Your earliest foreign language memory (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Your earliest foreign language memory
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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6439 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes

Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

Message 49 of 98

24 December 2009 at 4:36pm | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

joanthemaid wrote:

You can compare it to other sentences I think. After a while, especially if the order of words is stable, you'll end up getting which is the verb, which the subject and which the complement.

I don't think so, not if it was only audio with no basis for comparison. Eventually you would start to recognize words and common sentence fragments (like "-su ka?" in Japanese or "don't wanna" in English or "vamos a ver" in Spanish, but you wouldn't know what parts of speech they are or what they mean because there is no basis for comparison against anything else.

I can teach you 1000 sentences in a language you've never heard of and you would never know what any of the words mean. Even if I wrote them down and showed you the pronunciation and where one word ends and the next word begins (which would be an advantage over someone just listening to the radio).

Heck, you could even listen to 10,000 hours of radio in your target language while following along with a transcript of what is said for the entire 10,000 hours and it still wouldn't work. At the end of it, the only thing you would have accomplished is getting your brain adapted to becoming familiar with what the language sounds like and you'd recognize common words and phrases due to subconscious frequency analysis, but you wouldn't actually know any of the language.

It would be like trying to translate a passage of text in an unknown language without having access to any tools, dictionaries, books, native speakers, or anything else. You can look at a book (no pictures) of Sanskrit all day long for 10 years and not know any Sanskrit when you are done. (I chose Sanskrit because if I picked some other language like Spanish, people would say "oh well I know x language which is similar to Spanish so I could figure it out blah blah." That's not what we're talking about here).

Quote:

Then there are all the names to help you (of people, of places...)
Then again even with a case - based language, you'd end up picking up the declensions (without necessarily knowing which is what case though)

How would you know they're declensions? You might eventually be able to realize that are different version of the same word, like:

thenakka
thenakko
thenakkon
thenakkona

But how do you know those are declining nouns? How do you know they're not conjugating verbs? How do you know they're not varying levels of diminutives being added on to a name or other noun? Or honorifics?

Remember, you don't know any other words in the language so you have no idea of those are nouns (being modified by adjectives) or if they are verbs (messing with objects) or what is going on.

What you are suggesting is only possible if you already know some of the language, then you can identify noun declensions by context. But in a new language where you know nothing, doing so is not possible.

I absolutely agree, however, that listening to the radio/music/TV in your target language is a phenomenally powerful tool when used in conjunction with other learning methods.

Keep in mind when people claim to have learned a language by watching TV, that 1) this is more plausible than radio because with TV you can see what is going on, and 2) they are potentially being modest; it's possible they studied for hours a day but don't want to go into it or exaggerate their efforts for the sake of modesty, so they just say "oh, I watched TV." It's kind of like when you see a friend you haven't seen in a while and suddenly he's lost a ton of weight, or he's all huge and muscular, and you're like "WOW! Have you been working out?" And he replies "yeah, a little." Don't take it literally and think you can work out "a little" and achieve the same results. He's probably just being modest because he doesn't want to say "oh man, I worked out SO HARD and watched every single calorie I ate and completely changed my lifestyle around to facilitate this physical change in my appearance" (which is what actually happened).

No one claims it only takes 'a little' to learn a language this way; it's the most grueling way I can think of.

You've acknowledged that you can pick up cognates, you've acknowledged that you can figure stuff out when you know if something is a noun or a verb: the missing step is that you can use the earliest words you figure out quite a bit of grammar, given enough exposure. If you always hear "He XYZ's ZZ airplane", you can already make some fairly heavy semantic assumptions that XYZ is something like fixes or flies or imports (rather than, say, 'plays soccer with'); if you then hear 'He XYZ's bananas', that shifts around assumptions, further strengthening some and weakening others, but doesn't fundamentally change much. Given _enough_ sufficiently comprehensible sentences, you'll figure it out.

Say you understand the word 'philosophy'. You hear an interview with a philosopher. In a language that obligatory uses non-declined subject pronouns, you may well have a good guess at those by the end. If you hear variations on 'philosopher', you start learning the patterns for verbs, nouns, etc.

We both agree that you can only learn when enough is comprehensible. My point is, simply, that more is comprehensible than you would think, and that this provides a base your knowledge can grow from. There's nothing magic about learning basic vocabulary from a textbook rather than from hearing it.

For what it's worth, this doesn't only extend to cognates. My first non-cognate Japanese word was 'hai'; I learned it listening to Japanese radio, on a normal show for native speakers, where the hostess said it after almost every sentence of her interviewee.

