Does learning a foreign language necessarily require a lot of memorization?

[Boojatta]

You didn't need to memorize when you learned to speak and understand your first language (or "mother tongue"). Learning to read and write is a bit different and for now let's just focus on learning to speak a foreign language and learning to understand audible foreign language.

[ellenfl]

1. yes. eom

[Boojatta]

2. Why?

What makes the process of learning to speak and understand the spoken word in a foreign language different from the process for your first language?

[Occam Bandage]

5. A forty-year-old's brain is nothing like a five-year-old's brain.

Most of the language-oriented plasticity is permanently lost by twelve years of age.

[HereSince1628]

12. What makes you think you DIDN'T memorize your first language

Memorizing has a huge bad rap among educationists. How many people know their ABC's without doing a pre-school song?

This has always puzzled me. It seems to me that committing words, grammar,and syntaxe to memory is a form of "memorizing" whether the memorizing is done by by boring drills, or by 36 months of trial and error. But then I may lack knowledge of a word that would overcome my ignorance

I understand that a person can memorize/learn rules of conjugation or declension and apply those rules to members of a word family thus making a word seem to be the outcome of analysis rather than association. But please inform me of how having the stem of a word or one of its members stored in a neural net so that it can enjoin a set of rules is _not_ having that word memorized?

[ellenfl]

15. until you can actually think in the new language,

it will be all memorization. that does not mean that you cannot do it. what makes you think that the language you know now isn't memorized?

ellen fl

[Eryemil]

3. Not if you're immersed in the language, as opposed to learning it from a book

[tangent90]

4. So how did you develop a usable vocabulary without memorization?

:shrug:

[Occam Bandage]

6. It depends on what you mean by "learning."

If you mean in a classroom environment, yes. If you mean in an immersion environment, not necessarily. But if you are past your teens, you will never, ever learn another language with anything remotely approaching the skill with which you learned your first (and if you're lucky, your second) as a child.

It also depends on what you mean by "memorization." I assume you mean rote memorization, though if you have other definitions, the answer might change.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. No, it only requires critical thinking.

And a simple mathematical formula which translates English words and concepts into a specific language.

[Occam Bandage]

10. ...

((English concept)/English)*French = French concept.

[bridgit]

8. I think its like The Rosetta Stone, not Rosetta Stone but Thee Rosetta Stone...

So once you internalize that key that hooks it all together you're able to come up to speed quicker. I've had 4 years of Spanish so am able to get along there, and conversational French for buying baguettes on the streets of Paris and such. But I do think you hit on it here, "learning to understand audible foreign language" or as others speak their mother tongue, the nuance, little tonalities, etc...

I'm not a super big fan of Crichton, but he has his 13th warrior sort of doing just that till he begins to hear & understand the similarities within the north men's tongue by observation & listening; then maybe comes the structure a block at a time stuff like that :)

[YOY]

9. It depends.

On the language and how good you are at making mnemonic devices to remember shit.

I'm really good at it myself.

[MineralMan]

11. If you can't remember the words, you can't speak them...

Learning a foreign language is pretty tedious for most adults. The biggest problem is in practicing speaking and listening to the language. If you have someone you can talk to in the new language at least an hour a day, you'll learn pretty fast. If not, you won't. It's that simple.

You can't speak words you can't remember.

[mwb970]

18. I subscribe to a Spanish- language satellite service.

I get channels from Spain, Latin America, and the US. Watching these channels has definitely improved my listening comprehension, but it doesn't do much for me in terms of speaking, forming my own sentences, etc.

[dustbunnie]

13. Yes, endless merde and pig-dog word association memorizing.

[Igel]

14. No and yes.

We're not kids. Adults benefit from explicit grammar instruction--actually, so do kids after about 3rd grade (developmental psychologists have some explanations for that because linguists don't).

Pronunciation starts being affected after about age 6 and is difficult to make native-like after age 12-13, grammar's affected at age 12-13. Get them by those ages or you'll almost certainly be marked as non-native forever.

