The fourth week the revalation - 9th post

How stupid I have been! However, as the I Ching tells us, first we must be hindered, seek harmony and then have great harvest. My problem was that I wasn't paying attention to that which I set out to....the natural abilities of the mind!

This last week has seen no significant growth as I was trying to memorise random sentences which referenced different verbs, different verb forms, different times and different contexts. Most times, memory recall was low.

The research

Angela Friederici at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig has found the infants of 4 months old are able to hear 'correct' grammar.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-italian-beginners-four-month-olds-grammatical-language.html

Basically the babies were exposed to another language's specific grammar patterns ( a few sentences). The infants were then able to distinguish between sentences which fit this pattern and those which don't. The conclusion? Not the same that I came to, but lets allow the study to speak for itself.

The conclusion

The brain has the ability to recognise patterns. Then discriminate items not fitting these patterns. Simple.

The Meaning

The brain has the ability to store (memorise) items, thereby creating a reference bank. New information is constantly compared to the existing reference bank. The brain works by comparing old information with new information.

An example: when I ask you what you thought of a movie, think of the activity your brain has. You might perhaps think the prequel was better, that other movies of the actor/ director surpass it, that your expectations were exceeded, or just perhaps it contained elements which you enjoy (like action or comedy). In all examples,your brain compares the new information (the film) to the old/ existing information (previous films/ preconceptions/ likes/ dislikes).

The application

As with anything, one needs to create a frame of reference. This is done by moving from general to specific. Initially I started learning basic/ popular words and phrases. General. Now I need to learn to express past, present and future. More specific when compared with general phrases and expressions, yet more general than continuous, perfect indicative forms and all subjunctive verb forms.

However, it does no good to over specialise. One must still build a strong enough frame of reference in the general sense.

The resolution

Active study:

For the next week, I shall attempt to increase my frame of reference in general by learning an additional 30 nouns and 30 adjectives. (specific usage items I will encounter on a daily basis, such food nouns, adjectives describing people, etc).

Also, I will memorise 3 verbs per day. Focussing specifically on singular verb forms and past verb forms (I, you,he she it did). Also memorisation of useful sentences containing these forms.

Passive study:

Noticing verb forms (specifically singular for past) highlighting wherever encountered (TV, comics, newspapers,etc.) connecting reference bank in mind to real life contexts.

Highlight of the week

The ability of the brain to notice patterns. Active exercising of this ability means choosing an area in which you wish to improve (in my case singular past verb forms), create a reference bank (memorisation/ exposure to material leads to memorisation).

This can be done with any language or any skill, leading to the individual's improved understanding and therefore ability within their field of interest. I maintain that these natural abilities of the brain can be exploited by adults to maximise the learning process. Whether it be Spanish, Chinese or Swahili; or perhaps not even a language but a sport or science. Our brains have these universal abilities.

The next few weeks will see me testing this theory. How exciting.

The Third Week - 8th post

After a very busy week thanks to work and a lack of materials due to low motivation (I was so tired, I just needed a break) there were no lists memorised.

However, a few things have made themselves known.

The nature of my learning at the moment is low level. That is, I am an elementary – pre-intermediate learner. I am still learning things like general terms; how to express past and future; and simple grammatical collocations. For the moment I have decided to focus on expressions to help me construct past sentences (very common) and then perhaps future (less important as with English if you wish to communicate future, you can get by with saying “I'm going to + verb”)

It seems that its too early to be able to spontaneously produce truly native collocations. That sounds obvious but what I mean is that I am capable of producing a short native sentence in one tense. Change the tense however and you might find that its not a native expression any more. At this level all I can do is keep my brain switched on and ears open.

Something else which has come to light is the nature of study:

Active work/study:

memorisation of language; constructing sentences (playing with the language); talking and using collocations (testing your ability); etc.

Passive work/study:

listening to and watching people/ TV/ movies/ music and linking known collocations and words with context; noticing new language; etc.

