Language Flow and Language Fragments
Everyone’s seen lava, at least on television. You can see it spilling upwards and then spilling down a hill. Sometimes there’s a bit of a splash or a bubbling up of hot gasses, but in most cases it’s going in one indistinguishable mass of liquid rock until it falls into the waters of the sea.
But in time it cools. It no longer moves or drips. Things cause it to break apart, to be chipped away. It’s made into segmented rocks that are moved from here to there, to be used here in a wall, to be found there in another place at the bottom of a creekbed.
But before all of this, it was unified and had one common character, hidden, though it may have been, in vaults underground.
I’ve worked directly with hundreds of language learners over the years, and for the vast majority of them two things are true: 1) People want to speak a language with the same fluency with which they speak their first language, and 2) they begin their study of the language by focusing on grammar and vocabulary.
There is, naturally, no problem with either of these things, though I find them contradictory.
Of course, it’s no small task to learn an entire language, and so we seek to break it down into smaller parts. Vocabulary words and grammar structures make up but very, very small parts of this larger task.
Sometimes, though, it can feel like working with grains of sand. What’s one word when compared with a whole language? What’s one grammar pattern? One morphology table? The scale of language is so large, our time, our memories, so distracted. And so we need need a system to organize it all.
And then we have to learn how this system works. We think that, by mastering this system we are in fact mastering the language. That by working through some textbook or by passing a standardized test or by effectively using spaced-repetition software, we’ll eventually achieve the expressiveness that emerges among native speakers when their children become adults. That this structured study of fragments may even mimic how language came into being in the first place: when early people began to see variety in what heretofore had been indistinct in the passage of their lives — back when morning flowed to evening and before people saw the need to count the hours, back before months and when summer flowed into winter, when a mammoth and an elephant didn’t seem all that different, and a tiger was just another kind of lion.
These language learning systems are all interesting in their own right. And for some people, understanding them becomes the real purpose of studying a language.
Traditionally, grammar has received the most attention in this area. Since in many people’s minds, it represents accuracy in language use, it gets at the heart of what we all aspire to do — and indeed, a solid knowledge of grammar can enhance fluency. It can make us better writers and more articulate speakers. There’s a difference. between feeling language and in properly understanding it’s grammar, in the same way there’s a difference between climbing a stairway and stumbling down a staircase in the dark.
But the modern study of grammar emerged from what the English called “grammar schools.” This term, however, fails in our modern English idiom to describe what was, in fact, an immersion program, not unlike what one finds at the language schools at Middlebury or Monterrey. Once students stepped on the grounds of these schools, they were expected to use Latin and nothing else. They had to speak it and understand it, to write it as well as read it. Grammar books came into being as a form of support. They were designed to help people survive this broader project of immersion.
For another group of learners, the grammar textbook has another character as well, since they are, in no small part, records of the way in which people have learned. They’re miniature histories of a time and place, one that was long ago, but not so far. And to participate in the study fo the grammar is also, at some level, to participate in the lives of all those other people who learned a language as a second language.
Once I was on a bus in Yamaguchi Prefecture and heard school children reciting the lines he him his she her hers. Another time, when I was myself in school, I was in a Latin classroom where I recited, with others, agricola, agricolae, agricolam… This particular struggle with a foreign language is something anyone who has studied one can relate to.
And the terms we use to think of words — nouns, pronouns, verbs and adverbs, and then things like adjectives and prepositions — these are all the way that other people thought of some language, whether it was their own or that of another people. And this, too, gives us a common frame of reference that connects us, regardless of the stories we‘ve all heard about the comprehensibility of other languages, or the destruction of Babel under God’s wrath.
The unity of language, however, comes in the output of it. There are a lot of good ways to learn a language, a lot of good hypotheses about how they work. The human mind must absorb a certain amount of input, says one. In another, we need to focus on vocabulary. A third approach I read about sometimes focuses on pronunciation. But these are all secondary to the chief of them all, which is the integration of spontaneous thought with language that comes with speaking, and, to a lesser degree, writing. This applies even if your language ability isn’t grammatically correct or your word usage normal. When you use a language — whether it’s your language, or a language you’re borrowing — you’re interacting not just with some linguistic system, but with then contents of the world and all its properties.
And even if your speech is broken, it can still have the fluency of lava — if not the same purity. Even in simple matters, the words will contain an offshoot of your deeper purposes. Speaking gets them out in the world so that you and others can see them better. Reflecting on the way you actually speak let’s you understand your thinking better. And understanding your thinking better can help understand where and how best to learn the language. You’ll find your way forward even without a system of fragments.
