Other than my day time work and algorithm drills, one of my hobbie is to learn foreign language. I am a Chinese so naturally I know two dialects, an official dialect, i.e. Mandarin and a dialect of the region, i.e. Cantonese. I speak and write reasonable to room-to-improve English. Since I am not a professional writer, I gathered that's reasonable. So I switched away from English and try to learn the "foreign language" in America, Spanish. If I succeeded this time, it would be my forth language.
Spanish is not the first "forth language" I tried to master. Before Spanish, I tried to learn Japanese, Korean, Italian and Esperanto. I also picked up some small artificial language such Navi, Toki Pona and Klingon. While I have complete success in Toki Pona (because it has 100 words), I gave up all of them at the end. I have restarted Japanese recently. But so far, Spanish is the language I go the farthest. At this point, I would proudly say I learn all the tenses and have lively conversations with any Spanish speakers who can tolerate my poor accents and occasional incomprehensible grammar. Despite the shortcomings of my Spanish, I have been clearly improving rapidly. In fact, when I told my professor I only learn the language for a year, he was very surprised because many people took several years to come to my level. Not only you will doubt his statement. I had a lot of doubt as well because it doesn't make any logical sense.
In fact, for the most parts of her, America has foreign language learning program. Though it's astounding to see not many people in the States can master more than English. America has been culturally tolerant to other races for quite a number of years. That makes me wonder whether there are other reasons why people failed.
There are many possible reasons for this, but after a while I believe there are three ultimate reasons. The first is that generally we are not taught about the general structure of languages. When I said "general structure", I mean the common parts which is universal for all, or at least most of the languages.
There are two important corollaries of the first reason. One is that many people don't realize that a language can impose a completely different world view to human beings. What do I mean by imposing different world views? For example, in Spanish may be you can say "correr un riesgo" to mean "to run the risk". You cannot say "está calor" (is heat) but you can only say "tiene calor" (have heat). Since each language imposed a different views of the world, many people cannot get used to it.
If you went to a language class, this kind of questions come up all the time. "How do I say A from language X in language Y?" The teacher will give you a translation. Sometimes it could make no sense to a speaker in language X, so the first reaction for a intelligent person in language X is that "How can people think in this way?"
What the learner didn't know is that "of course, there is a reason for every small tidbits in another language from etymological to historical but a person doesn't has to know them before they go on". This type of problem appears in many level of language learning.
Another related observations - many learners in Spanish, French and Italian are very interested in learning new nouns. But they are stumbled on learning verbs because verbs are the hard part.
There are many irregular verbs in the above three languages. So an effective way to learn these language is rather surprising - one should simply acquire 500-1000 verbs of that language using technique such as rote training. After that one can then start the phase of acquiring different type of words such as adjectives and nouns through reading and perhaps listening.
The second reason, which is also a result of lack of knowledge about language itself, is that the most important factor of language learning is actually not the intelligence of the learner. Rather, language learning is more an issue of persistence. That is if you are willing to spend more time on it. This sounds like a clique. So why would I say it with such confidence.
One just need to look at the recent advances of computer speech recognition, then it would be completely clear that the clique thinking is actually not wrong. For a computer, equipped with correct algorithm, the performance of a speech recognition algorithm is usually not determined by the cleverness of the algorithm. Rather it is determined by the number of hours the recognition model is trained.
So what is the consequence of this observation? It's clear that if we spend more time on a language, we can be improved. It's also clear that when a person give up a certain study and restart. It would be much harder. So the conclusion is one should try not to give up in a language study. If one starts to learn and not able to pick up immediately, one should try their best to stay on course and keep on learning. That is paradoxically the most effective way to learn.
This funny reason is actually why many students decide to quit or ignore their language studies. Many students, after seeing their peers have mastered more than them, decide to give up. That happens a lot because at a certain moment, there got to be someone who is better than you in something. Most of the time, they feel that they cannot catch up. So at the end, they decide to give up.
In my observations, the said students can be very talented in a certain aspect of the language. May be they have good articulation of phonemes in a certain language. May be they are natural in repeating and learning grammars. In any cases, they just have to work on a part of the skill. Then they are done. But many people just cannot go over this hurdle.
In conclusion, I would think that language learning illustrate a concept which is deeper than language learning itself. That is how we should learn something usually depends on our abstract understanding about something. If more students understand the fundamentals and mechanics of language itself, I believe more and more people will speak foreign language fluently in USA.
33_P
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