Building New Language Habits Lectures on Polyliteracy I/3 from New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language

greetings and welcome to the third of five lectures on poly literacy based around robert hall's book new ways to learn a foreign language if anybody is just joining for the first time now poly literacy is a term that i've coined to reflect my own predominant love of learning lots of languages including ancient and dead languages primarily for the sake of reading literature in them this is to be maybe compared and contrasted with polyglottry which is the love of learning lots of languages for the sake primarily of speaking them and both of these are to be contrasted with normal language learning which is not an obsessive love of learning languages at all but a specific need to learn a specific language at a specific time in your life and hall's book is designed to help those learners all learners understand the difficulties that you're likely to encounter in embarking upon the study of foreign languages and understand better how to overcome them so hopefully anybody should be able to get something out of his lectures my lectures and his book so we're on to p part three this time which is building new language habits let's begin by reviewing what we talked about last tuesday the nature of languages was part two and this was all about linguistics it had five chapters chapter five was about speaking and writing the main point being that reading and writing are not distinct from speaking but are based upon it so you need to have even if your main goal is to read a language you have to have something to sub-vocalize underneath it so you need to know some sounds in order to to read effectively chapter six is about speech habits and there he talked about more than anything else the fact that elementary language learning is habit formation intellectual analysis comes in and plays a role in the intermediate level and specifically of the advanced levels but the elementary levels of language learning all about forming speech habits chapter 7 system and structure is basically just an overview of different parts of linguistics because he believes linguistic analysis will help you understand the problems you're likely to encounter i completely concur so he talks about phonetics phonology syntax morphology definitions and the like uh chapter eight meaning semantics he has a separate chapter for that and chapter nine was about language and society the fact that we all have different registers of speech different ways of using language at different times depending on our dialect and the like so today we're going to go on to part three building new language habits there are four sections four chapters in this he has one chapter for each of what he calls the four main stages of language learning the first and most important stage is imitating and memorizing so in this chapter we're going to look at how one can go about internalizing material as swiftly and efficiently and effectively as possible upon which to build for further learning chapter 11 is called discovering the patterns and this is where you bring in intellectual analysis to understand what it is that you've internalized once you have something inside of you then you can look at it and understand what it is chapter 12 is called practicing the patterns patterns and is obviously about different ways to intensively practice now you understand it first you internalize it then you analyze it now you understand it and you can practice it and after you've practiced it enough then you can put it into practice by reviewing improvising so this is the stage when you take everything you've learned and you put it into action in your own new formulations halt jumps rather swiftly into the nuts and bolts of well imitating and memorizing and i have been commenting upon his ideas of first presenting them and then giving my take on them as i develop them further or update them or indicate how in my own writings i'm planning on writing something similar and will will approach this but here i think it would be better to give some sort of a pre-commentary because i think it's too precipitous to just jump into how you go about doing this i think that in order to really effectively succeed at learning foreign languages you need some mental preparation before you can start building the habits i think it is not often enough acknowledged or stressed that learning a foreign language is wonderful as it is as fascinating it is is reinventing the wheel it's an inherently redundant task because you know a language already when you come to learn a foreign language you're learning how to do something that you basically you already know how to do and no matter how many wonderful uh intellectual reasons you might have for doing that you're going to have a certain degree of unconscious psychological resistance to that something inside your system is going to tell you i know how to do this already why am i having to learn how to do this again i'm not going to learn i'm not going to be able to do this as well as i can already do it this is a lot of work for something i'm already perfectly capable of doing there's going to be a lot of unconscious psychological resistance that you need to acknowledge and i think you can only overcome it if you have certain philosophical underpinnings if you've thought about some philosophical points for why you should be reinventing the wheel then that's something that your system will accept doing i think a bit more easily so this may sound like a terrible paradox but i think it's really true that in order to have the best chance of succeeding at learning a foreign language you shouldn't look at learning a language as learning a language you should forget about the fact that you're learning a language and focus on something else you should regard it as another kind of intellectual task yes it's learning a language but that's just the mechanics of it what is it that you're really doing you can regard learning a foreign language instead of as learning a language you can regard it as for example correcting accidents of birth i'll explain this more in the next three slides you can regard this as either spiritual development if you like to think in spiritual philosophical religious terms or if you don't you can look at it as human capital development how to make the most of your mind and you can regard it as a way to expand your intellectual horizons in a form of mental exercise