Choosing a Language

This is one of those questions that eternally haunts polyglots: why did you choose to learn language X, but not language Y? Why is language Z not in your list? Why are you so bad at Spanish while you are so good at French? In short, why does your language list look the way it does and why does it not always coincide with what should be the most common languages, either in terms of native speakers or economic power, or even the Youtube troll’s favourite, the “hardest language”? These three reasons are the biggest fallacies in language learning.

The reason is that most polyglots, me included, don’t really consider the amount of native speakers of a language when choosing to learn it. I’ll tell you why: a language like Mandarin has hundreds of millions of native speakers. You cannot possibly speak to all of those. In fact, you can (and you probably do) go for months without hearing someone speak Mandarin. There may be 800 million (or whatever number it comes down to exactly) native speakers, but the odds are you’ll meet about three of them during your lifetime if you live in an anglophone country (except for Singapore or maybe Hong Kong). Many polyglots simply don’t spend enough time around Mandarin speakers to make learning that language worthwhile!

Now, say, Czech only has a couple million native speakers. But let’s say you grew up in a neighbourhood where there was a large Czech immigrant community. Many of those people you went to school with; they are your friends; you are served their dishes on a regular basis. It’s worth a lot more to learn Czech in such a situation than it is to learn Mandarin, which you have no contact with. You will meet these Czechs every day; the Chinese, even though there are many more of them on the planet, simply are not located in the group of people that can be defined as your social circle.

The same goes for economic benefits. In a vague, statistical way, Spanish or Chinese may improve your wage by a couple per cent. But we live in a world where people realistically need to make money now, and that may be done in a different way using a different language if that locally happens to be more useful. Language learning is not done in isolation, and if my country has a lot of Turkish immigrants, I’ve probably got more Turkish people to talk to than people that speak Spanish. Economic benefits are not just a general thing, they have to be applicable to your life.

The last one is one I really detest: the “hardest language” argument. Polyglots are only to a certain extent linguists. Some people have that background – I, for one, don’t, and I don’t really get a kick out of finding out what the hardest language is and then learning it. I can honestly say that I have never picked a language to learn for its difficulty (even more so because difficulty is relative and very hard to define – it took me longer to learn proper French than it did to learn Mandarin to the same level! And Mandarin, is, apparently, super hard!). Maybe some people are interested in that puzzle approach to language learning, but I certainly never have been and never will be.

So the real trick is the following: determine which languages are important to your personal life, and therefore worth learning. You don’t need to set a record for the most languages either – for a first, it’s hard enough to define and count languages. Most people that end up learning languages well do so because:

1. They have lots of friends that speak a certain language but are not comfortable in the former person’s language
2. They are forced to by external circumstances (immigrants, work reasons)
3. A part of their family speaks that language (heritage)
4. They are very interested in the culture and history of a certain area where a particular language is spoken
5. They are travellers and need the language to make social contacts when abroad
6. They study the literature of a particular language or are simply interested in it

All of these reasons do not have to do anything with general, vague economic benefits, total amounts of native speakers or their complexity. They just have to or want to for some reason that is far more direct and compelling and fits (part of) their lifestyle. Learning languages for reasons of basic statistics seems to be, to me, the “big penis” reason; apparently, if you have learned a certain language, which has some statistical reason for prestige, you are apparently cooler. It’s like the old and tiresome chestnut of men comparing their organ’s length in order to determine who is the better man. It’s just not an argument to do anything.

Vocabulary Building

As promised, the next article is about vocabulary building. The reason this is about vocabulary (and not grammar) is because, essentially, vocabulary is the thing that carries the most meaning in language (intonation also carries a lot of weight, especially in speech, but we’ll leave it for another day). Considering that I want to divulge some of the secrets why some people learn faster than others, and a large part of learning languages is still vocabulary, I can’t get around not discussing how vocabulary learning works and how we can make the most out of one of the most difficult tasks in our path to competency (I rather say competency than fluency, since the latter is a loaded term and we can define competency as the level we need to be at for us to do the things we need to be competent enough to do in life. That level may vary, but it’s usually the one where you finally plateau out).

