Learning a language

From: Patrick Powers (frisbieinstein_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/11/04 

Date: 10 Jun 2004 20:49:05 -0700

I am having the pleasure of learning a third language, Indonesian.
This is a creole with lots of Arabic and some Chinese, Portugese,
English, Pidgin, Latin, and who knows what else. The grammar is
simple, regular, and unambiguous, with virtually every word always a
noun, verb, adjective, etc. so the complex grammar of English is
unneeded. The Latin alphabet is used and spelling is almost
completely phonetic. The only non-Western sound is the glottal stop.
Idioms are very rare.

I am renting a room in a homestay where a three-year-old girl lives
and am learning the language much faster than her. I can also compare
my skill with myself at age seven when I lived for one year in
Bavaria. I'd say I learned German more quickly and better, but the
difference is not all that marked.
In defense of three-year-old girls, it is surely much easier to learn
a language if one can read and write as oppose to simply overhearing
full-speed conversation. I've never noticed anyone teaching her to
speak.

I got nowhere for two months until I realized I could not memorize
sounds and did much better with written words. Even back when I was
seven one of the best tools for learning was comic books. I had to
sit down and brute force memorize using flash cards. Now that I have
a good start memorizing words by sounds is much easier. Perhaps the
brain rejects something quite unfamiliar as "not a word". It is much
easier to learn words similar to what is known.

I also teach English here. Many people learn English in school
starting with middle school. The emphasis is on reading and writing,
so while many can do that quite well often they cannot speak a single
sentence without the aid of paper. Europeans often can speak English
almost as well as a native speaker. When I asked why I was told that
English language shows were on television with subtitles so they had
heard the language all their lives.

One of the best English speakers I have met had never studied the
subject in school. He did not know the grammar and simply read a good
deal and practiced conversation whenever possible. I think it is
quite possible that knowledge of grammar is an impediment to learning.
 There is no question that the most important thing in learning to
speak is practice.

I've been told that Indonesian has "no grammar", that it is monotone,
and that syllables are not accented, none of which is true. All these
shows is that cultural conditioning can render one partially deaf. Or
perhaps having studied music all my life improved my ear. I also do
better than most with the accent, but this is purely mechanical. Most
adult westerners do not realize they should move the tongue back in
the mouth about half an inch.

Another odd thing is the difficulty everyone has with ending a word
with 's' for plural. It is such a simple rule, and plenty of
Indonesian words end with 's'. More complicated rules such as the
tenses of "to be" are learned more easily.

Another thing I've noticed in the writing of Balinese people is their
ability to construct grammatically correct sentences that nevertheless
seem quite alien. I'm convinced that people do not learn language in
a logical way. The may infer some rules, but mostly it is "when I
want to do this I say that". Grammatically correct phrases and
sentences are memorized for the most part. For that matter, English
has plenty of idioms that made no literal sense at all. In other
words, language is built by imitation, memorization and building on
what one knows, not by using rules to define the space of possible
sentences then choosing the best sentence from that space. Such a
space is far too large. I've also realized how repetitions everyday
life tends to be and how little one needs to be quite fluent. Reading
the newspaper is a whole 'nother matter.

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