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A theory on language learning | ||
Tags: Language Acquisition Theory | Music | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4184 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 9 of 23 21 February 2015 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Not to be discouraging of your theory, but...
You might want to learn a foreign language, and preferably several, before you create a theory based on how great you, the person who has not yet learnt a foreign language to fluency, are at learning languages. We're all free to think about how our background (genetic or acquired) affects our language learning, of course. It's just the phrasing that strikes me as odd. You'll want to actually figure out whether you're better than average, and actually able to "complete" the task you're talking about, before basing any theories about what a great advantage something is on yourself. --- It's a bit of a meme, repeating that people who are good at music are good at languages. There are skills that aid language learners that certain types of musicians are going to be already familiar with (languages are melodic, after all, have a certain beat, etc), and the persistence necessary to become an excellent musician is definitely useful when learning languages. Personally I think it's not a very useful way of looking at things outside of a highly academic lens, though, because the end result is that people who never really tried to learn a language properly will tell you they're "bad at languages" because they're "tone deaf", and they will tell you that until your ears bleed. It's very tiresome. They'll also strip you of your accomplishments because "you're a musical person", apparently a trait you are born with that runs in families and not the result of hard work, so obviously you're "good at languages". No, I'm not saying this out of bitterness. I'm actually an utterly "un-musical" person myself who sings horribly off-key, has zero sense for beats, and has been known to describe the sound of album mixes in such educated musical terms as "mashed potatoes", but I've always been lauded for my language skills, since I was a young child. OK, maybe some bitterness by proxy since the only person who seems to recognise my husband's hard work to learn French is me, because he's a composer which to others means that he got it all for free. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5393 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 10 of 23 21 February 2015 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Indeed, dropping out or not is irrelevant. So are those people you know who are great at languages good or potentially good at school? Edited by smallwhite on 21 February 2015 at 4:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6682 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 23 21 February 2015 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I highly recommend the book Language is music.
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| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3998 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French | Message 12 of 23 21 February 2015 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I wasn't saying that music learning and language learning were mutually exclusive, my background is in music mostly, and I was just asking the question if there was indeed a relation from one to the other? That being said lots of interesting reading. When is one ever done with learning a language? Even at 34 I still find words I've never heard of in English from time to time. Edit: my favorite composers are from a variety of different backgrounds, and after the 1700s they wrote tempi and directions in their own languages. I've seen French, German, and Italian markings, does that make me a master at those languages? No, I didn't say that, I just said I had exposure to them. Which is different from actually learning them. Edited by Tyrion101 on 21 February 2015 at 5:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4529 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 13 of 23 21 February 2015 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A lot of Asians like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans enrol their kids in music programs. The Suzuki music program
is popular in Asia as other places. Most Asians have little exposure to European languages when they were young. You may be playing pieces by Classical composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, etc. Being exposed to a word like Concerto which is Italian doesn't make you fluent in Italian. If you happen to sing opera melodies by Bizet, Rossini, Puccini, Wagner, etc., you have a higher probability of acquiring German, French & Italian than someone who plays piano and reads music with Italian terms (Allegro, forte, piano, poco rit.) written into the score. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5144 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 14 of 23 22 February 2015 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You will get the false appearance that languages and music are related if people who rate themselves highly at languages are more likely to rate themselves highly at music simply because they have a tendency to rate themselves highly in general. You could avoid this to a degree my also asking if they consider themselves to be above or below average at some other things, like math and sports. Luckily, you don't have to do this yourself--academics have published research on this. This study found that, once you control for short- term auditory memory and L2 learning circumstances, musical ability predicted learners' success in productive and receptive phonology, but not vocabulary or syntax. Edited by robarb on 22 February 2015 at 7:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4184 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 15 of 23 22 February 2015 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, you weren't. And no one appears to have claimed that you were. In fact, we've all taken you on your word (and our own experience) that it's entirely possible to learn both music and languages. I'm not sure who you are responding to. Nor what you're talking about, to be honest. Perhaps you could clarify this bit?
Who are you responding to? No one has claimed that you're saying you're a "master" at French, German and Italian because you've seen a word here and there. You, however, are making claims to be good at languages. Your very first sentence in this very thread is: I've been thinking about why I seem to be good at learning languages. You followed up with I think that all of these factors make me good at the language learning process. Despite apparently having yet to learn a language successfully to fluency, i.e. despite lacking knowledge about whether you're actually "good", "average" or "below average". And, no, it's not a question of "when does one truly finish learning a language".
You did ask that question, at the very end, which people have been responding to, seemingly without misunderstanding you. The rest of your entry was the presentation of a theory, based on yourself as a "good" (repeated twice) language learner. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4393 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 16 of 23 22 February 2015 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm not challenging you, but what you've said raises the question of when you can properly see
how well you compare to others. I would argue that it would be fair to say that, given some classroom setting where you notice yourself overtaking your peers with very comparable background knowledge at the outset, you could sensibly say that you "take to languages" or something similar after only a few months. Perhaps less: I knew I was talented at art because from the moment I could pick up a pencil I was better than the average of my peers, and it truly wasn't from any hard graft or home influence that I developed my skills: they simply worked out of the box, and not coincidentally my family was filled with talented artists. Now... I let my art skills decay and now I can hardly draw a cartoon cat on a whiteboard when I teach English. In this case I am no longer a good artist. I had no out-of-the-box functionality in languages, but after a year apiece I can communicate well in either Spanish or English, after living as a monoglot for nearly 22 years. This was from really pushing myself to learn at least 3 hours per day: sometimes up to 8 or 9 for a couple of insane months of overkill. So I'm left with the weird conclusion that I'm currently bad at art yet talented at it, and currently good at languages yet untalented at them. Perhaps the "talent" bit can be dispensed with, since my enthusiasm for lanugages more than replaces the motivating factor of realizing an innate talent. ...Oh goodness... what on earth was I originally saying? Better wrap it up now. Thanks for reading this far. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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