I think kids also memorize until they've internalized new words and constructions, it's just that they can do that fairly quickly. So kids talk to themselves, often repeating words and expressions they've heard. It's not memorization as we usually understand it, but they remember the words short-term and practice them until they have them long-term. It's a question of taking stuff we've "memorized", learned explicitly for explicit recall, and internalization, automatization, routinization, getting to the point where we don't put forth more than a trivial effort to produce the output or recognize the input. My kid was downright weird: He'd lay in bed at night and practice sounds, initial consonants to start, and then finally final ones: ka, ka, ka, ka, ka. A year later we heard him practicing vocabulary until we fell asleep: "fender, fender, fender ... crab, crab, crab ... colleague, colleague, colleague." He'd repeat the words until he got all the sounds right, and then move on.

Aural and oral skills aren't much different from reading and writing in some ways: There are layers of what's to be learned. My currently favorite theory of phonology is Joan Bybee's. We remember all the "tokens" of a word that we've heard, with some sort of context and information about them: "can", with the 'k' more or less aspirated, the 'ae' more or less nasal, shorter or longer, the 'n' more or less clearly uttered. We construction a mental "ideal" representation, some sort of weighted average, and then compare the incoming speech stream with the various tokens we've heard. We hear the low-level phonetics and glean contextual information from that token even as we record that token, so if you change dialect areas your "ideal" token can drift. This requires initially setting up a sort of "mental space" for the word, of course, and that's what happens when we learn a word. In any event, you still have to memorize then learn something like an auditory representation. Note that in childhood second language acquisition kids have a quiet period before they start to speak, as they learn words and phrases and even often subarticulate them (practice, if you will).

When it's time to speak, we come close to the center of the appropriate cluster of tokens for speed, context, style, etc. We practice them if we're adults learning a second language, seeking to automate production. It's where I flub Russian and other languages--I don't speak them much and don't think I'll ever speak them much, and when I need to speak I have to work on pronunciation. It's not automatic, I'm sort of generating the phonetic form as I go and it takes mental effort (mostly unconscious effort, but it increases the cognitive load by a fair amount). So I can rattle off long, complicated sentences in a piss-poor accent or I can refine my accent (often by mimicking some Russian!) and lose much of my stylistic flexibility. When I've been put in a position needing to speak often, my fluency improves from "Me--Igel" to "Hi, my name is Igel" to "Please be so kind as to allow me to introduce myself, if I may--I'm known in some circles as Igel" in a matter of weeks.

The four skills (reading, writing, aural, oral) work out about the same, in principle: If you have to work at spelling or speaking or hearing or reading it slows you down. You need to practice all four, "learning" (or 'acquiring', to use Stephen Krashen's preferred term; to use mine, automating perception and output). Sometimes you get a freebie: Learning Spanish or Polish you have the alphabet learned and most of the sounds approximated early on, and most of the grammar is fairly standard West European with a fair amount of overlap with English, and getting from written form to spoken form uses well-worn pathways. Learning Arabic you get no freebies in reading/writing, and far fewer freebies with grammar.

So, yeah, we need to memorize, even for speaking and hearing. But we can forget what we've memorized after we've learned it. :-)

[Odin2005]

20. My English vowel habits are a pain when I'm trying to speak Spanish.

I'm constantly reminding myself not to reduce unstressed vowels, "A" espcially, to a schwa and to speak with a syllable-time pattern instead of English's stress-timed pattern. Fortunately I have the stereotypical Upper-Midwestern habit of pronouncing the vowels in "day" and "boat" as "pure" vowels very close to Spanish E and O instead of "eh-ee" "oh-oo".

[Odin2005]

16. Yes, but it's the same for little kids learning thier native language.

The "ease" in which kids pick up language is greatly exaggerated IMO. It's just that much of a toddler's waking hours is spend absorbing the rules of the language. That's why immersion is always the best way to learn a language. I'm skeptical of notions popularized by Chomsky and Pinker that there is a specific "grammar module" in the brain. The hierarchical information processioning structure of the neo-cortex has been called a "neural grammar" and IMO the grammatical structures described by Chomsky, Pinker, and company are merely the manifestation of this hierarchical structure found in the brain generally.

irregular words, for example, have to be learned by rote (hence little kids saying "I goed there" and "the mouses"). If the word is not used often enough the irregularities will not be learned at the word will be regularized, thus the more often a word is used the more likely it is to be irregular, which is why "to be" is irregular in most languages.

[mainer]

17. It only takes a vocabulary of about 1000 words to be competent

for most interactions.

[QueenOfCalifornia]

19. Boojatta

Where have you been?

I haven't seen any of your bizarre ops lately...

That is, until today. :)

edit to fix spelling.... :)