|
 |
Pauses between languages | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| Zorndyke Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6959 days ago 374 posts - 382 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Czech | Message 1 of 2 24 October 2007 at 12:59pm | IP Logged |
|
Hello Professor Arguelles,
some time ago I found a very interesting thread here in the forum. It describes how different languages that you study might interfere with each other if you study them one right after the other without a break or with a very short interval of time between them. I would very much like to hear your opinion about this issue. How much (and in what manner) will studying various languages without a pause between each of them hinder one's language acquisition? How long should the breaks be? I have also heard somewhere that you have trained to be able to study many languages in a row without any unwanted "side effects" such as mixing the languages up or simply poor learning results. If this is true, how can one train this ability? I already have a kind of "system", but I wonder if it makes any sense at all. Basically, I have some "base languages". So far that's German and English, because they are my most advanced ones. That means I can always switch from any language to one of these or vice versa. But if I had just studied Spanish and wanted to switch to Mandarin, I wait "some time". That means I do other things no matter whether that takes me twenty minutes or some hours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 2 of 2 28 October 2007 at 6:06pm | IP Logged |
|
This is indeed a very interesting topic. The neuroscientist may well be right and I may well be an exceptional anomaly, but my direct personal experience contradicts what he says. It seems to me an unnecessary fallacy to say that the learning of two languages is a related activity. The way I experience it, studying various languages without a pause between each of them, far from hindering my language acquisition, propels it forward, and it is pausing that has a negative effect on progress because it breaks the momentum. I study in a comparative context and I acknowledge each language I study as an individual living entity of great interest to me, so why on earth should I mix them up? I have just never had any problem in this respect, but I have observed it in my students, and I think you can learn rather simply not to have problems in this respect. If you mix languages up, the problem is that you do not allocate a virtual individuality to them, but rather store everything you learn in a general category in your brain that might be labeled “foreign language storage area.” When you go from learning, e.g., Chinese to Castilian, you are opening up the “foreign language box” to find that everything you have thrown in there has, rather understandably, gotten jumbled together. So, do not throw things into such a box, but rather consciously visualize and imagine opening and using separate Mandarin and Spanish boxes. Try this brief mental exercise when you begin studying and when you switch languages and hopefully it will help. It is really only a question of experience. You could have gathered this experience by studying comparative philology when that was a living academic discipline, but alas… Still, you can get a good measure of this in the same fashion that I did, i.e., by prolonging your formal education until you have gone through all the stages of the process and earned a doctorate from some other program that will allow you this leeway. I certainly profited greatly from the experience of the likes of Rodney Maack and Anthony Buccini, both of whom taught me older Germanic dialects when I was at the University of Chicago. My memory may be faulty in this regard, but as I recall it I had Gothic, then Old High German, then Old English, then Old Norse, one after the other, four semesters in a row. There were only two of us in Norse, and not many more in the others, so the learning was intimate and intense, and so we developed the ability to distinguish the differences between these Teutons in the very context of stressing their fundamental similarities and common origin.
5 persons have voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
