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Sprachgefühl | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| linguanima Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6498 days ago 114 posts - 123 votes  3 sounds Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Spanish, French Studies: Italian, Latin, German | Message 1 of 19 11 January 2007 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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People talk about a 'feeling' of a language. It's the feeling you have for your mother tongue or a foreign language that you already speak very well. It's the feeling that makes you say, 'no it doesn't sound right' when you see an ill-structured sentence, rather than 'no, my grammar book doesn't say so'. It's the feeling that makes you creative in a language, composing appropriate sentences, choosing right words, without have memorised passages in your textbooks. I once read in the book that the feeling was called 'Sprachgefühl', maybe coined by some German linguist when Germany was the leading force of linguistics.
Everyone wants to 'acquire' a language rather than to 'learn' or 'study' it. Because the process of acquisition is far more enjoyable and less tiring. I think the key is to get the 'Sprachgefühl'. But in what way can it be achieved? Children can certainly do it. But does the ability REALLY decline with age? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6483 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 2 of 19 11 January 2007 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I see no reason why this ability should decrease with age. Every language has both regularities and irregularities, otherwise even natives wouldn't be able to learn it. If a certain construction catches the interest of a grammarian he/she may find some kind of logic, but the construction was developed by people who didn't think like grammarians, and it caught on because other non grammarians liked it. That's how languages develope, and it is rarely children who make the durable inventions.
We all have to start by learning the tricks of the natives, but even before we are advanced learners we have the right to try to be creative in the new language, and we have become advanced when our inventions have become as good as those of most natives. Edited by Iversen on 11 January 2007 at 9:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6723 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 3 of 19 11 January 2007 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
There is no question that adults do not learn languages the way children do, so something does get lost at a biological level, and this is well-known. Nevertheless, there are plenty of successful adult language learners, at least if one does not insist on native-like pronunciation. The only question then is whether one can hope to develop that special feel for the language one learns as an adult, or whether one's brain is stuck forever to handle the new language as a sort of artificial mental game with rules. I actually asked myself that question some years ago, upon realizing that English was becomeing second nature to me, and took up Spanish for the sole purpose, at the time, of watching this process of developing a feel for the language. The (alas, still only partial) experience has left me optimistic. Yes, one studies grammar and vocabulary and keeps consulting reference works as part of learning and maintaining the language, and one will never know it like a native, yet the more one reads, listens, and writes in an unencumbered manner (and speaks, for those who have enough opportunities to do so), the more various constructions and vocabulary nuances seem to seep into the subconscious, and it starts to happen way before one can claim fluency. Perhaps it is still not the real McCoy, but the way I see it, if it quacks like a duck, maybe it's just that, a duck. Otherwise, one has to get into Turing Test type arguments, that even if you think you have developed some feel for the language, perhaps you are just fooling yourself. I certainly would not hesitate playing a bit with a language I didn't yet know perfectly, at least in writing, although one does need some sense of how far (and when!) one can push this at a given stage in learning. Edited by frenkeld on 11 January 2007 at 12:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Silvestris Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6344 days ago 131 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, Polish*, German | Message 4 of 19 11 January 2007 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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No, it doesn't decrease with age. And of course it can be acquired, because I'm acquiring a 'Sprachgefühl' in German already.
It gets built while you're studying your language and listening to people speak it on a day-to-day basis. Granted, I still can't pick out every single mistake and also granted, all the articles are still very interchangable for me, but I'm starting to catch things like which case something should be in and so forth. It really is possible, it just depends how dedicated you are to learning your lannguage! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6398 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 5 of 19 11 January 2007 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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The linguistic term for what is referred to as 'Sprachgefühl' is 'linguistic intuitions'.
Adults can develop these linguistic intuitions in a new language in the same way as children develop them - by meaningful exposure to the target language. Adults also have the ability to study a language, - this is often referred to as "learning", in contrast to "acquiring" - but acquisition still plays a large part in becoming proficient in a language. The grammar of a natural language is complex, has thousands of grammatical structures (3,000 - 4,000 in English), and has been only partially elucidated for any language. Becoming proficient in a language also means becoming proficient in using thousands of lexical items, including thousands of multi-word "chunks" of language. There is no way all of this can be "learned" - most must be acquired. The "age effect" is well-attested in language acquisition. After the onset of adolescence, the ability to acquire a new language that in all aspects is "native-like" is lessened. However this ability to acquire a language is still operable in adults, and there is no evidence that it continues to deteriorate after the "critical age". Edited by Linguamor on 11 January 2007 at 3:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tujiko Senior Member United States Joined 6313 days ago 140 posts - 144 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 19 11 January 2007 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the blogger on All Japanese All the Time put it best when he stated the only advantage children had over adults in language acquisition was that they hadn't lived long enough to develop a neverending list of excuses as to why they couldn't acquire languages.
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| linguanima Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6498 days ago 114 posts - 123 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Spanish, French Studies: Italian, Latin, German | Message 7 of 19 11 January 2007 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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But do you think Sprachgefühl is much more powerful and longlasting than linguistic knowledge studied off a book? If so a learner should, at the very beginning of his/her language learning, get the Sprachgefühl. In what way can it be quickly developed, in a focused way?
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| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6475 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 8 of 19 12 January 2007 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Sprachgefühl is almost getting into... well, it involves language learning, yes, but in so many ways it's more of a concept associated with creative writing. There are good and bad sentences, and both can be grammatically correct. Sprachgefühl is more what'd tell you if the sentence is good, and grammar's mostly irrelevant at that point -- and, indeed, if people like Joyce and Faulker are any indication, Sprachgefühl is what lets you know when you should break grammar and rules in order to get something that just sounds good.
I think what I'm getting at here is if you want to use it as a tool for language acquisition -- quite a good idea, honestly -- then you don't look at how a child learns their language, but how a writer learns their craft. And, in general, it's just a matter of reading and writing. Constantly. Copying a favorite book and writing it out too, I've heard, can help, because you develop a sort of muscle memory and a sense of what feels right. I'm also not quite sure that 'native fluency' is a worthwhile aspiration. If English is any indications, most natives in general have a really, truly atrocious grasp of their own language. I was going to point out several poorly worded and ungrammatical sentences, but instead I think I'll just note that the people in my old dorm tended to communicate in bizarre shouts and throaty syllables, forgoing words entirely. And... I'm honestly not exaggerating (much)! Edited by MeshGearFox on 12 January 2007 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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