avatarBilgehan Arifoglu

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This is the only resource you need to learn a new language.

Before learning languages, one needs to understand the logic behind language acquisition. One must know how to learn languages before actually learning languages.

Learning a language can be fun.

Language Acquisition Theories

Our first rule is not to learn grammar.

⛔The assumption has been that we first learn structures (grammar), then practice using them in communication, and this is how fluency develops. 🟢The truth is exactly the opposite. We acquire by “going for meaning” first, and as a result, we acquire structure!

You just need to stop buying grammar books and start learning regular and irregular verbs, determiners, conjunctions, etc. It’s just not gonna work.

We are going to follow “Second Language Acquisition” by Stephen Krashen. This is by far the most efficient way to learn languages.

  • Natural language acquisition develops slowly, and speaking skills emerge significantly later than listening skills, even when conditions are perfect.
  • Language acquisition is a subconscious process; language acquirers are not usually aware that they are acquiring language but are only aware that they are using it for communication.
  • We are generally unaware of the rules of the languages we have acquired. Instead, we have a “feel” for correctness. Grammatical sentences “sound” right or “feel” right, and errors feel wrong, even if we do not consciously know what rule was violated.

The Input Hypothesis

❓Question: How do we move from stage i, where i represents current competence, to i+1, the next level? (i.e., Beginner to Intermediate) 🟢 A necessary (but not sufficient) condition to move from stage i to stage i + 1 is that the acquirer understands input that contains i + 1, where “understand” means that the acquirer is focussed on the meaning and not the form of the message.

🎯 We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language with a structure that is “a little beyond” where we are now. We also use context, knowledge of the world, and extra-linguistic information to help us understand language directed at us.

Stephen Krashner

The Input Hypothesis makes a claim that may seem quite remarkable to some people — we acquire spoken fluency not by practicing talking but by understanding input by listening and reading. It is, in fact, theoretically possible to acquire language without ever talking.

I favor this opinion, so I usually don’t start talking until I acquire the target language accent. This is a very concrete example for all of us. Compare your English accent with native English speakers. Since you learned English in primary school and you’re forced to speak, you did acquire the language without acquiring the English accent. I cannot stress this more because you didn’t listen to meaningful context enough.

🛑Stop talking from the day 1.

Characteristics of Optimal Input for Acquisition

  1. Optimal input is comprehensible. There will be no acquisition when the acquirer does not understand the message. It explains why it is practically impossible for someone to acquire a second or foreign language merely by listening to the radio unless the acquirer speaks a very closely related language. A monolingual English speaker, for example, hearing Polish on the radio, would acquire nothing because the input would be only “noise.”
  2. Another prediction that the comprehensibility requirement makes is that “just talking,” or “free conversation,” is not language teaching. In other words, simply being a native speaker of a language does not qualify one as a teacher of that language. Conscious and extensive knowledge of grammar does not make one a language teacher either. Instead, the defining characteristic of a good teacher is someone who can make input comprehensible to a non-native speaker, regardless of their level of competence in the target language.

🚀Input must be comprehensible. Slower rate and clearer articulation, more use of high-frequency vocabulary, less slang, fewer idioms; syntactic simplification, shorter sentences.

  • 🟢If the topic being discussed is exciting and comprehensible, much of the “pressure” generally associated with a language class will be “off,” anxiety will be lowered, and the acquisition will result. I think a desirable goal is that the student “forget,” in a sense, that the message is encoded in another language.
  • 🛑Error correction has the immediate effect of putting the student on the defensive. It encourages a strategy in which the student will try to avoid mistakes, avoid complex constructions, and focus less on meaning and more on the form.

We have concluded that an interesting conversation in a second language and reading something for pleasure are excellent language lessons. This is no surprise to the millions of people who have acquired language using only these “methods” and have acquired them very well.

How should you start learning languages?

Congratulations on your dedication to ‘acquiring’ a new language. Kudos to you. 🙋 Now that you’ve decided to acquire a language, you must know the basics, like the fundamentals of learning the target language.

It’s always good to start with language learning applications. But before starting to learn languages, ask yourself this question?

Am I ready to learn the target language?