is a big stretch to expand your reach of what you can do with your mind i really invite you to follow the next three slides and then to take the points that i put on them and really really cogitate them contemplate them meditate about them think about them and see if they make any sense to you if they do really try to believe them really don't just say that was an interesting talk i heard that but internalize them think about them and make them part of the way that you think and if you can do that then i think that you will have a much better chance of really succeeding in learning languages meaningfully and deeply so the first point i would call it a philosophical point number one this is for all language learners for your typical learner again as i described to somebody who's not obsessed with or fascinated by learning foreign languages in general but just wants and needs to learn a specific language for a specific reason right now from that kind of person all the way through the most obsessed person with the most severe form of polyidis you can think about this point and the point is that none of us have any choice regarding our native language or native languages if you come from a bilingual or more background you're born into a speech community utterly beyond your control you happen to be born into the english language or the chinese language or some other language you have no control over that whatsoever the community that you're born into and yet that language completely takes over your mind that language thoroughly programs you that language is becomes everything the way that your mind works programmed you must think through this language everything that you think is completely conditioned by determined by colored by the programming that you have the language that you're thinking in which again was absolutely not your choice that's always been the case and even more than that than the fact that you you can only think in the terms of the language that you happen to be born into i think in these days we face more and more and more instances of outright propaganda of media manipulation of commodification of commercialization of people trying to control your mind of people maybe brainwashing you really just trying to control your thoughts and tell you what to think and show you how to feel and and all of these things are done through your language and you have no control over the language that you were given over and against that if you can regard learning another language as not learning a language but making a choice making a choice to take control of your own programming you're saying yes i'm learning a language i'm going to learn to speak it read it writer but really what i'm doing is i'm going to control the program the the way that my brain functions the the terms that it uses the way it thinks rather than just accepting what i happen to be born into i'm going to choose the terms that i do that in and particularly if you can do this well enough to really think in the language to use this as an alternative a language that you learn through conscious study as an alternative to a language you just happen to inherit you're determining the direction your mind takes you're determining the terms that you're going to think in and when you can do that at very least you might be still exposed if you read a lot of exposures left to a lot of media in in that new language you're still going to be subject to these efforts to control your mind but you'll at least see them from a different perspective and you have a better choice of avoiding them or resisting them and even if you just happen to i said use the examples of english in chinese either one of these could be used as your native language if you have any born into it either one of these is going to exert enormous amounts of control over your mind and if you learn the other one though and you don't expose yourself to that kind of of media but you just think in it and use it on your own um then i think you are kind of really taking control of your mind in a way that you can't if you just accept the language that you happen to be born in so philosophical number point number one for all language learners language learning don't think of it as language learning think of it as controlling the program that your mind runs on philosophical point number i should say number two um is for everybody who has poliitis everybody who is affected with the love of learning languages lots of languages for the sake of it why should you want to do that what's the purpose of that well again none of us have any choice in how multilingual we are or are not if you're born into a society where multiple languages are spoken you'll speak them if you're not you won't if you're born into a family where your mother speaks one language and your father speaks another language you're likely to grow up bilingual if both of your parents speak the same language you're likely to grow up monolingual you're not having any control over this up to a certain point everybody who comes from a monolingual society a multilingual society is naturally multilingual you have societies in europe and africa and in asia you have societies where multiple languages are spoken and pretty much everybody speaks the country like lebanon pretty much everybody knows some degree of arabic and a french and of english it's not unusual at all for an old lebanese person to be trilingual there are societies where you have two languages three languages there are families where you have two or three languages up to a certain point that point seems to be from all of my understanding conversations and observations and reading of anthropology and the like seems to be at about half a dozen languages there are societies or big cities mainly in africa and asia where you might find a dozen languages in common use a dozen languages might be used in the same city but it's not common to find people who know a dozen languages but it is common to find people under those circumstances who might know five or six languages it's not to say they know them all fluently they might know only one of them might they be literate in another one they might only know a certain sort of use it in certain circumstances might have very different levels but nonetheless they have some degree of ability in five or six languages so if you look at it from that perspective it's your birthright as a human being to know six languages any human being who's born into an environment where lots