Learning Languages Is Not A New Thing 1

A recent post from Steve Kaufmann reminds us that people have been learning new languages for a long, long time. It bothers me, it has bothered me for some time that after thousands of years of people learning languages where they needed to, somehow, recently we seem to have come up with so many ingenious ways to mess it up. When I say bothered I don't mean a foaming at the mouth kind of bothered, the kind that some types of grammar pedants get into every time they spy a misplaced apostrophe or similar. The botheration has reached a point where I feel like writing about it though.

As Steve points out:

The invention of printing was even more recent, and it helped spread the written word. But for most people around the world, things did not change. Most people could not read until the previous century.

Now it seems a common concept that Chinese is especially difficult but if you go back a little in history it was not so clear cut, in fact learning fluency in spoken Chinese did not seem to be such a big deal assuming that you had access to native speakers of course, Take Giles, Herbert Allen, 1845-1935 for example you can read a transcription of an introductory lecture to Chinese he gave.

Giles does not seem think that colloquial (spoken) Chinese is particularly hard:

Colloquial Chinese is a comparatively easy matter. It is, in fact, more easily acquired in the early stages than colloquial French or German. A student will begin to speak from the very first, for the simple reason that there is no other way. There are no Declensions or Conjugations to be learned, and consequently no Paradigms or Irregular Verbs.

In a day or two the student should be able to say a few simple things. After three months he should be able to deal with his ordinary requirements; and after six months he should be able to chatter away more or less accurately on a variety of interesting subjects. A great deal depends upon the method by which he is taught.

Giles does think that the written language is very hard but bear in mind that at that time written Chinese would be much further removed from the spoken form than today. If Giles is correct then why would I find so many people on forums who are still of the opinion you must learn the written alongside the spoken form right from the start.

Writing has become connected with the concept of education, to the extent that to some it would seem un-educated not to learn to read the target language, one put down I received was "I don't want to be illiterate like you seem to". But if we assume that the thing that makes Chinese particularly hard is the written form then why not delay that until you have gained some spoken ability (I learn reading now).

Steve introduces the education element:

Somewhere along the line governments decided that everyone should go to school and read text books. Soon people thought that learning only took place in classrooms.

Gradually our view of language learning changed. School teachers, text book publishers, and linguistics theorists took over.

Ironically Giles actually wrote a book entitled Chinese without a teacher, being a collection of easy and useful sentences in the Mandarin dialect, with a vocabulary, you can read it online. This book is mostly a collection of phrases, not much help in isolation I guess Giles seems to have written it for those in China who needed an intro to get started, I am pretty sure that Giles himself would freely admit that it was poor a substitute for being in China and getting stuck in. The point is that at that time there was no alternative for those not in China so for a little while (relatively speaking) textbooks would have evolved and improved somewhat, would have been presented by teachers in classrooms etc. Now we are at the point however where recent (and not so recent) advances in technology provide a much, much better solution, lots of people don't appear to have noticed (maybe they have a vested interest in not noticing?).

People have been learning languages by listening for thousands of years, when that is an option (which it wouldn't have been for most that read Giles's book) I would suggest that it should be the main option.

Steve Kaufmann and Some Common Sense

Reflecting on my early Chinese learning experiences, I initially felt a little frustrated that so much effort seemed to be expended on activities that were obviously of little use (to me they they were of little use anyway). Assuming (as I did) that the best place for a motivated language learner would be in a country that spoke it, mixing it with the natives. Accepting that this was often not possible (as I had to) why did it seem that so many people we advocating or extending traditional classroom methods that were proven to be ineffective (just look around you for the proof).

Being the language learning newbie that I was (and still am to some extent), I didn't know that there were plenty of people advocating more natural approaches, I had already discovered Chinesepod early on, which presented a refreshing alternative to conventional classroom methods. Then I came across Steve Kaufmann (the Linguist). I think anybody learning languages can get some benefit from Steve's opinions Steve has picked up a fair number and variety of languages and is behind the Lingq language learning site, In my opinion he also talks a lot of sense about language learning. There are plenty of examples of Steve talking various languages and his experiences and advice have the ring of somebody who has put the effort and thought into his language learning. This is a refreshing change from savants or people with extraordinary talents. The stories of savants and people with abnormally wired brains although interesting don't help me (I don't ever expect to be able to "taste sounds" etc.).

The LingQ site seems a good place to practice, I only started using it recently as there is now a reasonable amount of Chinese content with spaces between the words (Chinese is still in Beta and the word parser at LingQ can't separate the word from normal Chinese losing a lot of the useful functionality). The are some interesting Chinese dialogues and you can't do much better than text + audio and some tools to help you work with the words. LingQ appears to be an excellent addition to any language learning program, the only problem being that rather realistically it requires time and motivation so unfortunately it is not likely to cash in like the large quantities of less useful merchandise that promises language learning with little effort (ending in the back of a cupboard with the learner little further enlightened)

You could say (I would at least), that a lot of what Steve says is just common sense (more on this in later posts) but look around you and you will see that common sense is not so common after all.

A little philosophy, and a good source of Chinese texts

I posted before about effortless learning and it created a little controversy. I can understand why as effortless can mean different things to different people. I came across a nice explanation of exactly what it means to me on Steve Kaufmann's website. At the beginning of his book (which you can read online if you follow the link) in the introduction Steve has this from from a Chinese philosopher. Zhuangzi, the Taoist philosopher, is supposed to have lived in China over 2,300 years ago. He encouraged people to achieve their potential through effortlessness, by not resisting their own natures. That is exactly what I meant by effortlessness.

I have an interest in philosophy, but know much more about ancient Greek and both ancient and modern European philosophy. I found this excellent website, the Chinese Text Project has number of texts with English translations. Some of the text also have modern Chinese versions alongside the older Chinese (an excellent way to learn to read older styles of Chinese).