The next week will be very interesting indeed

The second week - 7th post

Following my first week's results, I decided that I wouldn't need to learn grammar the conventional manner, I should make my lists bigger and more intricate, and finally that I should graduate to different material.

This weeks results are also another stepping stone with interesting results.

All five lists (1 for each working day of the week) were bigger and more intricate than the first week's. The first week saw me learning base verb forms, such as 'quedar' whilst week two's lists included structures such as “cerre la puerta y se me olbidaron las llaves dentro” or perhaps another example is “no sabia que estaba haciendo algo mal”. The first week seemed to be full of phrases/ expressions containing 2/3 items on average whilst the second week was more or less an increase to about 5/6 items on average.

The problem

I will say that this weeks lists were far more taxing than last weeks. They took a few tries before getting 100% accuracy, they drained the brain substantially (that is, I often lost focus and my mind wandered on more than one occasion, I felt like I had been doing exercise)

The silver lining

I did indeed graduate to new material, watching three films with spanish subtitles (the tourist, clash of the titans, piranha), the song lyrics I had brought with me, and also the work a friend left for me (an awesome Londoner who came here for a couple of weeks to study Spanish, hence the material was lists of synthetic elementary exercises, lists of vocab suitable for the level and a few grammatical things here and there). Please note here that I am not using his material for the purposes of doing the exercises, but rather looking at the Argentine Spanish and lifting collocations that I think would be good.

So whats the silver lining?

Well, I found myself encountering all the words on my lists, even the obscure ones. I managed to understand over 80% of the subtitles (but damn are they fast) as they had familiar words and familiar structures. The Spanish I have been producing when interacting with people around me (bus drivers, waiters, the laundry lady, etc.) has never needed repeating, which has to be a good thing. As well as the few aquaintences I have here noticing dramatic improvements in my production of the language.

Another silver lining?

Seemingly so. In the words/ items this week there were verb forms for the past and future which I haven't encountered before. I did manage to connect one or two to the subtitles of one of the movies and found myself connecting time as well as meaning from the memory to the situation in the film. Although it only happened twice, this re-enforces my theory of zero grammar studies. With more repetition it can only get better.

Results?

No grammar? Check

Bigger, more intricate lists? Check

Different material? Check

Resolutions based on this weeks development:

1 – smaller lists, but keep intricacy (perhaps 15 items per list)

2 – find enjoyable movie, watch a little everyday drawing language from repetition.

3 – start with even more material (comics/books/music)

Week two? So far so good

The aim, a bigger picture - 6th post

The prevailing opinion on language learning seems to be that languages can only be mastered in a short time by babies. Why? Patricia Kuhl from MIT has been doing neurolinguistic research to understand why. Very interestingly though, she shows a graph in her lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954) which shows the best period for the brain to acquire languages. It should come as no surprise that, according to her, the older you become, the more dificult it becomes to learn a language. Conventional wisdom seems to have the same thing to say on the matter.

Moreover, the quantifiable parts of language (grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology) have been used as a means to define whether a language is difficult for an English native speaker to learn, by contrasting the two languages to see which languages are more similar (and therefore easier to learn) the native language (in this case, English).

http://voxy.com/blog/2011/03/hardest-languages-infographic/#comments

Yes, it is a blog, but scroll down to the bottom of the graph and you will see that she based the graph on information provided by U.S. Government and Federal institutes. Conventional wisdom indeed. (please note that I disagree immensely with this information, it takes infants all over the world to acquire language at the same speed, therefore the same rationally stands for adults, we just haven't explored this yet as its nice to have the lazy excuse of "I'm too old" saving us from thought.)

Part of the idea behind organic language acquisition is to prove:

• adults can learn languages more efficiently than infants
• conventional methods and approaches of language analysis and language instruction is fatally flawed

Why is it that an infant is thought to be a linguistic genius and yet its not even developed enough to put together a coherent sentence? There seems to be a flaw here...