of languages is spoken can just acquire a certain degree of up to about six languages you didn't get to do that you got cheated circumstances didn't put you in a position where you could go and you could get your inheritance your heritage was taken away from you you can get it back conscious application the point of learning lots of languages can be to again to take back that heritage to to do with your mind what any mind should be capable of doing any mind should be capable of knowing that number of languages you should be able to do you don't have to do it all at once systematically learning your half dozen language as well and regard that as a lifetime project but getting to sort of the degree of human capital or spiritual expansion where you say yes the human mind is capable of absorbing and knowing a half dozen languages and i didn't get to do that but i want to be able to do that something i can do this should be point number three sorry for the mistakes on the slides this is just for people who are interested in becoming poly literate none of us have any choice in when we're born none of us has any choice when we live if you're alive now you happen to be born now you had no control over that who can whom can we speak with we can only have conversations talk to other people who also happen to be born about the same time that we were born however for about 6 000 years 25 years being a generation 25 divided by 6 000 for about 250 generations in some places people have been able to write their thoughts down their conversations their ideas they've left words behind that they considered to be of value the heritage that we have from the past i've mentioned this before that there's a winnowing process by literacy was less common if somebody knew how to write it was write down something important it was harder to write it took time it materials were not there and things happened to be copied had to be copied in scriptorium and that had to be something that people considered of values so there were plenty of laundry lists i'm sure 5 000 years ago but those are gone with wind in the dust but things that we have like the epic of gilgamesh have remained because people consider it to have great meaning and value they've left behind words that are there that we can possibly know so diet chronic language study studying languages of the past across time is the closest thing that we can come to time travel to going back into accessing those words those ideas those thoughts those those words of wisdom spiritual texts words great works of literature that they left behind and sort of honoring the fact that they did so to say to people who can't speak to us with words anymore we're still listening what did you have to say you thought this was important let me know what it is getting at the great books that have been left behind time travel is a great reason for learning languages so if you have these kind of things in your heart rather than just saying i'm going to learn another language you're overcoming that unconscious psychological resistance is saying i'm just reinventing the wheel no i'm not reinventing the wheel when i do these things i'm doing something different so please keep these things in mind when you embark upon building new habits and i think you will have a better chance of succeeding at them that's my preamble now on to hall chapter 10 imitating and memorizing this chapter starts by talking about the fact and i totally agree that the only way for any person to learn a new language is to build up habits that are akin to the habits that the native speakers in that language have and you want to do this this needs to be automatic you don't want to do this randomly you don't want to do this haphazardly you don't want to do this just by stumbling into the circumstance and picking up things and acquiring whatever you happen to encounter it's much better to be systematic about this and that's why textbook authors good textbook authors are people who write manuals for learning languages proceed systematically starting it easy going to difficult starting with what you really need to know first to what it's important to know but you don't need it immediately starting what is useful to get by to how do you express yourself in an elegant refined fashion hall says that and i think this is a common presupposition among many people most people that really you should master the contents of one lesson before going on to the next i don't necessarily agree there are certain kinds of textbooks in particular certain ways of studying that i have outlined and articulated where you don't necessarily need to master it step by step by step before going on but rather you can get a bird's eye view and then you can continue to cycle through the material and each time you go through it's like peeling an onion you go to a deeper layer but it's possible to get an overview of the whole thing initially and then to dive deeper and so to have a holistic perspective rather than necessarily needing to um to master one section before going on to the next hull makes a wonderful point about the value of bilingual text columns the learner should be told the meaning of what he is memorizing not forced to decipher it as a kind of puzzle that is the case in some more modern books that i've seen i don't want to call that any publishing company in particular but there are books where it seems like they're paradoxically forcing you to translate when they're trying to get you away from translating this seems to be thinking that there's something wrong with telling you exactly what you're uh hearing uh he says this is part of a learning language learning process this is not an intellectual exercise right now this is fixing the meaning of the sentence holistically in your memory you want to do this as soon as possible he mentions adjustment term about translation's translation um he talked about this in earlier sections it's a good thing to do when you're advanced when you understand the fine points of the language when you see things there there's a time and a place for everything and translation can be an excellent exercise but this initial imitating and memorizing period you should not be doing any translating you should know exactly what the meaning is you should see both the target language and the learning language and you should never be in the doubt of what you're learning when you're in the internalizing stage he mentions something and again he his book here is for the the spoken