The Practical Linguist / How to be an excellent language learner
Marshall R. Childs Special to The Daily Yomiuri
Last month I thought I polished off the issue of how some people can be excellent language learners even as adults. But reader responses showed that in the course of settling that one question I had provoked two more: (1) How can ordinary people become excellent language learners? and (2) Why did I say there is no critical period? I will address the first question this month, and the second next month.
My fundamental assumption about learning a second language is that success does not consist of explicit knowledge so much as a feeling for the language--that is, to be able to participate naturally and mostly automatically in interactions with other speakers of the language.
Having a feeling for a language includes, as a subset, having the ability to produce appropriate structures (grammar) and forms, but beyond that it includes expressiveness--not only exchanging surface meaning, but also giving and taking humor, shock, banality, beauty, profundity, etc., as required. The effort should be not only to think in the language but also to do everything else, up to and including dreaming in it.
A second language seems strange at first. It feels awkward and unnatural. In some people, it arouses fear and hatred. So the question is: How can an ordinary monolingual person become an excellent language learner? There are two requirements. First, you have to be sure you will succeed and, second, you have to get inside the language.
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Conviction of success
There are some things in life that cannot be done without a conviction that they will be done. The absence of that conviction is a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
An illustration of such a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs in Musashi, the fictional biography of the famous swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), by Eiji Yoshikawa, translated by Charles Terry.
In the final scene in the book, Musashi faced his greatest rival, Sasaki Kojiro of Ganryu, on the shore of a small island. Kojiro drew his sword and threw the scabbard down in the water.
Musashi suddenly said in a quiet voice, "You've lost, Kojiro."
"What?" Ganryu was shaken to the core.
"The fight's been fought. I say you've been defeated."
"What are you talking about?"
"If you were going to win, you wouldn't throw your scabbard away. You've cast away your future, your life."
He was right. After a short duel, Kojiro was no more.
Most Japanese students that I have met cannot really imagine succeeding at English. For this reason, if no other, they fail.
Some successful Japanese learners of English have told me that at first they thought of English not as a language but as a school subject, like math. The story typically continues, that they felt shock and surprise to see someone they knew actually speaking, conversing--and laughing--in English. The conclusion was swift: If the friend could do it, they could do it themselves.
One New Zealand man whom I interviewed--let's call him "Mr. Empathy"--began learning Japanese at age 36, and is now fluent in the language. He told me that he knew from the beginning that he would succeed. He had already mastered two other languages, French and Italian, and had studied German. He knew a lot about himself in relation to language learning. He said the most import!ant thing is to try to speak, not worrying about mistakes.
I told Mr. Empathy I thought he was in a special category of excellent language learners. He said, "Don't look at me as though I am an oddball. Languages do not come to me by magic; I still have to do the work! The only difference is that I know I will succeed."
The conviction that one can succeed is not loud or showy. It is a matter of quiet determination. It is, as American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) put it, "the calm confidence of a Christian--holding four aces."
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Getting inside the language
In previous articles I have described the process I call "mustering up" ("Mustering up the makings of a language" May 13, 2005, for instance), in which the brain activates a network of associations related to the situation and to the language being spoken. If you are going to muster up a second language, the muster has to be different from the one for your first language. The sense of process has to be different. The sounds in your mind's ear have to be different.
How can you get out of your normal mind and into the mind-set of the target language? First, you have to be convinced that you can do it; second, you have to find ways of doing it. Each person has different ways, and the ways range from simple hard work to taking advantage of unusual mental arrangements.
Last month I mentioned hypnosis, and some readers asked how that can contribute to language learning. A 1978 study under Prof. John Schumann of the University of California, Los Angeles, tested whether students' pronunciation of an unfamiliar language (Thai) improved under hypnosis, and found that it did. Hypnosis to aid in mustering up has not been studied to my knowledge.
I suspect that getting inside a language is very much like what good actors do when they get into a character. They live the part.
In a 1949 book by Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), Building a Character, this great Russian director said that building a character is not a matter of "acting"--if acting means imitating a stereotype. Doing that results in a wooden and unfeeling performance. Instead, building a character is a matter of finding within yourself the appropriate feelings and reactions. Starting small, you enhance those elements, filling them out so that you can stay within the character and produce the whole range of detailed behavior!s that proceed from it.
The point is to feel natural in the new role. Mr. Empathy said that when he first started to learn Italian, he told his friends, "OK, I will learn this language, but you'll never catch me making all those silly hand gestures!" But two years later, he found himself using many gestures. "Using your hands is an inseparable part of speaking Italian," he said. "It feels natural."
One of my Japanese colleagues, a teacher and administrator whom I will call "Aki," now speaks and writes excellent English. He said he wasn't very good at the language in high school although he supplemented the grammar-translation approach with audiotapes. In college, faced with native English-speaking lecturers and the necessity of writing papers, he decided to excel in the language. Having no unusual brain organization or special talent, he did it by a direct, sustained attack.
As a college student, Aki developed a number of learning routines. one of his favorite ways of mustering up English was what he called "mumbling in my mind." He seized every odd moment in his daily life to give a running commentary in the language, such as "OK. Now I'm going up the stairs to wait for the train. Here comes the train. The door opens. God, how come there are so many people? I hate rush hour trains..."
Excellent language learners have two things in common: They know they will eventually succeed in mustering up the target language, and they take responsibility for finding their own secret passages into it. Each excellent language learner is unique in his or her methods, even making up idiosyncratic ｅxpression!s like Aki's "mumbling in my mind" to describe what they do. They find varieties of ways to discover and practice the target language, and to interact with its speakers.
In summary, to become an excellent language learner, you have to be convinced in your heart that you will succeed, and then you must take charge of your own learning. You must find your own best ways of mustering up the language and getting inside it.
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Send e-mail to childs@tuj.ac.jp. The column will return on June 8.
Childs, EdD, teaches TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) and other subjects at Temple University, Japan campus.
(May. 11, 2007)