ave. Sometimes these capacities have been driven underground, so when we turn to language learning, these capacities don’t naturally pop up. They have to be teased out by putting ourselves in situations where they need to come out.
By trying to stay away from translating as much as we can, we can stimulate these capacities to reveal themselves and, over time, to become increasingly powerful.
Practicing grammar in artificial ways
Of course infants practice what they are learning. However, they do this by using the language; not through artificial exercises such as the kinds you will find in language course books and most language classes. These exercises are flawed for many reasons. One key cause is that they are one-dimensional, only calling upon simple memory skills. Language is far more than that. Again, if you want to stimulate the whole variety of skills we have for learning languages, letting go of these kinds of exercises can only do you good.
You are probably asking, “Ok, if I stop doing these, what can I do instead?”. The key thing I would suggest is to focus on using the language, in any way you can. By doing that, you will be forced to recycle what you have learned and it will expose you to new language in situ (not in some artificial setting that strips the layered meaning from the language).
There are ways of semi-artificial learning we can create that can start to approximate ways of education that are more organic and call upon more of ourselves than many exercises do. You will find some here.
Mimicry or straight copying is not something you will see a child do in the way adults typically do. I have been fortunate enough to be around my grandchildren learning English recently. I have seen them have a go at copying what I say, when they don’t understand it. They typically do so with a question tone embedded in the repetition. When this happens, they are typically more questioning the meaning, than the pronunciation, but that is there as well. When I repeat, usually in an explanation of a kind, they may well repeat again. But that is where they leave it…until the next time the word comes up.
Very young kids before they start talking will repeat sounds and combinations… like mu-mu-mu-mu. This, again, is not mimicry. This to me is the child working and exploring the various parts of their sound system. This is creation; not mimicry
Mimicry does not address the issue of how we create new sounds that we may not have in our first language. It does not address how we actually automate what we have created. On so many levels mimicry is a strategy that misleads us.
Focussing our awareness so we can notice more, our listening so we can hear more and our will so we can use our muscles differently and consistently, are all capacities we have access to and, indeed, express in our daily lives. Why not do so learning languages as well?
As an adult we would get much more value from our efforts if we focussed more of our efforts on listening, to ourselves, and to others. Then see what we have to alter in the way we use our mouth (etc) to bring closer what we say to what another says.
As they say, “You don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” I am not suggesting that you forget everything that infants don’t do. I am, however, suggesting that you can learn faster and better by understanding that you have so many capacities that you don’t utilise. And we simply don’t utilise them because the ways that we learn do not call on them. The only way we develop muscles is by using them. It is not enough to talk about them. So THE hack of all hacks is, wherever possible, to let go of ways of learning that don’t call on the considerable powers we all have. Instead, as I have shown, embrace practices that engage “all” of you. Sometimes this might mean tweaking what you are already doing, other times it may mean wholesale changes.