image: Minna Sundberg
One of my dreams last night was about a very interesting new method of learning new languages. A method which would be much more deep, fun, efficient, and conducive to the overall development of the mind than any other currently existing.
I was learning German in my dream. This happened via an audio-course aimed at English speakers which worked in the following way. The audio was essentially a narration of a long story. The story was at first narrated into English language, but then gradually the language of the story became more and more German. The intonation of the speaker was shifting; the accent was becoming more and more German. The words – initially in English – started sounding less and less familiar, started changing a bit. At some point half of the words in the speech were English no more than they were German. Gradually the language was turning towards German, but the change was so gradual, that one got used to it and one could still understand its meaning. Thus starting with an audio in English which one could understand perfectly, one was at the end listening to an audio in German that made just as much sense as an English one would have made.
Of course, the gradual change in the audio was not random. The path traced by the changing sounds was not arbitrary, but reflecting actual linguistic phenomena. What one was witnessing was an accurate – or at least as accurate as it could be, given that we have no audio recordings of the past – representation of how the languages evolved. An excursion down the branches of the linguistic tree, starting from the language we are currently at, down to the nearest common branch, and then up again to the branch which calls itself our target language.
Thus the audio was essentially going back in time to a period of common ancestry of the two languages and then back to the present again. Each word, English at first, would be gradually changing into an old English one, then into a yet older English, until finally the narrator of the story would be talking Proto-Germanic, at which point the direction of time would be reversed again, and up the linguistic branch the word would start evolving until it reaches its contemporary German form.
The audio-course worked smoothly in my dream. I developed an intuition and an understanding of German which now seemed – instead of a terribly awkward string of words from which only after hours of arduous conscious reflection I would be able to snatch some meaning here and there – meaningful. I listened to the story and I understood – with an understanding that was not grounded in an ability to translate what I listened to, or to be good in grammar – but which was immediate, natural, and unquestionable – just as an understanding of a native tongue is.
But despite the success it had in my dream, it is obvious that in the wake life there would be difficulties in implementing such a course. The mere technical effort of coming up with suitable stories, with plausible imitations of old language accents, in smooth language transitions, in actors to do the narrating well – this would be the smallest of problems.
More importantly, the transition to a common ancestor language would in most cases take us too far down the branches of the linguistic tree. If the distance one has to go is too great and the common ancestor is too different from both our starting and our target languages, then the effort of going down the tree and up again would prove not worthy. It would be impossible, due to too little information we have about the common ancestor language; and even if we had enough information in order to reconstruct such a language, it would not be obvious that we would gain much in our understanding of the target language by transitioning through a third and effectively a very different language. Thus the method would only work with languages which are not too far from one another in the linguistic family tree.
But even with languages that are relatively close cousins on this tree, there would still be difficulties, due to the fact that language evolution is not a function of a language’s past alone, but depends on the influence of other languages as well. For instance, at a certain stage in a language’s development there might be many words incorporated from another language. Thus, for example, in English there are a great many Latin words, although English is not a Romance language. This means that if we want to apply the method above in order to learn a close cousin to English starting from English, then for a great many of the words there would be no obvious corresponding words in the other language. And if we want to make the transition from these Latin words to the Germanic ones smooth, then we would have to go too far back in time, which would lead us back to our first problem.
Still, I think that the method presented in my dream is valuable as there is something important to be learned from it. Most obviously, it is a reminder that languages are not static systems, and that they evolve. Keeping this in mind breaks the awkward walls of inflexibile thought that make many people unable to imagine that there could be another way of translating between languages than following a set of rigid rules and looking up words in a dictionary one by one.
I remember an occasion in one of my first Russian classes in school in Bulgaria when we were given some reading comprehension tasks. To me they were easy; after all, there are sufficient similarities between Russian and Bulgarian in order to be able to make sense of the quite primitive (beginner’s level) Russian text. The bit I didn’t understand was how could some of my mates fail to complete the tasks. To me, without having had any exposure to Russian before, the words from the page were literally shouting their meaning at me. I couldn’t imagine how could it be possible to get the text’s sense wrong any more than I could have imagined getting a Bulgarian reading comprehension wrong. This puzzled me a lot and eventually I came to the conclusion that what distinguished me from those class-mates was the fact that they were thinking too much. I know it might sound weird, as certainly thinking is good and highly recommended in any endeavour. However, this is not how language understanding works in this context. Consciously reflecting on each word or sentence before trying to make a meaning of the text as a whole was certainly no help on this occasion. This ‘thinking too much’ – feeding each bit of information through the spotlight of your conscious reflection before, if ever, giving your intuition a try – can often slow you down, and worse – it often would not work at all unless there are some rules, such as the learned rules of grammar, that are already established in one’s reflective thought and are used to make sense of the information.
Thus sometimes the right way to approach a new language is not through learning grammar or vocabulary, but being confronted with a text, listening to a story, and making a sense of it as a whole. The understanding that language is an algorithmic system to be employed by a self-reflecting thought alone is artificial, wrong and unhelpful.
That is one of the reasons I liked the method of language-learning in my dream. There were no grammar rules there, no translations – just the narration of a long, interesting story. This is a much more natural way of learning a language – for example this is the way people in the past learned new languages, before the invention of dictionaries or textbooks. One can imagine the ancient dweller, moving from one town or village to another, being confronted with a different dialect each time, and eventually a different language (“Language is a dialect with an army.”) One can hardly imagine this person pondering over grammatical rules – they just had to learn the language, just to ‘get’ it; and the fact that they succeeded in this is no surprising – after all, they already knew how to handle at least one language – their native one.
And here there is one more important reason I like the method of my dream. I mentioned ‘overall development of the mind’ in my first sentence. I believe that the gradual transition between languages, as the one that happened in my dream, is indeed conducive to such a development. I think that such a transition would indeed help in understanding language as a fluid meaning-conveying system, susceptible to change and evolution. Moreover, it would give one a better and broader understanding of the language, just as etymology helps us sometimes see ‘hidden’ meanings in words we have grown used to.
Thus while it might not be entirely feasible to learn a language via my dreamt up audio-course, the existence of such a course could still be useful, and I would still be happy to see some such course in real life. For example, I could imagine such a course for Bulgarian speakers, willing to learn Serbian or Russian. The narrator in the course would be telling an old Bulgarian legend, at first in contemporary Bulgarian, then into Middle Bulgarian and then Old Bulgarian (=Old Church Slavonic), after which they would transition to Serbian or Russian. One would develop in such cases, I think, not just an understanding of the foreign languages, but perhaps more importantly – a much better understanding of one’s own.
A Piacere 