language services uh and you can see this in that army method the the foreign service institute books and other things like that um the building up or you can look at the other way the breakdown of a sentence rather than if when they give you a whole new long sentence they don't give you all at once they give you one word then two words and three words and they build up to it um they seem to have thought that that was necessary at a certain point in time uh frankly speaking i never really understood that and that's one thing i tend to enjoy lessons or manuals from the past but that's one thing i don't have any qualms about not seeing so much or using so much anymore we're going to have a follow-up discussion circle about this of course and if anybody has any different ideas about the value of these building up or breaking down of sentences i would be very eager to to hear those and to discuss those what he's talking about and he gives examples of these in many different languages are what he calls basic sentences and he seems to be uh very defensive at this point uh against potential attacks by people who's saying you're you're basically i think he calls a barbershop language you're teaching basic everyday sort of really simple conversation things and the goal of learning a foreign language should be able to kind of what i said before be able to think in it so you want to be able to have an interesting intellectual meaningful discussion in it and you're just giving people the most simple everyday ordinary everyday life conversations and he's defensive about that and um basically says that there's you need to build up to it and he's not sticking with that level but this is just the initial level and everything will grow out of that i agree 100 with him when he says that when you learn this way you have to overlearn thoroughly okay again this is not an intellectual stage this is habit formation and motor memory and you really need to thoroughly internalize a chunk of the language and have it inside of you with no questions and no hesitations and then again we'll go to the next stage then we analyze then we understand that comes later but this kind of thing you're doing here you have to thoroughly internalize which he calls over learning um he says that this is time consuming and a wearying test that takes considerable effort again i i just don't necessarily agree with this uh learning language always takes time yes but it's not worrying it can be invigorating and the effort uh can be perceived as a um an enjoyable game a fun thing rather than an exertion that's going to wear you out uh i think it would tie back kind of into the same approach that i mentioned before if you're taking that bird's eye view peeming an onion going back and cycling in various levels you're um you're getting deeper and deeper understanding whereas if you're trying to master something initially and only do one thing and make sure you know it if you don't know it you have to force yourself to know it maybe that's more weary but i don't think it necessarily needs to be this way and i think it ties in to his use of basic sentences i'd like to talk now about some basic sentence alternatives and yes i think they're preferable in all cases i think i think there are others that we could think of but there were three kinds of alternatives to basic sentences that were definitely around in his time that he should easily have known about probably did but didn't address here it's kind of a short cursory book maybe that's one reason or maybe he didn't think of them i don't know but rather than having basic sentences that contain just mundane let's call it spade a spade boring everyday conversation about you know just just doing something mundane not terribly interesting you can make it more lively if you have humor jokes puns situations where you're made to laugh and do something where might you see humor in systematic lesson books take a wild guess if you've seen any of my previous videos what's my basic uh go-to method for learning manuals for learning language assemil the french company that's been around since i don't know like 1920s i think and they use a kind of humor in almost all of their lessons it's a very french kind of humor i've been studying french my whole life i'm not sure i really understand french humor yet but i'm getting there and maybe i'll get there by the time i die um french humor is not always totally comprehensive but you can often see that it is and it just makes much better reading fun comprehension than boring everyday mundane conversations another thing that you could use and he does address this but then dismisses it is you could use descriptive paragraphs you can use a description comprehensible input wasn't a term in his day which is going around and saying this is this here in my room i see these kind of things i am now in my living room this is a chair this is a desk and then having a conversation about these kind of things this is another company that was produced and had been producing um autoducting materials for decades at the time hull was writing and take a wild guess all of you who know the companies that i like what's my fallback if there's not an essay meal or sometimes i say it's better than us what other method is really really good for teaching yourself a foreign language linguaphone this is what the linguaphone company has done all of their manuals are structured around description of a room a circumstance of place and then a conversation about that and that also to me is just much more interesting than basic mundane everyday life ordinary conversations and then the third kind of thing that was all sitting around in his time was and i think that this is better either than ivs but it's it's just not practiced as much as far fewer examples out there and that is continuous stories and the example of continuous stories that you could have from his time is somebody asked recently if i was going to do an overview of my reviews and i said no i was not um because i did do a review of this before this is something that you can perhaps go on to ebay and you can get yourself an old 1960s attache case like this and you can get some berlitz self teaching or comprehensive courses obviously this was the size of an old long playing record uh and it comes with cassette tapes and the like and they're only available for french german spanish and italian but these are just magnificent stories uh continuous story that's the same in all of them you