Language Learning kiddie style!

[Jembru]

I just wanted to share some inspiration I had yesterday. I'm really interested in the differences between how we learn our first and second languages. There are so many theories on why learning a second language is so different to learning your first.. and the one thing I've taken from it all is that it is pointless to try to learn the way a baby learns their first language. From the structure of our brains, to the fact we don't have someone standing over our bed telling us to go 'peepy bye byes' and other such linguistic nonsense for the first year of study, there is no way we as adults can pick up a second language only by listening to it, with absolutely no context for what we hear.

That said.. I couldn't help but be fascinated by the natural learning strategies children adopt. I'm not very maternal and don't really like kids all that much, but I can appreciate them and enjoy observing their behaviour. So yesterday my friend came over because I was actually free on a weekend for once! She brought her 2 year old who is really getting to grips with the stage of language learning where they begin trying to apply rules (the first stage tends to be all 'parrot fashion' which means 1-2 year olds use surprisingly good grammar, but can only say a small handful of things). Watching how she does this is amazing.

She came into the room and saw our cat. My friend has 2 cats, so the little girl pointed and said 'cats'. I said 'You have cats don't you?' 'yes, I have cats'.. 'we only have one cat'. he girl heard 'cat' and realised that the word is different to 'cats', but also picked up 'one'. This made her go to the kitchen and point to Dolly's bowl saying 'one cat food'. So I corrected this by saying 'yes, that's food for just one cat.' which she repeated back to me. 

What this girl was trying to do was find patterns. She applied it wrong, and she will apply many many incorrect grammar rules until she finds the ones that stick. She doesn't worry, she just keeps picking up what she hears and trying it out herself. Of course, she has native speakers around her during every waking hour, so this isn't quite a rule we can apply ourselves.. but there are other things we can copy.

Like what she does when she learns a new word.  Dolly isn't used to kids so was arching her back and showing aggressive behaviour. We warned my friend's daughter to be careful that she isn't scratched. Later on, Dolly did swipe for the girl (without her claws). I noticed after this the girl kept saying 'the cat cross me'. I realised she was trying to remember the word we'd used earlier 'scratch' and found 'cross' to be a close enough match. I said, 'did the cat scratch you', and what happened then was she started to use the word a lot. 'The cat scratch me'. then 'don't scratch cat'. 'you scratch naughty cat'.  Later dolly used her scratching post and the girl said, 'cat scratch the bed' (she has a cat gym with beds and scratching posts).  The little girl had learnt a new word and it was in her mind, so whenever she could think of a context to use it, she would.

It made me think... is this not something I can apply myself? When I learn a new word, what if I look around me for something I can say that uses the word. Then how about trying to hold it in my head and wait for a context for it. Even if I have to force that context. Surely using the word like this will engage more of my brain than just trying to recite it when it pops up on anki. I'll give it a go and let you know how it works out for me! 

So what do you think? Have you ever tried this approach? Have you ever noticed interesting characteristics of a child's language development? 

[Underlig]

I have a baby sister (she just turned 3) and like you listened to that little girl, I listen to her, she constantly makes errors and when I speak Japanese/Spanish/German(on Skype, to myself etc), she says "you speak English" haha(because a lot of tv is in english and she asks what it is, and we say english, so she has started to label every language she can't understand "English"). She also uses the word "yesterday" as past tense, if our grandparents came to visit once, she says "yesterday, yesterday, grandma was here". So that's that. Anyway, it's amazing how fast she went to only being able to hardly say words to form sentences.

I have tried it! And it totally works! Another form of this, I use when I chat, I use words I'm not sure fit in and if they don't, the person I'm writing with will say what's better in this context.

There's nothing wrong with using the language horribly, because you'll never learn if you don't(lang-8 is an example of that, people write stuff they may not be sure of). It's good to practice your language in every possible way, at least that's what I think.

A few years back I wrote stories in English and looking back, the grammar was appalling. I learned from it though. Because reading through it now I can spot a lot of grammatical errors(it sounds "wrong" in my head), so yeah.

[Jembru]

That's so sweet Underling! I can imagine how a child would assume anything outside of their first language is all the same. I remember being about 5 or 6 and wondering how people in France can understand one another because they didn't speak English ^^

I've been a bit under the weather for a few days, but I managed to play about with the idea of using new words when I learn them and it seems to work. I can only do it with one word at a time though but I managed to memorise 革命 'revolution' within a very short time because it showed up in the movie I was watching while I was curled up sick on the sofa. I was saying really pointless things like, there'd be a camera man on the screen so I'd say 'is this some kind of cameraman revolution' and shout out 'it's revolution time' for no relevant reason. But it did work!

Then when I think of words I've learnt from being out with my friends, are the ones that stick are words that have been repeated many times in the same evening. I always remember the time I learnt 逆転 because people were shouting it whenever their team was losing while playing pool (it came up again recently when I went bowling with my friends, and I think I was the one who started it that time ^^). The same goes for grammar sometimes too. After a night of fighting talk, I'd successfully mastered the use of こそ from defiantly yelling things like 今回こそストよ while holding a bowling ball! In fact, come to think of it, I only picked up that スト can mean a bowling strike as well as a workers strike, because I'd heard it said so many times during the game.

My conclusion is definitely that a word needs to be used soon after learning it, and then repeated frequently within that first 10-20 minutes, for it to really stick. I guess that's why the core vocabulary cards are so effective on anki, because they make you both recognise and produce new words usually quite close together when they're first introduced. 　

[Jembru]

I was talking to someone I work with and he told me some really interesting things about short term memory and how many times something needs to be repeated before it enters the long term memory. He told me that the short term memory can only hold 7 items before it starts to forget or confuse the information. He said you then have to review those 7 items around 40 times before they'll become permanent memories.

I'd never heard either of these theories so I did a little research when I got home. It seems the 7 items things is based on a 1956 paper written by Gearge A Miller. It seems that later research suggests that for words it's as few as 5 that we can handle at any one time.

As for his 40 repetitions, I can't find anything. He seemingly came by this information during a seminar at University. so I trust him that this is what he was told, but I don't know on what the lecturer was basing their information. Searching around, I see 20 times comes up a lot.

I don't know that I believe we can just pick 5 new words or grammar points, drill them 20 times and then know them forever. There is too much supporting evidence for the theory that information needs to reappear within particular time increments. Still, it's convinced me of what I already believed, that attempting to cram large amounts of information is just going to be a waste of precious study time. I wonder if children already instinctively understand this process. So they repeat the word as much as possible when it is first encountered, and then if they're lucky, the word will appear again over the following days. If not, then I guess they'll have to repeat the process, but if so, they'll be so much closer to being able to reproduce the word themselves when needed.

I already tried not to learn too many new words in a short time, but I'm definitely going to focus on just 5 new words at a time. I daresay other words will sneak into my memory uninvited, it happens, but looking to the clipboard next to me, I've already collected 13 new words over 2 days. I think I need to trim this list to the 5 words most immediately important to me and trust that the rest will show up again in good time. Maybe I'll remember having heard them before, maybe not, but their time will come sooner or later!

Of course, this new approach also means I have to increase my exposure to Japanese. I've therefore decided to cut down how many regular study sessions I do per week. What I refer to as a 'session' is usually made up of 2-3 40 minute periods, sometimes spanning 2 days if time's been tight. I've decided to reduce this to just one session per week. That way I can spend the rest of my time just watching youtube videos, chatting in Skype or reading kids books so I'm flooding myself with natural input. Hopefully this way I am giving my brain more time to digest the information I took in during my study session, while also giving myself plenty of chances to hear the target language in use.