Search through every characteristic exhibitted by infants and adults during any language learning tasks and you'll notice a few interesting things. Adults do not have a blank slate, as compared with infants, but rather they are constantly translating. This is frequently seem as counter-productive but wait a bit. For a child to reproduce a word, much less a sentence, it takes much more time than for an adult. However, the adult will probably become arrogant, seeing their reproduction of the sentence as some sort of accomplishment, and then forget it. The infant, on the other hand, is a blank slate remember, so it will be next to impossible for it to forget.

Imagine a blank canvas next to a finished painting. Now draw a smiley face on both. The one is defined by the smiley whilst the other is merely 'modified' by it. (subject,of course, to size, colour, location and style of the smiley).

Current methodology and approaches to language analysis and instruction seems incredibly fixated on frame works which yield terrible results. Anyone who has studied a language will testify to the fact that no matter how much you know the grammar, unless you can produce sentences written or spoken, you will not have learnt anything.

When adults learn, they need only use a few tools which conventional wisdom leaves behind: mnemonics, collocations, the nature of short-term memory vs. long-term memory, the 'exploratory' mindset, and perhaps the ever-elusive authentic material (most material in an English language course book is synthetic).

Language acquisition is a feat of memory and creativity. Two things that adults can excel at better than any child. Though a difference exists between first and second language acquisition, it stands to reason that there is an efficient method of putting language in the brain, and that this process can be artificially stimulated.

This is the aim of this blog.

The structural theory - 5th post

It seems that in the wake of last weeks results, its a good idea discuss the issue of language structure.

We will need a bit of context here, so please bear with me. As previously mentioned in the first post, language can be divided into skills and systems. Each of these has within 4 separate categories.

Language skills are easy – listening, speaking, reading, writing.

Language systems need more of an introduction:

1. Lexis: defined as vocabulary. Included are all the words of the language, in isolation, that is without a situation/ context.
2. Grammar: all the typical sentence structures of the language are contained here. Including the combination of them. An example is perhaps the present perfect tense “I've been to London” and a combination could be the second conditional “If I could live anywhere in the world, I'd choose Atlantis”. Interesting to note that this grammar is not derived from studying the language but rather it is the grammar of the most highly regarded language of the time (Latin) which was forced upon this young language.
3. Phonology: the study of phonetics, not only word pronunciation but also sentence stress, intonation and linking sounds (when two words go together there is usually an change of sound i.e. 'Half past seven' becomes 'haf pas seven' and 'half past eight' becomes 'haf pas tate')
4. Discourse: is defined very strangely indeed. Basically, it is real life language or situational language. Defined in a dictionary as: either communication of thought by words; a formal discussion of a subject in speech or writing, as a dissertation, treatise, sermon, etc.; or in linguistics . any unit of connected speech or writing longer than a sentence. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/discourse) and for more reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse)

Now, imagine an infant. Out one day with its mother, mom says 'look at the doggie!'. (of course remember the earlier posts saying 'parentese' is later modified to become normal vocabulary). Later the mother draws attention by using the same phrase but changing the object, i.e. 'look at the balloon'. The infant begins imprinting the structure passively into its mind by focussing on mom.

Infants don't learn grammar, nor do they acquire vocabulary by means of being presented with endless lists of words. This natural process happens by means of learning ,through context, certain spoken structures from an authentic language source (mom).

Sounds a little like discourse? Except perhaps the second definition, but give me chance... (*)

By means of collocations (words/ groups of words naturally occurring together) we can analyse any context and put it into memory, much like an infant, but more efficient as the collocation analysis and mnemonics make it a far more streamlined process.

Analysis of Discourse – the collocation division.

1 – lexical collocations

any information word (verb, noun, adjective, adverb) and its naturally occurring compatriots. Such as ' to have a coffee' learners will learn 1 phrase which has many inferred rules of grammar within i.e. to + verb (have), article (a) + noun (coffee). Other collocations in this category include noun + noun; verb + adverb; adjective + noun; adverb + adjective; and any other pairing of these. Usually they have a very strong and clear meaning.