have a youngish american businessman whose father comes from one of these countries and he's now going there for the first time on the ride over he encounters an older native from one of these countries that he's met at some conveyor convention prayer prior in new york and this person invites him to his house this person has a daughter they fall in love and start to get to know each other there's also a rich cousin of the family who gets disinherited by a wealthy aunt who gives the inheritance to the daughter the american businessman is in a car accident so he's out of commission for a couple of weeks they don't know what happens it's kind of not literature kind of so far but but it's a continuous developing story and they do things like go to go to operas or go to the theaters and museums and talk about culture and history it's quite rich and it also uh has interestingly enough other things that have come up rather than bilingual text columns it's an interlinear presentation i think these are really outstanding and these are all alternatives to basic sentences and i think it would be possible to develop even more um sort of stimulating ones uh along those lines so this is just stuff too to keep in mind how can we adapt as autodidact self-teachers of languages some of the things that he's talking about in this chapter it's quite interesting he doesn't refer to the teacher as a teacher but rather as a drill master and he says the main purpose of the drill master is to give patterns to be imitated so he really stresses that the need that you want to have somebody who speaks the standard variety of language socially acceptable standard variety of the language and i think that hopefully um in a school teaching environment uh you just have to trust the people who would hire this person not necessarily that you can but um i think that that is something there but as an auto died act i think one thing that people do today is hopefully the audio recordings you don't need to have a live person there you can do this but also you need to take some care if you're going to go to one of these sites where you can find a language exchange partner or tutor it's sort of iffy you can't go to somebody and say are you from the standard variety of the language do you speak a socially acceptable variety i mean people aren't likely to say no to that but i think you need to take some care when you're choosing your material there he also stresses the importance of coral repetition in a classroom setting and i think that that speaking aloud when you do shadowing for instance the way i did in my ojibwe demonstration or the advanced shadowing that is a way of doing coral repetition itself when you when you when you match the tone when you do not mutter but when you speak aloud you're doing something quite similar and just in general um he talks about interesting ways of mentioning already becoming your own drill master which i think is easiest to do if you have internalized some of those philosophical points that i began this lecture by talking about the next chapter chapter 11 is discovering the patterns and this is basically again these terms didn't exist but basically in this modern debate that has emerged where so many people say acquisition good learning bad um he flips that around he says acquisition [Music] wasteful learning very good intelligent and i tend to definitely agree with him at this point that basically uh post-pubescent people need some analytical awareness of what they're seeing what they're doing they're going to run into trouble they're going to run into problems they're going to run into interference in their native language if your mind is capable of of looking at resources to explain that and these resources exist it's wasteful not to do that so discovering the patterns is all about that for the purpose of overcoming the difficulties which can be as he points out um from uh any level of linguistic structure referring back to the earlier chapter about phonetic level syntactical level morphological level all of these things in this chapter he focuses mainly on pronunciation and spelling but then he goes on got another slide for grammar because he's mentioning already that in his time and i think this is only intensified well i'm sorry he he starts out by defining grammar redefining grammar as analysis of structural patterns and language habits and what i was about to say is that in his time already and i think intensified more so now there's this idea that grammar is somehow to be avoided to let's get rid of it if we can let's de-emphasize it when he says no using it particularly and defining it in this way we need to give it uh more attention we need to give it more stress because grammatical explanations do two really good things grammatical explanations help somebody who's learning a language to see their patterns and what you've memorized and once you see the patterns you can compare them and contrast the patterns with what's going on in your own language and see how they're different and learn how to develop these these better habits understanding grammar in this way also can help you in making new combinations so these are the two purposes of grammar he does say maybe we should banish grammar in the old terms that he says he calls i love this ingurgitation and regurgitation of rules so just memorizing paradigm times [Music] us i don't know if there's anything wrong with that that's kind of fun that's like chanting or singing you know latin grammar paradigms he doesn't see much use for that but he says rather than banish that let's take that and recast it in other terms let's let's put it as analyzing structural patterns and language habits so he doesn't even necessarily want to get rid of that so he finds grammar quite interesting and important when it comes to practicing the patterns mainly in this chapter 12 just talks about various kinds of pattern drills pattern drills aren't something we see very much of anymore so um i hope you if you're following this lecture series i hope you looked at the book and i don't want to go into too much detail but he talks about different kinds of pattern drills there are substitution drills where you just replace one element with another the cat sees the dog sees he she's sees she sees this kind of thing you just replace you're leaving the verb the same but you're replacing the the agent the noun with something correlation drills he says is when you change other parts of the frame to correlate with it