Now, when it comes to vocabulary, there are a bunch of things that we notice are variable and make learning words harder or easier, and these are things most of us learning a language have dealt with at some time or other. These are:

– degree of relatedness to a language we know (usually our native tongue, but it may also be a second tongue that we master very well)
– degree to which morphemes stack logically in that language, and/or affixes are used systematically to add meaning to a vocabulary item
– degree to which we can use memory hooks or other techniques in order to memorize these words
– plain old usefulness in our daily lives (which is very important!)
– degree to which they’re easy to spell or write down when heard in aural form, and vice versa (converting from the spoken to the written form and back)

…and probably a few others you may want to suggest. I think these are the main points though.

The thing is that most languages actually have very clever techniques for building new words from smaller components. English does not really do much of this, but many language families work almost like Lego bricks. Because of the various forms that this Lego system can take, their word formation may be a lot easier to remember. This is why vocabulary work can be approached smartly. Know the bricks you need to use, and you can build the house you want.

Some languages supplement this with loans. Loans are especially common for words that aren’t necessarily expressed well by the native tongue, and may also end up being lego bricks in themselves (English is rather odd in having them stand alone so often). If you speak English, you’re in luck – most languages have loaned from English at least once in their lifetime, and some, like Dutch or Swedish, just can’t stop loaning. You’ll find these words useful and in some cases they’re so common you’re going to breathe a sigh of relief whenever you see one of these popping up.

In related languages to your own, you’ll also find cognates, words that come from the same root and usually mean more or less the same thing – these are another bunch of words you’ll get for free and you’ll recognize them immediately. This is common if you’re learning a language from the same family – say you’re an English speaker learning German, you’ll soon find out “Boot” and “boat” are cognates. And mean the same thing.

Okay, so how do we harness all this information (and the words we may not yet know) in order to build our vocabulary?

Ok, so we know that we usually have words that:

– we know a priori, because they’re the same in our own language, give or take a few spelling/pronunciation differences
– we know a priori, because they were taken from our language but are used in the foreign one
– we know a posteriori, because we can figure out what they mean because we know the bricks.

That’s a lot of words you get for free, and words fall in those categories in EVERY LANGUAGE YOU LEARN. No, it doesn’t matter if you are learning Vietnamese or Hungarian, you will still see them. The number of cognates will be zero in non-related languages, but loans from English may be very frequent, especially in Japanese for example. You will always benefit from this and never start from zero.

Now, how does this work?

Let’s take a simple example for English speakers, where all three cases apply (cognates, loans, and word building). To do that we need a Germanic language (to get cognates and loans, and because Germanic languages are good at putting lego bricks together).

Let’s read the following Dutch sentence (it’s the closest to English so it’s the easiest language to demonstrate the various options):

In het ziekenhuis is vandaag een baby geboren.

Now, at first sight, if you don’t know Dutch, this will probably look like a lot of hooplah to you. And that’s normal, if you don’t speak Dutch. However, the astute reader will see a few similarities, and even three words that are exactly the same!

Let’s break it down:

– In is a cognate. It means what it does in English, it’s just the same preposition popping up in its Dutch guise, where it means… “in”. Well, that’s easy.
– Is… is also a cognate, and means… “is”. Hey, that word is exactly the same again!

That’s a quarter of the words that you’ve gotten for free! 25% of the words an English speaker should know by default and they haven’t even had to look in a book for Dutch knowledge. These are cognate words that are the same.

Then we also recognize the word “baby” (pronounced more or less the same in Dutch without so much gliding on the diphthongs). Surprise! That also means baby in Dutch. Ok, 37,5% done now!

“In … … is … … baby …”

Can we find more hints? Yes, we can. But to do this you need to know something about Dutch pronunciation rules. “Het” actually sounds more like “ut” in common speech, a bit like “it”. However in Dutch it’s a definite article (one of two). It would also make sense to have an article after “in”, so there we are, it’s “in it + noun…”, so “in the”. Een is pronounced almost like “an”, so it’s an indefinite article. (It’s another cognate, but in disguise this time). Having “a baby” also makes a lot of sense, even if you know that een is also the way to write “one” in Dutch. Considering het and een are two of the most common words in Dutch, it’s extremely likely you will know these.

