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"Myths" of foreign language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| vb Octoglot Senior Member Afghanistan Joined 6423 days ago 112 posts - 135 votes  Speaks: English, Romanian, French, Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 33 of 72 01 May 2010 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As far as I remember, coming up with the correct gender of French nouns became far easier once our teacher deigned to give us the general rules come 6th form.
Both my Cassell and Byrne/Churchill French grammars present the suite of noun gender rules and exceptions. The main reason why people, such as myself, will persist in learning vocabulary without adding context is that writing out word+context takes far more time than just scribbling down the word. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 72 01 May 2010 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Something's been turning over in the back of my mind for the last few days and now I'm managed to pin it down.
What s_allard seems to be talking about learning in phrases or sentences, which is a specific example of learning in context, but not the be-all-and-end-all. This idea has its limitations, and most of us will have experienced this at some point. Once we put the word into context, we do not only sacrifice the generality that Mondria talks about, but we often sacrifice information about the word. The easiest example is Spanish verbs. When we conjugate any regular verb to the first person present, we lose information about the root verb -- it no longer identifies itself as -ar, -er or -ir. In the vast majority of conjugations, we lose the distinction between -er and -ir, so we are left with a limited choice of conjugations or modal+infinitive constructions. We are forced into certain forms that demonstrate what we want to show, and the context becomes artificial and contrived, rather than natural. A better example (but more complicated) would be Welsh. Welsh has three mutations that affect initial consonants: soft mutation, nasal mutation and aspirate mutation. On top of that, there is "mixed mutation" in which anything that can take the aspirate mutation does, otherwise it takes a soft mutation (if possible) or no mutation. Unfortunately, in context these hide information as b and m both soften to f, and f doesn't take any mutation at all. When you see F at the start of a word in context, it could be: A) F in an unmutated position B) F in a position where other letters take soft mutation C) F in a position where other letters take nasal mutation D) F in a position where other letters take aspirate mutation E) F in a position where mixed mutation occurs E) a softened B F) a softened M In the end this might not pose a problem to learning the word, but if you are using learning-words-in-context as a means of learning grammar, it's a big problem. I said earlier that we've probably all experienced this at some time -- what did I mean? Perhaps it was in a course that tried to teach by induction from examples, but not all of us have done that. What the rest of us will have done is look in a grammar book or a verb table which uses examples which don't show the full distinction. For example, the Welsh course I'm currently following has a summary of verb forms as an appendix. The negative of simple (as opposed to periphrastic) tenses takes the mixed mutation. The interrogative takes the soft mutation. All the examples in the summary start with letters that do not take aspirate mutation, so both the negative and the interrogative end up being softened, and the distinction between the two is lost. As a reader, this confuses me. If the goal is to learn a word, I am distracted from it by needing to focus on the grammar. If the goal is to learn the grammar, there isn't enough information. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 72 01 May 2010 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I think we've come to the real heart of the matter of the difference between us. To say that nouns ending in E are feminine in French except for certain irregular nouns is a recipe for disaster because it is totally incorrect. There may be some confusion with the gender marking with adjectives where -e is generally added. As far as nouns are considered, such a rule is very misleading. This is exactly why people end up saying La site, La frère, la formulaire, la magazine, La centre, La verre, etc. Yes, there are subgroups of words that are nearly totally predictable, but as I emphasize, a huge number are simply not. But that is not really the key point I'm getting at here. I'm looking at a pedagogical strategy that addresses a particular problem of English-speakers learning French. Do people have a problem with gender agreement in French? Yes, I believe so. I see it all the time. It is probably the number one problem in French. Again, I must reiterate, the problem isn't figuring out whether the word is masculine or feminine. That's hard enough, but you have at least a 50% chance. The real problem is quickly putting all the morphological pieces in place. In other words, my main concern is how to use the word correctly and not make jarring mistakes. If it were so simple as plugging the word into the right grammatical construction, why is it such a problem (LE problème and not LA problème, as so many people say)? It is a problem because people don't learn the system from the very beginning. And, as I have said by way of comparison, the gender system in Spanish is much simpler and therefore does not have to be addressed specifically. That not being the case in French, I'm suggesting an approach that explicitly tackles the problem. Must I repeat myself? Use what works for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 36 of 72 01 May 2010 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I only stopped saying "la problème" when I learned the rule about Greek-derived -me words being masculine -- le système, le problème etc....