Because language learning is a life-long process, it never stops. It will be in your sleep and your mind, and you need to fall in love with your target language. You need to love their culture; you need to love their lifestyle, films, music, etc.

You transform yourself in a way that is as if you’re born there. Your speaking style and lifestyle will change; you will think like them. You’re going to be one of them. So, after all this, do you think you can learn English by sitting in the classroom and working on topics you’d never use and dull grammar?

From my experience, I am very cold to cooking and eating things. That’s why I usually avoid cooking terms -at the beginning- Which this theory expresses:

LEARN THE WORDS THAT YOU’RE GOING TO USE FREQUENTLY.📈

You don’t need to learn astrophysics if you’re a sports coach. This means that when you learn new words, just try to learn the words you will use.

With this theory, the 2nd principle is;

LEARN WORDS IN THE CONTEXT, BY NOT THEMSELVES ALONE. 🏢

Sentence structure is important. You learn words by giving them meaning in the sentence. You can never memorize/learn all the words on two pages of an English dictionary. But you can learn those words in the context (film, video, or in interesting news)

🏁Starting Acquiring the Language

Once you’ve completed introductory courses on mobile applications, which I’ll advise you later in this article, you immediately start acquiring language through authentic content.

What is, though, authentic content? Authentic content is relatable, interesting to follow, and repeatable several times without boring you. In terms of authentic content, we discover a new theory, which is :

Listen, Read, and listen 🔁 at least five times.

Once you have the content, you must print out or download the transcript of that particular episode. First, you’re going to only listen to the episode, and then you’re going to listen while reading (following) the transcript, and you repeat this process for every episode at least five times. This is a MUST for acquiring the language.

The content must be joyful, engaging, and relatable to you so that you can repeat the process without losing your interest. For example, when I started learning French, my first authentic content was this:

Seven things to do every day.

So, this content is relatable for me because I like to listen to personal development videos. Also, the transcript is available, so that’s a perfect fit for me.

Even today, I remember every sequence of this video and its context, and I can talk about personal development topics in French because I know sentence patterns. I use this formula to boost my French. I did listen to this video at least ten times while following the transcript.

Sentence patterns are key. 🔑

After some time, you’ll realize you won’t make grammar mistakes when you try to write or speak. That’s because, as Stephen Krasher says:

“Language acquisition is a subconscious process; language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language, but are only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication.”

Your brain will do the work while you acquire the language. Our brain is designed to recognize patterns and create meaningful connections between patterns. Eventually, after some intermediate level, you’ll start learning grammar as you did when you learned to speak your native language. I prefer to start learning grammar once you’ve reached the B1 level.

Do not force yourself to speak. The Input Hypothesis makes a claim that may seem quite remarkable to some people — we acquire spoken fluency not by practicing talking but by understanding input by listening and reading. It is, in fact, theoretically possible to acquire language without ever talking.

And that’s because language acquisition is a lifelong process. Use this method whenever possible until you are comfortable speaking and understanding the desired context. I aim to speak about various subjects at a higher level and understand most of the written news.

Keep yourself interested in the language; you can start texting with some native speakers, but be sure you consume enough content to understand the accent and imitate it. If you start speaking immediately, you’ll speak with your native accent if you’re not talented with language acquisition.

💀 Myth: Learning the most frequent 1000 words.

Some people might tell you that you must learn the most frequently used 1000 words to understand the spoken or written language. That’s true. But you don’t necessarily memorize or do some flashcards to learn those 1000 words.

In the above example, “7 things to do every day” already includes 500 unique words, meaning that if you acquire and absorb that content, you can already know 500 unique words. And that’s a good start. You can multiply your word pool by choosing a different topic (i.e., environment, politics, etc.)

You won’t read, listen, and skip to the other video. Those videos will be your flagships to learning languages. They contain many words and patterns to understand the spoken or written language. It would be best to give yourself two weeks to master those contents.

So, start learning immediately by finding interesting podcasts with available transcripts or YouTube videos that are relatable to you, interesting, and repeatable.

You can mimic and imitate the creator’s speaking after you listen to it a couple of times to improve your oral ability. But be sure to “really imitate” without hesitating or being shy.

Language Learning
Language
Linguistics
Language Acquisition
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