Ok. Now we have…

“In the … is … a baby …”

In some place, a baby did something at some point. Geboren is another cognate, it means “born”. It’s obscured because of the extra ge- prefix, but it’s there (and if you speak German you will definitely know that one). There’s a little e in there as well, but it’s still the same word in a more complex guise. Yahey, I needed to think a bit, but you can also figure out this one.

That leaves two words: “ziekenhuis” and “vandaag”. Both are very common words as well, but they are typical Dutch Lego-brick words.

Ziekenhuis is made up of two words, “ziek” and “huis”. Huis is obvious – it’s a house. Ziek is also a common word and it means “sick” or “ill”. (The -en is a connecting infix that often gets thrown into compound words in Dutch, usually because there’s a plural). A sick-house is called a hospital in English (French loanword), but it’s extremely logical to see it as a house where sick people go. And that’s how it’s constructed in Dutch (and actually, in most of the Germanic languages).

Vandaag is a bit tricky, as it’s a turn of phrase, but “daag” comes from “dag”, and van means “of/from”. Of the day is simply the expression for today. This is a word you will probably have to learn separately because it’s not a very logical construction.

So the sentence reads: “In the hospital is today a baby born”. Mix up the words to make it sound more English and you get a nice translation: “A baby was born in the hospital today” (because in English past tense is preferred to the present perfect tense that is used in Dutch).

Dutch gives you a lot of clues (some obvious, some not so much), but as you could see three words in that sentence were the exact same, two were basic articles any beginner will know, one was a clear cognate, and two were made up of cognate words used in a different way to English. None of these words were truly unknown – you just needed to puzzle them out.

In the same way, you can form Chinese words even though they are not cognates. For example, the types of meat are simply animal name + meat in Mandarin:

猪肉 = pig-meat = pork
羊肉 = sheep-meat = mutton
牛肉 = cow-meat = beef
鸡肉 = chicken-meat = chicken

And so on.

You can build vocabulary like this in every language. Find out what patterns they use for building, and you’re all good to go. Good luck hunting words!

The Unit of Meaning

I am sorry about the delay, but I’ve been away a lot and not static for the past few weeks. I hope to be more regular with updates now.

The principal goal of us, language learners, is (at least in the majority of cases) to communicate with other people. Generally that’s why we speak a language (be it our own or a foreign one). To understand how we produce this communication and further our goal, we have to understand how meaning is actually produced in sentences. Many things can be said in various ways; structured in even more diverse ways; so how do we determine what we are going to say and how we should end up saying it?

I use a technique called “the unit of meaning”. What I am trying to say is that every sentence, at its most basic, has a core, that you can use to express meaning. This can be very simple, but it’s this meaning that lends us the idea and context to move further and embellish our phrases. This meaning can be very simple (and sometimes phrased in a very short, direct way), so I would like to show you how you can analyse what phrase is going to have meaning and how you can tolerate a deviation (or error, which you’re going to make as a beginner) and why that means that cases don’t matter that much to a beginner learner. But let’s make our first example a language where everything is phrased very simply: Mandarin, and let’s take as our example “I am going to City X”. For Mandarin we’ll take Beijing. We’ll leave word order out of the picture for a moment and focus on the morphology, but rest assured word order can play a role too, especially in Mandarin.

In Mandarin, the phrase “I am going to Beijing” can be rendered very simply as:
“我去北京。”　”Wo3 qu4 Bei3jing1″. This is a very simple phrase. There are literally no redundant elements in it:
“我” means I. I’m the one doing stuff, apparently.
“去” means to go. What I am doing.
“北京” Beijing is the name of the capital of China, and it’s where I’m going.

Note the absence of a preposition. In Mandarin you don’t need one to say that you are going somewhere, unless you make the phrase more complicated. Now, all these words have meaning. They all indicate who is doing what and in this case where to they’re going (which is important if you state movement). You cannot phrase this sentence in a more precise manner; optionally, if you know from the context it is you that is talking, you could leave out “wo”, or if someone asked a question whether you were going to Beijing you could say “wo qu” or even “qu!”, but without any prior information this is basically all the essential information you need about movement.