Also, a magic tip to boost comprehension: the more you know of what will be said in advance, the more you'll be able to figure out. The low-level version of this is reading the news in a language you know before listening to it in your target language. The high-level version of this is L-R, which is ridiculously easier, faster, and more fun than the pure radio method.

When you come down to it, I can't think of a single tool in language learning which isn't related to boosting comprehension ... sometimes indirectly, I admit. Textbooks, grammars, lists of sound shifts, etc are obvious. Less obviously, pronunciation is also in this category; a surprising amount of 'irregularities' in grammar make phonetic sense.

Also: people have successfully managed to translate material from extinct languages. For Ancient Egyptian, a tool as small as the Rosetta stone was enough to get started. Something as simple as being familiar with contemporary news and listening to it in your target language provides way more clues than that, and modern languages have tons of recognizable borrowings from English.

1000 sentences isn't enough. 10,000 hours is more powerful than you think.

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Aleksey Groz
Tetraglot
Newbie
Yugoslavia
Joined 5369 days ago
14 posts - 19 votes
Speaks: Serbo-Croatian*, English, Czech, French^B2

Message 50 of 98

17 March 2010 at 2:45am | IP Logged

***

Edited by Aleksey Groz on 17 March 2010 at 3:23am
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ManicGenius
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5481 days ago
288 posts - 420 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese

Message 51 of 98

17 March 2010 at 3:39am | IP Logged

Playing with some kids from Quebec and having no idea why no matter what I said they just
stood silent. Till the very end when they both rattled off something in French (to me it
sounded like they were just saying gobbledygook). I responded in kind :-P

Only when I found out it was another language did I realise that I sounded like
gobbledygook the whole time to them.
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Iris-Way
Newbie
United States
Joined 5576 days ago
22 posts - 24 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 52 of 98

17 March 2010 at 3:47am | IP Logged

When I was in grade school, I used to take the Italian picture dictionary out of the school library. (:
I didn't really learn anything but I would constantly take it out every week.
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Wilco
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6330 days ago
160 posts - 247 votes

Speaks: French*, English, Russian

Message 53 of 98

17 March 2010 at 4:03am | IP Logged

ManicGenius wrote:

That's funny: I had the exact same experience, but the other way around: I was playing with some American kid in front of our hotel in Orlando. I think we were both shocked to find out that someone actually didn't speak our language.
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liyulianyanyu
Newbie
China
Joined 5370 days ago
10 posts - 11 votes
Studies: English

Message 54 of 98

17 March 2010 at 4:39am | IP Logged

meramarina wrote:

I have just started reading a book about the natural history of human language, The Power of Babel by the linguist John McWhorter. So far, it's an easy read with good information about how languages change over time. What interests me for the purposes of forum discussion, though, is the beginning. He describes the first time that he suddenly realized, as a young child, that other languages existed and they were not like his native English. He describes it as shocking, fascinating, and frightening to hear another language spoken for the first time, when he heard a classmate speak Hebrew. He gives this as the reason for beginning his own independent study of languages, which would later become his profession.

Do you remember a moment like this? Obviously, people will differ in their memories according to whether they grew up in a multilingual family or culture. I come from a monolingual home, but I don't remember having any such sudden revelation that languages other than English existed. My paternal grandparents sometimes spoke in Polish, but for some reason, I did not perceive this as strange. It was simply "the-way-they-talk-when-I-have-been-very-bad-and-they-don't- want-me-to-understand." It didn't cause any curiosity; actually, it was a reliable sign that it was time to hide behind the curtains.

If you can remember, what is your first memory of hearing a foreign language? Did it cause you to want to learn other languages, or did that desire arrive later?

Yes.I want to learn other languages with fircely desire.And often i watch Tv and learn them pronounce.I learn English for many years in the school and now i want to learn others

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GREGORG4000
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5523 days ago
307 posts - 479 votes

Speaks: English*, Finnish
Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French

Message 55 of 98

17 March 2010 at 5:00am | IP Logged

Apparently I learned to say some things in a Chinese dialect when I was 2 or 3, but I don't remember it :\
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Johntm
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5422 days ago
616 posts - 725 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

Message 56 of 98

17 March 2010 at 5:43am | IP Logged

I don't clearly remember, but it was probably hearing Spanish speakers. Either that or when forced to take Spanish (and later French) in elementary school. I never had a "realization" that there were languages other than English (that I can remember), I just have known different people speak different things for as long as I can remember :\.

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