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 37 of 72 02 May 2010 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cainntear, not to rub it in, but I would say that if you had learned "un sérieux problème" initially, you probably would never had made that mistake again.
But more importantly, I think you have hit the nail on the head in your comment. The gender marking system in French is essentially etymological rather than morphological. So words can resemble each other in terms of endings and have different genders because of their etymology. I don't have time to go into the details now, but I would love to do so at the appropriate moment, 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 38 of 72 02 May 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
I started learning French in the 90s. My school was a bit behind the wave of the "learn in phrases" fad, but we were taught using articles as an indicator of gender in our word-lists rather than marking "m" or "f" afterwards as in the dictionaries. I was supposed to be learning gender from the article, but my brain generalised the feminine -e from exposure -- i.e. my brain saw all these feminine words ending in -e and saw the change of adjectives from masculine to feminine and generalised to assume that all words ending in -e were feminine. The human brain is wired to look for generalisations like this. In infant language learning it is often observed that children start by learning irregular verbs, as they are the most common and most frequent. Then they learn the regular verbs, and when they do, they overgeneralise the rules and start applying them to irregular verbs. So a child starts by saying "I went" (correct), then starts saying either "I go-ed" or even "I wented", then goes back to saying "I went". If learners start out consciously aware of the general rule, they can also be made consciously aware of the exceptions.
There is nothing specific to French about this. Nouns with unusual gender-marking owing to non-Latin origins occur in the other Romance languages. More importantly, they usually come in groups: le problème, le système, le morphème. I could learn these all individually and independently, or I could learn them as a class. Incidentally, the last one was a guess. I took the rule, I generalised, I checked it in a dictionary and I was right. If I'd been having a conversation in French, I would have said this without hesitation, even though I have never used the word in any language other than English before today. So we can learn the majority rule (-e is feminine), we learn the "slightly irregular" families of exceptions (e.g. -ème is masculine), we learn that certain endings are unpredictable (eg -ste) and "very irregular", and we learn that there are a few isolated weird ones that are "completely irregular" (e.g. "la maison"). When we speak we first check whether the word is in the small set of completely irregular words, then the medium sized set of very irregular words, and finally in the larger set of slightly irregular words. If it's not in one of those, we assume it's regular. This saves us having to memorise all of the many, many regular words and speeds up recall significantly. If this was not the case -- if we learnt every word individually and independently -- then there would be no tendency to "regularise" language. The exceptions would be equally distributed among rare and common words, rather than being overwhelmingly in common usage ("la maison" is an everyday word, être and avoir are simultaneously the two most common verbs and the two most irregular verbs in the French language). If our internal model wasn't based on generalisations, why do the Greek-derived -ème words consistently remain masculine rather than randomly changing? Language is made up of connected groups of words, structures and concepts, and if these logical groupings are presented to the student, the student is encouraged to build up an internal understanding of the language that matches the logical structure of the language itself. If you allow the student to learn without structure, the student will learn without structure. It's all well and good you telling us how hard French is to learn, but you've never had to sat down and study it, have you? I'm assuming from your profile that you're a native speaker, so you've been speaking the language longer than you can remember. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 72 03 May 2010 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