2 – grammatical collocations

Basically a sentence frame. A normal organisation of ideas. The ideas can change but the organisation does not. Such as 'I've never seen a dog before.' We can therefore assume the sentence frame is ' (subject) has never (verb) a (noun) before'. Once we have this, we can fill it with other information words. 'He's never eaten a steak before'. These two collocations (grammatical and lexical) are the two biggest fish in the pond.

3 – situational collocations

These are linguistics items (words/ phrases) which are typically strongly connected with specific situations. Such as the word 'shot' being connected to 1 – guns; 2 – vaccinations; 3 – alcohol; 4 – films and photography; 5 - a chance. Or perhaps the expression 'I beg your pardon' being connected with either 1 – actually being sorry, or the more common situation 2 – when you're annoyed and wish to communicate that you're upset, but in a civilised manner.

4 – cultural collocations

Collocations specific to a culture/ area. That's easy. Such as 'top of the morning to you' but perhaps it should be written more as it is said 'top o the mornin ta ya'. Very typical of us to collocate it with the Irish. Thanks television provided stereotypes. But say to a South African 'its not inside, it's oooonnnnnn......'. The final word ,'top', provides you with a famous catch phrase for a coffee creamer.

5 – prepositional collocations

Much more specific for English, an language with so much importance placed on them. Learners always seem to have a hard time with these. I.e., in ___(?)__ of . What word would you insert? If you were a leader, you would be in charge of other people. You dedicate something in memory of a person. Get the idea? Perhaps its too easy, but it represents the flexibility of the system. For a different language (say Spanish) we can have another set of collocations here.

This type of system is just one suggestion to help create a starting point for any language learner. It also leaves space for a language item to be more than one type. 'To be in charge of a business' shows the aforementioned prepositional collocation, but it now acts as a multi-layered verb collocated with the noun 'business' making it a lexical collocation. All roads lead to Rome.

This system of contextual learning from an authentic source is how we all learnt our mother tongue. The two elements which make it a more adult venture are the mnemonics and the collocations. Nobody learns grammar to be able to function in their mother tongue (perhaps in school, but do you really want to argue that the child/teenager was not proficient in their language before this time?)

No dictionaries to learn meaning, no grammar, no school. Just yourself with authentic contexts.

(*) speaking of authentic contexts, do you see how we can apply the analysis of collocations to the second definition of discourse (a formal discussion of a subject in speech or writing, as a dissertation, treatise, sermon, etc.) and it becomes evident that the only thing which differentiates these contexts from everyday contexts are the specialisation of the collocations. Easy, eh? :D

The first week - 4th post

Infant phoneme familiarisation

My first observation in my journey into language acquisition.When one notices an infant learning it's language, one can see how it mimics formation of sound. This could arguably be the first step for a child's cultural identity as the infant begins to become accustomed to the cultural phonetics (not specific to language as different dialects i.e. Brazilian Portuguese is quite a contrast to the sounds of Continental Portuguese). University of British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker has found through her research that bilingual infants are able to distinguish two other languages apart from their own.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218092539.htm

This suggests that familiarisation of phonemes (and their grouping) is one of the first steps in language acquisition. Great for bilingual infants but adults, with years of television and transcultural exposure, have the upper hand as they could probably distinguish between far more languages than a child (without being raised bilingual). What does this mean? Its raises two points:

1 – once again, the hypothesis is that adults can acquire languages faster, more efficiently and with greater ease than children and,

2 – the brain (and speech muscles) need to create neural and muscular memory of phonemes and the normal cultural chunking of these sounds. i.e. it is foreign for an English speaker to produce a 'D' sound with a bi-dental plosive instead of an alveolar plosive, that is making the 'D' sound by putting the tongue between the front teeth instead of behind the upper front teeth. The brain and physical muscles creating the sounds need repeated exposure to the sounds and repeated attempts at mimicry to produce the sounds more accurately. This holds true for sequences of sounds such as 'dar', which most English speakers would pronounce similar to the 'dar' in 'Darth Vader'. Whereas the more accurate pronunciation of it would be with the 'a' pronounced as the 'ahhh' when you sit in a dentists chair. Not a common chunking of phonemes for an English speaker but quite common for Spanish speakers.