Now let’s take a look at Russian and see how they render “I’m going to Moscow”.

Я еду в Москву.*

*Assuming you are not going on foot to Moscow. In Russian, verbs of motion also indicate whether you are using a vehicle to go somewhere, or whether you are going on foot, or flying, or swimming. Very useful, because it makes meaning more precise; however, it also means that you have to remember a lot more words…)

Ok. Now this paints an interesting picture. What we get in Russian (as opposed to Mandarin) is:

я – I (logical, it’s me performing the action)
еду – go – but it’s conjugated! In Mandarin, verbs don’t conjugate, so no matter what happens the verb always stays the same. But here the morphological ending in -у shows that we are dealing with a 1st person singular conjugation – so why did we add я to the sentence when еду would have sufficed? There is a reason, namely that in Russian it’s not as common as in Spanish or Italian for example to drop the pronouns, although you could, and because in Russian for some verbs, especially in the past tense, the conjugation is by gender and not person, so providing the pronoun gives more valuable information about the sentence. Basically, Russians have a habit of not dropping this pronoun all the time, which is why it’s still said, even though from the verb conjugation the information can be gleaned.
в – this preposition means in or to – here it means to, which we know because…
Москву … the city name is declined. (The original is Москва). In the accusative. Which means that it looks like the object of a sentence. Accusatives are usually the answer to a question like “What did you eat”?, where the answer “I ate an apple” leads the apple to be in the accusative. But in Russian, the case itself is used with a preposition to indicate motion towards a place, and that’s actually a very common structure in European languages. However, we already knew that we were moving! We said “еду”, which hardly leads us to stand still. In other words, there is stuff in this sentence that we simply don’t need. So what words form the unit of meaning?

еду Москва. Those are the only two words that already tell you “I am going to Moscow”. The preposition is unnecessary – the verb already tells you that you are going somewhere, and Russian confusingly uses the same preposition for static situations (although with a different case). Я is definitely unnecessary, since the verb is conjugated. (You could argue that you should say я ехать Москва, which removes the conjugation, which is hard, but replaces it by putting a pronoun up front. Whichever way, both phrases don’t have redundancy inside them). So if you were learning a language from scratch, this is all you would need to express the meaning of “I am going to Moscow”, without for the moment bothering to make the statement grammatically accurate.

For communicative purposes, this last sentence is actually enough! You can provide all the necessary information to an interlocutor saying it this way, even though we don’t habitually do so! And when you’re learning, and you want to say something, it’s better to produce this stilted piece of Russian than keep your mouth shut, or you are not going to Moscow today. Which is like space, except on Earth.

Ok. So why don’t Russians just say it the way the Chinese do and dispense with all the unnecessary crap? Because in engineering a proper system, that’s not how stuff works. Most systems build redundancy into their core makeup precisely because a lot of information tends to get lost on the way somewhere. If you are a newbie, it isn’t at all obvious that you will hear all these constituent parts of a sentence, even if someone is speaking slowly and clearly with a standard accent for your benefit. So they add in the redundancy (the extra preposition, pronoun, and case ending) so that even if you miss one clue, you’ll get the other ones. Maybe you don’t know ехать, but if you see the case ending then you’ll know they are going somewhere. Mandarin is actually harder; miss one word, and you don’t understand what is being said. However, Mandarin helpfully has tones and a very choppy intonation, so that it’s much easier to hear the breaks between words (Mandarin isn’t spoken at the same spitfire speed as Russian, usually). That’s why you need the tones and melody as well – to figure out where the beginning and end goes!

What it comes down to is the following – grammatical meaning can be gleaned on paper, but in real life, when you are speaking a language, there are a lot more environmental factors obscuring the drawing of meaning from a sentence, and they don’t all have to do with grammar. They have to do with stupid things like background noise, your mental state that day, whether the interlocutor just went to the dentist and is talking with a jaw full of anesthetics, obscure dialects etc. We build redundancy into phrases so that we can glean information from somewhere even if we don’t hear all of it, which happens to all of us. (Mandarin isn’t immune to this – consider measure words!)

