What is real language?

General discussion about learning languages
s_allard
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Re: What is real language?

Postby s_allard » Sat May 20, 2017 6:08 am

I'm a stickler for proper terminology because it avoids a lot of misunderstanding. A case in point is the use of real here when talking of language. For reasons that I have yet to understand, one use of real here is that of a synonym for informal spoken language. Other manifestations of language would seem to be what I don't know, maybe unreal. So, the French of a novel by Marcel Proust is certainly not how I speak most of the time but it certainly has a very real existence in French literature. If we are talking about conversational or informal spoken language, why not call it that?

In passing, since we are talking about informal spoken language, the dialogue of comic books and graphic novels are certainly closer to the spoken language than most works of literature but they are far from accurately representing real spoken language. That's all explained in the OP.

The other strange use of the term real language seems to be in opposition to phrases or sentences that are created for teaching purposes and have not been spontaneously used by speakers. I can see that certain utterances may not make sense to some people, but if they are grammatically correct, why call them not real. They may be artificial, contrived, illogical, improbable or even incomprehensible but they can be real. I can see a distinction between real natural language produced by human beings and artificial machine-generated language.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby SophiaMerlin_II » Sat May 20, 2017 6:15 am

LeCon wrote:In my view, learning dialogues from a course for instance, you get a lot of speech as it's very unlikely to be said by a native speaker in a conversation. Why courses teach people this and have continued to teach people this for the last 50 years i don't know.

In a graphic novel, novel, film, TV series, you get language as it's very likely to be used by people depending on the kind of material.



I think language materials come by it honestly. People often speak with horrible grammar, repeat themselves, omit words, imply things, use regionalism, idioms, etc. In real life I could completely imagine the following happening:

Her: Well, mean to say, just is...
Me: I know! I know. Sad to say, but yeah... It's just like 'what y'all doing?' haha, and I'm just like, "well, um, officer, what had happened was..." and he gave me a face like "what". But I'm just like, "Must is 'cause was is don't sound right" hahaha. Yeah, I know it was stupid but it was sooooo funny.


But would something like that make for a good language textbook dialogue? Probably not. I don't think "what had happened was..." is proper grammar (I use it so much when telling hypothetical stories, that I honestly can't tell at this point, but I think it's probably pretty well understood in my age group. However "must is 'cause was ain't don't sound right" is a hyper-regionalism, that I believe is based off the punchline of a very old, deep South comedian, or so the story goes. I live in Texas now, and it's never used here, and in Georgia, people might know what I meant but would make the face like "you're too young to know that". It was apparently quite the joke when my GREAT-GRANDFATHER was younger, where he lived, North of Dothan, and was (apparently) eventually recorded onto an LP by way of some comedian. Again, that's the story I grew up with.

Is a language textbook going to teach "y'all" or "ain't"? Probably not. They might be common (at least where I live) but they're not considered "right".

Additionally, a lot of conversation revolves around personal relationships, and so it contains a lot of reported speech, and needs some background and body language to back it up.

So I think textbooks could have more realistic dialogue, but in the A1/2 level, it would probably do way more harm than good, and probably induce a lot of frustration. They'd also have to decide which regionalisms they want to include, which can be difficult as well. Such things would probably also age much faster than "proper" language, which could be good or bad, depending on how you see it.

As far as graphic novels, books, TV shows, etc. having more authentic language, well it depends. Reality TV has some of the most realistic language out there, for obvious reasons. But some genres of books and films suffer the same problems also, others don't.

Is all of it useful for learning? Yeah, I think so. But which is most appropriate really depends on your goals.

s_allard wrote:The other strange use of the term real language seems to be in opposition to phrases or sentences that are created for teaching purposes and have not been spontaneously used by speakers. I can see that certain utterances may not make sense to some people, but if they are grammatically correct, why call them not real. They may be artificial, contrived, illogical, improbable or even incomprehensible but they can be real. I can see a distinction between real natural language produced by human beings and artificial machine-generated language.


The reason I think that the reason language created for teaching purposes is not "real" is because it doesn't have the aim of communicating content, which is the intent of language. I don't know what else you would call it? Non-content language? Form-focused language?

