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"Myths" of foreign language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5568 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 17 of 72 27 April 2010 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ignoring the word "best" for now, the issue is not with physical location but the belief that being in a specific country negates the need for any other type of learning. I think most people would agree that, timing considered, being in country can be a fantastic addition to one's language acquisition efforts.
I see Mondria's argument as taking issue with the absolutist stance implied in the word "always," rather than negating any of the points you made. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6728 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 18 of 72 27 April 2010 at 8:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The strongest candidate for fossilization is probably the wrong accent. Obvious grammatical and usage errors may be easy to correct, but what about the more subtle ones? The example josht gave, "folg mir" vs. "folg mich" stands out by its triviality - one may need some practice to avoid saying it the wrong way, but the correct usage is quite unambiguous here. Not all grammar is unambiguous. For example, the full range of the use of articles in English cannot be easily pigeonholed into a set of clear rules. You will pretty much need to develop a feel for how to use them, and for someone with a native language that doesn't have articles it may take a while to get there, if one ever gets there. Is it so clear there can be no fossilization in such more subtle areas of grammar and usage, even if there isn't any in the more straightforward ones? Edited by frenkeld on 27 April 2010 at 10:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 72 27 April 2010 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It is true that there are words whose meaning is quite diffuse. Often they are used in fixed expressions whose meaning isn't just 'the sum of the parts', but words can also develop multiple meanings outside such expressions. For some reason these words are often seen as the ultimate proof of the thesis that words should be learned in context. But I think that this idea is flawed. The first time you see such a word in a text you cannot have any idea about all the uses you haven't seen yet. So being an unknown word you can do two things with it: either you guess at the meaning, or you look it up in a dictionary. In the dictionary you find half a page with examples and definition, and then you KNOW that this word has diffuse and maybe even multiple meanings and many idiomatic uses - though it would probably not be wise to try to learn them all in one go. If you just guess you will not have an inkling of an idea about the other possible uses, - and you may even have misinterpreted your first specimen.
OK, what can you get from the dictionary? Mostly there is one or maybe a few 'core meanings', and many (but not necessarily all) the idiomatic meanings are somehow derived from these, That's all you need to know in the beginning - your reading and listening are supposed to teach you the details and nuances of the uses, and possibly also most of the idiomatic uses. So context is certainly important, but mostly to extend your knowledge about known words and their uses. It would take far too much time to make the field work of a lexicographer each time you meet a new word, - let those people do the the initial footwork for you. Edited by Iversen on 27 April 2010 at 9:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5819 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 20 of 72 27 April 2010 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I would modify that to "The best way to perfect a foreign language is to live in a country where it is spoken" 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5796 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 72 27 April 2010 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not so much. If we think in terms of the "valency" of the word rat to various concepts, it really is overwhelmingly the little animal. When we call someone a rat or when we smell a rat, we are referring by metaphor to the unpleasant associations of that animal, so we must know the literal meaning before the metaphor can be understood, so it stands that the word rat is first and foremost a concrete item that does not need context to learn. In fact, this is a fairly extreme example of one point specifically raised by Mondria "learning a word in a particular context may result in a learner knowing the word only in that context, or worse: not even recognizing the word outside that context" -- if you learn the word "rat" in the phrase "smell a rat", it will make absolutely no sense to you outside of that phrase. To use a less extreme example, a fork is a piece of cutlery. If we get too focused on the "tableware" or "dinnertime" context, a fork in the road (a pretty self-explanatory metaphor) or even something literal like a "garden fork" can seem completely alien. I've experienced this myself, where I've been staring at something I really should have already known....
You're conflating two issues here -- learning grammar and learning vocabulary. These will happen at the same time sometimes, but Mondria is talking about learning vocabulary as its own goal. The example you've picked is a regular feminine noun (ends e). There are certain false masculines and false feminines (le monde) and I would certainly agree that it's essentially to develop a "feel" for these rather than consciously keep telling yourself "monde is masculine", but this is not the majority case.