you change the gender the number the case and the tense so to you would say i see i see you see she sees you would say i see him i see her you need to change these things so it's not just sort of plugging in one thing to take another but you have to take into account the other changes that come along when you make when you substitute one word for another he has also says each of these can be done in terms of simple drills is when you only change one part of the frame um so basically that would be like i just said uh with with the example of somebody uh simple to only change one part of the frame i eat he eats she eats so you're only changing the the pronoun um and then you had a progressive gels when you change first one thing and then another and i think these are more interesting than things like i i i i read the book i read the page he reads the page so you change different aspects of the things um he says i think this is really interesting that the born language learning coulson practices this kind of variation automatically without thinking about it you just do it you go around and you make it fun you make it a game um as you go about your life whereas other people need to have this made explicit and made frequent i think that this interest in this kind of patterns is made explicit and frequent in well again in his own spoken language service courses spoken albanian through spoken vietnamese you can see the complete list on the back here it looks like they had about 40 or 50 languages in the spoken series the um foreign service institute courses uh and the defense language institute courses foreign language first foreign service institute courses are packaged by barron's services still available today you can get them free online or pay barons lots of money for them some of the cortina courses that came up in the discussion circle last time chad showed the cortina russian that course in particular has a lot of pattern drills in it and i think that in just these are all older courses from the 1960s or so but these are all courses that have strong followings people who still like them and use them a lot in the polyglot community in language learning forums and the likes so among autodidacs i think there's a recognition that these kinds of pattern drills can be quite useful i personally i do find simple substitution drills to be deadly boring but progressive correlation drills for languages like russian or latin that have lots of grammar those are well done those are incredibly incredibly useful so again i would love to have this come up in a discussion circle i wonder why these are completely banished from modern manuals i think if you pick up a contemporary um book that has lots of different types of exercises and is trying to give you um all sorts of different kinds of exercises so you don't get bored these just aren't there i wonder if there was a feeling that these are actually bad rather than just boring for some reason that the reaction that came to this at some point in in language pedagogy but it is quite enigmatic again given how manifestly useful these are four languages again as i just said correlation progressive correlation drills for languages that have a a lot of complex grammatical forms these are extremely useful and it's a shame that they have been banished and done away with [Music] chapter 13 is called reviewing and improvising and this is again focused on the classroom or textbooks that he has talking about before you really can go out and speak a language once you've learned things there's a time for these review readings and these review dialogues these are times to uh step in and uh look at new arrangements of words and constructions you've already seen so i think you can kind of see this in pretty much every similar course for example you have the the lesson gives you some new vocabulary and words and then the exercises afterwards show the same words same ideas but just in different combinations so it's it's this kind of idea and he says when you're practicing these kind of things again you're still not at the level when you're really trying to get to free conversation and speak your mind and really come up with new constructions it's fine if you make minor variations in this but again we're we're still not a level here at this early stage of trying to get to originality or individual expression these are ultimate goals this is something you want to do eventually but this is just not something that you're striving for at this in the elementary stages how can we adapt this to autodidactic study again his book seems here he's talking mainly about classroom things i think this is something just already inherently done and understood by all the polyglots that i've encountered we all sort of understand something that people who take languages and classes don't i mean you are going to use multiple manuals if you're trying to teach yourself a language you're going to use a teach yourself book and a colloquial book and an assameal and a lingua phone if they're all available you'll use multiple generations of asimio books if they're available to you when you're engaged in autodidactic study the review comes by using multiple books for the same language whereas people who take elementary language in school want to go straight on to the next level they're going to rebel against repeating sort of the same material with another book but when you're your own drill master your own conversation partner getting these kind of things in a different presentation is extremely helpful finally he goes on to talk about um what kind of person learns well i don't know quite why he throws us in to the end of chapter 13 reviewing and improvising but because he does let's look at it and discuss this and maybe discuss this in a discussion circle as well he says that difficulties in language learning primarily due to cultural inhibition he's trying to downplay any notion of talent here and saying it's not not some ability that you have but the attitude that you have is what's more important this will find very odd he says that it's helpful to have a friendly environment but not necessary well gosh if you have an environment where people are are teasing you or or an unfriendly environment maybe it says not hostile but you don't need a friendly environment it seems to me you do but you do need to be free a fear of making funny noises i do see this among all the students i've ever had in language classes other fellow students have been there