But of course they're real in the sense that they're actually English (or French, or what have you), it's not as if they're suddenly in some other language, or don't exist somehow.
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s_allard
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Re: What is real language?

Postby s_allard » Sat May 20, 2017 6:18 am

LeCon wrote:
SophiaMerlin_II wrote:No, I wouldn't consider them "real" music. That doesn't mean that it's not useful. Then again, when it comes to classical type music I am a complete dunce, and would sooner rip my ears off of my head than listen to something with a high-pitched instrument, such as a violin or flute, etc. So I could be wrong here. I don't know much (anything really) about this kind of music outside of a few little things. Other people seem to think they are real music enough to perform them professionally.

This is an interesting conversation.

I don't think playing from sheet music is making music. You're making sounds but you're not practicing at being a musician. It's the musical equivalent of tracing a drawing and calling yourself an artist.

My wife's sister is a classically trained pianist and doesn't have a musical bone in her body. She doesn't even listen to music, of any kind, ever. She cannot improvise or play with other people. She can only play from sheet music sat at the piano. She's not a musician.


This is a perfect example of why I do not like to use analogies in the debates here. They inevitably end up in wild-goose chases and red herrings. To say that playing from sheet music is not making music or that someone who plays from sheet music is not a musician is one of the most outlandish statements I have heard in a long time. As someone who regularly attends concerts of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra where on a given evening about 60 musicians are playing from sheet music, I can only guffaw.
Last edited by s_allard on Sat May 20, 2017 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby reineke » Sat May 20, 2017 6:21 am

LeCon wrote:
Speakeasy wrote:I find myself in disagreement with those who maintain that text or speech composed for educational purposes is not “real” or “authentic” and therefore somehow "fake" language.

Of course it's 'real' but maybe 'real' is the wrong word. However i feel that we could just be being pedantic about that.


You are not making things easier with the music talk.

Authentic passages and dialogues differ from pedagogical materials in terms of redundancy, disfluencies, syntactic complexity, information density and length.

Would you documemt a language using materials devised for foreign language learners?.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat May 20, 2017 7:01 am

Serpent wrote:As Khatzumoto wrote...

(post contains some inappropriate language)


I love all the "Don't learn Japanese from.... you'll sound like a.... " or "Don't learn Japanese from... people don't talk like that" Funny stuff ;)
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Re: What is real language?

Postby aaleks » Sat May 20, 2017 10:49 am

Maybe I got confused but when the definition 'real' was used in the thread of comics novels I understood it as 'the language which real native speakers use in their real everyday life'. From this point the language of books, movie, and especially textbooks, isn't 'real' but just more or less resembles it. But I wouldn't use the word 'fake' here because it bears the negative connotation, implying lie, fraud etc.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby Cainntear » Sat May 20, 2017 11:22 am

s_allard wrote:I'm a stickler for proper terminology because it avoids a lot of misunderstanding.

Unfortunately, us teaching professionals are in the minority here, and most people don't know the current jargon (and jargon it is), as demonstrated by this whole thread.

A case in point is the use of real here when talking of language. For reasons that I have yet to understand, one use of real here is that of a synonym for informal spoken language.

Which is part of what makes the term "real language" real language, ironically. Real language is vague, which is why professionals define technical jargon.

Of course, the danger of introducing technical jargon into common use is that it too becomes vague -- look how many reinterpretations of "comprehensible input" you can find here, even though Krashen's original definition of the term was clearly defined and unambiguous. (And we shouldn't forget the F word, should we?)

The other strange use of the term real language seems to be in opposition to phrases or sentences that are created for teaching purposes and have not been spontaneously used by speakers. I can see that certain utterances may not make sense to some people, but if they are grammatically correct, why call them not real. They may be artificial, contrived, illogical, improbable or even incomprehensible but they can be real. I can see a distinction between real natural language produced by human beings and artificial machine-generated language.

The problem is that most expository examples are often unnatural in ways that are in fact ungrammatical, just that our typical grammar rules don't capture that.
Take the contrived examples of pre-war books, for example:
The swan is on the lake (a translation task from a Gaelic book)

You could say that it is grammatically correct, and you could contrive an explanation for why it is, but the simple fact of natural language is that if "the swan" is new information, the sentence would be "there's a swan on the lake", note the different construction and the use of the indefinite article. If "the swan" is previously given information, (eg. the sentence is an answer to "Where is the swan?") then the correct form would be "it's on the lake".