I actually agree with most of this. No doubt part of the learning process is to look for regularities. All languages are essentially very systematic. If I look at the gender marking system in French, it is relatively systematic from an etymological perspective. This simplifies learning and generalizing. All words ending in -isme, referring to a doctrine or school of thought are masculine; all words ending in -tion are feminine; all words ending in -euse are feminine; all words ending in -rie, referring to a place (e.g. boulangerie, billeterie) are feminine. These all work because of derivational regularities of French vocabulary. If the whole system functioned were totally regular, we wouldn't be talking about it and learners would not have a problem. First let me point out that when we talk about gender marking, we tend to think of the written forms. But it's important to remember that the writing system of French, unlike Spanish for example, is not phonetic. This means that the gender (and often number) is not always phonetically marked. This is very important because the system is acquired by native speakers orally without any reference to the written forms. When the gender is phonetically marked as well as morphologically, as in -euse, -erie, -isme, everything is simple. But since a large number of words are not phonetically marked, it is often difficult to derive the gender from phonetic form. This is of course where Spanish differs so radically from French. And this is why the gender system in Spanish is not really a big problem for learners. This is also why to formulate a rule such as all words ending in -e are feminine except for exceptions is something only a foreigner learning from the written form would do and that is why it leads to such disastrous results. A 6 year old child who does not know how to write (or even illiterate adults) can use the system perfectly without any knowledge of the spelling. This child would never say UNE problème. And this is not because this child has learned about forms derived from ancient Greek. The child has simply been exposed to the correct forms in context. The only people who say LA verre or LA site are foreigners who are generalizing some rule based on a written form. In passing, because the system is acquired orally, the vernacular language can make gender assignments that are considered incorrect in the formal language. In Quebec Vernacular French, we hear people say things like UNE autobus, UNE ascenseur, UNE hôpital, UNE écran and UNE argent instead of the masculine article. This obviously has nothing to do with the ending. This phenomenon that has been observed in all popular varieties of French is simply the overgeneralization of a rule of phonetic agreement. Certain adjectives before a masculine word starting with a vowel will require a special phonetic form as in "un nouvel écran, un bel ascenseur". The adjective forms are pronounced exactly like their feminine counterparts (i.e. "bon" in "un bon enfant" is pronounced like "bonne"). The tendency here is to make the corresponding nouns feminine. Notice here how the agreement system in context "drives" the spontaneous learning of gender assignment. This is where the education system comes in to correct spontaneous regularizations. This, as we know, is often what separates educated from uneducated speakers. I should point out that there are some cases where gender marking ending may clash with logical gender. For example LA sentinelle would tend to become LE sentinelle when referring to male guards. In the same way that LA trompette will become LE trompette when referring to the musician (Pierre est le premier trompette de l'orchestre). This opens a whole can of worms concerning grammatical gender and logical gender. I don't even want to touch that issue Sorry to have been a bit long-winded here. As I've said before, trying to use a general rule such as all words ending in -e are feminine except for certain exceptions is, in my opinion, a very poor learning strategy. Yes, there are regularities in the gender marking system in French, thank God, and that does make things simpler. But for many words (not all), I still believe that the best approach to master the agreement system is to learn the words in context. Edited by s_allard on 03 May 2010 at 6:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 40 of 72 03 May 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
As learners, our end goal is to learn what the child learns, not how. "Learning like a child" is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and can only be judged by what the learner knows after the process is complete. The majority of evidence suggests that it is not effective. The fact of the matter is that experimental observation and statistical study give us a very clear picture of how the information is organised in the native-speaker's internal model of the language. As adults we have far greater abilities in dealing with abstract information than adults, and this allows us to consciously build an organisational model quickly and efficiently rather than simply throwing lots of input at our brain and hoping our brain will organise it all instinctively. On top of that, adults learn in a way that is physiologically different from children. While our learning is remarkably flexible, it is several orders of magnitude less flexible than that of an infant. If that wasn't enough, adult-learned languages go into a different part of the brain from native languages. It would appear that the human race underwent two different and complementary evoluntionary adaptations to learn languages. The assumption that child learning is a suitable model for adult learning is not based on any solid evidence or any firm scientific principles. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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