a rather frustrating night out with some native speakers of chinese, i think i understand a little bit more about the separation between (a) learning textbook knowledge about a language, and (b) acquiring the rather different skill of producing language on the fly while listening and understanding other spoken language.

maybe this is why i’m stuck in the loop of both feeling that languages are really easy to learn and yet never actually succeeding at being able to communicate anything to anyone verbally, beyond simplistic things. Since i have a degree in computing science and mathematics, and i’ve spent months at a time learning esoteric things like quantum physics, i’m highly trained in the acquisition of arcane book knowledge. Treating language acquisition as study of arcana is sorta running down the wrong path. It ignores the fundamental separation of spoken/listening language centers of the brain from the memory/association/analytical aspects. I mean, ya, they’re connected in many ways, but separate enough that you really can’t learn to speak a language properly just by becoming a human dictionary.

I think of this as a “Conan the Librarian” approach. You can’t just brute-force conquer a language by amassing a huge collection of
vocabulary and grammar…you’ll end up with the spoken eloquence and ability of a bulging fur-clad roid-monkey with only 8 spoken lines in a two hour movie (except with fewer opportunities to be elected governor of kawwwleefohhhnya). So how do we escape Conan?

collaborative online collection of language learning strategies and real life material is the answer, i think. Each “Learn $SomeLanguage in $StupidlyShortAmountOfTime” book is limited by the format. They’re all 100 - 300 pages in length, with certain mandated topics to satisfy some absurd notion of “completeness”. By using the internet and wiki collaboration techniques that seem to work so well for knowledge-collection tasks like wikipedia, we can move beyond the limiting format of soft-cover 300 page 12 chapter phrasebooks. I imagine that instead of just 1 chapter on some topic, there could be 20 “chapters”, all related to the topic. As a learner of languages, one of the hardest things to find is examples of proper usage of the language that aren’t totally unintelligible. it’d be great to have a huge collaboratively created repository of proper language instead of just the half-page of dialog normally allotted to a topic.

They don’t have to be that complicated either. It’d probably be better if there were many of them and none of them were that complex. a tiny bit of new vocab, a tiny bit of new grammar, just to push you a little bit, but overall a lot of examples to practice saying aloud. This has really been revealed to me lately as i see people with a lot less theory than me, speaking chinese rather effortlessly. My textbook’s focus on using each sentence in a dialog to convey the maximum amount of new vocab and grammar in the tightest package is not really that helpful. I don’t particularly need new grammar at this stage, especially when these other people are able to use what i already have in order to get along just fine in daily life.

Maybe an analogy of length and breadth would be useful here…1 dimension being book knowledge of grammar and vocab, and the other dimension actual speaking ability. A good book on really learning languages would outline many many strategies for acquiring knowledge in both dimensions, and then the organization of it would also be in 2 dimensions. My current textbook is long, but not very wide. at each level of grammar and vocab, there’s not really that much content available to practice with. It needs many many more example sentences at that same level of vocab and grammar complexity so that one can really drill it into one’s skull, in the appropriate speaking ability section of the brain.

Does this make sense? The textbook for my spoken chinese class (汉语口语课）has some good examples i think. each chapter has some new vocab listed, but the focus isn’t really on the vocab. Each chapter excels at giving you practice phrases that are only slightly different from each other. On the page i’m looking at, there are 8 sections. Each section starts off with 1 sentence, and then lists 5 or 6 more sentences that are very similar to the first one in meaning but with just a few words switched or added to show slightly different ways to say the same thing. here’s an example where all the sentences mean something like “how’s her chinese speaking ability?”, expressed slightly differently each time, and then a second example where they all mean “she speaks chinese pretty well.”:

朗读下列句子:
Read aloud the following sentences:
1. 她的汉语怎么样？
她汉语怎么样？
她汉语说得怎么样？
她说汉语说得怎么样？
她说得怎么样？

2. 她的汉语不错。
她汉语不错。
她汉语说得不错。
她说汉语说得很不错。
她说得非常好。

It seems to me like it should be a pretty simple task to generate a lot of these sorts of exercises, and certainly they’d be very useful to run through. If you hold the idea of the sentences in your head and repeat them out loud, then keep repeating the closely related sentences too, then i think you’d become a lot more proficient in using them when it came to the actual situation where you need it. The part that’s not present here, though, is a replication of the situation where someone says something to you and you have to quickly come up with something to say in reply. I haven’t quite worked out a way to exercise that on your own, but perhaps it’d involve using some flashcards with topics on them and you have to say 4 or 5 sentences about the topic. maybe after thinking about it briefly and trying whatever comes to mind, you could then look at a page of a hundred response sentences that are doable with easy vocabulary. This would give you the confidence in your ability vocabulary-wise to produce plenty of useful sentences on that topic.

Come to think of it, that’d be another good way to use a wiki. You could use the collaborative abilities of tens or hundreds of people to produce a whole bunch of correct sentences. Thinking as an english speaker, if i came upon a bunch of pages that said “talk about taking a boat ride” or something, i could easily shoot out a whole bunch of simple sentences about it and it could be tremendously helpful to people learning english.

Another section that would be useful is strategies to better take advantage of any one-on-one time you have with a native speaker. It
seems that people frequently are in situations where they have the attention of a native speaker who wants to help them learn the language, but that native speaker really has no idea how to go about teaching anything. In this case, it is incumbent upon the student to always be prepared with a bunch of things to ask or some sort of exercise to run through in order to take advantage of that time.

Ok, i guess i’ve gone on long enough for now, so maybe i can sum up a bit before i get back to studying for my upcoming chinese exam. First, i’d like to have a collaborative website along the lines of wikipedia or the Go/Weiqi page senseis.xmp.net where many people can help create the content together. There would be a section explaining all sorts of methods that people use to practice, especially focusing on those methods that are possible to do by one’s self when there are no native speakers around who can assist. These methods should include variations and examples. Then there would be sections of the site for all different languages, wherein there’d be content about different grammar structures, vocab, and lots and lots of easy content as described above. It’d be great if there were some nice easy multilingual stories such that each paragraph closely corresponds amongst the languages that the story uses. I find these quite helpful for studying chinese…if i lose track of the plot, i can just glance over at the english side and then i’m back on track.

With a collaborative environment like this, i think that we could create language learning material that vastly outpaces most of the books currently available, and we could make it accessible to everyone for free. anyone interested in helping?

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 00:31 am and is filed under Front Page, chinese, computers, languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.