Of course, sentences of this structure are possible with other words:
The bag's in the car.
and you could argue that this is the same grammatically, but only in a strict structural sense.
The reason we can have two noun phrases with definite articles here is because we have a natural circumstance being modelled, and the sentence is plausible.
The speaker hasn't been asked a question, and is telling the listener that they've completed a task that we presume was set earlier. It's easy to imagine the speaker and listener having this common shared context.
Furthermore, "the car" is a common collocation, and we're used to people talking about their own car/shared car as "the car", just as they refer to the place they work as "the school", "the office", "the university" etc. There's a slight pronominal quality to these, and "the lake" carries some of this, but less so as many people don't see lakes as part of their everyday life (particularly city dwellers).

The dog's in the car.
This doubles up on that almost-pronominal "the", because people often say "the dog" instead of "my dog" and the listener has no problem with that.
Now there are at least two interpretations of this sentence in terms of meaning -- "I've put the dog in the car" (analogous to "the bag's in the car" above) or "the dog has gotten into the car".

If we can mentally reconstruct the scenarios with no conscious effort, it is a naturalistic sentence; if we can't, it's not. We can consider it consciously and mentally and deconstruct it, put it doesn't hit our ear and cause an immediate natural reaction, which is what "real" language does. If it can only be processed consciously, isn't it more "abstract"?
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Re: What is real language?

Postby Speakeasy » Sat May 20, 2017 11:51 am

LeCon wrote: ... People who can only play from sheet music are nothing more than physical parrots. They know where to move their body in order to execute what the paper is telling them. They play what a musician wrote ...
One: I have spent virtually a lifetime perfecting my technique on the guitar (classical, flamenco, blues, jazz). I have had the pleasure of delivering solo performances and of playing in small ensembles. My experiences inform me that virtually all musicians, whether classically-trained or not, spend the vast majority of their time practicing, interpreting and performing someone else's creations. Even the apparent "spontaneous musical creations" of jazz musicians are nothing more than reworkings of familiar chord progressions, arpeggios, scales, riffs, stock patterns and phrases.

Two: I seriously doubt that any musician who has the ability to play from sheet music can perform on his instrument solely with the aid of a written score. Even if this were the case, an element of interpretation is always present. Sheet music is no more than the written expression of a musical composition. Musical notation systems are imperfect and incomplete and they require both technical and artistic interpretation. The same is true of the written word for which all notation systems are imperfect. When transformed into speech, they too, require both technical and artistic interpretation ... a good actor can (seemly) transform a mediocre script into a Shakespearean play ... a bad actor can butcher the finest Churchillian speech.

Three: Thank you for the digression.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby s_allard » Sat May 20, 2017 11:52 am

LeCon wrote:
s_allard wrote:From a language learner's perspective, while graphic books are great tools, we will not to speaking our TL with them. At some point we will be using the language for real with native speakers. That's when the real real language comes into play. If you want to be able to interact with native speakers, you have to know how they speak. Which is why IN ADDITION to reading lots of graphic books, it would be advisable to actually listen to real speech with transcripts as you might find on Youtube.

Listening to how they speak the real language that you've already seen elsewhere hasn't really got anything to do with acquiring that knowledge in the first place though. As my example about 'POUR DEUX' illustrated.

I feel you are deliberately obtuse - either that or you intentionally conflate differing ideas to suit your narrative - i can't tell which but i will thus bow out of this conversation.


Emphasis added. Promises, promises, promises. All fake.

For some reason an earlier post of mine was deleted. In it I gave the link to a fabulous French site of recordings of actual conversations in French with transcriptions and explanations:
https://francebienvenue1.wordpress.com/
This is real French as spoken by young people in an informal interview setting. It doesn't get more real than this. Period.
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Re: What is real language?

Postby Speakeasy » Sat May 20, 2017 11:56 am

SophiaMerlin_II wrote: ... étude ... I wouldn't consider them "real" music. ... Then again, when it comes to classical type music I am a complete dunce ...
Need I say more?
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