Tag: language

New words, new worlds: learning a language “like a child”

· Leave a comment ·

People argue about whether adults can, through immersion, learn “like children”. Plenty of people maintain that, textbooks and flashcards notwithstanding, this is the only way that anybody actually learns a language. Without dipping my rather unscientific toes into that debate I will give you the following anecdotal evidence: to me, learning languages as an adult feels the same as the linguistic exploration of my youth, if not quite my earliest childhood.

The first language I ever learnt was English. I remember struggling to learn it. Hesitation when speaking to (other) native speakers, experimentation with words I didn’t fully understand. I remember the joy that I felt in my mid-teens when I realised that I could express complex thoughts without pausing to plan my sentence first, to make sure that I didn’t lose the plot (on reflection I wonder whether this was at least in part an ADHD problem). I remember reading books and understanding all (or most of) the words, without feeling as though I was really absorbing the meaning. I remember saying out loud words that I had only ever read on paper and realising, publicly, that my pronunciation was ridiculous.

Of course I have a lot more context as an adult for some of the concepts in other languages, especially those that are more closely related to English. I don’t need to learn again what distinguishes epistemology from ontology, or why anybody cares about either. But for many concepts, and even for my own emotional connection to them, the exploration feels the same. Even in the closest languages concepts are typically overlapping rather than identical – you have to figure out all over again where they start and stop, with more context this time but with many red herrings for the same reason. If I tell someone I like them am I accidentally saying I love them? Is there a real emotional difference between saying I like something and saying that it “pleases me”? If I say something is “not bad” is it a compliment or an insult?

And when listening to people speak I feel that I am learning over again where my own personal boundaries are – which words and phrases appeal to me, which I dislike, which will form part of my own active vocabulary. I know for a fact that I have expressed ideas in Romanian that I wouldn’t say in English, and some things I would find concerning, because I was repeating words I had heard used by adults.

I am not a person with a huge amount of nostalgia for youth, but this small rediscovery of it – of exploration and new joys – is pleasing. So to what extent do adults learn in the same way as children? I don’t know – a large one, I suspect, with some key differences. Would I recommend learning a language as an adult? Highly.

My goodness is there a world of food out there if you know how to listen

· Leave a comment ·

I have learnt a lot about languages and a lot about cooking from watching cooking videos in other languages. This is partly a point about language-learning, but it is also just an acknowledgement of the fact that the less I am the target of a particular piece of media the more likely I am to learn something from it, and that that is particularly true when it comes to food.

For language learning, cooking videos carry the vast power of repetition. The relatively narrow range of vocabulary video to video combined with the visual context for most novel vocabulary is a powerful natural spaced repetition system. The content is both comprehensible, one way or another, and interesting (at least for me), and is rarely so long that I just zone out. It really has it all! If you are not particularly interested in cooking but you have other skills or special interests, new or old, watching content about them in another language is a great way to find comprehensible input for your target language. This is the case whether is is comprehensible because of visual context or because of your existing knowledge.

For learning how to cook watching cooking videos in other languages is also fantastic. I see a lot of English language cooking content, which at any one time follows a few main trends and introduces cooking techniques from around the world in a few main ways. This is not to deny that there are English language content creators who have knowledge and experience of cooking techniques that are not commonly presented in English language content, but it is a lot easier to find content that really teaches you something new when you look beyond that to content that is aimed at a different audience entirely. Recently I learnt how to make a type of spring roll wrapper from an extraordinarily wet dough and it was very exciting.

If this interests you my main tip is as follows: use search terms in your target language, even if you have to use a translator to get them. For example instead of searching “cooking techniques in Mandarin”, search “烹饪技巧”, in Mandarin! I acknowledge that for many people this will be obvious, but it really makes a difference so I think it is worth saying. Also beware of YouTube’s automatically translated video titles – looking for your target language in the thumbnail can really save you time.

Whilst writing this post I got excited about the possibilities of Hindi cooking videos and watched several videos on Maharashtrian thali. I hope you get as excited as me and get some good language and some good food!

Learn a language slowly

· Leave a comment ·

When I say to learn a language slowly I am making two different, though not unrelated, points. One is practical, the other philosophical.

The first is that, simply from a practical perspective, the primary determiner of a person’s skill in a language is the time that they have spent in the language. Language-learning takes time and trying to rush that process is immensely frustrating and demotivating, and motivation really is your most valuable resource when it comes to getting those hours in.