That's not far off what he's saying. His "didactic suggestion" against myth 4 is "Learn words in context, but not in the final stage of the learning process." Introduce it with context as support, but remove it from that context as soon as possible afterwards -- "decontextualise" it. His main point can be boiled down to "learn in context but don't learn the context" -- ie the word should be repeated but the situation of presentation shouldn't. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5796 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 72 27 April 2010 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Excellent example, but that's not just a question of accent, but more fundamental phonemics, and yes, that's probably the hardest thing to correct once you're a way into a language. That's the one thing you'd get away with calling fossilised in my book. The problem is that two meaningful units of sound (phonemes) have become learnt as one. Thus all words containing either of these sounds get learned as being one type of thing. You have to relearn all the words as different things to get two phonemes back and be able to then move towards a good accent. But as for subtle things in grammar, do we need "fossilised errors" to account for this? Surely the fact that these are initially difficult to learn is enough? I mean, if you never actually learn something, it stands to reason that you're always going to get it wrong. I've even heard native speakers of English change some of these subtleties. For example, articles are used differently in colloquial speech in England and Scotland, and I know many Scottish people who have adopted the English way -- their Scottish grammar was not fossilised. Many English people I know have picked up the Americanism of "meeting with" someone rather than just "meeting" them. Not even correct language is fossilised, and as I've already said, the brain learns "errors" or "wrong language" the same way as it learns correct language. Edited by Cainntear on 27 April 2010 at 10:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6728 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 23 of 72 27 April 2010 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is not the only way to have a wrong accent. I can't off the top of my head think of there being such merged phonemes in Spanish, and yet one can sport a perfectly bad accent in it. (There are, to be sure, languages like Hindi where the phenomenon you describe does have to be dealt with, but even with Hindi this is not the only pronunciation problem one has to grapple with.)
My rather mundane concern is whether one way of acquiring/learning the language teaches you how to use the language correctly while another one doesn't quite do it. Let me define "fossilization" as pertaining to the areas of grammar and usage that remain prone to error even after several decades of full-time immersion. They will depend on one's L1. I can't think of a more extreme way of thinking about the concept.
Usage varies from one area to another, and it varies in time. I fought gallantly for a long time to keep saying "there are" with plural nouns, but at some point I gave up and started saying "there's", just like everybody else does nowadays. If nothing else, it is hard not to talk like everyone else when the prevalent usage changes around you, whether you are a native of a foreigner. I don't see this phenomenon as relevant to the concept of fossilization. I'll repeat myself in saying that ultimately what I am after is whether all roads do or do not lead to Rome when it comes to language learning. The danger of fossilized parts in one's "language center" that can't be easily remolded later, if such danger exists, would ultimately be the only obstacle to learning languages the way one would really like to do it. Edited by frenkeld on 28 April 2010 at 12:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 24 of 72 28 April 2010 at 6:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure if we really disagree. I think we agree that one has to learn in context (e.g. "smell a rat", "her bedroom was a rat's nest", "I don't give a rat's ass about your family"). But Mondria and Cainntear suggest the word should be repeated without the context (e,g, "rat") because a "core meaning" radiates through the various metaphors and usages. I don't really go along with the idea that the core meaning is a sufficient guide. Native speakers of English know how to use "rat". Sure, a rat is a furry little animal with unpleasant associations, but why does "smell a rat" mean to be suspicious about something? We're not talking about the smell of the rat. What does the definition of a rat tell us about a "rat's ass" or a "rat's nest"? Why not use a "mouse's ass" or a "squirrel's nest"? Actually, we could probably use these expressions and most native English speakers would understand something, but the original expressions are "locked in" metaphors. Take the French word "le coup". The core meaning could be something like "blow" or "stroke". The problem is that this core meaning does not take us very far. "Un coup d'argent, un coup de coeur, boire un coup, un coup de pouce" are expressions that have nothing in common except the word "coup". And that is precisely the problem of people learning core meanings and trying to understand idiomatic expressions. We've looked primarily at nouns. The problem may be even more severe with verbs. Take a common English verb like "to make". I think most readers know that this verb has many usages that are totally unrelated. Things get even more complicated when one factors in that interesting English grammatical feature called phrasal verbs. What do "make up a lie", "make up an actor's face", "make out in the car", "make out the sign in the fog", "make out like bandits" and "make out like he didn't understand" have in common besides the word "make"? Again, native speakers have no problems manipulating all these forms. But non-natives will have exactly the same problem with "make" that we will have with the French "faire" or the Spanish "hacer". Their meanings derive from the contexts way beyond what the "core" meanings tell you. This explains why we make certain translation mistakes. We know that a rat is "un rat" in French and smell is "sentir". So we attempt to translate "smell a rat" by "sentir un rat", which is wrong. In fact, one would probably use an expression like "avoir la puce à l'oreille" or "have the flea in the ear". So, as long as we learn in context without always searching for core meanings, I don't object to decontextualizing for purposes of presentation. I'm not against vocabulary lists per se. I'm just concerned about their proper usage. Edited by s_allard on 28 April 2010 at 6:47am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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