In the beginning, you don’t need to worry about this when you start talking – you just need to express an idea, and the quickest way from A to B will work. Tarzaning the sentence is completely okay at this point, because other people can get the meaning if you speak slowly and your accent is not too thick. We need to learn how to embellish the unit of meaning not because we think being artsy is fun, but because it serves a purpose – to safeguard against misunderstandings caused by random things we can’t always control.

However, it’s worth searching out the unit of meaning because when you’re still at ground zero, you can’t embellish something that doesn’t exist. You need something to build on first. So if you say я ехать Москва now, that’s okay, but remember; at some point you’re expected to say Я еду в Москву. And that hasn’t got to do with your tutor ramming it into you because it’s grammatically correct. It’s because it’s said that way by people, and because people deal with people things, there’s a good people reason to do so.

Next time, we’re going to talk about vocabulary, and how you recognise and build your vocabulary. And most importantly, what you can get for free!

The Importance of Genius

One of the first things people always tell me when they find out I speak more than one language (which is funny in and of itself, as English isn’t even my native tongue – it’s just the one people hear first, and because of my lack of accent, people assume it’s the first – it’s not!) is that I must be a genius, or have a “language talent”. This is probably the comment I get the most often, no matter where I am, when people realize I can speak several languages. And I think it’s also the most misguided comment that people make – if I were so talented, then I probably ought not to have struggled with all my languages in the first place!

But in order for this blog to be credible in any sort, way or form, I need to establish that, I, the author am a being of human flesh and blood without any special, divine talent that confers upon me greater wisdom or ability than for others. Maybe I am more talented, in that after all my years of practice, I’ve become able to sort the wheat from the chaff – but we don’t say that experts in gene engineering are talented, they’ve also become engineers through hard work. And I would like to state, that to understand the inner workings of polyglots, this premise must be understood from the get go. If there was some kind of magic bullet, then I should probably not be making this blog – you cannot imitate the divine! But you can, and here’s what I think happens when people state that someone who is a polyglot is a genius:

They project their inability to understand the more complex effort and practice needed upon those who have taken the burden on them to learn these languages in reality. They glance at these people from the sidelines, like watching an athlete run a marathon without assisting at training practice every day. It’s like saying that Usain Bolt runs the 100m event and beats world records because of his genius or talent, when you haven’t seen the practice that goes into his olympic training! Usain Bolt is a professional who has worked hard every day to achieve his goal of becoming a top athlete; those of us who are polyglots have worked hard every day to achieve our goal of becoming polyglots. We are masters of a skill, much like athletes, carpenters, woodworkers, fletchers, and goldsmiths are. We just use words instead of power tools.

This is crucial to understand. If we do not accept polyglottery as a skill, then anything I explain here will be useless. That’s what I think about the importance of genius. Any sufficiently advanced mastery of a skill appears to be magic, as much as any superbly advanced technology is perceived as magic by those who have never cast their eyes upon it.

Now, why does someone like me learn faster than someone who is new to the game? Well, why does a top athlete learn how to run a different event faster than someone who is new to track and field? Because they’re professionals with experience who know what is required, and who already possess all the tools in the professional’s arsenal in order to improve their skills. I use a lot of techniques (Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 months calls them “hacks”) to help me learn particular words or rules, or to overcome motivational issues, or to improve generally, or to shortcut and work around issues that would otherwise be a notoriously laborious ordeal.

It’s these techniques and hacks which make up the meat and potatoes of this blog. It is also the understanding and logic behind them which I will explain. This is not a log about self-promotion or fire and brimstone, because I don’t have anything to sell. This is a more in-depth, engineering-based look at how we can wire our brains to become a better foreign language learner. I am a teacher teaching you a skill in this blog – I do not have a silver bullet, but I can show you how my methods work. The golden rule is that talent is important, but hard work, and most importantly clever, targeted, reasoned work based on logic and empirical evidence, beats any sort of talent every time. After all in India many people speak more than one language, and not all of them are geniuses. Neither is it the case in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Montreal, or any other locale where people are generally capable in more than one language.

Bottom line: It is a skill learnable by both you and me. Follow me further next week for more in-depth information on how I determine the unit of meaning (which is the most important thing in language learning), and how it relates to morphology (how the words in the language are built up) and difficulty.