The second, which to me is extraordinarily motivating, is that time spent in the language is the fun part. You unequivocally do not need to be fluent, or even anything more than the most beginnery of beginners, to enjoy using a language. Enjoyment in multiple forms is available immediately from “I recognised that word!” to “I liked that joke!” or “this show is cool”. There is no delayed gratification here – you are not working hard so that one day you can use the language, you are using the language every moment that you are “working” on it, be that watching a YouTube video for learners, listening to a podcast for native-speakers, or reading your favourite book in translation. That is not to deny that sooner or later this joys will be followed by the joys of “I am really enjoying this conversation” and “I understood that joke and its cultural referents without subtitles!” (and oh man are jokes funnier when you feel a little bit smug about understanding them), but really the language and the cultures it gives you access to are worth it every step of the way.

What this means is, essentially, that you can cut out most of the boring stuff that you would be doing to make the process faster – most of which does not really make the process faster. Being able to recognise common words and grammatical structures can give you a good start at the beginning, but drilling them until you can reproduce them perfectly is neither as fun nor as useful as just enjoying the language.

Cantonese and Mandarin, a foolish commitment?

· Leave a comment ·

I’ve started learning Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, both more or less from zero. By many people’s estimation this is foolish, and I don’t fully disagree. Taking any two languages from zero at the same time is something that I have avoided for as long as I’ve been learning languages, and with good reasons. Confusing your languages is inevitable – when I started learning Polish it always came out sounding like the Russian that I had learnt (to a fairly low level) previously, and nowadays my Russian (which I have not maintained) is basically Polish. Even between languages as different as Hindi and Romanian I frequently mix up words, especially conjunctions, since though they are essential to the sentence they are also not the main point of the sentence, and so don’t keep my focus. It stands to reason that languages with which I am less familiar will suffer more from this kind of mixing, particularly when they have so much shared vocabulary (with important tonal differences).

When I first picked up Cantonese I was excited about taking on what in my mind would be a ten year project. Disregarding perfection, you could learn Cantonese to a very high level in a much shorter time-frame, but it was never intended to be the main language that I study. I have other language projects that are more relevant to my daily life and in which I have more of a footing. 10 years was, with very little commitment to the number, my broad acknowledgement that it would be a fun hobby but not my priority. Since I started learning Mandarin (for pretty unrelated reasons – I now live with someone who is learning it and watching dramas is a fun group activity) my excitement for Cantonese has also grown by a huge margin.

The reasons I am allowing myself to undertake this project are as follows: Language-learning is a long-term project, and I no longer feel much of the frustration that it is not progressing quickly enough. It is a process that can be measured best in hours spent with the language, but those hours are typically spread out over several years, more so when multiple languages are in progress simultaneously. Also, the more I practice my Hindi and my Romanian – often switching between them when I am lucky enough to be presented with the challenge of working with speakers of both languages in the same day – the less I confuse them. Subjecting them to that challenge as often as possible only strengthens them. It stands to reason that the same thing will happen with Mandarin and Cantonese, and I am more than comfortable with the fact that it will take a long time to get there.

And there have proven to be benefits! Those same drawbacks – the similarities between the languages in grammar, vocabulary, and especially in their written form, have also been useful and fun. Being able to parse and acknowledge (to avoid saying “understand”) the dramatic differences between Cantonese speech and its subtitles, for example, has been really aided by learning the language that the more standardised text is based on. For related reasons, it is also immensely interesting from a cultural and political perspective.

Noticing the grammatical and vocabulary similarities has also been fun, and I am noticing and remembering words that I recognise from the other language more quickly than I would if I were only learning one. As far as I can tell at this early stage, recalling and reproducing those words reliably in a sentence with the correct vowels and tones will quite possibly take longer than it otherwise would, but I don’t know that speaking fluently will necessarily require additional hours of engagement with each language. I am planning for this to be a long process anyway. Learning another language is living in another language, so I am here for life.

My language-learning to date has shown me that I am, and encouraged me to be, a person who is very comfortable with significant ambiguity, and so rapidly expanding the data points I can engage with is much less scary for me than it would have been if it were my first or even third target language. Learning other languages sometimes makes me forget the right words in English, but that is not a reason not to do it! As I said, confusing languages is inevitable – whatever you do – so I’m not going to worry about it too much.