The results

This past week has seen me using mneumonics to memorise (with 100% recollection each time) 5 lists (one per day) of 20 items each. This is not entirely true as a Columbian friend taught me 2 extra expressions which I added to list number 3 (the Wednesday list) with ease.

The findings are interesting indeed. As per my last post (the initial problem) on the 3^rd list of items I started using multi-layered chunks of vocabulary, that is expressions with many words, rather than a single word. To my surprise, it was easier than anticipated to memorise them. I think this is due to the ability to contextualise the phrase and 'act' it out instead of just spew out a list of words (suggesting that the process is made easier by actively taking part in as many ways as possible).

So list 2 included the word 'quedar' – to stay/remain. And list 3 included the expression for 'at what time shall we meet?' which is 'a que hora quedarmos?'. This repetition of items creates multiple neural pathways to the same word, it just so happens that the cultural norm in the language is not similar to English (therefore cannot be translated word for word, but needs a more pragmatic translation, that is a translation based on meaning not word form). This type of occurrence promotes the idea that one has to study collocations (typical sequences of words with an attatched meaning) but more on this later.

The prediction hypothesis

The other notable observation is that, by memorising various different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) one can start predicting the forms of words as different parts of speech.

For example 'cambiar' = the verb 'to change' and the noun being 'cambio' (loose change/ money)

and 'cerrar' = the verb 'to close/ to shut' and the adjective being 'cerrado' (closed)

finally 'comer' = the verb 'to eat' and the continuous form 'comiendo' (eating)

knowing these and learning the expression 'estoy bromeando' (I'm kidding/joking) means that by comparison I can predict the noun and verb (can't think of an adjective). My guesses are bromo, bromer.

Not bad :) the correct forms are broma (I messed up and assumed a masculine form) and bromer.

If it is agreed upon that these guesses are solely the comparison of similar and the prediction according to the form of the norm, then it stands to reason that authentic language is just fixed patterns put onto flexible form.

Yeah? And? So? What?

Well, basically it means that I don't have to learn basic grammar rules (and advanced grammar rules I assume,but we'll come to that later) as my brain will function in the natural way and compare know data to predict unknown data.

This theory is (at the moment) in direct opposition with Chompsky's theory of universal grammar which says that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain. Its only a simple matter of connecting memories together and predicting unknown data by means of following the pattern in known data.

Its an ability of the brain, a natural process which exists independent of language (the same process works with predicting people's behaviour). This is one of the abilities of the brain necessary to develop as mentioned in the 1st post.

This hypothesis works with a similar dynamic to the 'Integrated Information Theory' (IIT) as put forward by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-theory-of-consciousness

The theory states that a creature that can create and form associations from the memory to the present has a greater value consciousness.

Bringing the blog full circle to the 3 'M's (see first post): Memory, Material and Motivation.

Regarding memory, it seems a better idea to memorise multi-layered items versus single items. Also the memory techniques I utilise has the potential to take on more expressions. Therefore, next weeks list will be set at 25 items per list. A challenge? We'll see...

Regarding material, I memorised the 2 expressions my Columbian friend gave me as well as a few from a Continental Spanish phrase book. I have used them once or twice and have decided that it is better to adopt a completely Argentinian material input policy. No more influence from other Spanish speaking cultures.

Regarding motivation? I have almost exhausted my lists of most common verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. I seem to have a lack of input, therefore it is essential that I find a T.V./by lots of comics from here/ start brainstorming list of expressions to translate/ start reading newspapers + magazines. Woe is me :)