yeah you need to make funny noises you need to stick your tongue out and stick yourself out and make noises and you know you're probably going to make them wrong and they're going to sound even funnier because of that you can't have that fear if you're going to learn the language well you're going to make mistakes you're going to say things wrong you're going to sound stupid is what you might be thinking in your mind if you're inhibited about this but you can't think that you need to be okay i'll make a mistake and i'm going to learn from my mistake i'm going to learn by trial and error oh i don't say it that way i said this way good now i know i have to make that mistake in order to to know how to say it so you need these kind of freedoms of fears freedom of fear making funny noises you don't fear making mistakes he says you need a reasonably good memory i took reasonably out you do need a good memory what is this i mean if you're going to learn something you need to have a good memory and unfortunately i think a lot of people these days do things to weaken their memories rather than strengthen them so naturally it's it's difficult um luckily language learning in itself is good mental exercise that will strengthen your memory so it's a chicken and egg question if you practice learning languages i think you'll get better at not just learning languages but remembering things so that's a side benefit of learning languages he wants to come to a i think a motivating encouraging conclusion um saying that given the right attitude and if you put enough energy and application just anybody should be able to learn a foreign language and i know that that's something that we're supposed to believe but i don't um i the idea is that everybody learns his or her native language therefore we're able to learn a foreign language but we just went back and we make all this distinction between acquiring a native language and learning a foreign language and they're totally different beasts the fact that you can acquire your native languages as child does not mean that you can learn a foreign language as an adult can everybody learn how to play the cello give it a reasonable amount of effort and application if you have two hands then you should be able to take the bow and bring it across the strings will you be able to make noise that other people like to listen to let alone play box solo cello pieces i don't think so it's not something i mean i wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody can do everything and it's not very interesting we need people to do different kinds of things so to i've met too many people who want to learn languages older people have been learning languages their whole lives and they have put in plenty of energy and application and they're still trying and they don't have these fears and they're still plugging away but god bless their hearts they're doing everything they can but they're still struggling after decades of effort and to say that they should be somehow if they've done something different they would be over that is kind of to me that sort of demeaning to all the effort that they have put into it um so i do think that there are people who learn well and uh people who don't just say that there are people who can play the cello well and people who can't people who can play some sort of sports well and people who can't there's plenty of different things and talents that people human beings are good at and to insist that everybody can do everything i've never really understood that okay um i think we're getting to the end that is the end um next time we're going to talk about part four of paul's book uh which he calls interference from old habits there are only three chapters in this section maybe i'll be able to make these lectures shorter than an hour chapter 14 is on sounds chapter 15 is on forms and chapter 16 is on syntax this is uh on tuesday now and we are going to follow this up on friday with a discussion circle for lecture three i have been holding the discussion circles on fridays because if i publish my lectures on tuesdays usually most of the comments and questions come in on tuesday wednesday thursday they continue to trickle in for ages because they'll be out there but the the main thrust of people who are actively watching wanting to discuss it um seems to be within the first 24 to 48 hours so having the discussion circle after that makes sense it's most convenient for me to have it on thursday i'm sorry on fridays at uh four o'clock chicago time but this next one i'm going to hold not at 4 00 p.m but at 10 a.m and the specific reason for that is because uh i have i'm totally aware that i have quite a number of people watching on my videos and perhaps wanting to participate in these discussion circles who are in russia and poland and germany and britain and europe in general um and so this is to accommodate them because 4 pm here is late in the middle of the night for them so because of that i am asking the indulgence and understanding of a number of people who have expressed interest in being in the discussion circles and said well they couldn't be in the last one or this one they'd like to be in maybe this coming up one but if i would like you if anybody who wants as usual signal your interest to me again in the contact form in the description you can say i'd like to be in the discussion circle and i haven't asked this before but please let me know where you are so this discussion circle is for people who are in the european time zone right now and if you are not in the europe if you're also in north america with me uh and i have lots of people who are in europe this next time i would ask you to wait again uh next time we can do this uh in the afternoon again but this time i'd like 4 p.m uh to be the sort of the regular normal time and then occasionally exceptionally every second or third discussion circle i will move the time to accommodate those in a different time zone so this upcoming one on this thursday this friday sorry will be for those in the european time zone so um i guess i'm done for now i thank you very much for your interest and for listening and i look forward to meeting some of you in the discussion circle and to continuing this uh intellectual journey with you next week thank you goodbye

Channel: Alexander Arguelles

Views: 4,408

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Id: bGqvaP8zw4s

Length: 52min 51sec (3171 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021